The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  As soon as women of the 1960s spoke up, the media took on the dreamwork demanded by the vital lie of the time, and trained the beauty myth against the women’s appearance. The reaction to the 1969 protest against the Miss America pageant set the stage. Coverage focused on signs reading, THERE’S ONLY ONE THING WRONG WITH MISS AMERICA—SHE’S BEAUTIFUL and JEALOUSY WILL GET YOU NOWHERE. Soon, Esquire was profiling Gloria Steinem as “the intellectual’s pinup” and Commentary dismissed feminism as “a bunch . . . of ugly women screaming at each other on television.” The New York Times quoted a traditional women’s leader saying, “So many of them are just so unattractive.” The 1970 march down Fifth Avenue was interpreted by the Washington Star as important for having “retired the canard about women’s libbers being ugly,” as reporter Pete Hamill hadn’t “seen so many beautiful women in one place for years.” Norman Mailer said to Germaine Greer before their famous debate at City Hall, “You’re better looking than I thought.” Headlines read, WOMEN ARE REVOLTING. Women took in the way the movement was being depicted, and the caricatures did their work.

  Though many women realized that their attention was being focused in this way, fewer fully understood how thoroughly politically such focusing works: In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women’s identification with the issues. If the public woman is stigmatized as too “pretty,” she’s a threat, a rival—or simply not serious; if derided as too “ugly,” one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda. The political implications of the fact that no woman or group of women, whether housewives, prostitutes, astronauts, politicians or feminists, can survive unscathed the no-win scrutiny of the beauty myth are not yet reorganized in their full dimensions so the divide-and-conquer dreamwork was effective. Since “beauty” follows fashion, and the myth determines that when something female matures it is unfashionable, the maturing of feminism was crudely but effectively distorted in the lens of the myth.

  The new wave of post–women’s movement magazines gained ground from the anxiety that such caricature provoked in achieving women. Nonetheless, the new wave—initiated in 1965 by the revamped Cosmopolitan—is indeed revolutionary compared with the earlier service magazines that Friedan had attacked. Their formula includes an aspirational, individualist, can-do tone that says that you should be your best and nothing should get in your way; a focus on personal and sexual relationships that affirms female ambition and erotic appetite; and sexualized images of female models that, though only slightly subtler than those aimed at men, are meant to convey female sexual liberation. But the formula must also include an element that contradicts and then undermines the overall prowoman fare: In diet, skin care, and surgery features, it sells women the deadliest version of the beauty myth money can buy.

  This obligatory beauty myth dosage the magazines provide elicits in their readers a raving, itching, parching product lust, and an abiding fantasy: the longing for some fairy godmother who will arrive at the reader’s door and put her to sleep. When she awakens, her bathroom will be full of exactly the right skin-care products, with step-by-step instructions, and palettes of exactly the required makeup. The kindly phantom will have colored and cut the sleeper’s hair to perfection, made over her face, and painlessly nipped and tucked it. In her closet she will discover a complete wardrobe arranged by season and occasion, color-coordinated and accessorized on shoe trees and in hatboxes. The refrigerator will be full of miniature vegetables, artfully displayed in prepared gourmet meals, with Perrier and Evian water virtuously ranged. She will deliver herself into a world of female consumer apotheosis, beyond appetite.

  The extreme contradictions between the positive and negative elements of the magazines’ message provoke extreme reactions in women (in 1970, The Ladies’ Home Journal was the target of an angry all-woman sit-in). Why do women care so much what the magazines say and show?

  They care because, though the magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women’s mass culture. A woman’s magazine is not just a magazine. The relationship between the woman reader and her magazine is so different from that between a man and his that they aren’t in the same category: A man reading Popular Mechanics or Newsweek is browsing through just one perspective among countless others of general male-oriented culture, which is everywhere. A woman reading Glamour is holding women-oriented mass culture between her two hands.

  Women are deeply affected by what their magazines tell them (or what they believe they tell them) because they are all most women have as a window on their own mass sensibility. General culture takes a male point of view on what’s newsworthy, so that the Super Bowl is on the front page while a change in child care legislation is buried in a paragraph on an inside page. It also takes a male point of view about who is worth looking at: Of fifty years of Life magazine covers, though many showed women, only 19 of those were not actresses or models; that is, not there because of their “beauty” (indeed, true to the beauty myth, in the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, almost every interviewer makes a reference to her famous “ugliness”). Newspapers relegate women’s issues to the “women’s page”; TV news programming consigns “women’s stories” to the daytime. In contrast, women’s magazines are the only products of popular culture that (unlike romances) change with women’s reality, are mostly written by women for women about women’s issues, and take women’s concerns seriously.

