Top Quotes: “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women” — Naomi Wolf
Background: Wolf is a feminist writing in the early ’90s about what she deems to be the patriarchy’s replacement method to hold women back from their full power after they entered the workplace: the ‘beauty myth,’ the idea that women need to look forever young and have bodies so skinny that only 5% of women can achieve them without impacting their health. She touches on the topics of cosmetic surgery, anorexia, male vs. female public nudity, and much more in this incredibly eye-opening book that I think everyone should read! (Note that some of the stats cited in the book have been disputed, but the theoretical power of her ideas is undeniable.)
Intro
“Beauty ideals didn’t simply descend from heaven, they actually came from somewhere and served a purpose, often a financial one, namely to increase the profits of those advertisers whose ad dollars actually drove the media that, in turn, created the ideals. The stronger women were becoming politically, the heavier the ideals of beauty would bear down upon them, mostly in order to distract their energy and undermine their progress.”
“Silicone’s dangers have been all too thoroughly documented and silicone implants were taken off the general market. Not coincidentally, these days one rarely reads about breast-size anxiety. Why? Because increased scrutiny of the procedure has led to legal action, which closed down the expanding market for breast implants. There is no longer an ad budget driving magazine articles about breast-size anxiety.”
“The influence of porn on women’s sexual sense of self has become so complete that it is almost impossible for young women to distinguish the role porn plays in creating their idea of how to be, look, and move in sex from their own innate sense of sexual identity.”
“Back in the ’90s, public opinion considered anorexia and bulimia to be anomalous marginal behavior, and the cause was not assumed to be society’s responsibility — insofar as it created ideals and exerted pressure to conform to them — but rather personal crises, perfectionism, poor parenting, etc. In reality, these diseases were widely suffered by women and girls simply trying to maintain an unnatural ‘ideal’ body.”
“Up to 2% of American women are anorexic — between 1.5–3 million women — of those, sufferers typically become anorexic in adolescence. The death rate for anorexia, .56% per decade, is about 12 times higher that the annual death rate due to all causes of death among females age 15 to 24. Anorexia is the biggest killer of American teenager girls.”
“The beauty-myth mutation doesn’t stop with women, although with men, it is driven less by cultural backlash and more by simple market opportunity. A male beauty myth has established itself in the last 2 decades, moving from inside gay male subculture to the newsstands of the nation, and hitting suburban dads with a brand-new anxiety about their previously comfortable midsections. The power gap between the sexes has continued to close, dislodging men from their ages-old position as arbiters, rather than providers, of sexual attractiveness and beauty. Inevitably, a vast market for Viagra has opened up. Male fashion, health, and grooming magazines have taken off. Male cosmetic surgery use has hit an all-time high. Men are now a third of the market for surgical procedures, and 10% of college students suffering from eating disorders are men. Is it progress when both genders can be commodified and evaluated as objects?”
“In the past few decades, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. During the early 2000s, consumer spending doubled, porn became the main media category — ahead of legitimate films and records combined — and 33,000 American women told researchers they’d rather lose 10–15 pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we ever have before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret ‘underlife’ poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.”
What is the Beauty Myth?
“It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social redux that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control. The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable. It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.”
“Feminism gave us laws against job discrimination based on gender; immediately case law evolved in Britain and the U.S. that institutionalized job discrimination based on women’s appearances. Patriarchal religion declined; new religious dogma arose around age and weight to functionally replace traditional ritual. Feminists broke the stranglehold on the women’s popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women’s intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model replaced the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood. The sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality; ‘beauty porn’ — which for the first time in women’s history artificially links a commodified ‘beauty’ directly and explicitly to sexuality — invaded the mainstream to undermine women’s new and vulnerable sense of sexual self-worth. Reproductive rights gave Western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23% below that of ordinary women and a mass neurosis was promoted that used food and weight to strip women of that sense of control. Women insisted on politicizing health; new technologies of invasive, potentially deadly ‘cosmetic’ surgeries developed apace to re-exert old forms of medical control of women.”
