by Naomi Wolf
How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay. The pay-to-effort ratio at the top of the display professions, of which women are kept well-informed (“it’s really gruelling under those hot lights”), is a caricature of the real relation of women’s work to their pay. The gross high pay of professional beauties is a false gloss over women’s actual economic situation. Hyping fantasies of discovery in the overpaid display professions, the dominant culture helps employers avoid organized resistance to the repetitiveness and low pay of real women’s real work. With the aspirational link of the women’s magazines in between, women learn unworthiness. The sense of professional entitlement a worker acquires from expecting a fair reward for a job well done thus remains conveniently distant from the expectations of working women.
Employers admit that “one way of weeding out women applicants for a job is to readvertise it at a higher salary.” “When it comes to defining our worth financially,” one study concludes, “we have severe doubts about ourselves.” In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.
The professional insecurity this situation generates cuts across the biological caste system that the PBQ sets up: It is found in “beautiful” women, since often no amount of professional success can convince them that they themselves, and not their “beauty,” have earned them their positions; and it’s found in “ugly” women, who learn to devalue themselves.
Pinups in the workplace are metaphors for the larger issue of how Iron Maiden imagery is used to keep women down on the job. At the Shoemaker Mine in the United States, when women coal miners joined the work force, graffiti appeared that targeted for ridicule individual women’s breasts and genitals; a woman with small breasts, for instance, was called “inverted nipples.” Faced with such scrutiny, reports legal scholar Rosemarie Tong, “the female miners found it increasingly difficult to maintain their self-respect, and their personal and professional lives began to deteriorate.” Nevertheless, a ruling by an American court, Rabidue v. Osceola Refining Co. (1986), upheld the right of male workers to display pornography in the workplace, no matter how offensive to women workers, on the grounds that the landscape is steeped in this sort of imagery anyway.
In Great Britain, the National Council for Civil Liberties recognizes that pinups constitute sexual harassment, as they “directly undermine an individual woman’s view of herself and her ability to do her job.” When unions formed discussion groups about the subject of pinups, forty-seven of the fifty-four groups ranked pinups as examples of sexual harassment that disturbed women. The Society of Civil and Public Servants ranks sexually evaluating looks, as well as pinups, as sexual harassment. Women interviewed said that when pinups are on the walls, they feel that “direct comparisons are being made.” Pinups are used directly to undermine women: In Strathclyde Regional Council v. Porcelli, Mrs. Porcelli testified that her harassers often “commented on my physical appearance in comparison with that of the nude female depicted.” But neither the American nor the British judicial system shows insight into the fact that this kind of harassment is intended to make women in the workplace feel physically worthless, especially in comparison with the men. It is intended to reinstate the inequalities that women’s entry into that workplace took away. In fostering in women the feeling of ugliness—or, if their “beauty” is the target, of exposure and foolishness—it should not have to lead to another injury, as the law now defines it, in order to be understood as discriminatory; it is already an injury.
The PBQ keeps women materially and psychologically poor. It drains money from the very women who would pose the greatest threat were they to learn the sense of entitlement bestowed by economic security: Through the PBQ, even richer women are kept away from the masculine experience of wealth. Its double standard actually makes such women poorer than their male peers, by cutting a greater swathe in the income of a female executive than in that of a male, and that is part of its purpose. “Women are punished for their looks, whereas men can go far in just a grey flannel suit,” complains, ironically, a former beauty editor of Vogue, who estimates that her maintenance expenses will be about $8,000 annually. Urban professional women are devoting up to a third of their income to “beauty maintenance,” and considering it a necessary investment. Their employment contracts are even earmarking a portion of their salary for high-fashion clothing and costly beauty treatments. New York Woman describes a typical ambitious career woman, a thirty-two-year-old who spends “nearly a quarter of her $60,000 income . . . on self-preservation.” Another “willingly spends more than $20,000 a year” on workouts with a “cult trainer.” The few women who are finally earning as much as men are forced, through the PBQ, to pay themselves significantly less than their male peers take home. It has engineered do-it-yourself income discrimination.
When used against newly wealthy women, the PBQ helps to enforce and rationalize discrimination at the highest levels. A 1987 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report found that corporate women, vice presidents and above, earn 42 percent less than male peers. Men in the twenty highest-paid professions make significantly more than women peers, says Ruth Sidel. This discrepancy is protected by the way the PBQ leeches money and leisure and confidence from this rising class, thus allowing corporations to draw on women’s expertise at the higher-paid levels, while defending the structures of male-dominated organizations from a potential onslaught of women who have stopped thinking poor.
