Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  To promote their skin “treatments,” cosmetics companies employed traditional scare tactics about skin damage (“Premature Aging: Don’t Let It Happen to You,” Ultima II ads warned—it’s “every skin-conscious woman’s worst nightmare come true”), but they delivered these fear-inducing messages now with pseudofeminist language about taking control. The ad agency that created Oil of Olay’s successful ’80s campaign—which shifted the company’s focus from older women with real wrinkles to baby-boom women with imaginary ones—employed what its executives labeled “the control concept.” Its age-terrorized but take-charge female model vowed, “I don’t intend to grow old grace-fully. . . . I intend to fight it every step of the way.” Chanel ads even advised professional women to use antiwrinkle creams to improve their work status; fighting wrinkles, they informed, was “a smart career move.”

  While cosmetics companies used the vocabulary of women’s liberation for marketing purposes, they also claimed that the fruits of that liberation were eroding women’s appearance. Career “stress” was the real destroyer of feminine beauty, the cosmetics industry insisted. The fluorescent office lights and even the daily commute posed a greater threat to female skin than intensive tanning, Ultima II ads insisted. “Dermatologists have agreed that you accumulate far more damage during the year going to and from work than in two weeks of concentrated sunbathing.”

  The beauty companies fared better hawking antiwrinkle potions than traditional scents and cosmetics because backlash appeals in this venue were able to couple female awareness of ancient cultural fears of the older woman with modern realities of the baby-boom woman’s aging demographic. This was a most effective combination. By 1985, a cosmetics trade association survey of skincare professionals found that 97 percent had noticed that their clients were markedly more worried and upset about the threat of wrinkles than just a few years earlier. By 1986, skin-cream annual sales had doubled in five years to $1.9 billion. And for the first time, many department-store cosmetics counters were selling more skin-treatment products than color makeup. At I. Magnin, these treatments made up 70 percent of all cosmetics sales.

  The popularity of high-priced antiwrinkle creams could hardly be attributed to improvements in the lotions’ efficacy. The claims made on behalf of high-priced antiaging products were virtually all fraudulent, the promises of “cell renewal,” “DNA repair,” and age “reversal” so ludicrous that even the Reagan-era U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued cease and desist orders against twenty-three of the cosmetic firms. Promises to protect women’s health by shielding their skin from the sun were similarly phony. Skin-care companies cashed in with sunblocks claiming protection factors as high as 34; researchers and the FDA could find no effectiveness over 15. And while it would be nice to believe that beauty companies simply wanted to guard women’s skin from carcinogenic rays, they showed no such vigilance against cancer when publicizing one of their most highly touted skin-treatment innovations of the decade: Retin-A.

  A century earlier, women were encouraged to consume “Fowler’s Solution,” an arsenic-laced acne cream, to revitalize aging skin; it made them sick, some fatally. In the ’80s, beauty doctors dispensed a prescription acne ointment reputed to possess antiaging properties. Retin-A, however, also had caused cancer in mice and an oral version of the drug, Accutane, was linked to birth defects. Moreover, Retin-A seemed more effective at burning women’s faces than burnishing them. In the one study testing the cream’s effect on wrinkles—sponsored by Retin-A’s own maker, Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp.—73 percent of the participants who took Retin-A needed topical steroids to reduce the painful swelling and 20 percent developed such severe dermatitis that they had to drop out of the study. (On the other hand, the study found that Retin-A gave one of the participants a “much improved” facial appearance.)