“The beauty myth tells a story. The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary because it is biological and evolutionary: Strong men battle for beautiful women and beautiful women are reproductively more successful. Women’s beauty must correlate to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless. None of this is true. ‘Beauty’ is a currency system determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”
“‘Beauty’ is not universal or changeless. Nor is ‘beauty’ a function of evolution. Its ideals change at a pace far more rapid that that of the evolution of a species, and Darwin himself was unconvinced by his own explanation that ‘beauty’ resulted from a ‘sexual selection’ that deviated from the rule of natural selection; for women to compete with women for ‘beauty’ is a reversal of the way in which natural selection affects all other mammals.”
“Though the pairing of older rich men with young, ‘beautiful’ women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000BC to about 700BC, the situation was reversed. Among the Nigerian Wodaabes, the women hold economic power and the tribe is obsessed with male beauty; Wodaabe men spend hours together in elaborate makeup sessions, and compete — provocatively painted and dressed, with swaying hips and seductive expressions — in beauty contests judged by women. There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.”
“The beauty myth is actually composed of emotional distance, politicals, finance, and sexual repression. It is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.”
“The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will remain divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been ‘beautiful’ in women because they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is ‘unbeautiful’ since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken. Older women fear younger ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span. Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval.”
Origins of the Myth
“The beauty myth in its modern form gained ground after the upheavals of industrialization, as the work unit of the family was destroyed, and urbanization and the emerging factory system demanded what social engineers of the time termed the ‘separate sphere’ of domesticity, which supported the new labor category of the ‘breadwinner’ who left home for work during the day. The middle class expanded, the standards of living and literacy rose, the size of families shrank; a new class of literate, idle women developed, on whose submission to enforced domesticity the evolving submission to industrial capitalism depended. Most of our assumptions about beauty date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated, and the beauty index invented.”
“Since the Industrial Revolution, middle-class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints. The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the roles of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic; and a definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lacemaking — to expend female energy and intelligence in harmless ways. During a century and a half of unprecedented feminist agitation, they effectively counteracted middle-class women’s dangerous new leisure, literacy, and religious freedom from material constraints.”
“So the fictions simply transformed themselves once more: Since the women’s movement had successfully taken apart most other necessary fictions of femininity, all the work of social control once spread out over the whole network of these fictions had to be reassigned to the only strand left intact. This reimposed onto liberated women’s faces and bodies all the limitations, taboos, and punishments of the repressive laws, religious injunctions, and reproductive enslavement that no longer carried sufficient force. Inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework. As the economy, law, religion, sexual mores, education, and culture was forcibly opened up to include women more fairly, a private reality colonized female consciousness. By using ideas about ‘beauty,’ it reconstructed an alternative female world with its own laws, economy, religion, sexuality, education, and culture, each element as repressive as any that had gone before.”
Why does the Beauty Myth exist?
“The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal.”
“Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel ‘worth less’ was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more.”
“Employers did not simply develop the beauty backlash because they wanted office decoration. It evolved out of fear. The beauty backlash is absolutely necessary for the power structure’s survival.”
“Women work hard — twice as hard as men. All over the world, and for longer than records have been kept, that has been true. If a catalog of primitive labor in prehistoric societies were made, women would be found doing five things where men did one. In modern tribal societies, women regularly produce as much as 80% of the tribe’s total food intake and ⅘ of the work necessary for the group to survive.”
“While women represent 50% of the world population, they perform nearly ⅔ of all working hours, receive only 1/10 of the world income, and own less than 1% of world property.”
“Partners of employed women give them less help than do partners of housewives! Husbands of full-time homemakers help out for an hour and 15 minutes a day, while husbands of women with full-time jobs help less than half as long — 36 minutes. 90% of wives and 85% of husbands in the U.S. say the women does ‘all or most’ of the household chores.”
“In the U.S. between 1960 and 1990, the number of women lawyers and judges rose from 7,500 to 180,000; women doctors, from 16,000 to 108,000; women engineers from 7,000 to 175,000. In the past 15 years, the number of women in local elected office tripled, to 18,000.”
