The Beauty Myth (21 page)

In a study of women in the United States, Dr. E. Hariton found that 49 percent had submissive sexual fantasies. Legal decisions are being made out of the propagation throughout the culture of the rape fantasy: In 1989 a U.K. civil suit brought by a woman raped by her physiotherapist was denied because it was suggested that she had fantasized the rape and that such fantasies are common among women. Violent sexual imagery is also redefining the idea of sex in the law: When another young British woman brought rape charges against a police officer, the bruises
and contusions on her body, and the abrasions of his truncheon held against her throat, were ruled to be consistent with a consensual “amorous tussle.”

The debate continues about whether classic pornography makes men violent toward women. But beauty pornography is clearly making women violent toward ourselves. The evidence surrounds us. Here, a surgeon stretches the slit skin of the breast. There, a surgeon presses with all his weight on a woman’s chest to break up lumps of silicone with his bare hands. There is the walking corpse. There is the woman vomiting blood.

Why this flood of images now? They do not arise simply as a market response to deep-seated, innate desires already in place. They arise also—and primarily—to set a sexual agenda and to
create
their versions of desire. The way to instill social values, writes historian Susan G. Cole, is to eroticize them. Images that turn women into objects or eroticize the degradation of women have arisen to counterbalance women’s recent self-assertion. They are welcome and necessary because the sexes have come too close for the comfort of the powerful; they act to keep men and women apart, wherever the restraints of religion, law, and economics have grown too weak to continue their work of sustaining the sex war.

Heterosexual love, before the women’s movement, was undermined by women’s economic dependence on men. Love freely given between equals is the child of the women’s movement, and a very recent historical possibility, and as such very fragile. It is also the enemy of some of the most powerful interests of this society.

If women and men in great numbers were to form bonds that were equal, nonviolent, and sexual, honoring the female principle no less or more than the male, the result would be more radical than the establishment’s worst nightmares of homosexual “conversions.” A mass heterosexual deviation into tenderness and mutual respect would mean real trouble for the status quo since
heterosexuals are the most powerful sexual majority. The power structure would face a massive shift of allegiances: From each relationship might emerge a doubled commitment to transform society into one based publicly on what have traditionally been women’s values, demonstrating all too well the appeal for both sexes of a world rescued from male dominance. The good news would get out on the street: Free women have more fun; worse, so do free men.

Male-dominated institutions—particularly corporate interests—recognize the dangers posed to them by love’s escape. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. Women who have broken out of gender roles have proved manageable: Those few with power are being retrained as men. But with the apparition of numbers of men moving into passionate, sexual love of real women, serious money and authority could defect to join forces with the opposition. Such love would be a political upheaval more radical than the Russian Revolution and more destabilizing to the balance of world power than the end of the nuclear age. It would be the downfall of civilization as we know it—that is, of male dominance; and for heterosexual love, the beginning of the beginning.

Images that flatten sex into “beauty,” and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring that men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism, their separate versions of loneliness.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, in
Re-Making Love
, point out that the new market of sexual products demands quick-turnover sexual consumerism. That point applies beyond the sexual accessories market to the entire economy of consumption. The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5-trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

Though the survival of the planet depends on women’s values
balancing men’s, consumer culture depends on maintaining a broken line of communication between the sexes and promoting matching sexual insecurities. Harley-Davidsons and Cuisinarts stand in for maleness and femaleness. But sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart’s desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women’s dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror’s mercury, antierotic for both men and women.

But even more powerful interests than the consumer index depend on heterosexual estrangement and are threatened by heterosexual accord. The military is supported by nearly one third of the United States government’s budget; militarism depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children. Men who loved women would shift loyalties back to the family and community from which becoming a man is one long exile. Serious lovers and fathers would be unwilling to believe the standard propaganda of militarism: that their wives and children would benefit from their heroic death. Mothers don’t fear mothers; if men’s love for women and for their own children led them to define themselves first as fathers and lovers, the propaganda of war would fall on deaf ears: The enemy would be a
father and partner too. This percentage of the economy is at risk from heterosexual love. Peace and trust between men and women who are lovers would be as bad for the consumer economy and the power structure as peace on earth for the military-industrial complex.

Heterosexual love threatens to lead to political change: An erotic life based on nonviolent mutuality rather than domination and pain teaches firsthand its appeal beyond the bedroom. A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It’s true what they say about women: Women
are
insatiable. We
are
greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we
would
ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands
would
begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, child-care, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.

The economy also depends on a male work structure that denies the family. Men police one another’s sexuality, forbidding each other to put sexual love and family at the center of their lives; women define themselves as successful according to their ability to sustain sexually loving relationships. If too many men and women formed common cause, that definition of success would make its appeal to men, liberating them from the echoing wind-tunnel of competitive masculinity. Beauty pornography is useful in preventing that eventuality: When aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman—known, marked, lined, familiar—who hands him the paper every morning.

