The Beauty Myth (40 page)

Technology will continue radically to destabilize the social
value of the female body. Products are being developed to predetermine sex, with success rates of 70–80 percent; when such products are available one can expect, based on gender preferences recorded worldwide, that the ratio of women to men will drop precipitously. In the near future, warns one group of scientists, “women could be bred for particular qualities, like passivity and beauty.” Adjustable breast implants are now a reality, allowing women to be adapted for each partner’s preferences. The Japanese have already perfected a lifelike geisha robot with artificial skin.

But the first signs of the mass production of the female body are still the exception; the mass production of the female mind is pervasive. Women are the drugged sex: Between 1957 and 1967, consumption of psychotropic drugs (sedatives, tranquilizers, antidepressants, appetite reducers) increased by 80 percent, and 75 percent of the drug users are female. By 1979, 160 million prescriptions were written for tranquilizers, over 60 million for Valium alone. Sixty to 80 percent of those prescriptions went to women, and Valium abuse is reported as the most common drug problem that hospital emergency services deal with. Today, in Great Britain and the United States, twice as many women as men take tranquilizers; a scandal in Canada is the overprescribing of tranquilizers to women. In all three countries, women are the main subjects of electroshock treatment, psychosurgery, and psychotropic drugs.

This recent history of woman as pharmaceutical subject sets the stage for “a new era of ‘pharmaceutical cosmetics,’” including Lilly Industries’ antidepressant drug Fluoxetine, awaiting approval by the FDA, which will be marketed as a weight-loss pill.
The Guardian
reports that another, the adrenalinelike ephedrine, speeds metabolic rate, and a third, DRL26830A, thins subjects down while inducing “transient tremors.” Though of course “there is concern within the pharmaceuticals industry that they could create serious ethical problems,” industry spokesmen are already prepared for “setting the stage for more ‘cosmetic’ rather than medical use.” Women take drugs, one drug agency quoted in the article reports, “in order to be seen as feminine. The ‘feminine’ woman . . . is slim, passive, deferential to men and ‘does not exhibit emotions such as anger, frustration or assertiveness.’”
The new wave of cosmetically directed mood enhancers may solve the problem of women once and for all, as we dose ourselves into a state of perpetual cheerfulness, deference, passivity, and chronically sedated slimness.

Whatever the future threatens, we can be fairly sure of this: Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from category “woman” to category “ugly,” and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face. The free market will compete to cut up women’s bodies more cheaply, if more sloppily, with no-frills surgery in bargain basement clinics. In that atmosphere, it is a matter of time before they reposition the clitoris, sew up the vagina for a snugger fit, loosen the throat muscles, and sever the gag reflex. Los Angeles surgeons have developed and implanted transparent skin, through which the inner organs can be seen. It is, says one witness, “the ultimate voyeurism.”

The machine is at the door. Is she the future?

CAN WE BRING
about another future, in which it is she who is dead and we who are beautifully alive?

The beauty myth countered women’s new freedoms by transposing the social limits to women’s lives directly onto our faces and bodies. In response, we must now ask the questions about our place in our bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society.

What is a woman? Is she what is made of her? Do a woman’s life and experience have value? If so, should she be ashamed for them to show? What
is
so great about looking young?

The idea that a woman’s body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven’t taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately adapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body? Is there a difference between fashions in clothing and fashions in women’s bodies? Assuming that someday women can be altered cheaply, painlessly, and with no risk, is
that to be what we must want? Must the expressiveness of maturity and old age become extinct? Will we lose nothing if it does?

Does a woman’s identity count? Must she be made to want to look like someone else? Is there something implicitly gross about the texture of female flesh? The inadequacy of female flesh stands in for the older inadequacy of the female mind. Women asserted that there was nothing inferior about their minds; are our bodies really inferior?

Is “beauty” really sex? Does a woman’s sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she’s a person, or must she earn that right through “beauty,” as she used to through marriage? What is female sexuality—what does it look like? Does it bear any relation to the way in which commercial images represent it? Is it something women need to buy like a product? What really draws men and women together?

Are women beautiful or aren’t we?

Of course we are. But we won’t really believe it the way we need to until we start to take the first steps beyond the beauty myth.

Does all this mean we can’t wear lipstick without feeling guilty?

On the contrary. It means we have to separate from the myth what it has surrounded and held hostage: female sexuality, bonding among women, visual enjoyment, sensual pleasure in fabrics and shapes and colors—female fun, clean and dirty. We can dissolve the myth and survive it with sex, love, attraction, and style not only intact, but flourishing more vibrantly than before. I am not attacking anything that makes women feel good; only what makes us feel bad in the first place. We all like to be desirable and feel beautiful.

But for about 160 years, middle-class, educated Western women have been controlled by various ideals about female perfection; this old and successful tactic has worked by taking the best of female culture and attaching to it the most repressive demands of male-dominated societies. These forms of ransom were imposed on the female orgasm in the 1920s, on home and children and the family in the 1950s, on the culture of beauty in the
1980s. With this tactic, we waste time in every generation debating the symptoms more passionately than the disease.

We see this pattern of
the self-interested promotion of ideals
—eloquently pointed out in the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English—throughout our recent history. We must bring it up to date with the beauty myth, to get it once and for all. If we don’t, as soon as we take apart the beauty myth, a new ideology will arise in its place. The beauty myth is not, ultimately, about appearance or dieting or surgery or cosmetics—any more than the Feminine Mystique was about housework. No one who is responsible for the myths of femininity in every generation really cares about the symptoms at all.