It tires women out. As the century draws to an end, working women are exhausted; bone-tired in a way their male colleagues may not be able to imagine. A recent series of surveys summarized in the women’s press “all point to one thing: modern women are worn out.” Seventy percent of senior women executives in the United States cite tiredness as their main problem; almost half of American eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds feel “tired most of the time”; 41 percent of the one thousand Danish women questioned responded that they “felt tired at present.” In Great Britain, 95 percent of working women put “feeling unusually tired” at the head of a list of their problems. It is this exhaustion that may call a halt to women’s future collective advancement, and that is the point of it. A weariness intensified by the rigors of the PBQ, sustained by its perpetual hunger, and renewed on its endless electronic treadmill, the PBQ may ultimately manage what direct discrimination cannot achieve. Professional, high-achieving women have, because of it, just enough energy, concentration, and time to do their work very well, but too little for the kind of social activism or freewheeling thought that would allow them to question and change the structure itself. If the rigors intensify to bring women to the physical breaking point, they may begin to long just to go back home. Already in the United States, there are murmurs among worn-out career women of nostalgia for life before the mechanized stairs that lead nowhere.
All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.
It inverts the male career span. The PBQ teaches women visually that they must yield power at the same pace at which men gain it. Of women over sixty-five, the fastest-growing segment of the United States population, one in five lives in poverty. A third of people living alone in the United States are old women, of whom half have less than $1,000 in savings. If you are a woman, writes one economist, “you have a 60 percent shot at being poor in old age.” The average American old woman’s income was 58 percent of that of old
men. In Great Britain, lone old women outnumber lone old men by four to one; and of those, over twice as many as old men need income support. The average West German retiring woman gets only half the full pension. Of retiring American women, only 20 percent have private pensions. Worldwide, just 6 percent of wage-earning women will receive a pension by the year 2000. If it is scary to be an old woman in our culture, it is not just because you lose your complexion. Women cling to the PBQ because what it threatens is true: A young woman may indeed do better economically by investing her sexuality while it is at an optimum exchange rate than she does by working hard for a lifetime.
“Beauties” reach the peak of the possibilities open to them in early youth; so do women in the economy. The PBQ reproduces within the economy the inverted life-span of the “beauty”: Despite twenty years of the second wave of the women’s movement, women’s careers still are not peaking in middle and later life alongside those of men. Though business began recruiting women in the early 1970s, long enough ago to give them time for significant career advancement, only 1 to 2 percent of American upper management is female. Though half the law school graduates are women, and 30 percent of associates in private firms are female, only 5 percent of partners are women. At the top universities in the United States and Canada, the number of women full professors is also about 5 percent. The glass ceiling works to the advantage of the traditional elite, and its good working order is reinforced by the beauty myth.
One reaction to this is that older American women who have made advances within every profession are being forced to see the signs of age (the adjunct of male advancement) as a “need” for plastic surgery. They recognize this “need” as a professional, rather than a personal, obligation. While male peers have evidence of a generation above theirs of old, successful men who look their age, contemporary women have few such role models.
This employment demand for cosmetic surgery brings women into an alternative work reality based on ideas about the uses of human beings as workers, ideas that have not applied to men since the abolition of slavery, before which a slave owner had the right to inflict physical mutilation on his workforce. The surgical economy is no slave economy, of course; but in its increasing demand for permanent, painful, and risky alteration of the body, it constitutes—as have tattooing, branding, and scarification in other times and places—a category that falls somewhere between a slave economy and a free market. The slave owner could cut off the foot of the slave who resisted control; the employer, with this development, can, in effect, cut off parts of a woman’s face. In a free market, the worker’s labor is sold to the employer; her body is her own.
Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women’s hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete. We can better understand how insidious this development is if we try to imagine a racial discrimination suit brought in the face of a powerful technology that processes, with much pain, nonwhite people to look more white. A black employee can now charge, sympathetically, that he doesn’t want to look more white, and should not have to look more white in order to keep his job. We have not yet begun the push toward civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say that she’d rather look like herself than some “beautiful” young stranger. Though the PBQ ranks women in a similar biological caste system, female identity is not yet recognized to be remotely as legitimate as racial identity (faintly though that is recognized). It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep as any ethnic or racial pride, a woman’s determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.
