The Beauty Myth (12 page)

In the free West, there is a good deal that women’s magazines cannot say. In 1956 the first “arrangement” was made, when a nylon manufacturers’ association booked a $12,000 space in
Woman
, and the editor agreed not to publish anything in the issue that prominently featured natural fibers. “Such silences,” writes Janice Winship, “conscious or not, were to become commonplace.”

Those silences we inherit, and they inhibit our freedom of speech. According to Gloria Steinem,
Ms.
lost a major cosmetics account because it featured Soviet women on its cover who were not, according to the advertiser, wearing enough makeup. Thirty-five thousand dollars worth of advertising was withdrawn from a British magazine the day after an editor, Carol Sarler, was quoted as saying that she found it hard to show women looking intelligent when they were plastered with makeup. A gray-haired editor for a leading women’s magazine told a gray-haired writer, Mary Kay Blakely, that an article about the glories of gray hair cost her magazine the Clairol account for six months. An editor of
New York Woman,
a staff member told me, was informed that for financial reasons she had to put a model on the cover rather than a remarkable woman she wished to profile. Gloria Steinem remembers the difficulty of trying to fund a magazine beyond the beauty myth:

As she put it more wearily in a later interview in
New Woman
, “Advertisers don’t believe in female opinion makers.” Steinem believes that it’s the advertisers who’ve got to change. And she believes they will, though perhaps not in her lifetime. Women need to change too, though; only when we take our own mass media seriously and resist its expectations that we will submit to still more instructions on “how to wash our hair” will advertisers concede that women’s magazines must be entitled to as wide a measure of free speech as those for men.

Other censorship is more direct: Women’s magazines transmit “information” about beauty products in a heavily self-censored medium. When you read about skin creams and holy oils, you are not reading free speech. Beauty editors are unable to tell the whole truth about their advertisers’ products. In a
Harper’s Bazaar
article, “Younger Every Day,” opinions on various antiaging creams were solicited only and entirely from the presidents of ten cosmetics companies. Cosmetics and toiletry producers spend proportionately more on advertising than any other industry. The healthier the industry, the sicker are women’s consumer and civil rights. Cosmetic stock is rising 15 percent yearly, and beauty copy is little more than advertising. “Beauty editors,” writes Penny Chorlton in
Cover-up
, “are rarely able to write freely about cosmetics,” since advertisers require an editorial promotion as a condition for placing the ad. The woman who buys a product on the recommendation of beauty copy is paying for the privilege of being lied to by two sources.

This market in turn is buoyed up by another more serious form of censorship. Dalma Heyn, editor of two women’s magazines, confirms that airbrushing age from women’s faces is routine. She observes that women’s magazines “ignore older women or pretend they don’t exist: magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful; i.e., less their age.”

This censorship extends beyond women’s magazines to any image of an older woman: Bob Ciano, once art director of
Life
magazine, says that “no picture of a woman goes unretouched . . . even a well-known [older] woman who doesn’t want to be retouched . . . we still persist in trying to make her look like she’s
in her fifties.” The effect of this censorship of a third of the female life span is clear to Heyn: “By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60-year-old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60-year-old readers look in the mirror and think they look too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.” Photographs of the bodies of models are often trimmed with scissors. “Computer imaging”—the controversial new technology that tampers with photographic reality—has been used for years in women’s magazines’ beauty advertising. Women’s culture is an adulterated, inhibited medium. How do the values of the West, which hates censorship and believes in a free exchange of ideas, fit in here?

This issue is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one’s own future and to be proud of one’s own life. Airbrushing age off women’s faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened. That would be making the same value judgment about blackness that this tampering makes about the value of the female life: that less is more. To airbrush age off a woman’s face is to erase women’s identity, power, and history.

But editors must follow the formula that works. They can’t risk providing what many readers claim they want: imagery that includes them, features that don’t talk down to them, reliable consumer reporting. It is impossible, many editors assert, because the readers do not yet want those things enough.

Imagine a women’s magazine that positively featured round models, short models, old models—or no models at all, but real individual women. Let’s say that it had a policy of avoiding cruelty to women, as some now have a policy of endorsing products made free of cruelty to animals. And that it left out crash diets, mantras to achieve self-hatred, and promotional articles for the profession that cuts open healthy women’s bodies. And let’s say that it ran articles in praise of the magnificence of visible age, displayed loving photo essays on the bodies of women of all shapes and proportions, examined with gentle curiosity the body’s changes after birth and breast-feeding, offered recipes without punishment or guilt, and ran seductive portraits of men.

It would run aground, losing the bulk of its advertisers. Magazines, consciously or half-consciously, must project the attitude that looking one’s age is bad because $650 million of their ad revenue comes from people who would go out of business if visible age looked good. They need, consciously or not, to promote women’s hating their bodies enough to go profitably hungry, since the advertising budget for one third of the nation’s food bill depends on their doing so by dieting. The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful.

But more significantly, that magazine would run aground because women are so well schooled in the beauty myth that we often internalize it: Many of us are not yet sure ourselves that women are interesting without “beauty.” Or that women’s issues alone are involving enough for them to pay good money to read about if beauty thinking is not added to the mix.

