The Beauty Myth (25 page)

These figures show that much AIDS education has been utterly naive. If a quarter of young women have at some point had control denied them in a sexual encounter, they stand little chance of protecting themselves from the deadly disease. In a speakout on
sexual violence at Yale University, the most common theme was a new crime that has been largely ignored: when a woman stipulates a safe, or nonpenetrative, sexual encounter, but the man ejaculates into her against her will. AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires. Only when that happens will sex in the age of AIDS be free of the aura of terror it now seems to carry on so many college campuses.

In recent literature and films by young people, sexual violence or alienation is the hallmark. In Steven Soderbergh’s film
sex, lies, and videotape,
the hero can’t make love to a real woman but masturbates to women’s videotaped sexual confessions; in Bret Easton Ellis’s
Less Than Zero,
bored rich kids watch snuff films—and a preadolescent girl, bound on a bed, and raped repeatedly, is a background image throughout; in Tama Janowitz’s
Slaves of New York,
women are sexual slaves in exchange for housing (the Bloomingdale’s ad based on the novel asks if you are “a slave to your boyfriend”); in Susan Minot’s
Lust,
the heroine describes her promiscuity as making her feel “like a piece of pounded veal”; the heroine of Catherine Texier’s
Love Me Tender
seeks out increasingly violent sexual humiliation (“Like the times we did it so hard,” sings Sinead O’Connor, “there was blood on the wall”). Romantic, intimate sexual love in the culture of the young is mostly confined to gay relationships, as in the novels of David Leavitt, Michael Chabon, and Jeanette Winterson. It is as if, in an ambience of violent heterosexual imagery, the young have retreated into a dull, aching sexual estrangement that is beyond warfare; more like daily life in a militarized town, in which civilians and soldiers have little more to say to one another.

Evidently such imagery is bad for sex. Is it good for love?

Under the Feminine Mystique, men were kept ignorant of the details of women’s sexuality and of childbirth. New fathers were kept in hospital waiting rooms. Apart from protecting himself
from venereal diseases and shotgun weddings, a man left contraception to women. Menstruation was taboo. The dirtier aspects of housekeeping and child rearing were kept from men. These details were part of women’s sphere, which separated them from men with a line they were not to cross. For a man to come in contact with the “female mysteries” of reproduction and domesticity was, it seemed, to put himself at the mercy of an emasculating magical power: It was supposed to make men pass out or become Milquetoasts or just make a terrible mess. So when the frazzled Papa handed Baby in exasperation to smug Mama, he was handing her the tribute of his ignorance, her expertise. She naturally knew best. Crossing the gender line subjected men to ridicule.

Today, many men feel free to be real fathers. Those who are glad of what their fathering has given them can look back at this scenario and see how it excluded them from something precious. Because the old-fashioned tribute left the drudgery to women, it seemed that the joke was on them. But because the tedium and hassle of “women’s mysteries” are inseparable from the joy, the joke was on men too. Not long ago, the division of labor where these tasks are concerned was considered biological and changeless. It changed.

Today, the “women’s mysteries” surrounding beauty in sexuality, beauty
as
sexuality, seem biological and changeless. They too are cloaked in flattery that manipulates women while they seem to give men the better sexual deal. They too burden women with obligations while keeping men, through peer pressure, far from a source of joy. A man today must face ridicule from other men if he joins his partner beyond the beauty myth. At the moment, the joke’s on both of them. But that too can change.

The beauty mysteries that occupied the space vacated by the Feminine Mystique now constitute the topics that women censor in themselves. At least one major study proves that men are as exasperated with the beauty myth as women are. “Preoccupation with her appearance, concern about face and hair” ranked among the top four qualities that most annoyed men about women. These mysteries are what men do not know how to discuss with women whom they are trying to love without doing them harm. They put back what was nearly lost when women left their status
as marital slaves: suspicion, hostility, incomprehension, obsequiousness, and rage.

Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable.

He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn.

Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her
because
she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone.

He is witnessing something he cannot possibly understand. The mysteriousness of her behavior keeps safe in his view of his lover a zone of incomprehension. It protects a no-man’s-land, an uninhabitable territory between the sexes, wherever a man and a woman might dare to call a ceasefire.

Maybe he throws up his hands. Maybe he grows irritable or condescending. Unless he enjoys the power over her this gives him, he probably gets very bored. So would the woman if the man she loved were trapped inside something so pointless, where nothing she might say could reach him.