“The likelihood of backlash in some severe form was underestimated because the American mindset celebrates winning and avoids noticing the corollary, that winners only win what losers lose. Men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing; precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else. A real meritocracy means more competition at work and more housework at home.”
“In a court of law, to talk about something imaginary as if it was real makes it real. Since 1971, the law has recognized that a standard of perfection against which a woman’s body is to be judged may exist in the workplace, and that if she falls short of it, she may be fired. A ‘standard of perfection’ for the male body has never been legally determined in the same way. A woman can be fired for not looking right, but looking right remains open to interpretation.”
“Women in the U.S. are clustered in 20 of 420 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 75% of American women are still employed in traditional ‘women’s jobs,’ most of which are ill-paid and many of which stress their physical attractiveness.”
“When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer. How to make sure their busy, stimulated working women would keep consuming at the levels they’d done when they had all day to do so and little else of interest to occupy them? A new ideology was necessary that would compel the same insecure consumerism; that ideology must be a briefcase-sized neurosis that the working woman could take with her to the office.”
“Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring ‘beauties.’ The modern form of the beauty myth was figured out, with its $33 billion thinness industry and $20 billion youth industry. The beauty myth, in its modern form, arose to save magazines and advertisers from the economic fallout of the women’s revolution.”
“The women’s movement nearly succeeded in toppling the economics of the magazines’ version of femininity. During its second wave, clothing manufacturers were alarmed to find that women weren’t spending as much money on clothing anymore. Stripped of their old expertise, purpose, and advertising hook, the magazines invented — almost completely artificially — a new one. In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a ‘problem’ where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma. The number of diet-related articles rose 70% from 1968 to 1972. Articles on dieting in the popular press soared from 60 in the year 1979 to 66 in the month of January 1980 alone.”
“What editors are obliged to appear to say that what men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.”
“Women think about food all the time because the cult skillfully insists that they do so. If a woman is fat to the detriment of her health, it is fairly more likely to be as a result of the cult than in spite of it.”
“Women’s lives are a never-ending test, a morass of temptation and trial, with which they must struggle forever: ‘Once the weight is lost, accept the fact that watching yourself is a lifelong obligation.’ It gives life itself a compromised meaning: The woman who dies thinnest, with the fewest wrinkles, wins.”
Violence & Porn
“Kinsey found that religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man’s sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as a the circumcision knife into a woman’s enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.”
“The upsurge in violent sexual imagery took its energy from male anger and female guilt at women’s access to power. Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped. Even if we never seek out porn, we often see rape where sex should be.”
“In the ’80s, when many women were graduating with professional degrees, anger against women cracked the airwaves. We saw a stupendous upsurge in violent sexual imagery in which the abused was female. In 1979, the New York Times identified ‘a popular genre of thriller that attempts to generate excitement by piling up female corpses.’”
“Many women may have rape fantasies for no more subtle psychological reason than that image of sexuality is the primary one they witness. Men and women whose private psychosexual history would not lead them to eroticize sexual violence are learning from such scenes to be interested in it. In other words, our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it.”
“Men asked in Playboy to comment on the average penis size censored their findings: They ‘flatly refused,’ worrying it would have ‘a negative effect on Playboy’s readers,’ and that ‘everyone would walk around with a measuring stick.’ The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was attacked by Congress for sponsoring an exhibit that displayed very large penises. The Ontario Police Project held that images of naked women tied up, bruised, and bleeding, intended for sexual purposes, were not obscene since there were no erect penises, but a Canadian women’s film was banned for a five-second shot of an erect penis being fitted with a condom.”
“It is still apparent that there is an officially enforced double standard for men’s and women’s nakedness in mainstream culture that bolsters power inequities. The practice of displaying breasts in contexts in which the display of penises would be unthinkable, is portrayed as trivial because breasts are not ‘as naked’ as penises or vaginas. But if we think about how women’s genitals are physically concealed, unlike men’s, and how women’s breasts are physically exposed, unlike men’s, it can be seen differently: women’s breasts, then correspond to men’s penises as the vulnerable ‘sexual flower’ on the body, so that to display the former and conceal the latter makes women’s bodies vulnerable while men’s are protected. Unequal nakedness almost always expresses power relations: In modern jails, male prisoners are stripped in front of clothed prison guards; in the antebellum South, young black male slaves were naked while serving the clothed white masters at table. To live in a culture where women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. Sexual imagery is clearly heavily edited to protect men’s sexual — and hence social — confidence while undermining that of women.”
“Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer porn has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women’s dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty porn is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror’s mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women.”
“A consequence of female self-love is that the women grows convinced of social worth. If a woman loves her body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc.”
“The economy also depends on a male work structure that denies the family. Men police one another’s sexuality, forbidding each other to put sexual love and family at the center of their lives; women define themselves as successful according to their ability to sustain sexually loving relationships. If too many men and women formed common cause, that definition of success would make its appeal to men, liberating them from the echoing wind-tunnel of competitive masculinity. Beauty porn is useful at preventing that eventuality: When aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman — known, marked, lined, familiar — who hands him the paper every morning.”
“Beauty porn lowers women’s sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which ‘beauty’ is only key.”
“Women are not getting the pleasure from their own bodies or the bodies of men that they deserve or of which they are capable. Could there be something wrong with the way in which intercourse is culturally taught to men and women, and something wrong with the way women are asked to experience their own bodies? The beauty myth wants to discourage women from seeing themselves unequivocally as sexually beautiful.”
“If women feel ugly, it is our fault, and we have no inalienable right to feel sexually beautiful. A woman must not admit it if she objects to beauty porn because it strikes to the root of her sexuality by making her feel sexually unlovely. Male or female, we all need to feel beautiful to be open to sexual communication: ‘beautiful’ in the sense of welcome, desired, and treasured. Deprived of that one, one objectifies oneself or the other for self-protection.”
“Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sex education maintains men’s power in the myth: They look at women’s bodies evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over.”
“A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge women’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, grooming, or taste of clothes. The fact is that women are able to view just as men view women, as subjects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we took are effortlessly able to choose the male ‘ideal’ from a lineup; and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.”
“Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, ‘need’ beauty porn based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet personality seemed to be the only reason for them to exist — then a real young man would probably approach the young woman’s bed with, to say the last, a failing heart.”
“Having been trained does not mean one cannot reject one’s training. Men’s dread of being objectified in the way they have objectified women is probably unfounded: If both genders were given the choice of seeing the other as a combination of sexual object and human being, both would recognize that fulfillment lies in excluding neither term. But it is the unfounded fears between the sexes that work best to the beauty myth’s advantage.”
“Imagery that is focused exclusively on the female body was encouraged in an environment in which men could no longer control sex but had for the first time to win it. Women who were preoccupied with their own desirability were less likely to express and seek out what they themselves desired.”
“The cultural inversion of female sexuality starts early, beginning with the masturbation taboo. Early solitary desire is one of the rare memories that can remind women that we are fully sexual before ‘beauty’ comes into the picture and that sexual feeling does not have to depend on being looked at. Men take this core for granted in themselves. Men’s sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. It does not lie dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman’s will. We all know about the sexual desire of adolescent boys. But scenes of young women’s sexual awakening in themselves do not exist except in a mock-up for the male voyeur. Women’s genitals are not eroticized for women. Men’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Other women’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Female masturbation is not eroticized for women. Each woman has to learn for herself, from nowhere, how to feel sexual (though she learns constantly how to look sexual). She is given no counterculture of female lust looking outward, no descriptions of the intricate presence of her genital sensations. Left to herself in the dark, she has very little choice: She must absorb the dominant culture’s fantasies as her own.”
“Young women find their gaze returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why? … Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from a young boy’s point of view his first touch of a girl’s thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty.”
“Both men and women tend to eroticize only the woman’s body and the man’s desire. That means women are exaggeratedly sensitive to male desire for their own arousal, and men are exaggeratedly insensitive to female desire for theirs.”
“Because many women need to feel ‘swept away’ before they can experience desire, only 48% of them use contraception regularly. In the US., 49% of abortions follow from unprotected intercourse. If women’s sexuality were so highly valued and attentively fostered that they could protect themselves without fear of lessened sexual feeling, half of the abortion tragedy would be a thing of the past.”
