Authors: Naomi Wolf
The reflexive responses that have developed to keep us silent will doubtless increase in intensity: “Easy for you to say.” “You’re too pretty to be a feminist.” “No wonder she’s a feminist; look at her.” “What does she expect, dressed like that?”
“That’s what comes of vanity.” “What makes you think they were whistling at you?” “What was she wearing?” “Don’t you wish.” “Don’t flatter yourself.” “There’s no excuse any more for a woman to look her age.” “Sour grapes?” “A bimbo.” “Brainless.” “She’s using it for all she can get.” Recognizing these reactions for what they are, it may be easier to brave coercive flattery or insults or both, and make some long-overdue scenes.
This will be hard. Talking about the beauty myth strikes a nerve which, for most of us, is on some level very raw. We will need to have compassion for ourselves and other women for our strong feelings about “beauty,” and be very gentle with those feelings. If the beauty myth is religion, it is because women still lack rituals that include us; if it is economy, it is because we’re still compensated unfairly; if it is sexuality, it is because female sexuality is still a dark continent; if it is warfare, it is because women are denied ways to see ourselves as heroines, daredevils, stoics, and rebels; if it is women’s culture, it is because men’s culture still resists us. When we recognize that the myth is powerful because it has claimed so much of the best of female consciousness, we can turn from it to look more clearly at all it has tried to stand in for.
So here we are. What can we do?
We must dismantle the PBQ; support the unionization of women’s jobs; make “beauty” harassment, age discrimination, unsafe working conditions such as enforced surgery, and the double standard for appearance, issues for labor negotiation; women in television and other heavily discriminatory professions must organize for wave after wave of lawsuits; we must insist on equal enforcement of dress codes, take a deep breath, and tell our stories.
It is often said that we must make fashion and advertising images include us, but this is a dangerously optimistic misunderstanding of how the market works. Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem. If it flatters our self-esteem, it
is not effective. Let’s abandon this hope of looking to the index fully to include us. It won’t, because if it does, it has lost its function. As long as the definition of “beauty” comes from outside women, we will continue to be manipulated by it.
We claimed the freedom to age and remain sexual, but that rigidified into the condition of aging “youthfully.” We began to wear comfortable clothing, but the discomfort settled back onto our bodies. The seventies’ “natural” beauty became its own icon; the 1980s’ “healthy” beauty brought about an epidemic of new diseases and “strength as beauty” enslaved women to our muscles. This process will continue with every effort women make to reform the index until we change our relationship to the index altogether.
The marketplace is not open to consciousness-raising. It is misplaced energy to attack the market’s images themselves: Given recent history, they were bound to develop as they did.
While we cannot directly affect the images, we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them, look directly at one another, and find alternative images of beauty in a female subculture; seek out the plays, music, films that illuminate women in three dimensions; find the biographies of women, the women’s history, the heroines that in each generation are submerged from view; fill in the terrible, “beautiful” blanks. We can lift ourselves and other women out of the myth—but only if we are willing to seek out and support and really look at the alternatives.
Since our imaginary landscape fades to gray when we try to think past the myth, women need cultural help to imagine our way free. For most of our history, the representation of women, our sexuality and our true beauty, has not been in our hands. After just twenty years of the great push foward, during which time women sought to define those things for ourselves, the marketplace, more influential than any solitary artist, has seized the definition of our desire. Shall we let women-hating images claim our sexuality for their royalties? We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays, and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden. Let’s expand our culture to separate sex from the Iron Maiden.
We’ll need to remember, at the same time, how heavily
censored our mass culture is by beauty advertisers: As long as prime-time TV and the mainstream press aimed at women are supported by beauty advertisers, the story line of how women are in mass culture will be dictated by the beauty myth. It is understood without directives that stories that center admiringly on an “unprocessed” woman will rarely get made. If we could see a sixty-year-old woman who looks her age read the news, a deep fissure would open in the beauty myth. Meanwhile, let’s be clear that the myth rules the airwaves
only
because the products of the process buy the time.
Finally, we can keep our analytical gaze always sharp, being aware of what shapes the Iron Maiden can affect how we see, absorb, and respond to her images. Quickly, with this consciousness, they begin to look like what they are—two-dimensional. They literally fall flat. It is when they become tedious to us that they will evolve to
adapt
to the sea change in women’s moods; an advertiser can’t influence a story line if there is no audience. Responding to sheer boredom on women’s part, creators of culture will be forced to present three-dimensional images of women in order to involve us again. Women can provoke, through our sudden boredom with the Iron Maiden, a mass culture that does in fact treat us like people.
In transforming the cultural environment, women who work in the mainstream media are a crucial inside vanguard. I have heard many women in the media express frustration at the limitations surrounding the treatment of beauty myth issues; many report a sense of isolation in relation to pushing those limits. Perhaps debate renewed in more political terms about the beauty myth in the media, and the seriousness of its consequences, will forge new alliances in support of those women in print and TV and radio journalism who are eager to battle the beauty myth at ground zero.
Quickly, when we put together a personal counterculture of meaningful images of beauty, the Iron Maiden begins to look like an image of unattractive violence; alternative ways to see start to leap out from the background.
“Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces. . . . But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces?”
