Ladies, good news! Our vain, superficial obsessions with our hair, clothes, shoes, skin and weight, are not our fault. They're not even Sarah Jessica Parker's fault.
They are the fault of a CONSPIRACY by the patriarchy to preserve the status quo. By artificially creating a nearly unattainable beauty ideal and then putting enormous social, cultural and professional pressure on women to live up to it, the corporate power structure is sucking up women's excess time, energy, confidence and money in pursuit of beauty, in order to prevent them from organizing to demand social change and economic equality. Or at least, this is the thesis advanced by Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. This book, first published in 1991, describes the "Beauty Backlash" that developed in the 1970s and 80s to replace the cult of domesticity, as women left the isolation of the home and the imprisonment of the feminist mystique in pursuit of higher education, the workplace, and political and economic equality. The goals of the Beauty Backlash are numerous: to keep our consumer economy chugging along through the sale of expensive beauty products, diet products and cosmetic surgery; to occupy what's left of women's time and energy after their day job and work of running a household are done, by demanding rituals of exercise, skin care, and other beauty-related pursuits, so they can't use that time to agitate for, say, state-sponsored childcare; and, especially sinisterly, to force women to exist in a constant state of insecurity and uncertainty about their value, which not only holds individual women back by undermining their confidence but prevents women from banding together by cultivating an atmosphere of beauty-based rivalry and mistrust.
The Beauty Myth is not a terribly well-written book. It's highly academic and statistic-stuffed in places, and then occasionally veers off into strange, poetic passages that draw on Wolf's personal experiences. It's often alarmist and dramatic, drawing comparisons between the oppression of women by the Beauty Myth and slavery, the Holocaust, and genital mutilation of young girls in Africa. Though she pays ostensible homage to the shackles women have shaken off in escaping the centuries of political and economic repression that preceded the modern day, she suggests that our gains are severely compromised, if not entirely moot, in the face of the new oppression that has risen to replace the old. She tries to argue that beauty oppression has arisen as a direct result of women's progress, but it's still hard to imagine that the older generations of feminists Wolf so clearly admires--the suffragists, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer--would not find it, at the very least, silly and even a little churlish to compare the fact that women are besieged with ads for lipstick and liposuction to being unable to divorce, own property or vote.
However, although I think Wolf exaggerates both the extent of the conscious patriarchal political conspiracy and the devastating reach of its influence, many of her observations about the effects the Beauty Myth have on the female psyche are thought-provoking, and in some cases resonated powerfully with my experiences and those of other women I've known. The two aspects of beauty she focuses on most are weight and aging, what she calls the cult of the fear of aging and the cult of the fear of fat.
She talks about the dangers of eating disorders and cosmetic surgery in the pursuit of a super-skinny female ideal and the way models and actresses ("the beauty elite corps") have grown thinner and thinner, promoting an ever-more unattainable ideal. In many ways, twenty years after she's writing, we as a culture are aware of the unrealistic ideals held up to us, though it's usually blamed on Hollywood and the fashion industry, not the diet/exercise/cosmetic surgery industries which actually stand to profit hugely from a widespread paranoia about fat. We know about anorexia and bulimia and the fact that studies show that men choose an ideal body type a full size bigger than women do, slash have no idea if you've gained or lost five pounds. We also know about the obesity epidemic and the mortal physical and social dangers of being overweight--we are simultaneously urged to love our own best body and learn to embrace our curves (though never our lack of curves), and warned that becoming obese is easy, dangerous and basically unpatriotic.
Wolf, writing twenty years ago, brushes off any real medical danger from being overweight in a way I think is irresponsibly dismissive and inaccurate; she suggests that magazines that run articles on the danger of obesity do so to support their advertisers who work for the diet industries. It's almost certainly true that women's magazines, in particular, are highly constrained in their editorial content by their advertisers, and that's why they are so vapid and repetitive; still, I don't think it's fair to say that there's no truth to arguments about the dangers of obesity.
Where I do think she's spot on is the sense of obligation the Beauty Myth has succeeded in creating for, at the very least, young women (and I think many older and wiser women as well). In a chapter on religion, she discusses how the beauty interests have appropriated a language of morality--good/bad, guilt, punishment, redemption--to discuss the need to be thin and attractive. She suggests that dieting culture has become so ingrained and pervasive that eating is now seen as a moral and spiritual weakness, the body conquering the mind, the way masturbation was once seen: "Where 'immature' women in the 1950s wanted clitoral orgasms, while 'mature' ones passively yielded, today oral desire is interpreted in a similar sexual code. It is considered immature for women to eat heartily, since they're told they risk their sexuality; they are seen as mature if they starve, promise to win sexuality that way" (200).
This is a pretty bald statement, and one that maybe those of us who consider ourselves relatively well-adjusted would dismiss; again, we all know about eating disorders. But I do think there's a culture of admiration for the woman who exercises great self-control in her eating habits and works out regularly, over and above the actual physical result of her labors; and a sense of contempt, if tempered by relief or envy, toward women who eat whatever they want, even if they stay thin anyway. More tellingly, these values--that women who work hard to maintain "healthy" habits are responsible and good, and those who don't are ignorant and irresponsible--are so deeply ingrained that it's hard for me to even see them as dysfunctional. After my first year of college, where I was confronted for the first time by dozens of girls my age who were eating salad and watching their weight, I went to work at a restaurant. A woman about my age took us through a few days of menu training, describing the dishes, including a french toast flambe, in which french toast was dipped in egg, sauteed, flambed in sugar and brandy, and then topped with syrup, english cream and sugary fruit; the girl describing it said, "It's basically like the best thing ever." I remember being shocked that she would admit, to a room full of people she didn't know, that she ate things like that. I've never been anorexic or even a particularly committed dieter; I've never given up junk food successfully for any period of time; still, it was inconceivable to me that one would admit to eating french toast flambe. My technique, and that of other girls I knew, was to pretend such caloric monstrosities simply didn't exist, and I was so firmly steeped in this way of thinking that it was a considerable shock to me to realize that other people still recognized that they did.
The moral guilt, and the depth of self loathing, that can attend eating too much or failing to exercise is profound. What resonated with me most was the identification of a female obligation to society to be attractive--not so much that in order to get a job, or attract a man, it is necessary to be beautiful; but that it is somehow your civic duty to wear makeup to the grocery store and blow dry your hair. I know this is silly. I know it's silly to expect it of myself and even worse to expect it of other women--the choices they make about their bodies are theirs alone, and their eating and exercise habits, unless they are literally physically endangering a woman I care about, are not mine to applaud or condemn. But nonetheless, the anti-fat value system is there, and so deeply held that even the idea of questioning it is nerve racking. Even as I read and was filled with righteous feminist anger at the machinations of the corporate interests, another part of me was filled with panic at the idea of abandoning the beauty ideals; being led away from the path of glamour, rewarding self-discipline, and aesthetic fulfillment promised by the perpetrators of the Beauty Myth. I caught myself hoping, as I read, to find beauty secrets tucked in amongst the feminism, that maybe in a section labeled "what not to do," I would find a new weight-loss tip or a checklist of beauty ideals I could measure myself against. And this upsetting realization lent credence to more of what Wolf had to say that I might normally have given; seeing that the Beauty Myth is, in fact, pervasive enough that even the idea of challenging it provokes distinct anxiety.
No comments:
Post a Comment