The Beauty Myth (20 page)

Two conventions from soft- and hard-core pornography entered women’s culture: One “just” objectifies the female body, the other does violence to it. Obscenity law is based in part on the idea that you can avoid what offends you. But the terms ordinarily used in the pornography debate cannot deal adequately with this issue. Discussions of obscenity, or nakedness, or community standards do not address the harm done to women by this development: the way in which “beauty” joins pornographic conventions in advertising, fashion photography, cable TV, and even comic books to affect women and children. Men can choose to enter an adult bookstore; women and children cannot choose to avoid sexually violent or beauty-pornographic imagery that follows them home.

Sexual “explicitness” is not the issue. We could use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing; if there were a full spectrum of erotic images of uncoerced real women and real men in contexts of sexual trust, beauty pornography could theoretically hurt no one. Defenders of pornography base their position on the idea of freedom of speech, casting pornographic imagery as language. Using their own argument, something striking emerges about the representation of women’s bodies: The representation is heavily censored. Because we see many versions of the naked Iron Maiden, we are asked to believe that our culture promotes
the display of female sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s bodies, so that only the official versions are visible. Rather than seeing images
of
female desire or that cater
to
female desire, we see mock-ups of living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female sexuality. In the United States and Great Britain, which have no tradition of public nakedness, women rarely—and almost never outside a competitive context—see what other
women
look like naked; we see only identical humanoid products based loosely on women’s bodies.

Beauty pornography and sadomasochism are not explicit, but dishonest. The former claims that women’s “beauty”
is
our sexuality, when the truth goes the other way around. The latter claims that women like to be forced and raped, and that sexual violence and rape are stylish, elegant, and beautiful.

Midway through the 1970s, the punk-rock scene began to glorify S and M: High school girls put safety pins through their ears, painted their lips bruise-blue, and ripped their clothing to suggest sexual battle. By the end of the decade, S and M had ascended from street fashion to high fashion in the form of studded black leather, wristcuffs, and spikes. Fashion models adopted from violent pornography the furious pouting glare of the violated woman. “Vanilla” sexual styles—loving and nonviolent—came to look passé.

In the 1980s, when many women were graduating with professional degrees, anger against women crackled the airwaves. We saw a stupendous upsurge in violent sexual imagery in which the abused was female. In 1979, Jack Sullivan in
The New York Times
identified “a popular genre of thriller that attempts to generate excitement by piling up female corpses.” According to Jane Caputi, who calls the modern period the Age of Sex Crime, film portrayals based on sex abusers became common during the late 1970s and 1980s:
Dressed to Kill, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Blue Velvet, 9½ Weeks, Tightrope, Body Double
, the list goes on. That decade perfected the “first person” or “subjective camera” shot that encourages identification with the killer or rapist. In 1981, American film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert denounced “women in danger” films as an antifeminist backlash; a few years
later, they praised one because it lets “us” really know “how it feels to abuse women.” The
Zap
underground comics of the 1970s depicted child abuse and rape at gunpoint; by 1989,
The New York Times
ran a story featuring the new sadomasochism in kids’ comic books, and the British comic
Viz
began to degrade women sexually in the strip “Fat Slags.” Sex just wasn’t sex anymore without violence. In a world in which both sexes’ guilt and angry fear surrounded the sense that women were getting out of control, the public quickly lost interest in ordinary unharmed nakedness. Presented as more compulsively engaging to the attention of men and, eventually, women, was imagery that played out anxieties from the sex war, reproducing the power inequality that recent social changes had questioned: male dominance, female submission. Female nakedness became inhuman, “perfected” beyond familiarity, freakishly like a sculpture in plastic, and often degraded or violated.

The upsurge in violent sexual imagery took its energy from male anger and female guilt at women’s access to power. Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped. Even if we never seek out pornography, we often see rape where sex should be. Since most women repress our awareness of that in order to survive being entertained, it can take concentration to remember. According to a Screen Actors Guild study in 1989—a year in which female leading roles made up only 14 percent of the total—a growing number of the roles for women cast them as rape victims or prostitutes. In France, TV viewers see fifteen rapes a week. That has a different effect on the audience than, for example, seeing murders: One person in four is unlikely to be murdered. But even if she avoids pornography, a woman will, by watching mainstream, middle-brow plays, films, and TV, learn the conventions of her threatened rape in detail, close up.

Rape fantasies projected into the culture are benign, we’re told, even beneficial, when commentators dismiss them through what Catharine MacKinnon has satirized as “the hydraulic model” of male sexuality (it lets off steam). Men, we are given to understand, are harmlessly interested in such fantasies;
women
are harmlessly interested in them (though many women may have rape fantasies for no more subtle psychological reason than that
that image of sexuality is the primary one they witness). But what is happening now is that men and women whose private psychosexual history would not lead them to eroticize sexual violence are
learning
from such scenes to be interested in it. In other words, our culture is depicting sex as rape
so that
men and women will become interested in it.

