The Beauty Myth (32 page)

The sun steamed through the rain, the microphone crackled, the mud churned, we sat still, all wrong, under our hot polyester gowns. The speaker had transposed us for a moment out of the gentle quadrangle, where we had been led to believe we were cherished, and into the tawdry district four blocks away where stolen photographs of our naked bodies would find no buyers. Waiting for the parchment that honored our minds, we were returned with reluctant confusion to our bodies, which we had just been told were worthless. Unable to sit still for the rest of the speeches unless we split our minds, being applauded, from our bodies, being derided, we did so. We wanted the honor, we deserved it. The honor and derision came at the same time from the same podium. We shifted in our seats.

We paid the price asked of us. With moments like that to live through, the unreal-sounding statistics of young women’s eating diseases begin to come clear. A split like that makes one nauseous. The pride of four years’ hard work and struggle was snatched back from us at the moment we reached for it, and returned to us fouled. There was the taste of someone else’s bile in our mouths.

The pressure of beauty pornography and the pressures of achievement combine to strike young women where they are most vulnerable: in their exploration of their sexuality in relation to their sense of their own worth. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in
Face Value
found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

When women of different ages do have the rare opportunity to talk, the gap between older women and those of the anorexic/pornographic generations causes grave mistranslations. “This is what I say to get their attention,” says Betty Friedan of her college audiences.

For many young women in Friedan’s audience, the girdle is made of their own flesh. They can’t take it off at night. The “little bikinis” have not brought this generation heedless bodily freedom; they have become props that superimpose upon the young women chic pseudosexual scenarios that place new limits on what they can think, how they can move, and what they can eat. The backlash does to young women’s minds, so much more free, potentially, than any ever before, what corsets and girdles and gates on universities no longer can. The post-1960 daughter sees more images of impossibly “beautiful” women engaged in “sexual” posturing in one day than her mother saw throughout adolescence: She needs to be shown more if she is to know her place. By saturation in imagery, the potential explosiveness of this generation is safely defused.

Young women born after 1960 have been made ill enough from having seen little representation of sexuality apart from
beauty pornography. But they are not as ill as the generation who were children in the 1970s; those even younger women are sick almost to death. And the daughters of the eighties?

“Preadolescent dieting has increased ‘exponentially’ in recent years. . . . We know that dieting is rampant in the fourth and fifth grades,” reports Vivian Meehan, president of the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. In a survey of 494 middle-class schoolgirls in San Francisco, more than half described themselves as overweight, while only 15 percent were so by medical standards. Thirty-one percent of nine-year-olds thought they were too fat, and 81 percent of the ten-year-olds were dieters. A 1989 article in
The New York Times
, titled “Babes in Makeup Land,” describes a new marketing drive of cosmetics for little girls, six-year-olds “painted to the hilt”; one doll, Li’l Miss Makeup, “resembles a girl that’s 5 or 6 years old” who, when cold water is painted on, “springs eyebrows, colored eyelids, fingernails, tinted lips and a heart-shaped beauty mark.”

These little girls, born around the time of Ronald Reagan’s first election, are showing third-generation mutations from the beauty backlash against the women’s movement. They are born with a congenital deformity: They lack childhoods. This generation will have even more trouble with life in the body than do daughters of the 1960s and 1970s. Born to compete, they will from their earliest memories associate femaleness with deprivation. Hunger is already being eroticized for today’s little girls as an entry into adult sexuality. For a contemporary seven-year-old, to climb onto a scale and to exclaim with horror is as much a ritual of femininity, inextricable from the promise of sexual gratification, as my generation’s posing provocatively on high heels in front of mirrors, and of my mother’s generation dressing dolls in white satin. If they start dieting at seven and don’t have sex until their mid-teens, it will already be too late: They will have spent over half their lives learning masochism in preparation for sexual gratification. They will have had little chance to build up memories of erotic life in the Edenic, undivided, pleasure-seeking, satisfied child’s body. They will be learning masochism as they learn sexuality, and will enter a long, insecure adolescence, besieged by further messages of beauty as masochism, unprotected by the integrity of a sexual core innocent of pain.

The protection of chaperons left behind, the protection of sexual integrity not yet fully claimed, young women are vulnerable in brand-new ways. They do have greater leeway to move unaccompanied through the world than ever before; but that, ironically, has created still another new use for eating disorders.

The old claustrophobia has a new irritant, more chafing than ever. The young girl knows, more than her mother could at her age, what it is she is missing; she has had a taste. In Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” one sister, who did not taste forbidden fruit, stayed whole. The other took one sip of sweetness and found it addictive. She needed more, she needed to glut herself, or she would waste away.