Since self-hatred artificially inflates the demand and the price, the overall message to women from their magazines must remain—as long as the beauty backlash is intact—negative not positive. Hence the hectoring tone that no other magazines use to address adults with money in their pockets: do’s and don’ts that scold, insinuate, and condescend. The same tone in a men’s magazine—
do
invest in tax-free bonds;
don’t
vote Republican—is unthinkable. Since the advertisers depend on consumer behavior in women that can be brought about only through threats and compulsion, threats and compulsion weigh down the otherwise valuable editorial content of the magazines.

Women see the Face and the Body all around them now not because culture magically manifests a transparent male fantasy, but because advertisers need to sell products in a free-for-all of imagery bombardment intent on lowering women’s self-esteem; and, for reasons that are political and not sexual, both men and women now pay attention to images of the Face and the Body. And it means that in the intensified competition to come, if no change of consciousness intervenes—for women’s magazines cannot become more interesting until women believe that we
ourselves are more interesting—the myth is bound to become many times more powerful.

And then the further the magazine guides the reader on her positive intellectual journey, the further it will drive her at the same time down the troubled route of her beauty addiction. And as the experiences along the way become ever more extreme, the stronger will grow women’s maddening sense that our culture has a split personality, which it seeks to convey to us through a seductive, embarrassing, challenging, and guilt-laden quid pro quo between dazzling covers.

THE MAGAZINES TRANSMIT
the beauty myth as the gospel of a new religion. Reading them, women participate in re-creating a belief system as powerful as that of any of the churches whose hold on them has so rapidly loosened.

The Church of Beauty is, like the Iron Maiden, a two-sided symbol. Women have embraced it eagerly from below as a means to fill the spiritual void that grew as their traditional relation to religious authority eroded. The social order imposes it as eagerly, to supplant religious authority as a policing force over women’s lives.

The Rites of Beauty counter women’s new freedom by combating women’s entry into the secular public world with medieval superstition, keeping power inequalities safer than they might otherwise be. As women enter on a struggle with a world moving into a new millennium, they are increasingly weighed down with a potent belief system that keeps part of their consciousness locked in a way of thinking that the male world abandoned with the Dark Ages. If one consciousness is centered on a medieval
belief system and another is thoroughly modern, the contemporary world and its power will belong to the latter. The Rites are archaic and primitive so that part of the core of female consciousness can be kept archaic and primitive.

Men too have reverent feelings about this religion of women’s. The caste system based on “beauty” is defended as if it derives from an eternal truth. People assume that who don’t approach the world with this kind of categorical faith in anything else. In this century, most fields of thought have been transformed by the understanding that truths are relative and perceptions subjective. But the rightness and permanence of “beauty’s” caste system is taken for granted by people who study quantum physics, ethnology, civil rights law; who are atheists, who are skeptical of TV news, who don’t believe that the earth was created in seven days. It is believed uncritically, as an article of faith.

The skepticism of the modern age evaporates where the subject is women’s beauty. It is still—indeed, more than ever—described not as if it is determined by mortal beings, shaped by politics, history, and the marketplace, but as if there is a divine authority on high who issues deathless scripture about what it is that makes a woman good to look at.

This “truth” is seen in the way that God used to be—at the top of a chain of command, its authority linking down to His representatives on earth: beauty pageant officials, photographers, and, finally, the man in the street. Even he, the last link, has some of this divine authority over women, as Milton’s Adam had over Eve: “he for God, and she for God in him.” A man’s right to confer judgment on any woman’s beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given. That right has become so urgently important for male culture to exercise because it is the last unexamined right remaining intact from the old list of masculine privilege: those that it was universally believed that God or nature or another absolute authority bestowed upon all men to exert over all women. As such, it is daily exercised more harshly in compensation for the other rights over women, and the other ways to control them, now lost forever.

Many writers have noticed the metaphysical similarities between beauty rituals and religious ones: Historian Joan Jacobs
Brumberg notes that even the earliest diet books’ language “reverberated with references to religious ideas of temptation and sin” and “echoed Calvinist struggles”; Susan Bordo speaks of “Slenderness and the Soul”; historian Roberta Pollack Seid traces the influence on “the weight-loss crusade” of Christian evangelism in “the spectacular rise of evangelically inspired weight-loss groups and books” (The Jesus System for Weight Control,
God’s Answer to Fat—Lose It, Pray Your Weight Away, More of Jesus and Less of Me
, and
Help Lord—The Devil Wants Me Fat!
). “Our new religion,” she writes of weight hysteria, “. . . offers no salvation, only a perpetually escalating cycle of sin and precarious redemption.”

What has not yet been recognized is that the comparison should be no metaphor: The rituals of the beauty backlash do not simply echo traditional religions and cults but
functionally supplant them
. They are
literally
reconstituting out of old faiths a new one,
literally
drawing on traditional techniques of mystification and thought control, to alter women’s minds as sweepingly as any past evangelical wave.

The Rites of Beauty are a heady compound of various cults and religions. As religions go, this one is more alive and responsive than most to the changing spiritual needs of its congregants. Bits and pieces and several belief systems are cobbled together in it, and abandoned when they no longer serve. Like the larger myth, the structure of its religion transforms itself with flexibility to offset the various challenges posed to it by female autonomy.