The current allocation of power is sustained by a flood of hostile and violent sexual images, but threatened by imagery of mutual eroticism or female desire; the elite of the power structure seem to know this consciously enough to act on it. The imposition of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism from the top down shows in obscenity legislation. We saw that the language of women’s naked bodies and women’s faces is censored. Censorship also applies to what kind of sexual imagery and information can circulate: Sexual violence against women is not obscene whereas female sexual curiosity is. British and Canadian law interprets obscenity as the presence of an erect penis, not of vulvas and breasts; and an erection, writes Susan G. Cole in
Pornography and the Sex Crisis
, is, “according to American mores . . . not the kind of thing a distributor can put on the newsstands next to
Time
.” Masters and Johnson, asked in
Playboy
to comment on the average penis size, censored their findings: They “flatly refused,” worrying that it would have “a negative effect on
Playboy
’s readers,” and that “everyone would walk around with a measuring stick.”

This version of censorship policed the same decades that saw the pornography industry’s unparalleled growth: In Sweden, where the sale of violently misogynist pornography is defended on the grounds of freedom of expression, “when a magazine appeared with a nude male for a centerspread, [the authorities] whisked [it] off the stalls in a matter of hours.” Women’s magazine
Spare Rib
was banned in Ireland because it showed women how to examine their breasts. The Helena Rubinstein Foundation in the United States withdrew support from a Barnard women’s
conference because a women’s magazine on campus showed “explicit” images of women. Several art galleries banned Judy Chicago’s collaborative show,
The Dinner Party
, for its depiction of the stylized genitals of heroines of women’s history. The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was attacked by Congress for sponsoring an exhibit that displayed erect penises. The Ontario Police Project P held that photos of naked women tied up, bruised, and bleeding, intended for sexual purposes, were not obscene since there were no erect penises, but a Canadian women’s film was banned for a five-second shot of an erect penis being fitted with a condom. In New York subways, metropolitan policemen confiscated handmade anti-AIDS posters that showed illiterate people how to put a condom over an erect penis; they left the adjacent ads for
Penthouse
, displayed by the New York City Transit Authority, intact. Leaving aside the issue of what violent sexual imagery does, it is still apparent that there is an officially enforced double standard for men’s and women’s nakedness in mainstream culture that bolsters power inequities.

The practice of displaying breasts, for example, in contexts in which the display of penises would be unthinkable, is portrayed as trivial because breasts are not “as naked” as penises or vaginas; and the idea of half exposing men in a similar way is moot because men don’t have body parts comparable to breasts. But if we think about how women’s genitals are physically concealed, unlike men’s, and how women’s breasts are physically exposed, unlike men’s, it can be seen differently: women’s breasts, then correspond to men’s penises as the vulnerable “sexual flower” on the body, so that to display the former and conceal the latter makes women’s bodies vulnerable while men’s are protected. Cross-culturally, unequal nakedness almost always expresses power relations: In modern jails, male prisoners are stripped in front of clothed prison guards; in the antebellum South, young black male slaves were naked while serving the clothed white masters at table. To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.

These images institutionalize heterosexual alienation by intervening in our fantasy lives. “So powerful is pornography, and so smoothly does it blend in with the advertising of products . . . that many women find their own fantasies and self-images distorted too,” writes Debbie Taylor in
Women: A World Report
. Romantic fiction, she points out, is “seldom sexually explicit, tending to fade out . . . when two lovers touch lips for the first time.” The same sexual evasiveness is true of nearly all dramatic presentation of mainstream culture where a love story is told. So rare is it to see sexual explicitness in the context of love and intimacy on screen that it seems our culture treats tender sexuality as if it were deviant or depraved, while embracing violent or degrading sex as right and healthy. “This leaves,” Taylor says, “the sexual stage,” in men’s and women’s minds, “vacant, and pornographic images are free to take a starring role. The two leading actors on this stage are the sadist, played by man, and the masochist, played by woman.”

Until recently, the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, and private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people’s bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies’ mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time and deep in the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination. The locus of fantasy of a lucky man holds no robots; of a lucky woman, no predators; they reach adulthood with no violence in the garden.

Protecting one’s fantasy life is becoming daily more difficult, especially for the young. The beauty barrage peoples the fantasy locus of a woman with “beautiful” naked ghosts that claim her
territory, turning a dim private space into a movie set where famous strangers who have nothing to do with her display themselves. The purpose of the beauty myth of the 1980s was to people the sexual interior of men and women with violence, placing an elegantly abused iron maiden into the heart of everyone’s darkness, and blasting the fertile ground of children’s imaginations with visions so caustic as to render them sterile. For the time being, the myth is winning its campaign against our sexual individuality, the most movingly personal images that take their associative power from our earliest childhood, our clumsy adolescence, our first loves. It is making certain that men and women, just freed to find one another, will be sure to miss.

The usual discussions about pornography center on men and what it does to their sexual attitudes toward women. But the parallel effect of beauty pornography on women is at least as important: What does that imagery do to women’s sexual attitudes toward themselves? If soft-core, nonviolent, mainstream pornography has been shown to make men less likely to believe a rape victim; if its desensitizing influence lasts a long time; if sexually violent films make men progressively trivialize the severity of the violence they see against women; and if at last only violence against women is perceived by them as erotic, is it not likely that parallel imagery aimed at women does the same to women in relation to themselves? The evidence shows that it does. Wendy Stock discovered that exposure to rape imagery increased women’s sexual arousal to rape and increased their rape fantasies (though it did not convince them that women liked force in sex). Carol Krafka found that her female subjects “grew less upset with the violence [against women] the more they saw, and that they rated the material less violent” the more of it was shown to them.