  Women react so strongly to their inconsistencies since they probably recognize that the magazines’ contradictions are their own. Their economic reality is that of an individual woman writ large: They reflect the uneasy truce in which women pay for scope and power with beauty thinking. Women’s magazines themselves are subject to a textual version of the PBQ. Like its readers, the magazine must pay for its often serious, prowoman content with beauty backlash trappings; it must do so to reassure its advertisers, who are threatened by the possible effects on women’s minds of too much excellence in women’s journalism. The magazines’ personalities are split between the beauty myth and feminism in exactly the same way those of their readers are split.

  Are the magazines trivial, degrading, and antifeminist? The beauty myth is; the editorial content by now, wherever it can escape the myth, decidedly is not. Many women who care about women’s culture are drawn to tap in to this one stream of female mass consciousness, whether as editors, writers, or readers. The magazines’ editorial content changed beyond recognition, for the better, after the rebirth of feminism. Twenty years ago the activists who demonstrated at the offices of The Ladies’ Home Journal offered a utopian list of article ideas: Instead of “Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Bed,” they proposed “How to Get an Abortion,” “How and Why Women Are Kept Apart,” “How to Get a Divorce,” “Developments in Day Care,” and “What Our Detergents Do to the Rivers and Streams.” And it happened: One recognizes each of these once-extreme suggestions as the typical fare of the new wave of women’s magazines.

  What is seldom acknowledged is that they have popularized feminist ideas more widely than any other medium—certainly more widely than explicitly feminist journals. It was through these glossies that issues from the women’s movement swept out from the barricades and down from academic ivory towers to blow into the lives of working-class women, rural women, women without higher education. Seen in this light, they are very potent instruments of social change.

  The feminist content in these magazines is of a level that could not have been imagined in Cecil Beaton’s Vogue or in the Redbook targeted by Betty Friedan: Articles regularly run on abortion, rape, woman battering, sexual self-expression, and economic independence. Indeed, criticism of the beauty myth is found in them more often than anywhere else. For example, Glamour: “How to Make Peace with the Body You’ve Got”; She: “Fat Is Not a Sin”; Cosmopolitan: “What Should We Do About Pornography?” Glamour again: “The Appeal of Real Women,” (“Ma
ke way for the smart-mouthed actresses who get the man without being gorgeous . . . whose sex appeal comes from energy, snappy banter, smartness, rather than statuesque bodies or great looks.”) Even the articles that deal with emotional states and personal relationships, those most often ridiculed, are not ridiculous when one considers how communities are held together through this “emotional housework” that women are expected innately to know how to do.

  When the emphasis is on the “mass” part of their appeal, the women’s magazines’ political importance grows clearer. Many books and journals have brought issues from the women’s movement to the minority: middle-class, educated women. But the new breed of women’s magazines are the first messengers in history to address the majority of women, those who are struggling financially, to tell them they have a right to define themselves first. They point out ways for them to get power: to study martial arts, to play the stock market, to take charge of their health. These magazines run women’s fiction, profile female achievers, and discuss women-related legislation. If only in terms of making enough space to cover women’s political and cultural experience, the most lightweight women’s magazine is a more serious force for women’s advancement than the most heavyweight general periodical.

  They also provide a rare platform, through letters, serialization, and changing contributors, for woman-to-woman debate. Because they are the only place for women to find out what’s going on in the other world—the female reality so fleetingly acknowledged by “serious” journals—women’s intense love-hate reaction to them makes sense. In these respects, the magazines’ role should be seen as very serious. For a mass female culture that responds to historical change, they are all that women have.

  No wonder that women resent the elements of their format that follow repetitive formulas. No wonder it disturbs them when their magazines seem servile to the degrading economic bottom line of the beauty myth. Women’s magazines would not provoke such strong feelings if they were merely escapist entertainment. But in the absence of mainstream journalism that treats women’s issues with anything like the seriousness they deserve, women’s magazines take on a burden of significance—and responsibility—that would otherwise be spread out over half the “serious” periodicals on the market.

  But women’s magazines do not simply mirror our own dilemma of beauty being asked as an apology for new scope and power. They intensify it. Even their editors worry that many readers have not learned how to separate out the prowoman content from the beauty myth in the magazines, whose place is primarily economic.

  Unfortunately, the beauty backlash is spread and reinforced by the cycles of self-hatred provoked in women by the advertisements, photo features, and beauty copy in the glossies. These make up the beauty index, which women scan as anxiously as men scan stock reports. It promises to tell women what men truly want, what faces and bodies provoke men’s fickle attentions—a seductive promise in an environment in which men and women rarely get to talk together honestly in a public setting about what each really desires. But the Iron Maiden they offer is no direct template of men’s desires, any more than beefcake photos tell the whole truth about women’s desires. The magazines are not oracles speaking for men. Indeed, as one study found, “our data suggest women are misinformed and exaggerate the magnitude of thinness men desire . . . they are misinformed, probably as a result of promotion of thinness in women through advertising in the diet industry.” What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

  The magazine’s message about the myth is determined by its advertisers. But the relationship between the reader and her magazine doesn’t happen in a context that encourages her to analyze how the message is affected by the advertisers’ needs. It is emotional, confiding, defensive, and unequal: “the link binding readers to their magazine, the great umbilical, as some call it, the trust.”

