The Beauty Myth (26 page)

Simone de Beauvoir said that no man is truly free to love a fat woman. If that is true, how free are men? Women can imagine the emotional aridity of men’s experience of the myth if they look back on their lovers and try to imagine their women friends and colleagues criticizing them for any mate—no matter how witty, powerful, famous, sexy, rich, or kind—who did not resemble Praxiteles’ Charioteer.

Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight . . . but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot. The way in which women regard men’s bodies sexually is proof that one
can
look at a person sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.

What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman,
with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

Some men do get a sexual charge from a woman’s objective “beauty,” just as some women feel sexual pleasure at the thought of a man’s money or power. But it is often a status high, a form of exhibitionism, that draws its power from the man imagining his buddies imagining him doing what he is doing while he does it. Some men feel a sexual thrill upon smelling the leather interior of a new Mercedes-Benz. It is not that that thrill is not real, but that it is based on the meaning assigned by other men to that leather. It is no deep psychosexual attachment to leather itself. There is certainly a reflexive—not instinctive—male response to the cold economy of the beauty myth; but that can be completely separated from sexual attraction, the warm dialogue of desire.

When men are more aroused by symbols of sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists. Fetishism treats a part as if it were the whole; men who choose a lover on the basis of her “beauty” alone are treating the woman as a fetish—that is, treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her sexual self. Freud suggests that the fetish is a talisman against the failure to perform.

The woman’s value as a fetish lies in the way her “beauty” gives him status in the eyes of other men. So when a man has sex with a woman whom he has chosen for her impersonal beauty alone, there are many people in the room with him, but she is not among them. These relationships disappoint both because both must live in public to get that constant, recharging affirmation of the woman’s high exchange value. But sexual relationships always go back to private space, where the beauty, as tediously human as any other woman, makes the stubborn mistake of asking to be known.

Some men by now cannot respond to anything but the Iron Maiden. A writing professor says that every year, when he assigns an essay on media imagery, young women write about their lovers’ having expressed disappointment that the women don’t look like those in pornography. If some men have come to
“need” beauty pornography—Binet did simple experiments that proved that when sexual imagery was preceded by an image of a boot, he was able to create a sexual response to a boot—it is because the stimulus-response imprinting took place in the best of lab conditions: the ignorance that society tries to maintain in men about female sexuality.

So even those women who take men’s beauty pornography to heart and try, and even succeed, in looking like it, are doomed to disappointment. Men who read it don’t do so because they want
women
who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is
not
a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.

Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist: The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

The myth actually undermines sexual attraction. Attraction is a dialogue or dance or high-wire balancing act that depends on the unique qualities, memories, patterns of desire, of the two people involved; “beauty” is generic. Attraction is about a sexual fit: two people imagining how they will work together.

“Beauty” is only visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions. The visual is the sense monopolized by advertisers, who can manipulate it much better than can mere human beings. But with other senses, advertising is at a disadvantage: Humans can smell, taste, touch, and sound far better than the best advertisement. So humans, in order to become dependable, sexually insecure consumers, had to be trained away from these other, more sensual senses. One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up. “Beauty” leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit, in favor of a portrait on a pillow.

The shape and weight and texture and feel of bodies is crucial to pleasure but the appealing body will not be identical. The Iron
Maiden is mass-produced. The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one another as more masks are assumed. Cues are missed.

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is “done up” she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand the airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by “beauty”—a box continually shrinking—he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.

CHRISTIAN LACROIX GIVES WOMEN BACK THEIR FEMININITY,
reads the fashion headline. “Femininity” is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If “femininity” means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. Wherever we feel pleasure, all women have “good” bodies. We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow
earn
good erotic care; we always deserved it.

Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.

Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman’s face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light in her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

The Big Lie is the notion that if a lie is big enough, people will believe it. The idea that adult women, with their fully developed array of sexual characteristics, are inadequate to stimulate
and gratify heterosexual male desire, and that “beauty” is what will complete them, is the beauty myth’s Big Lie. All around us, men are contradicting it. The fact is that the myth’s version of sexuality is by definition just not true: Most men who are at this moment being aroused by women, flirting with them, in love with them, dreaming about them, having crushes on them, or making love to them, are doing so to women who look exactly like who they are.

