The University of Auckland Beauty Myth Discussion In class we discussed Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth and attached is a pdf of the title chapter. The centra

The University of Auckland Beauty Myth Discussion In class we discussed Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth and attached is a pdf of the title chapter. The central tenets of the Beauty Myth are: that there is a quality called “beauty” that objectively and universally exists, that women must want to embody it, and men must want to possess women who embody it… that it is really a backlash against “Feminism” that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against womens advancement by keeping them vulnerable to outside approval… and is really about prescribing behavior instead of appearance. Do some independent research and reflection on the concept of the Beauty Myth. Share a current (last 10 years) article/website/campaign that speaks to the influence of the Beauty Myth in your life or generation. Include a short (200 word) recap/explanation. The Beauty Myth
A
t last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. In the two
decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the
early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights,
pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and
overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role. A generation on, do women feel free?
The affluent, educated, liberated women of the First World, who can
enjoy freedoms unavailable to any women ever before, do not feel as
free as they want to. And they can no longer restrict to the subconscious
their sense that this lack of freedom has something to do with—with
apparently frivolous issues, things that really should not matter. Many
are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns—to do with physical
appearance, bodies, faces, hair, clothes—matter so much. But in spite
of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it
isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something
important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between
female liberation and female beauty.
9
10 / THE BEAUTY MYTH
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through,
the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have
come to weigh upon us. Many women sense that women’s collective
progress has stalled; compared with the heady momentum of earlier
days, there is a dispiriting climate of confusion, division, cynicism, and
above all, exhaustion. After years of much struggle and little recognition,
many older women feel burned out; after years of taking its light for
granted, many younger women show little interest in touching new
fire to the torch.
During the past decade, women breached the power structure;
meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery
became the fastest-growing medical specialty. During the past five
years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main
media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and
thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would
rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal. More
women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition
than we have ever had 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.
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 reflex
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 uncontrolla-
The Beauty Myth / 11
ble: 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.
This counterforce is operating to checkmate the inheritance of feminism on every level in the lives of Western women. Feminism gave us
laws against job discrimination based on gender; immediately case law
evolved in Britain and the United States that institutionalized job discrimination based on women’s appearances. Patriarchal religion declined; new religious dogma, using some of the mind-altering techniques
of older cults and sects, arose around age and weight to functionally
supplant traditional ritual. Feminists, inspired by Friedan, 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 supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful
womanhood. The sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female
sexuality; “beauty pornography”—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 percent below that of ordinary women, eating disorders rose exponentially, 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.
Every generation since about 1830 has had to fight its version of the
beauty myth. “It is very little to me,” said the suffragist Lucy Stone in
1855, “to have the right to vote, to own property, etcetera, if I may not
keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” Eighty years later,
after women had won the vote, and the first wave of the organized
women’s movement had subsided, Virginia Woolf wrote that it would
still be decades before women
12 / THE BEAUTY MYTH
could tell the truth about their bodies. In 1962, Betty Friedan quoted a
young woman trapped in the Feminine Mystique: “Lately, I look in the
mirror, and I’m so afraid I’m going to look like my mother.” Eight years
after that, heralding the cataclysmic second wave of feminism, Germaine
Greer described “the Stereotype”: “To her belongs all that is beautiful,
even the very word beauty itself…she is a doll…I’m sick of the masquerade.” In spite of the great revolution of the second wave, we are not
exempt. Now we can look out over ruined barricades: A revolution has
come upon us and changed everything in its path, enough time has
passed since then for babies to have grown into women, but there still
remains a final right not fully claimed.
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 an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and
natural because it is biological, sexual, and evolutionary: Strong men
battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively 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 like the gold
standard. Like any economy, it is 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, though the West pretends
that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman;
the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts. Nor is
“beauty” a function of evolution: Its ideals change at a pace far more
rapid than that of the evolution of species, and Charles Darwin was
himself 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 through “beauty” is a reversal of
the way in which natural
The Beauty Myth / 13
selection affects all other mammals. Anthropology has overturned the
notion that females must be “beautiful” to be selected to mate: Evelyn
Reed, Elaine Morgan, and others have dismissed sociobiological assertions of innate male polygamy and female monogamy. Female higher
primates are the sexual initiators; not only do they seek out and enjoy
sex with many partners, but “every nonpregnant female takes her turn
at being the most desirable of all her troop. And that cycle keeps turning
as long as she lives.” The inflamed pink sexual organs of primates are
often cited by male sociobiologists as analogous to human arrangements
relating to female “beauty,” when in fact that is a universal, nonhierarchical female primate characteristic.
Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing
of the older rich men with young, “beautiful” women is taken to be
somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the
situation was reversed: “In every culture, the Goddess has many lovers…. The clear pattern is of an older woman with a beautiful but expendable youth—Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Cybele and
Attis, Isis and Osiris…their only function the service of the divine
‘womb.’” Nor is it something only women do and only men watch:
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.
If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics,
or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and
life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not
about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional
power.
The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely
symbols of the female behavior that that period considers
14 / THE BEAUTY MYTH
desirable: 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 be divided from one another. Youth and
(until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since 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 young 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, carrying the vital sensitive organ of
self-esteem exposed to the air.
Though there has, of course, been a beauty myth in some form for as
long as there has been patriarchy, the beauty myth in its modern form
is a fairly recent invention. The myth flourishes when material constraints on women are dangerously loosened. Before the Industrial Revolution, the average woman could not have had the same feelings
about “beauty” that modern women do who experience the myth as
continual comparison to a mass-disseminated physical ideal. Before
the development of technologies of mass production—daguerrotypes,
photographs, etc.—an ordinary woman was exposed to few such images
outside the Church. Since the family was a productive unit and women’s
work complemented men’s, the value of women who were not aristocrats or prostitutes lay in their work skills, economic shrewdness,
physical strength, and fertility. Physical attraction, obviously, played
its part; but “beauty” as we understand it was not, for ordinary women,
a serious issue in the marriage marketplace. 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 the workplace
during the day. The middle class expanded, the standards of living and
of literacy rose, the size of families shrank; a new class of literate, idle
women developed, on whose submission to enforced domesticity the
evolving system of industrial capitalism de-
The Beauty Myth / 15
pended. Most of our assumptions about the way women have always
thought about “beauty” date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the
cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.
For the first time new technologies could reproduce—in fashion
plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures—images of how
women should look. In the 1840s the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful” women
first appeared in mid-century. Copies of classical artworks, postcards
of society beauties and royal mistresses, Currier and Ives prints, and
porcelain figurines flooded the separate sphere to which middle-class
women were confined.
Since the Industrial Revolution, middle-class Western women have
been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints. This situation, unique to this group, means that analyses that
trace “cultural conspiracies” are uniquely plausible in relation to them.
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 middleclass 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, timeconsuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lacemaking.
All such Victorian inventions as these served a double function—that
is, though they were encouraged as a means to expend female energy
and intelligence in harmless ways, women often used them to express
genuine creativity and passion.
But in spite of middle-class women’s creativity with fashion and
embroidery and child rearing, and, a century later, with the role of the
suburban housewife that devolved from these social fictions, the fictions’
main purpose was served: During a century and a half of unprecedented
feminist agitation, they effectively counteracted middle-class women’s
dangerous new leisure, literacy, and relative freedom from material
constraints.
Though these time- and mind-consuming fictions about women’s
natural role adapted themselves to resurface in the post-
16 / THE BEAUTY MYTH
war Feminine Mystique, when the second wave of the women’s
movement took apart what women’s magazines had portrayed as the
“romance,” “science,” and “adventure” of homemaking and suburban
family life, they temporarily failed. The cloying domestic fiction of
“togetherness” lost its meaning and middle-class women walked out
of their front doors in masses.
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, which action consequently strengthened it a hundredfold. 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 were 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.
Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has
resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological
sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current
ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual
fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out
of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened
by women’s freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension
about our own liberation—latent fears that we might be going too far.
This frantic aggregation of imagery is a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change. The mass
depiction of the modern woman as a “beauty” is a con-
The Beauty Myth / 17
tradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing
their individuality, as the myth has it, “beauty” is by definition inert,
timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate
is evident in the way “beauty” so directly contradicts women’s real
situation.
And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and
pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation:
powerful industries—the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion
cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and
the $7-billion pornography industry—have arisen from the capital made
out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their influence
on mass culture, to use, stimulate, and reinforce the hallucination in a
rising economic spiral.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it doesn’t have to be. Societies tell
themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and
families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist
Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social
level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its
meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots,
he writes, are destructive communal illusions. Possibilities for women
have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for
counterimages.
The resulting hallucination materializes, for women, as something
all too real. No longer just an idea, it becomes three-dimensional, incorporat…
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