(Katherine Mansfield); “To Lily her beauty seemed a senseless thing, since it gained her nothing in the way of passion, release, kinship, or intimacy. . . .” (Jane Smiley); “She was astonishingly beautiful. . . . Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw forever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty. . . .” (Virginia Woolf); “If there is anything behind a face, that face improves with age. Lines show distinction and character: they show that one has lived, that one may know something.” (Karen de Crow); “Though she was now over fifty . . . it was easy to credit all one had heard about the passions she had inspired. People who have been much loved retain even in old age a radiating quality difficult to describe but unmistakable. Even a stone that has been blazed on all day will hold heat after nightfall . . . this warm radiance.” (Dame Ethyl Smyth).
The beauty cult attests to a spiritual hunger for female ritual and rites of passage. We need to develop and elaborate better women’s rituals to fill in the void. Can we evolve more widely among friends, among networks of friends, fruitful new rites and celebrations for the female life cycle? We have baby showers and bridal showers, but what about purification, confirmation, healing, and renewal ceremonies for childbirth, first menstruation, loss of virginity, graduation, first job, marriage, recovery from heartbreak or divorce, the earning of a degree, menopause? Whatever organic form they take, we need new and positive, rather than negative, celebrations to mark the female lifespan.
To protect our sexuality from the beauty myth, we can believe in the importance of cherishing, nurturing, and attending to our sexuality as to an animal or a child. Sexuality is not inert or given but, like a living being, changes with what it feeds upon. We can stay away from gratuitously sexually violent or exploitive images—and, when we do encounter them, ask ourselves to feel them as such. We can seek out those dreams and visions that include a sexuality free of exploitation or violence, and try to stay as conscious of what we take into our imaginations as we now are of what enters our bodies.
An eroticism of equality may be hard to visualize now. Critiques of sexuality tend to stop short with the assumption that sexuality cannot evolve. But for most women, fantasies of objectification or violence are learned superficially through a patina of images. I believe that they can be as easily unlearned by consciously reversing our conditioning—by making the repeated association between pleasure and mutuality. Our ideas of sexual beauty are open to more transformation than we yet realize.
We need, especially for the anorexic/pornographic generations, a radical rapprochement with nakedness. Many women have described the sweeping revelation that follows even one experience of communal all-female nakedness. This is an easy suggestion to mock, but the fastest way to demystify the naked Iron Maiden is to promote retreats, festivals, excursions, that include—whether in swimming or sunning or Turkish baths or random relaxation—communal nakedness. Men’s groups, from fraternities to athletic clubs, understand the value, the cohesiveness, and the esteem for one’s own gender generated by such moments. A single revelation of the beauty of our infinite variousness is worth more than words; one such experience is strong enough, for a young girl, especially, to give the lie to the Iron Maiden.
When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? What is the context? When someone discusses a woman’s appearance to her face, she can ask herself, Is it that person’s business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?
A woman’s appearance is more often called to her attention for a political reason than as a constituent of genuine attraction and desire. We can learn to get better at telling the difference—a liberating skill in itself. We need not condemn lust, seduction, or physical attraction—a much more democratic and subjective quality than the market would like us to discover—we need only to reject political manipulation.
The irony is that more beauty promises what only more female solidarity can deliver: The beauty myth can be defeated for good only through an electric resurgence of the
womancentered political activism of the seventies—a feminist third wave—updated to take on the new issues of the nineties. In this decade, for young women in particular, some of the enemies are quieter and cleverer and harder to grasp. To enlist young women, we’ll need to define our self-esteem as political: to rank it, along with money, jobs, child care, safety, as a vital resource for women that is
deliberately
kept in inadequate supply.
I don’t pretend to have the agenda; I know only that some of the problems have changed. I’ve become convinced that there are thousands of young women ready and eager to join forces with a peer-driven feminist third wave that would take on, along with the classic feminist agenda, the new problems that have arisen with the shift in
Zeitgeist
and the beauty backlash. The movement would need to deal with the ambiguities of assimilation. Young women express feelings of being scared and isolated “insiders” as opposed to angry and united outsiders, and this distinction makes backlash sense: The best way to stop a revolution is to give people something to lose. It would need to politicize eating disorders, young women’s uniquley intense relationship to images, and the effect of those images on their sexuality—ir would need to make the point that you don’t have much of a right over your own body if you can’t eat. It would need to analyze the antifeminist propaganda young women have inherited, and give them tools, including arguments like this one, with which to see through it. While transmitting the previous heritage of feminism intact, it would need to be, as all feminist waves are, peer-driven: No matter how wise a mother’s advice is, we listen to our peers. It would have to make joy, rowdiness, and wanton celebration as much a part of its project as hard work and bitter struggle, and it can begin all this by rejecting the pernicious fib that is crippling young women—the fib called postfeminism, the pious hope that the battles have all been won. This scary word is making young women, who face many of the same old problems, once again blame themselves—since it’s all been fixed, right? It strips them of the weapon of theory and makes them feel alone once again. We never speak complacently of the post-Democratic era: Democracy, we know, is a living, vulnerable thing that every generation must renew. The same goes for that aspect of democracy represented by feminism. So let’s get on with it.
Women learned to crave “beauty” in its contemporary form because we were learning at the same time that the feminist struggle was going to be much harder than we had realized. The ideology of “beauty” was a shortcut promise to agitating women—a historical placebo—that we could be confident, valued, heard out, respected, and make demands without fear. (In fact, it is doubtful whether “beauty” is the real desire at all; women may want “beauty” so that we can get back inside their bodies, and crave perfection so that we can forget about the whole damn thing. Most women, in their guts, would probably rather be, given the choice, a sexual, courageous self than a beautiful generic Other.)