The Beauty Myth (31 page)

In college, we never had a chance to mourn for Sally. Dressed like a tatty rag doll, in faded ginghams and eyelet lace, she wore a peacock feather in an old hat. She kept her round kwashiorkor belly politely hidden and her vicious intelligence sheathed, but she was able to shred an argument into so much cotton wool and negligently hold up a conclusion sharp as quartz. Her small voice would come to a flat halt and her lips press whitely together. At parties she’d lean back her flossy head, so much too big for her body, to get the leverage to bang it again and again into the nearest wall; her brain loosened for comfort, she would dance like a Halloween creepie, waving her disjointed limbs. It was a campus set piece: “Play something good for Sally to dance to.”

She left suddenly. Her roommates had to pack her things up after her: the postage scales for weighing the day’s half bread roll;
the fifteen-pound hand weights; the essay of devastating clarity left on her desk half-finished.

When I was told her strength had run out, I remembered one bright blue afternoon in autumn, when a group of students came out of a classroom, arguing, high on words. She dropped her books with a crash. Flinging back her shoulders, from which her sweater hung letting in great pockets of icy air, she turned in a slow pirouette, and leaped right up into the knot of the group. A boy caught her before she fell, and offered her to me, wriggling like a troublesome baby.

I held her between my forearms without strain. She’d made it. She had escaped gravity. Her limbs were as light as hollow birch branches, the scrolls of their bark whole, but the marrow crumbled, the sap gone brittle. I folded her up easily, because there was nothing to her.

Bundles of twigs, bones in worn-soled Nikes, slapping forward into a relentless weather; the young women cast shadows of Javanese stick-puppets, huge-headed, disappearing in a sideways light. Dry-mouthed like the old, unsteady, they head home on swollen knees while it is still morning.

Nothing justifies comparison with the Holocaust; but when confronted with a vast number of emaciated bodies starved not by nature but by men, one must notice a certain resemblance. The starving body cannot know it is middle-class. The imprisoned body cannot tell that it is considered free. The experience of living in a severely anorexic body, even if that body is housed in an affluent suburb, is the experience of a body living in Bergen-Belsen—if we imagine for the Belsen inmate a 40-percent chance of imprisonment forever and a 15-percent chance of death. These experiences are closer to one another than either is to that of a middle-class body that is not in prison in the affluent First World. Though I am trying to avoid the imagery of death camps, it returns. These young women weigh no more than the bodies documented in the archives of what is legitimately called Hell. They have, at their sickest, no more to eat; and they have no choice. For an unknown reason that must be physiological, at a certain point in their starvation they lose the ability to stop starving, the choice to eat. Finally—as is seldom acknowledged—they are
hungry; I was hungry every conscious moment; I was hungry in my sleep.

Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are—less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of an inhumane social order.

Anorexia is a prison camp. One fifth of well-educated American young women are inmates. Susie Orbach compared anorexia to the hunger strikes of political prisoners, particularly the suffragists. But the time for metaphors is behind us. To be anorexic or bulimic
is
to be a political prisoner.

If we look at most young women’s inert relationship to feminism, we can see that with anorexia and bulimia, the beauty myth is winning its offensive. Where are the women activists of the new generation, the fresh blood to infuse energy into second-wave burnout and exhaustion? Why are so many so quiet? On campuses, up to a fifth of them are so quiet because they are starving to death. Starving people are notorious for a lack of organizational enthusiasm. Roughly another 50 percent are overcome with a time-devouring and shameful addiction to puking their guts out in the latrines of the major centers of higher learning. The same young women who would seem to be its heiresses are not taking up the banner of the women’s movement for perhaps no more profound reason than that many of them are too physically ill to do much more than cope with immediate personal demands. And on a mental level, the epidemic of eating disorders may affect women of this generation in such a way as to make feminism seem viscerally unconvincing: Being a woman is evidently nothing to be up in arms about; it makes you hungry, weak, and sick.

Beyond this are other succession problems generated by the myth. Young women inherited twenty years of the propagandizing caricature of the Ugly Feminist, so—“I’m feminine, not a feminist,” says a college senior in a
Time
magazine report; “I picture a
feminist as someone who is masculine and doesn’t shave her legs.” Too many young women do not realize that others pictured “a feminist” in that way so that they would be sure to respond as this one does. Others, alarmingly, blame the women’s movement for the beauty backlash against it—“Kathryn,” a twenty-five-year-old quoted by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, describes a party at her law firm: “I often resent . . . the way women’s liberation has increased the expectations of men”: Twenty years ago, she complains, a young male lawyer would want to arrive with “a drop-dead blonde” on his arm, whereas today he and and his colleagues compete to escort the highest achiever—“the only catch was that these yuppie women had to look every bit as glamorous as the drop-dead blondes of the past.” Finally, the myth seeks to discourage all young women from identifying with earlier feminists—simply because these are older women. Men grant themselves tradition to hand down through the generations; women are permitted only fashion which each season renders obsolete. Under that construct, the link between generations of women is weakened by definition: What came before is rarely held up for admiration as history or heritage, but derided by fashion’s rigid rule as embarrassingly démodé.

