The Beauty Myth (22 page)

I once talked with other young women students about the soft-core pornography to which our college common room subscribed. I had it all wrong. I mentioned politics, symbolism, male cultural space, social exclusion, commodification. A thoughtful young woman listened intently for a while, but without a flicker of response in her eyes. “I’ll support you,” she said eventually, “though I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I know is that they make me feel incredibly bad about myself.”

The covers of soft-core magazines come close to a woman’s psyche by showing versions of the models familiar to her from her own fantasy life, which is composed of images from film, TV, and women’s magazines. Unlike the “alien” whores of hard-core pornography, whose “beauty” is less to the point than what they can be made to do, these models are a lesson to her: They are “her” models undressed. “Hefner’s a romantic, into the beauty of it all,” says Al Goldstein, publisher of
Screw,
“and his girls are the girls next door. My girls are the
whores
next door, with pimples and stretch marks and cheap black and white newsprint.” If those are the only two choices of sexual representation available to women, no wonder they seek beauty to the point of death.

The “romantic” models give the woman a hypnotic revelation of a perfected body to sketch in under the familiar protected face; the rosy labia and rouged nipples can be imagined under the lace
of the Sunday supplement models, whose gleaming flanks and sinuous bellies can be imagined under the fashion layouts. To this consumer striptease she compares her own. She may feel wry humility, an antidote to desire, or she may feel a sense of narcissistic “measuring up,” pornographically charged but ultimately as antierotic, since the woman who “fits” does not win; she is simply allowed to fill the outline of the Iron Maiden. Indeed, it is possible that “beautiful” women are more vulnerable to pornographic intervention in their fantasy lives, since they can “see” themselves in pornography where other women do not.

A woman who dislikes
Playboy
may do so because the sexual core is not easily killed. Though she may have submitted her self-image to other humiliations, in its last site of resistance, this, the sexual essence, will fight hard and long. She may resent
Playboy
because she resents feeling ugly in sex—or, if “beautiful,” her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker’s essay “Coming Apart” investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover’s pornography, her heroine “foolishly” decides that she is not beautiful.

“I fantasize,” says “Betty” in Nancy Friday’s collection of female sexual fantasies,
My Secret Garden
, that “I have changed into a very beautiful and glamorous woman (in real life I know I’m somewhat plain). . . . I close my eyes and seem to be watching this other beautiful woman who is me from some other place, outside myself. I can see her so vividly that I want to shout encouragement to her . . . ‘Enjoy it, you deserve it.’ The funny thing is that this other woman isn’t me.” Writes “Monica”: “I was suddenly not my own self. The body . . . was not this funny fat thing of mine, it wasn’t me. . . . It was my beautiful sister . . . all the time it wasn’t me, it was all happening to these two beautiful people in my mind.” Those voices—“it was not me”; “I was suddenly not my own self”; “it was this other beautiful woman”—are haunting. In only twenty years, the myth has slid a pane of imagery to separate women from their bodies during the act of love.

When they discuss this subject, women lean forward, their voices lower. They tell their terrible secret. It’s my breasts, they
say. My hips. It’s my thighs. I hate my stomach. This is not aesthetic distaste, but deep sexual shame. The parts of the body vary. But what each woman who describes it shares is the conviction that
that
is what the pornography of beauty most fetishizes. Breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies; the most sexually central parts of women, whose “ugliness” therefore becomes an obsession. Those are the parts most often battered by abusive men. The parts that sex murderers most often mutilate. The parts most often defiled by violent pornography. The parts that beauty surgeons most often cut open. The parts that bear and nurse children and feel sexual. A misogynist culture has succeeded in making women hate what misogynists hate.

“Lady, love your cunt,” wrote Greer, and yet Hite’s figures showed that about one woman in seven thought her vagina was “ugly”; the same number thought its smell was “bad.” Lady, love your body is an even more urgent message a generation later: A third of women are “strongly dissatisfied” with their bodies, which leads them to experience “higher social anxiety, lower self-esteem, and
sexual dysfunction
” (italics added). Dr. Marcia Germaine Hutchinson estimates that 65 percent of women do not like their bodies, and that poor physical self-esteem leads women to shy away from physical intimacy. That low self-esteem and diminished sexuality are the psychic black hole that beauty pornography hollows in a woman’s physical integrity.

The black hole of self-hatred can migrate: An obsession with her breasts can fade away and revulsion at the sight of her thighs can take its place. Many women read the beauty index fearfully because it often
introduces
new and unexpected points of revulsion.