The myth stereotyped sexuality into cartoons by representation: At one extreme, called “male,” and reinforced by classic pornography, is anonymity, repetition, and dehumanization. At the other extreme, the “female,” sexual desire is not something split off but suffusing all of life, not confined to the genitals, but flowing over the whole body; it is personal, tactile, and sensitizing.

These poles are not biological. Women raised free are doubtless more genital, healthily selfish, and aggressively curious about men’s bodies than the female extreme allows; men raised free are probably more emotionally involved, vulnerable, healthily giving, and sensual over their entire bodies than the male extreme allows. Sexual beauty is an equal portion that belongs to both men and women, and the capacity to be dazzled is gender-blind. When men and women look at one another beyond the beauty myth, it will bring greater eroticism between the sexes as well as greater honesty. We are not as sexually incomprehensible to one another as we are meant right now to believe.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving. . . .

—
Allen Ginsberg
, “Howl”

THERE IS A
disease spreading. It taps on the shoulder America’s firstborn sons, its best and brightest. At its touch, they turn away from food. Their bones swell out from receding flesh. Shadows invade their faces. They walk slowly, with the effort of old men. A white spittle forms on their lips. They can swallow only pellets of bread, and a little thin milk. First tens, then hundreds, then thousands, until, among the most affluent families, one young son in five is stricken. Many are hospitalized, many die.

The boys of the ghetto die young, and America has lived with that. But these boys are the golden ones to whom the reins of the world are to be lightly tossed: the captain of the Princeton football team, the head of the Berkeley debating club, the editor of the
Harvard Crimson
. Then a quarter of the Dartmouth rugby team falls ill; then a third of the initiates of Yale’s secret societies. The heirs, the cream, the fresh delegates to the nation’s forum selectively waste away.

The American disease spreads eastward. It strikes young men at the Sorbonne, in London’s Inns of Court, in the administration of The Hague, in the Bourse, in the offices of
Die Zeit,
in the universities of Edinburgh and Tubingen and Salamanca. They grow thin and still more thin. They can hardly speak aloud. They lose their libido, and can no longer make the effort to joke or argue. When they run or swim, they look appalling: buttocks
collapsed, tailbones protruding, knees knocked together, ribs splayed in a shelf that stretches their papery skin. There is no medical reason.

The disease mutates again. Across America, it becomes apparent that for every well-born living skeleton there are at least three other young men, also bright lights, who do something just as strange. Once they have swallowed their steaks and Rhine wine, they hide away, to thrust their fingers down their throats and spew out all the nourishment in them. They wander back into Maury’s or “21,” shaking and pale. Eventually they arrange their lives so they can spend hours each day hunched over like that, their highly trained minds telescoped around two shameful holes: mouth, toilet; toilet, mouth.

Meanwhile, people are waiting for them to take up their places: assistantships at
The New York Times
, seats on the stock exchange, clerkships with federal judges. Speeches need to be written and briefs researched among the clangor of gavels and the whir of fax machines. What is happening to the fine young men, in their brush cuts and khaki trousers? It hurts to look at them. At the expense-account lunches, they hide their medallions of veal under lettuce leaves. Secretly they purge. They vomit after matriculation banquets and after tailgate parties at the Game. The men’s room in the Oyster Bar reeks with it. One in five, on the campuses that speak their own names proudest.

How would America react to the mass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons? How would Western Europe absorb the export of such a disease? One would expect an emergency response: crisis task forces convened in congressional hearing rooms, unscheduled alumni meetings, the best experts money can hire, cover stories in newsmagazines, a flurry of editorials, blame and counterblame, bulletins, warnings, symptoms, updates; an epidemic blazoned in boldface red. The sons of privilege
are
the future; the future is committing suicide.

Of course, this is actually happening right now, only with a gender difference. The institutions that shelter and promote these diseases are hibernating. The public conscience is fast asleep. Young women are dying from institutional catatonia: four hundred dollars a term from the college endowment for the women’s center to teach “self-help”; fifty to buy a noontime talk
from a visiting clinician. The world is not coming to an end because the cherished child in five who “chooses” to die slowly is a girl. And she is merely doing too well what she is expected to do very well in the best of times.

Up to one tenth of all young American women, up to one fifth of women students in the United States, are locked into one-woman hunger camps. When they fall, there are no memorial services, no intervention through awareness programs, no formal message from their schools and colleges that the society prefers its young women to eat and thrive rather than sicken and die. Flags are not lowered in recognition of the fact that in every black-robed ceremonial marches a fifth column of death’s-heads.