“In 1980, a study of 2,000 married couples in the U.S. found that there had been assault in 28% of them, with 16% reporting violence in the past year. ⅓ of the violence was serious: punching, kicking, hitting with an object, assault with a knife or gun. In an assault, it is the woman who gets hurt in 94–95% of the cases. At least one and a half million American women are assaulted by their partners every year. One quarter of the violent crime in the U.S. is wife assault. Researchers in Pittsburgh tried to find a control group of nonbattered women — but 34% of the control group reported an attack from their partner. Battering accounts for one out of every four suicide attempts by women treated in U.S. ERs. In a National Institute of Mental Health study, 21% of women having emergency surgery were battered and half of all injured women using emergency services were battered. The Worldwatch Institute asserted in 1989 that violence against women was the most common crime worldwide.”
“Child sexual abuse links sex to force very early in a quarter to a third of the female population. Worldwide research suggests that one in four families is incestuous; in 80–90% of those cases, girls are sexually abused by a male relative, usually fathers. As many as 100 million young girls may be being raped by adult men often day after day, week after week, year in, year out.”
“Researchers in the U.S. found that 30% of male college students rated faces of women displaying emotional distress — pain, fear — to be more sexually attractive than the faces showing pleasure; of those respondents, 60% had committed acts of sexual aggression.”
“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. 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 them to pieces.”
“‘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 ad. 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.”
Thinness & Beauty
“Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat the moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture’s fixation on female fatness or thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men (40%) are medically overweight than women (32%) and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women. In fact, ‘there is very little evidence to support the claim that fatness causes poor health among women…The results of recent studies have suggested that women may in fact live longer and be generally healthier if they weigh 10–15% above the life-insurance figures and they refrain from dieting’; when poor health is correlated to fatness in women, it is due to chronic dieting and the emotional stress of self-hatred. The National Institutes of Health studies that linked obesity to heart disease and stroke were based on male subjects; when a study of females was finally published in 1990, it showed that weight made only a fraction of the difference for women that it made for men.”
“Women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the beauty myth, women’s bodies are not our own but society’s, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
“Researchers in Chicago found that plumper women desired sex more often than thinner women. On scales of erotic excitability, they outscored thin women by a factor of almost two to one. To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality. ‘Studies consistently show that with dietary deprivation, sexual interests dissipate.’”
“Dieting….itself may provoke obsessive behavior and binge-eating. It may indeed cause both eating disorders and obesity itself. Sustained caloric deprivation appears to be a severe shock to the body that it remembers with destructive consequences. Women’s problems with food seem to stem…from their effort to get an ultra-lean body…The only way 95% can get it is by putting themselves on deprivatory diets. Much of the behavior thought to cause anorexia and bulimia may actually be a consequence of starvation…The normal weight dieter who diets to look and feel thin also is vulnerable to disturbed emotional, cognitive, and behavior patterns.”
“Anorexia and bulimia can no longer be explained as a private issue. If suddenly 60–80% of college women can’t eat, it’s hard to believe that 60–80% of their families are dysfunctional in this particular way. There is a disease in the air; its cause was generated with intent; and young women are catching it.”
“Anorexia, bulimia, even compulsive eating, symbolically understood, are not actually diseases. They begin as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation. The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it.”
“Administering a class half full of mentally anorexic women is an experience distinct from that of administering a class half full of healthy, confident young women. The woman in these women cancelled out, its closer to the administration of young men only, which was how things were comfortably managed before.”
“For women to stay at the official extreme of the weight spectrum requires 95% of us to fantasize or rigidify to some degree our mental lives. The beauty of thinness lies not in what it does to the body but to the mind, since it is not female thinness that is prized, but female hunger, with thinness merely symptomatic. Hunger attractively narrows the focus of a mind that has ‘let itself go.’ Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick babies. Only this new mystique could prove strong and deep-reaching enough to take on the work given up by domestic isolation and enforced chastity. If there is a most natural urge, it is to satisfy hunger. If there is a natural female shape, it is the one in which women are sexual and fertile and not always thinking about it. To maintain hunger where food is available, as Western women are doing, is to submit to a life state as unnatural as anything with which the species has come up yet. It is more bizarre than cannibalism.”