  The myth isolates women by generation, and the magazines seem to offer them the wise advice, tested by experience, of an admirable older female relative. There are few other places where a modern woman can find such a role model. She is taught to dismiss her own mother’s teachings about beauty, adornment, and seduction, since her mother has failed—she is aging. If she is lucky enough to have a mentor, it will be in a professional relationship, in which these intimate skills are not part of the training. The voice of the magazine gives women an invisible female authority figure to admire and obey, parallel to the mentor-protégé relationship that many men are encouraged to forge in their educations and on the job, but which women are rarely offered anywhere else but in their glossy magazines.

  The voice encourages that trust. It has evolved a tone of allegiance to the reader, of being on your side with superior know-how and resources, like a woman-run social service: “Many cosmetics companies are on hand to help”; “We know how to make a difference. Let our beauty specialists guide you step by step.” The magazines provide actual services, listing help lines, offering readers’ polls, giving women tools for budgeting and financial information. These combine to make the magazine seem to be more than a magazine: They make it appear to be a mix of extended family, benefit agency, political party, and guild. They make it look like an interest group with the reader’s best interest at heart. “A magazine,” says one editor, “is like a club. Its function is to provide readers with a comfortable sense of community and pride in their identity.”

  Because people trust their clubs and because this voice is so attractive, it is difficult to read the magazine with a sharp eye as to how thoroughly ad revenue influences the copy. It is easy to misread the whole thing—advertisements, beauty copy, images of models—as if it were a coherent message from the editors telling women, “You should be like this.” Some of the harm done by the magazines to women comes out of that misunderstanding. If we could read them in a more informed way, we could take the pleasure and leave the pain, and the magazines, with different advertisers, could do themselves the justice that they deserve in providing women with the only serious mass-market women’s journalism available.

  Women also respond to the beauty myth aspect of the magazines because adornment is an enormous—and often pleasing—part of female culture. And there is almost nowhere else where they can participate in women’s culture in so broad a way. The myth does not only isolate women generationally, but because it encourages women’s wariness of one another on the basis of their appearance, it tries to isolate them from all women they do not know and like personally. Though women have networks of intimate friends, the myth, and women’s conditions until recently, have kept women from learning how to do something that makes all male social change possible: How to identify with unknown other women in a way that is not personal.

  The unknown woman, the myth would like women to believe, is unapproachable; under suspicion before she opens her mouth because she’s Another Woman, and beauty thinking urges women to approach one another as possible adversaries until they know they are friends. The look with which strange women sometimes appraise one another says it all: A quick up-and-down, curt and wary, it takes in the picture but leaves out the person; the shoes, the muscle tone, the makeup, are noted accurately, but the eyes glance off one another. Women can tend to resent each other if they look too “good” and dismiss one another if they look too “bad.” So women too rarely benefit from the experience that makes men’s clubs and organizations hold together: The solidarity of belonging to a group whose members might not be personal friends outside, but who are united in an interest, agenda, or worldview.

  Ironically, the myth that drives women apart also binds them together. Commiserating about the myth is as good as a baby to bring strange women into pleasant contact, and break down the line of Other Woman wariness. A wry smile about calories, a complaint about one’s hair, can evaporate the sullen examination of a rival in the fluorescent light of a ladies’ room. On one hand, women are trained to be competitors against all others for “
beauty”; on the other, when one woman—a bride, a shopper in a boutique—needs to be adorned for a big occasion, other women swoop and bustle around her in generous concentration in a team formation as effortlessly choreographed as a football play. These sweet and satisfying rituals of being all on the same side, these all-too-infrequent celebrations of shared femaleness, are some of the few shared female rituals left; hence their loveliness and power. But, sadly, these delightful bonds too often dissolve when the women reenter public space and resume their isolated, unequal, mutually threatening, jealously guarded “beauty” status.

  Women’s magazines cater to that delicious sense of impersonal female solidarity, now, compared with the high-water mark of the second wave, so rare. They bring out of the closet women’s lust for chat across the barriers of potential jealousy and prejudgment. What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men? The magazines offer the electrifying feeling that women are too seldom granted, though men in their groups feel it continually, of being plugged in without hostility to a million like-minded people of the same sex. Though the magazines’ version is sadly watered down, women are so deprived of it that it is powerful even in a dilute concentration. Each reader, Mormon housewife in Phoenix, schoolteacher in Lancashire, conceptual artist in Sydney, welfare mother in Detroit, physics professor in Manhattan, prostitute in Brussels, au pair in Lyons, is dipping into the same bath of images. All can participate in this one way in a worldwide women’s culture, which, though inadequate and ultimately harmful, is still one of the few celebrations of female sexuality in solidarity that women are allowed.