Even where a woman and a man have managed to build and inhabit that sand castle—an equal relationship—this is the
unlistening tide; it ensures that there will remain a tag on the woman that marks her as the same old something else, half child, half savage. He can take his pick—here at least the old insults still apply.

Hysterical. Superstitious. Primitive. Immanent. Other.

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” she says. “She’s okay,” he says. “Do you think I’m that pretty?” she says. “You’re great,” he says. “Should I cut my hair like that?” she says. “I love you the way you are,” he says. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks in a rage. The culture has set it up so that men and women must continually hurt and offend one another over this issue. Neither can win as long as beauty’s power inequalities stay in place. In the dialogue, the man has said something that in a culture free of the beauty myth would be as loving as can be: He loves her, physically, because she is who she is. In our culture, though, the woman is forced to throw his gift back in his face: That is supposed to be less valuable than for him to rate her as a top-notch art object. If his loving her “the way she is” were considered more exciting than his assigning her a four-star rating, the woman could feel secure, desirable, irreplaceable—but then she wouldn’t need to buy so many products. She would like herself too much. She would like other women too much. She would raise her voice.

So the beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence “You’re beautiful,” which is next to “I love you” in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is
destined
to be unhappy. And the “luckiest” woman of all, told she is loved because she’s “beautiful,” is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.

This futile bickering goes far deeper than simply to show that women are insecure. It is not insecurity speaking the woman’s
lines but—if she does have self-respect—hostility: Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man’s intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.

Just as “beauty” is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because “beauty” is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. “Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely, “Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines. The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her “for herself alone.” A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal “beauty” a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved “for herself alone,” for whom is she being loved? Auden knew that what is “bred in the bone” of both women and men is to crave “not universal love/but to be loved alone.” The “love” the beauty myth offers is universal: this year’s full-lipped blonde, this season’s disheveled tawny nymph.

But we long to be loved the way we were, if we were lucky, as children: every toe touched, each limb exclaimed upon with delight, because it was ours alone, incomparable. As adults, we seek that release from the scale of comparison in romantic love: In the eyes of one’s true love, even the most jaded wish to believe, each of us will be “the most beautiful woman,” because we will be truly seen and known for ourselves. The beauty myth, though, gives us the opposite prospect: If there is a set of features that is lovable, those features are replaceable. Those elements that make each woman unique—the unrepeatable irregularity of her face, the scars of a childhood trauma, the lines and furrows of a life of
thought and laughter, grief and rage—exclude her from the ranks of mythical beauties, and from the charmed playgrounds, we are told, of love.

By having to “present” herself to her lover as “beautiful,” the woman remains not fully known. She leaves his bed at dawn to paint over her face. She leaves his arms to run around a barbed-wire reservoir. She needs to flirt with strangers because his desire for her cannot fill the black hole or compensate her for what she has sacrificed. They both stay counterpoised on the mistrustful axis: her face, her body. Mary Gordon in
Final Payments
describes the way the beauty myth makes women hide from men: “I knew I could not possibly see him as I was now, with my stomach hanging over the top of my underpants, with my thighs that chafed together. . . . I would have to do so much before I could see him. For I knew, and in knowing this, I hated him for a moment, that without my beauty he would not love me.” Insofar as he will never know her now, the man will never fully know her; and insofar as she cannot trust him now to love her with her “beauty” in eclipse, she can never fully trust him.

Beauty practices are being stressed so that the relationships between men and women will continue, in spite of a social movement toward equality, to feel dictatorial. Placing female pleasure, sex or food or self-esteem, into the hands of a personal judge turns the man into a legislator of the woman’s pleasure, rather than her companion in it. “Beauty” today is what the female orgasm used to be: something given to women by men, if they submitted to their feminine role and were lucky.

For many men, the myth is a drug that insulates them from the dangers of self-knowledge. Contemplating an art object made out of a living woman is one way a man can fool himself that he is immortal. If the woman’s eyes are his mirror, and the mirror ages, the gazing man must see that he is aging as well. A new mirror, or a fantasy mirror made of “beauty” rather than degenerating flesh and blood, saves him from this self-awareness. Contact would ruin
the ideal nature of the mirror. Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss./Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.” The sentence’s ambiguous grammar, which has given sleepless nights to generations of schoolgirls, reiterates the promise to women that they will get love if only they escape from time. Forever wilt thou love
because
she will be forever fair? The dark side, the girl hears, is that if she is not fair forever, he will not love her forever.

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.