  The dermatologist who had conducted this lone study, John Voorhees, agreed to serve as Ortho’s chief promoter of Retin-A. Needless to say, the dermatology chairman from the University of Michigan didn’t dwell on the medical dangers when he endorsed Retin-A at a news conference in the Rainbow Room in Manhattan—a publicity stunt that caused Johnson & Johnson’s stock price to leap eight points in two days. The media dubbed Voorhees the ’80s Ponce de Leon; USA Today declared his discovery “a miracle.” In one year, Retin-A sales rose 350 percent to $67 million, pharmacies sold out of the $25 tubes, dermatologists’ office visits skyrocketed and doctors set up Retin-A shopping-mall “clinics” that drew hundreds of women. The FDA had not approved Retin-A’s use for wrinkles, but dermatologists dispensed it for that purpose anyway, simply claiming on the prescription forms that their middle-aged female patients were suffering from adolescent acne breakouts. On paper anyway, the doctors had succeeded in turning grown women back into pimply teenage girls.

  THE RETURN OF THE BRECK GIRL

  It was a sad day for America when the Breck Girl retired. That’s what her maker, American Cyanamid, said, anyway, when it put to rest “a stable force in our society for over forty years.”

  Actually, the glossy-haired paragon had been more of an intermittent force, coming on strongest during backlash years. She was born a salon poster baby in the Depression. She entered mass advertising in the feminine-mystique era, debuting as a seventeen-year-old celestial blonde on the back cover of a 1946 Ladies’ Home Journal. Each year, the company traded in one wholesome young model for another. As time passed, she became the twenty-plus blonde, although often still clutching a doll.

  With the ’70s, the Breck Girl began to fall from favor. First women turned to shampoos with herbal and other natural ingredients. Then the women’s movement began criticizing the company for its cookie-cutter vision of femininity. To appease its critics, the company began including mini-biographies in the ads, to give each girl a “personality.” Even so, the Breck Girl’s popularity kept slipping, and the company finally paid her its last respects in 1978. “It was management’s feeling that the Breck Girl was no longer promoting the shampoo effectively,” Breck product manager Gerard Matthews explains.

  But come the ’80s backlash, the Breck Girl rose from her Madison Avenue tomb. She’s back and more “modern” than ever, the company’s spokesmen assured customers in 1987, as they unveiled her new slogan: “The Breck Girl: A Self-Styled Woman of the Eighties.” Breck rehired its ’70s illustrator, Robert Anderson, and sent him out on a national hunt for the perfect Breck Girl.

  Anderson was still nursing wounds from his last skirmish with the women’s movement. “These militant feminists would come up to me and say, ‘What right do you have to go out and decide what’s beautiful?’” he recalls. It was a right Anderson would gladly reclaim in 1987, as he set off on “the Search” to seek “the personification of American beauty.” Like the prince bearing the glass slipper, Anderson says, “I knew when I saw her, I would know her at once.” The company also gave him a few pointers. “We didn’t want a woman who was a doctor or above average,” Breck product manager Gerard Matthews recalls. Anderson concurred; as he wrote in “My Impressions of the Search,” women might find successful female role models intimidating—“equally frustrating,” in fact, as “flawlessly beautiful models.” He decided to move cautiously; he would look for a woman who had made only “some decisions” about her life and was “perhaps a bit more defined than some of the earlier Breck Girls.”

  “I was busy at my computer and when he walked by, I just nodded—there wasn’t even any conversation,” Cecilia Gouge says, recalling the eventful March day when Anderson’s search arrived at her desk. At twenty-eight, Gouge had started working as a secretary at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta only a month earlier, after getting “really bored” as a housewife.

  The next day, Gouge was interviewed by Anderson and an assistant. She recalls a lot of questions about “my morals.” “He asked me a lot about my family, my values, how I felt toward my family,” Gouge says. “I told them that Joey [her husband] used to be a minister and I was a Sunday school teacher,
and they were very interested in this. . . . They asked me if I had a problem going back to work after Morgan [her daughter] was born. I told them how I decided, after I had Morgan, to stay home with her and didn’t go back to work until later. They were really interested that I had done that.” She also was clear where she stood on the equal rights question. “I’m not a big woman’s mover type. I’m not a feminist. In my family, Joey is the head of the household.”