To share a meal with a young woman of the present generation, you have to be prepared to witness signs of grave illness. You ignore her frantic scanning of the menu, the meticulous way she scrapes the sauce. If she drinks five glasses of water and sucks and chews the ice, you mustn’t comment. You look away if she starts to ferret a breadstick into her pocket, and ignore her reckless agitation at the appearance of the pastry tray, her long shamefaced absence after the meal, before the coffee. “Are you okay?” “I’m
fine
.” How dare you ask.

When you share the bill, you haven’t shared a meal. The always renewed debate that young people of each generation take for granted, about how to change the world to suit their vision, is not going to be renewed for women over a table such as this. The pastry cart comes first; its gilt handles tower over you, blocking out the landscape. The world will have to wait. That’s how it works.

There is no villain lurking by the cash register. No visible enemy has done this to you two; there’s only your waiter, and the
block-print tablecloths, the blackboard with the daily menu, the ice bucket full of melting cubes, the discreet hallway that leads to the bathroom with its sliding bolt. Evil, said Hannah Arendt, is banal. But the work is done anyway, and it looks as if it has been done by your own hands. You claim your coats and step outside and part ways, having talked nothing new whatever into life.

Young girls and women are seriously weakened by inheriting the general fallout of two decades of the beauty myth’s backlash. But other factors compound these pressures on young women so intensely that the surprise is not how many do have eating diseases, but that any at all do not.

Girls and young women are also starving because the women’s movement changed educational institutions and the workplace enough to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness of power itself. Women in “coeducational” schools and colleges are still isolated from one another, and admitted as men manqué. Women’s studies are kept on the margins of the curriculum, and fewer than 5 percent of professors are women; the worldview taught young women is male. The pressure on them is to conform themselves to the masculine atmosphere. Separated from their mothers, young women on campus have few older role models who are not male; how can they learn how to love their bodies? The main images of women given them to admire and emulate are not of impressive, wise older women, but of girls their own age or younger, who are not respected for their minds. Physically, these universities are ordered for men or unwomaned women. They are overhung with oil portraits of men; engraved with the rolling names of men; designed, like the Yale Club in New York, which for twenty years after women were admitted had no women’s changing room, for men. They are not lit for women who want to escape rape; at Yale, campus police maps showing the most dangerous street corners for rape were allegedly kept from the student body so as not to alarm parents. The colleges are only marginally concerned with the things that happen to women’s bodies that do not happen to the bodies of the men. Women students sense this institutional wish that the problems of their female bodies would just fade away; responding, the bodies themselves fade away.

Added to this isolation and lack of recognition is the
unprecedented level of expectation placed on ambitious young women. Older women, in some ways, explored the best of both gender roles: They grew up as women and fought their way into the masculine work force. They learned to affirm the values of women and master the work of men. They are doubly strong. Young women have been doubly weakened: Raised to compete like men in rigid male-model institutions, they must also maintain to the last detail an impeccable femininity. Gender roles, for this generation of women, did not harmonize so much as double: Young women today are expected to act like “real men” and look like “real women.” Fathers transferred to daughters the expectations of achievement once reserved for sons; but the burden to be a beauty, inherited from the mothers, was not lightened in response.

Ceremonies of achievement play out this conflict: Meant to initiate young people into a new level of power or expertise, those ceremonies summon an unfeminine emotion—pride. But with each rite of passage through these institutions, payment is exacted from the young woman in the form of “beauty”; placating and flattering to men in power, it is required at these times as proof that she does not mean anything too serious by winning this diploma or this promotion. On one hand, here again the powerful stress the beauty myth so as to neutralize the achievement of the women involved; on the other, women do homage to the myth at such moments in request for its protection, a talisman that will let them get to the next stage unpunished.

In the 1950s, “domesticity” was what mitigated these moments of achievement. As a Listerine ad put it: “What was the diploma compared to those precious sparkling rings Babs and Beth were wearing?” Today “beauty” does the same work: “Only fifteen days until Becky’s graduation. I want her to be proud of me too. . . . Alba makes your diet a sweet success.” In a Johnnie Walker ad, it takes two high-fashion models to muse that “he thinks it’s fine for me to make more than he does.”
The New York Times
cites a woman whose boyfriend gave her breast implants for completing her doctorate. A current trend in the United States is for graduating daughters to get breast implant surgery while boys get the traditional grand tour of Europe. The most brilliant female students on campus are often the closest to full starvation.
Women are having breast surgery, liposuction, rhinoplasty, not only as rewards for attaining power—doctorates, inheritances, bat mitzvahs—they are also having these things, and being asked to have them, as antidotes for their having attained this power.

This sacrificial impulse is religious, to propitiate the gods before undertaking the next stage of a journey. And the gods are thirsty; they are asking to be propitiated. “Boys, that’s all,” said the administrator preparing Rhodes Scholarship interviewees at Yale. “Girls, please stay a few moments for pointers on clothes, posture, and makeup.” At the interview luncheon, when boys were asked, “How do you plan to save the world from itself?” a girl was asked, “How do you manage to keep your lovely figure?”

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud.

At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an all-male secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers.

Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Yale graduates but we would still not make pornograhy worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was
our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us.