“In young women today, fathers transferred the expectations of achievement once reserved for sons; but the burden to be a beauty, inherited from their mothers, was not lightened in response.”
“Women are not getting it wrong when they smoke to lose weight. Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty ‘fixes’ that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs is more highly rewarded socially than a hearty old crow. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her ‘Health’; if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.”
“The prime of life, the decades from 40 to 60 — when many men but certainly most women are at the height of their powers — are cast as men’s peak and women’s decline (an especially sharp irony since those years represent women’s sexual peak and men’s sexual decline). This double standard is based on the artificial inequality of the beauty myth — with the true message that a woman should live hungry, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.”
Cosmetic Surgery
“A risk never mentioned in sources available to most women is the death of the nipple. According to Penny Chorlton, ‘Any surgery on the breast can and probably will adversely affect any erotic stimulation a woman has hitherto enjoyed, and this should be pointed out by the surgeon in case it is important to the patient.’ Breast surgery, therefore, in its mangling of erotic feeling, is a form of sexual mutilation.”
“Imagine this: penis implants, penis augmentation, foreskin enhancement, testicular saline injections with a choice of three sizes, surgery to correct the angle of erection, to lift the scrotum and make it pert. Before and after shots of the augmented penis in Esquire. Risks: Total numbing of the glans. Diminution of sexual feeling. Permanent obliteration of sexual feeling. Testicular swelling and hardening, with probable repeat operations, including scar tissue formation that the surgeon must break apart with manual pressure. Implant collapse. Leakage. Unknown long-term consequences. Weeks of recovery necessary during which the penis must not be touched. The above procedures are undergone because they make men sexy to women, or so men are told.”
“Women report new sexual fulfillment after the operation, even if their breasts are nerve-dead and rock-hard. How can that be? Many women’s sexuality is becoming so externalized by beauty porn that they may truly be more excited by sexual organs that, though dead or immobile, visually fit into it.”
“Women are asked to be stoic in the face of surgical pain as they were asked to be stoic for childbirth. The medieval church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, according to Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating. ‘The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse that made childbirth a painful punishment — it did not have to do with the ‘right to life’ of the unborn fetus.’” “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.”
Conclusion
“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 our faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.”
“We need to define our self-esteem as political: to rank it, along with money, jobs, childcare, safety, as a vital resource for women that is deliberately kept in inadequate supply.”
“It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman’s body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will. At present, ‘beauty’ is an economy in which women find the ‘value’ of their faces and bodies impinging, in spite of themselves, on that of other women’s. This constant comparison, in which one woman’s worth fluctuates through the presence of another, divides and conquers. It forces women to be acutely critical of the ‘choices’ other women make about how they look. But that economy that pits women against one another is not inevitable.”
“What ‘beauty’ really involves is the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on a carousel, hostility and skepticism from other women, adolescence extended longer than it ought to be, cruel aging, and a long hard struggle for identity. And we will learn that what is good about ‘beauty’ — the promise of confidence, sexuality, and the self-regard of a healthy individuality — are actually qualities that have nothing to do with ‘beauty’ specifically, but are deserved by and, as the myth is dismantled, available to all women. The best that ‘beauty’ offers belongs to us all by right of femaleness. When we separate ‘beauty’ from sexuality, when we celebrate the individuality of our features and characteristics, women will have access to a pleasure in our bodies that unites us rater than divides us. The beauty myth will be history.”
“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all. The woman wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”
“A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission — to eat; to be sexual; to age; to wear overalls, a paste tiara, a second-hand opera clock, or combat boots; to cover up or practically go naked; to do whatever we choose in following — or ignoring — our own aesthetic. A women wins when she feels that what each woman does with her own body — unforced, uncoerced — is her own business. When many individual women exempt themselves from the economy, it will begin to dissolve. Institutions, some men, and some women, will continue to try to use women’s appearance against us. But we won’t bite.”