The architects of the Feminine Mystique didn’t really believe that a floor in which you could see yourself indicated a cardinal virtue in women; in my own lifetime, when the idea of menstrual psychic irregularity was being clumsily resurrected as a last-ditch way to hold off the claims of the women’s movement, no one was really vested in the conviction of menstrual incapacity
in itself.
By the same token, the beauty myth could not care less how much women weigh; it doesn’t give a damn about the texture of women’s hair or the smoothness of our skin. We intuit that, if we were all to go home tomorrow and say we never meant it really—we’ll do without the jobs, the autonomy, the orgasms, the money—the beauty myth would slacken at once and grow more comfortable.

This realization makes the real issues behind the symptoms easier to see and analyze: Just as the beauty myth did not really care what women looked like as long as women felt ugly, we must see that it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful.

The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether.
The real problem is our lack of choice
.

Under the Feminine Mystique, virtually all middle-class women were condemned to a compulsive attitude toward domesticity, whatever their individual inclinations; now that this idea is largely dismantled, those women who are personally inclined
scrupulous housekeeping pursue it, and those women who couldn’t be less interested have a (relatively) greater degree of choice. We got sloppy, and the world didn’t end. After we dismantle the beauty myth, a similar situation—so eminently sensible, yet so remote from where we are—will characterize our relationship to beauty culture.

The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don’t. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes “beauty” hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not adornment, or expressed sexuality, or time spent grooming, or the desire to attract a lover. Many mammals groom, and every culture uses adornment. “Natural” and “un-natural” are not the terms in question. The actual struggle is between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion.

Costumes and disguises will be lighthearted and fun when women are granted rock-solid identities. Clothing that highlights women’s sexuality will be casual wear when women’s sexuality is under our own control. When female sexuality is fully affirmed as a legitimate passion that arises from within, to be directed without stigma to the chosen object of our desire, the sexually expressive clothes or manner we may assume can no longer be used to shame us, blame us, or target us for beauty myth harassment.

The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious? We must reject that false and forced dilemma. Men’s sexuality is taken to be enhanced by their seriousness; to be at the same time a serious person and a sexual being is to be fully human. Let’s turn on those who offer this devil’s bargain and refuse to believe that in choosing one aspect of the self we must thereby forfeit the other. In a world in which women have real choices, the choices we make about our appearance will be taken at last for what they really are: no big deal.

Women will be able thoughtlessly to adorn ourselves with pretty objects when there is no question that
we
are not objects. Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to
use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.

Many writers have tried to deal with the problems of fantasy, pleasure, and “glamour” by evicting them from the female Utopia. But “glamour” is merely a demonstration of the human capacity for being enchanted, and is not in itself destructive. We need it, but redefined. We cannot disperse an exploitive religion through asceticism, or bad poetry with none at all. We can combat painful pleasure only with pure pleasure.

But let’s not be naive. We are trying to make new meanings for beauty in an environment that doesn’t want us to get away with it. To look however we want to look—and to be heard as we deserve to be heard—we will need no less than a feminist third wave.

The trouble with any debate about the beauty myth is the sophisticated reflex it uses: It punishes virtually any woman who tries to raise these issues by scrutinizing her appearance. It is striking to notice how thoroughly we comprehend this implied punishment. We know well how it works in a typical beauty myth double bind: No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize—as her personal problem—observations she makes about aspects of the beauty myth in society.

Unfortunately, since the media routinely give accounts of women’s appearance in a way that trivializes or discredits what they say, women reading or watching are routinely dissuaded from identifying with women in the public eye—the ultimate anti-feminist goal of the beauty myth. Whenever we dismiss or do not hear a woman on television or in print because our attention has been drawn to her size or makeup or clothing or hairstyle, the beauty myth is working with optimum efficiency.

For a woman to go public means she must face being subjected to invasive physical scrutiny, which by definition, as we
saw, no woman can pass; for a woman to speak about the beauty myth (as about women’s issues in general) means that
there is no right way she can look
. There is no unmarked, or neutral, stance allowed women at those times: They are called either too “ugly” or too “pretty” to be believed. This reflex is working well politically: Often today, when women talk about the reasons they do not engage more with women-centered groups and movements, they often focus on differences not in agenda or worldview but in aesthetics and personal style. By keeping the antifeminist origins and reactionary purpose of this direction of attention always in mind, we can thwart the myth. For us to reject the insistence that a woman’s appearance
is her speech,
for us to hear one another out beyond the beauty myth, is itself a political step forward.

Blame is what fuels the beauty myth; to take it apart, let us refuse forever to blame ourselves and other women for what it, in its great strength, has tried to do. The most important change to aim at is this: When someone tries, in the future, to use the beauty myth against us, we will no longer look in the mirror to see what we have done wrong. Women can organize around discrimination in employment on the basis of appearance only when we examine the usual reactions to such complaints (“Well, why did you wear that tight sweater?” “So, why don’t you do something about yourself?”) and reject them. We cannot speak up about the myth until we believe in our guts that there is nothing objective about how the myth works—that when women are called too ugly or too pretty to do something we want to do, this has nothing to do with our appearance. Women can summon the courage to talk about the myth in public by keeping in mind that attacks on or flattery of our appearance in public are never at fault. It is all impersonal; it is political.