  Anderson called off the search; the Breck Girl had been “discovered,” as the subsequent press release put it. “Cecilia possessed every quality we were looking for in the New Breck Girl,” Anderson asserted. “She’s not just a pretty face.” Her other qualities, according to the company’s announcement: She “loves to cook country style” and “play with her baby daughter”—and she “does her own housework.”

  Breck did not pay this new Breck Girl for her services. Cecilia Gouge’s only compensation was an all-expenses-paid trip to New York and free tickets to a Neil Simon Broadway play. The company’s officials said they would pay her a few hundred dollars for each subsequent public appearance, but they only recalled her once—for the company’s “Family Day.”

  “Sometimes it does bother me a little bit,” Gouge says of the unre-munerative arrangement. “But then, I guess it’s tit for tat. I got the recognition, the chance for a whole nation to know me. It was a chance to launch a modeling career.” But that career never materialized.

  “Cecilia came back from Boston [where she sat for the Breck portrait] in the clouds,” her husband, Joe, recalls, a year later. He is sitting at the kitchen table in the Gouges’ home in an Atlanta suburb. Cecilia, having just returned from her forty-hour-a-week clerical job, after stopping at the day care center to pick up their two-year-old daughter, is now stationed at the stove, preparing a casserole. Joe, waiting for dinner to be served, continues: “The more she talked, the less excited I got. She had stars in her eyes. I remember we went out to dinner and finally she looked at me and said, ‘You don’t look very excited,’ and I said, ‘To be honest, I’m not.’ I felt like her going back to work was enough of an adjustment. I was very worried about what this might lead to.”

  Soon after she received the Breck Girl title, Cecilia hired a modeling agent and signed a contract to make $3,000 monthly appearances at the Marathon Company’s boat dealers’ meetings. But Joe canceled the deal after a few months. “My biggest concern was her being gone to the different cities by herself. I like to have everything organized and laid out at home, and it got a little disorderly.” Cecilia eventually saw things his way. “It was all getting a little hectic, I guess,” she says now, clearing the kitchen table—as Joe retires to the living room to watch TV.

  The next year, Breck reported that unit sales for its fifteen-ounce shampoo bottle had risen 89 percent in 1987. But, as the company’s product manager conceded, the surge was unrelated to the Breck Girl’s return. It was the 22 percent price cut earlier that year that proved the decisive factor.

  THE BREAST MAN OF SAN FRANCISCO

  Over lunch at San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club, the businessmen are discussing their wives. “My wife is forty but she looks thirty,” plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Harvey tells them. So far, all he’s had to do is a few facial collagen injections to smooth her crow’s feet. “Eventually, she’ll probably want a tummy tuck.” The men nod genially and spear bits of lobster salad. The few women present—at lunch, the club admits women as “escorted” guests—say nothing.

  At this noon repast, Dr. Robert Harvey, the national spokesman of the Breast Council, is the featured speaker. This is, in fact, his second appearance. “The Breast Man of San Francisco,” as some of his staff and colleagues refer to him, Harvey is said to be the city’s leading breast enlargement surgeon—no small feat in a city boasting one of the nation’s highest plastic surgeon—to-patient ratios.

  With lunch over, the Breast Man pulls down a movie screen and dims the lights. The first set of slides are almost all photos of Asian women whose features he has Occidentalized—making them, in Harvey’s opinion, “more feminine.” As the before-and-after pictures flash by, Harvey tells the men how one woman came in complaining about the shape of her nose. She was “partly correct,” he says; her nose “needed” changing, but not in the way she had imagined.

  Back at the office later that day, one of Harvey’s “patient counselors” rattles off a long list of Harvey’s press and public appearances: “Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, the ‘Dean Edell Show’—we’ve got a video of that if you want to see it. . . .” Then there are the speaking engagements: “The Decathalon Club, the San Francisco Rotary Club, the Daly City Rotary Club, the Press Club. . . .” The list is surprisingly long on men’s associations. “They tell their wives about it,” she explains. “The men’s clubs are very revenue-producing.”