The myth freezes the sexual revolution to bring us full circle, evading sexual love with its expensive economic price tag. The
nineteenth century constrained heterosexuality in arranged marriages; today’s urban overachievers sign over their sexual fate to dating services, and their libido to work: One survey found that many yuppie couples share mutual impotence. The last century kept men and women apart in rigid gender stereotypes, as they are now estranged through rigid physical stereotypes. In the Victorian marriage market, men judged and chose; in the stakes of the beauty market, men judge and choose. It is hard to love a jailer, women knew when they had no legal rights. But it is not much easier to love a judge. Beauty pornography is a war-keeping force to stabilize the institutions of a society under threat from an outbreak of heterosexual love.

Glamorous rape scenes obviously eroticize the sex war. But what about nonviolent beauty pornography? The harm is apparent in the way such imagery represses female sexuality and lowers women’s sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which “beauty” is the only key. Since the myth began to use female sexuality to do its political work, by pairing it with “beauty” images in a siege of repetition, it has a stronger grip on women than ever before. With sex held hostage by “beauty,” the myth is no longer just skin deep, but goes to the core.

Western women’s sexuality may be as endangered by the myth as the sexuality of many Eastern women is endangered through cruder practices. Kinsey’s 1953 study showed that only between 70 and 77 percent of women had ever achieved orgasm, either by masturbation or intercourse. Women’s sexual satisfaction has not kept pace with the ostensible progress of the “sexual revolution”: Shere Hite’s 1976 figures showed that only 30 percent of women have orgasms regularly from intercourse without clitoral stimulation by hand, another 19 percent with clitoral stimulation; 29 percent don’t have orgasms during intercourse; 15 percent don’t masturbate at all; and 11.6 percent don’t have orgasms at all, ever. Helen Kaplan’s 1974 research showed that 8 to 10 percent of women never have orgasms, and up to 45 percent do so
during intercourse only with additional clitoral stimulation. Only 30 percent of women in Seymour Fischer’s 1973 study had orgasms regularly during intercourse.

The 1980s showed surprisingly little change: By 1980, Wendy Faulkner found that only 40 percent of British women have masturbated by the age of forty, versus 90 percent of men. In a 1981 study, only 47 percent of Danish women were found ever to have masturbated to orgasm at all. In the United Kingdom, a 1989 study of 10,000 women discovered that 36 percent “rarely” or “never” experienced orgasm during intercourse and “most admitted faking it to please their husbands.” Western women’s sexuality may be so endangered by the myth that even Eastern circumcised women have more pleasure: Incredibly, in contrast, a major study of 4,024 circumcised Sudanese women (their clitorises removed by sunna circumcision) showed that 88 percent had experienced orgasm.

Though intercourse certainly need not be set up as the primary act around which women must adjust their pleasure, it is legitimate to ask why intercourse and masturbation, as just two sources of potential pleasure out of many, should be giving women so little satisfaction now. Western heterosexual women are not getting the pleasure from their own bodies or the bodies of men that they deserve or of which they are capable. Could there be something wrong with the way in which intercourse is culturally taught to men and women, and something wrong with the way women are asked to experience their own bodies? The beauty myth can explain much of that dissatisfaction.

The myth wants to discourage women from seeing themselves unequivocally as sexually beautiful. The damage beauty pornography does to women is less immediately obvious than the harm usually attributed to pornography: A woman who knows why she hates to see another woman hanging from a meat hook, and can state her objections, is baffled if she tries to articulate her discomfort with “soft” beauty pornography.

This fear of pornography that cannot speak its name is a quiet dismay that extends across the political spectrum. It can be found inside “free speech” feminists who oppose the antipornography movement, and inside women who don’t follow feminist debate, and inside women who don’t identify with the “bad” women in
hard or soft pornography, inside religious women and secular, promiscuous women and virgins, gay women and straight. The women hurt by it do not have to be convinced of a link between “real” pornography and sexual violence; but they cannot discuss this harm without shame. For the woman who cannot locate in her worldview a reasonable objection to images of naked, “beautiful” women to whom nothing bad is visibly being done, what is it that can explain the damage she feels within?

Her silence itself comes from the myth: If women feel ugly, it is our fault, and we have no inalienable right to feel sexually beautiful. A woman must not admit it if she objects to beauty pornography because it strikes to the root of her sexuality by making her feel sexually unlovely. Male or female, we all need to feel beautiful to be open to sexual communication: “beautiful” in the sense of welcome, desired, and treasured. Deprived of that, one objectifies oneself or the other for self-protection.