How did this disastrous definition of sexuality arise? “Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both “beautiful” and “sexual” constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention. When society needed chastity from women, virginity and fidelity endowed women with beauty (religious fundamentalist Phyllis Schlafly recently reasserted that sex outside marriage destroyed
women’s beauty), and their sexuality did not exist: Peter Gay shows that Victorian women were assumed to be “sexually anaesthetic,” and Wendy Faulkner quotes the conviction of Victorian writers that middle-class women were “naturally frigid.” Only recently, now that society is best served by a population of women who are sexually available and sexually insecure, “beauty” has been redefined as sex. Why? Because, unlike female sexuality, innate to all women, “beauty” is hard work, few women are born with it, and it is not free.

The disparity between “beauty” and sex in the production of such images resonates in a memory of mine: A friend, a model, at fifteen, showed me the prints from her first lingerie shoot, for a big department store’s Sunday supplement ads. I could hardly recognize her: Sasha’s black hair, straight and puritanical, had been tousled and teased. Her high breasts were filmed over with a sheen of black-and-peach silk. The woman whom Sasha had pretended to become in the photo was seated on her haunches in a stylishly unmade bed, its sheets folded back like overblown cabbage roses. Her bed, on which we sat looking at the prints, was single, tucked-in, austere, covered in gray-cotton ticking. Above us were Shakespeare’s plays in dog-eared high school editions, her biology book, and a calculator; never those ropes of pearls, diamond cuff links, the lurid gladioli with stuck-out stamens. The thing made from Sasha arched its back, so the undersides of her breasts caught the glare. “Your poor back,” I said, thinking of its tense shoulder blades. Sasha had scoliosis. She had to wear a brace made of steel and rigid foam. The brace existed in a dimension outside the cropped window, the sophisticated orange twilight into which we both peered. Sasha’s glossed lips were parted over her teeth as if she had plunged a hand into scalding water. Her eyes were half closed, the Sasha in them painted out. Like me, Sasha was a virgin.

Looking back, I can imagine how the image would come out that weekend: exploding into a life of its own, between columns of text. A thousand grown women, who would know secrets that we two could not have begun to imagine, would stare at it. They would take off their clothes and brush their teeth. They would turn around before a mirror in the buzzing light, and the scoured illuminated shell of Sasha’s body would spin above their heads in
the dark sky. They would flick off the light and go to their wide warm lively beds, to open arms, chastened, with a heavier tread.

The link between beauty pornography and sex is not natural. It is taken for granted that the desire to have visual access to an endless number of changing centerfolds is innately male, since that form of looking is taken to be a sublimation of men’s innate promiscuity. But since men are not naturally promiscuous and women are not naturally monogamous, it follows that the truism so often asserted about beauty pornography—that men need it because they are visually aroused while women aren’t—is not biologically inevitable. Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men’s power in the myth: They look at women’s bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no “rock called gender” responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality—an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire—brings heterosexual men and women together.

The asymmetry of the beauty myth tells men and women lies about each other’s bodies, to keep them sexually estranged. The myth’s series of physical lies negates what a heterosexual woman knows to be true about the bodies of men. Women are supposed to be the “soft-skinned” sex, but a woman knows that the aureole around a man’s nipple is supremely soft, and that there are places on his body where the outer skin is softer than anywhere on a woman’s: the glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the “sensitive” sex; yet there is no part of a woman’s body so vulnerable as the testes. Women must keep their shirts on in every weather ostensibly because their nipples are sexual. But men’s nipples are sexual too, and that doesn’t keep them covered when the mercury breaks eighty. Women are “ugly” where they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women’s breasts must be perfectly symmetrical; men’s genitals sure aren’t. There is a whole literature of ancient revulsion against the tastes and sights of
women’s bodies; men can taste unpleasant and look perfectly alarming. Women love them anyway.

The boom in images that turn women into sexual objects accompanied the sexual revolution not to cater to men’s fantasies but to defend them against their fears. When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll kill us.” When she asked men the same question about women, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll laugh at us.” When men control women’s sexuality, they are safe from sexual evaluation. A Japanese woman of the eighth century, for instance, reports Rosalind Miles, was taught “always to say of his
membrum virile
that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other. . . . And you will add, ‘Come fill me, O my wonder!’ and a few other compliments of the same kind.” A sixteenth-century literate woman was less complimentary: “The old man kissed her, and it was as though a slug had dragged itself across her charming face.” With women experimenting sexually, men risked hearing what women hear every day: that there are sexual standards against which they might be compared. Their fears are exaggerated: Even with sexual freedom, women maintain a strict code of etiquette. “Never,” enjoins a women’s magazine, “mention the size of his [penis] in public . . . and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right.” That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or
we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate
.

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes—all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as subjects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male “ideal” from a lineup; and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, “need” beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist—then a real young man would probably approach the young woman’s bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.

But again, so what? Having been trained does not mean one cannot reject one’s training. Men’s dread of being objectified in the way they have objectified women is probably unfounded: If both genders were given the choice of seeing the other as a combination of sexual object and human being, both would recognize that fulfillment lies in excluding neither term. But it is the unfounded fears between the sexes that work best to the beauty myth’s advantage.