  Harvey’s patient counselor (who has since relocated) was herself a prime revenue-producer for the doctor. When prospective clients called, she told them to come on in and look at her breasts. She had hers expanded from 34B to 34C a few years ago. She told the women, “I can say that personally I feel more confident. I feel more like a woman.” (She doesn’t, however, feel confident enough to have her name used; some of the men closest to her, she explains, don’t know she had the operation.) She served as an effective marketing tool, she says. “They feel safe if they can talk to a nonthreatening [woman] first. That way they don’t feel like a guy is trying to sell them something.” Her assistance was a real boon, helping Harvey’s breast business to double in three years. Harvey liked to call her “my right arm.”

  For patients nervous about surgery, Harvey’s counselor suggested they start out with a facial injection of collagen. At $270 per cc, one collagen injection lasts about six months. “It’s a good way for them to get their feet wet. It helps them cross the bridge to surgery.” She administered several injections a day—“seven is my max.” In one year, she says, this procedure alone quadrupled Harvey’s revenues. He didn’t pay her a commission on the surgical patients she brought into his practice this way, but she says she doesn’t mind; she’s just “grateful” that he let her perform the operation. Anyway, Harvey rewards his employees in other ways: for their birthdays, he has given nearly half the women on his staff free cosmetic surgery.

  Harvey originally became a plastic surgeon “for altruistic reasons;” he wanted to work with burn patients. But he soon switched to cosmetic procedures, which are “more artistic”—and far more lucrative. Sitting in an office stocked with antiques and coffee-table books on Leonardo da Vinci, Harvey explains, “It’s very individual. We are sculptors.” He has never had plastic surgery himself. “I guess my nose isn’t great, but it just doesn’t bother me.” From his desk drawer, Harvey pulls out samples of the various “choices” now available to women seeking breast implants. They can choose between silicone-based, water-based and “the adjustable.” The last comes with a sort of plastic straw that sticks out of a woman’s armpit after the operation. If she doesn’t like the size, he can add or subtract silicone through the straw: “That way the lady can feel she has some control. She can make adjustments.”

  Most women who want breast implants are “self-motivated,” he says. By that, he means they aren’t expanding their breasts to please a man. “They are part of that Me Generation. They are doing it for themselves. Most times, their husbands or boyfriends like them just the way they are.” That doesn’t stop him, however, from maintaining his full schedule of men’s-club speaking engagements.

  “I’ve never met anyone post-op who wasn’t just thrilled,” Harvey’s counselor says, as she provides a list of five satisfied customers. “The results are excellent,” Harvey says. “Only five percent have to get their implants removed.”

  But the very first woman on the list belongs to that five percent. A year earlier, Harvey had injected silicone gel implants through this woman’s armpit into her breasts. A few weeks later, her breasts started hurting. Then they hard
ened into “rocks.” Then the left implant started rising.

  “It just got worse until it felt like the implant was stuck under my armpit,” says the woman, an engineer in nearby Silicon Valley. “I couldn’t move it. I’d use my bicep and two arms and my boyfriend would help me and it still wouldn’t move. I tried tying an Ace bandage around my chest to keep them in line. I was getting afraid.” She called Harvey and he told her, she recalls, “not to worry, it would go down.”

  Instead, it rose higher. She went to the medical school library and started reading about breast surgery. The studies she read in the professional literature informed her that breast implants injected through the armpit fail 40 percent of the time, not 5 percent. (Harvey says he got the 5 percent figure from an unwritten, unpublished study he conducted of two hundred of his own patients.) After a year of anguish, she finally had Harvey remove the implants. He installed a new set through the nipples, a procedure that leaves a scar but has a lower failure rate. So far, she says, it seems to be working out. She says she bears Dr. Harvey no ill-will. “At first,” she says, “I was kind of angry, but he was very good about helping me with my problem. I was really grateful for his patience. He didn’t even charge me for the second operation.”

  Asked about this woman’s experience later, Harvey blames it on the patient. “She probably wasn’t massaging enough,” he says.