It keeps women isolated. Collective female solidarity in the workplace would force the power structure to tackle the expensive concessions that many economists now believe are necessary if women are to have truly equal opportunity: day care, flextime, job security after childbirth, and parental leave. It might also change the focus of work and the very structure of organization. The unionization of women clerical and sales workers would force Western economies into a serious recognition of what the female work force contributes: 50 percent of working women in the United Kingdom are not unionized, according to the Equal Opportunities Commission. In the United States, 86 percent are not unionized. Many economists believe that the future for unions is female—and that they are the solution to “the feminization of poverty” of the past twenty years. “The fact that unionized women workers earn, on average, 30 percent more than nonunionized women workers speaks for itself,” writes one. “Collectively women workers do better.” Clerical workers, a third of female wage labor, and sales and service workers, over a quarter, have been some of the hardest groups to unionize. Solidarity is hardest to find when women learn to see each other as beauties first. The myth urges women to believe that it’s every woman for herself.
It uses her body to convey her economic role. When a woman says, “This will never be fair even if I play by their rules,” she gains insight into the real workings of the myth. No amount of labor will ever be adequately compensated; she will never, hard though she may try, really “make it”; her birth is not the birth of a beauty aristocrat, that mythic species. It isn’t fair. That’s why it exists.
Women’s labor for beauty, and the evaluation of women as beauties rather than as workers, issue women each day with metaphors of the real economic injustices that apply to them in the workplace: selective benefits; favoritism in promotion; no job security; a pension plan that pays out a fraction of the capital the worker has put in; a shaky shares portfolio managed by unscrupulous advisers who stand to profit from the investor’s losses; false promises and worthless contracts from management; a policy of first hired, first fired; no union, rigorous union-busting, and plenty of scab labor ready to be called in.
In a behavioral experiment Catharine MacKinnon cites, one group of chickens was fed every time they pecked; another, every second time; and the third, at random. When the food was cut off, the first group stopped trying at once, then the second group soon stopped. The third group, she writes, “never stopped trying.”
Women, as beauty and work reward them and punish them, never come to expect consistency—but can be counted upon to keep on trying. Beauty work and the professional beauty qualification in the workplace act together to teach women that, as far as they are concerned, justice does not apply. That unfairness is presented to a woman as changeless, eternal, appropriate, and arising out of herself, as much a part of her as her height, her hair color, her gender, and the shape of her face.
Culture
SINCE MIDDLE-CLASS women have been sequestered from the world, isolated from one another, and their heritage submerged with each generation, they are more dependent than men are on the cultural models on offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them. Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men’s names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and “beautiful”) stone women. That situation is true of culture in general. Given few role models in the world, women seek them on the screen and the glossy page.
This pattern, which leaves out women as individuals, extends from high culture to popular mythology: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.” Critic John Berger’s well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever.
Men are exposed to male fashion models but do not see them as role models. Why do women react so strongly to nothing, really—images, scraps of paper? Is their identity so weak? Why do they feel they must treat “models”—mannequins—as if they were “models”—paradigms? Why do women react to the “ideal,” whatever form she takes at that moment, as if she were a non-negotiable commandment?
Heroines
It is not that women’s identities are
naturally weak. But “ideal” imagery has become obsessively important to women because it was meant to become so. Women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while “beauty” is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, “beauty” is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence—but it is not a moral act. From the “beauties” in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson—that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.
Since the fourteenth century, male culture has silenced women by taking them beautifully apart: The catalog of features, developed by the troubadours, first paralyzed the beloved woman into beauty’s silence. The poet Edmund Spenser perfected the catalog of features in his hymn the “Epithalamion”; we inherit that catalog in forms ranging from the list-your-good-points articles in women’s magazines to fantasies in mass culture that assemble the perfect women.
Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both. A common allegory that teaches women this lesson is the pretty-plain pairing: of Leah and Rachel in the Old Testament and Mary and Martha in the New; Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Anya and Dunyasha in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Daisy Mae and Sadie Hawkins in Dogpatch; Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West in Oz; Veronica and Ethel in Riverdale; Ginger and Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island; Janet and Chrissie in Three’s Company; Mary and Rhoda in The Mary Tyler Moore Show; and so forth. Male culture seems happiest to imagine two women together when they are defined as being one winner and one loser in the beauty myth.