The threat of sexual danger makes the girl’s body a landscape on which she must project the outer world that now closes in. This house arrest of adolescence brings dreams of quest and exploration to a barren awakening. Marrakesh, Malabar, the Spice Islands, fantasies of discovery collapse, and she learns to put a dot of highlighter in the center of her upper lip. Her adventures must be restricted to those in which she can safely be looked at, because the really good adventures will expose her to being looked at to disastrous effect. Where her male peers go On the Road, she and the golden shackle of her “beauty” have to turn off it.

As an adolescent, she realizes with mounting horror that they were not kidding: For her to walk alone will be a fraught activity forever. Anorexia, bulimia, and exercise fixations work off and numb the frustration of the claustrophobia that accompanies the girl’s grieving realization that the wide world she had imagined, and just inherited, is shut down to her by the threat of sexual violence.

If she were to eat, she would have energy; but adolescence is arranged for the safe venting of masculine steam. From athletic events to sexual conquests to a moody walk in the woods, boys have outlets for that agitation of waiting to fly. But if a girl has her full measure of wanderlust, libido, and curiosity, she is in a bad way. With ample stores of sugar to set off the buzz for intellectual exploration, starch to convert into restlessness in her elongating
legs, fat to fuel her sexual curiosity, and the fearlessness born from a lack of concern over where her next meal will come from—she will get in trouble.

What if she doesn’t worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women’s shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem so obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?

But if she
is not careful
she will end up: raped, pregnant, impossible to control, or merely what is now called fat. The teenage girl knows this. Everyone is telling her to be careful. She learns that making her body into her landscape to tame is preferable to any kind of wildness.

Dieting is being careful, and checking into a hunger camp offers the ultimate in care.

One must suffer to be beautiful.

—
French Proverb

Women must labour to be beautiful.

—
W. B. Yeats

Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

—
Genesis 3:16

HUNGER MAKES WOMEN’S
bodies hurt them, and makes women hurt their bodies. Studies of abusers show that violence, once begun, escalates. Cosmetic surgery is the fastest-growing “medical” specialty. More than two million Americans, at least 87 percent of them female, had undergone it by 1988, a figure that had tripled in two years. Throughout the 1980s, as women gained power, unprecedented numbers of them sought out and submitted to the knife. Why surgery? Why now?

From the beginning of their history until just before the 1960s, women’s gender caused them pain. Because of puerperal fever and childbed complications, giving birth was cruelly painful until the invention of chloroform in 1860, and mortally dangerous until the advent of antisepsis in the 1880s. Afterward, sex still carried the risk of an illegal abortion, with its dangers of hemorrhage, perforated uterus, and death by blood poisoning. “Labor”
for women has meant childbirth, so that work, sex, love, pain, and death, over the centuries, intertwined into a living knot at the center of female consciousness: Love hurt, sex could kill, a woman’s painful labor was a labor of love. What would be masochism in a man has meant survival for a woman.

Sex began to lose its sting in 1965, when in the case of
Griswold
v.
Connecticut
the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the sale of contraceptives and the Pill was widely prescribed. It hurt even less from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, when safe abortion was legalized in most Western countries. As women entered the paid work force and lost their dependence on sexual barter for survival, it hurt less still. Changing social mores and the women’s movement’s championing of female sexuality began to make it imaginable that the pleasure their sex gave women might finally and forever outweigh the pain. The strands of sex and pain in women at last began to separate.

In the strange new absence of female pain, the myth put beauty in its place. For as far back as women could remember, something had hurt about being female. As of a generation ago, that became less and less true. But neither women nor the masculine social order could adapt so abruptly to a present in which femaleness was not characterized and defined by pain. Today, what hurts is beauty.

Many women took on this new version of pain exacted by beauty stoically because freedom from sexual pain left a gap in female identity. Women were expected, and expected themselves, to conform to freedom effortlessly, with superhuman resilience. But freedom is not learned easily overnight. One generation is not long enough to forget five millennia of learning how to bear being hurt. If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable.

Even aside from the biological pain of women’s gender, modern women are just recovering from our long experience of man-made punishment for pleasure. The Greek lawmaker Solon ruled that an unmarried woman caught in a sexual act could be sold into
slavery; the emperor Constantine decreed that a virgin who had willingly fornicated must be burned (her penalty was lighter if she had been raped); death was the price a free woman paid for making love with a slave. The laws of Romulus gave a husband the right to kill his adulterous wife. Adulteresses in modern Saudi Arabia are stoned to death. Resistance to the abortifacient pill RU428 derives partly from its relative painlessness. Antiabortion activists often make exceptions for rape and incest, which suggests that it is her desire for sex for which a woman must pay with her pain. And many women, from a memory that extends back through endless mothers, are inclined consciously or not to agree.