by Naomi Wolf
One sees the “perfect” face differently with this in mind. Its power is not far-reaching because of anything innately special about the face: Why that one? Its only power is that it has been designated as “the face”—and that hence millions and millions of women are looking at it together, and know it. A Christian Dior cosmetic vision stares from a bus at a grandmother drinking a café con leche on a balcony in Madrid. A cardboard blowup of the same image gazes at the teenage Youth Training Scheme worker setting it up in the local pharmacy in a village in Dorset. It glows over a bazaar in Alexandria. Cosmopolitan appears in seventeen countries; buying Clarins, women “join millions of women worldwide”; Weight Watchers products offer “Friends. More friends. Still more friends.”
The beauty myth, paradoxically, offers the promise of a solidarity movement, an Internationale. Where else do women get to feel positively or even negatively connected with millions of women worldwide? The images in women’s magazines constitute the only cultural female experience that can begin to gesture at the breadth of solidarity possible among women, a solidarity as wide as half the human race. It is a meager Esperanto, but in the absence of a better language of their own they must make do with one that is man-made and market driven, and which hurts them.
Our magazines simply reflect our own dilemma: Since much of their message is about women’s advancement, much of the beauty myth must accompany it and temper its impact. Because the magazines are so serious, they must also be so frivolous. Because they offer women power, they must also promote masochism. Because feminist poet Marge Piercy attacks the dieting cult in New Woman, therefore the facing page must give a scare sheet about obesity. While the editors take a step forward for themselves and their readers, they must also take a step back into the beauty myth for the sake of their advertisers.
Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors. They blur the line between editorial freedom and the demands of the marketplace. The magazine may project the intimate atmosphere of clubs, guilds, or extended families, but they have to act like businesses. Because of who their advertisers are, a tacit screening takes place. It isn’t conscious policy, it doesn’t circulate in memos, it doesn’t need to be thought about or spoken. It is understood that some kinds of thinking about “beauty” would alienate advertisers, while others promote their products. With the implicit need to maintain advertising revenue in order to keep publishing, editors are not yet able to assign features and test products as if the myth did not pay the bills. A women’s magazine’s profit does not come from its cover price, so its contents cannot roam too far from the advertisers’ wares. In a Columbia Journalism Review story captioned “Magazine Crisis: Selling Out for Ads,” Michael Hoyt reports that women’s magazines have always been under particular pressure from their advertisers; what’s new is the intensity of the demands.
Women’s magazines are not alone in this editorial obligation to the bottom line. It is on the increase outside them, too, making all media increasingly dependent on the myth. The 1980s saw a proliferation of magazines, each competing wildly for its piece of the advertising pie. The pressure is now on newspapers and news magazines: “Editors are facing a harder time maintaining their virginity,” says the editor of the Christian Science Monitor. Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, says that New York editors speak of “the fragility of the word” and “advise discretion when approaching topics likely to alarm the buyers of large advertising space.” “The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy,” he writes. According to Time, modern media management now “sees readers as a market.” So publishers must seek upscale advertisers and apply pressure for upscale stories. “Today, if you had Watergate, you would have to check with the marketing department,” says editor Thomas Winship. The Columbia Journalism Review quotes the former editor of The Boston Globe: “‘Magazines are commodities, commodities are there to sell goods, and the competition these days is ferocious.’ He admits that now he too is heavily dependent on fashion ads. ‘We used to have a silken curtain between advertising and editorial, but no more.’ For years now, some publishers have gone out of their way to attract advertisers by creating what advertisers regard as a favorable editorial atmosphere.” John R. MacArthur, editor of Harper’s, believes, writes Hoyt, that “editing for advertisers” will destroy what makes magazines valuable: “an environment of quality and trust.” Soon, if this trend continues unchecked, there will be few media left that will be free to investigate or question the beauty myth, or even offer alternatives, without worrying about the advertising repercussions.
The atmosphere is thronged with more versions of the Iron Maiden now than ever before also because of recent changes in media organization that have intensified visual competition. In 1988, the average person in the United States saw 14 percent more TV advertising than two years before, or 650 TV messages a week as part of the total of 1,000 ad messages each day. The industry calls this situation “viewer confusion”: Just 1.2 of the 650 messages are remembered, down from 1.7 in 1983; the advertising business is in a growing panic.
So images of women and “beauty” become more extreme. As advertising executives told The Boston Globe, “You have to push a little harder . . . to jolt, shock, break through. Now that the competition is fiercer, a whole lot rougher trade takes place. [Rough trade is gay male slang for a sadistic heterosexual partner.] Today, business wants even more desperately to seduce. . . . It wants to demolish resistance.” Rape is the current advertising metaphor.
In addition, film, TV, and magazines are under pressure to compete with pornography, which is now the biggest media category. Worldwide, pornography generates an estimated 7 billion dollars a year, more, incredibly, than the legitimate film and music industries combined. Pornographic films outnumber other films by three to one, grossing 365 million dollars a year in the United States alone, or a million dollars a day. British pornographic magazines sell twenty million copies a year at 2 to 3 pounds (about $3.20 to $4.80) a copy, grossing 500 million pounds a year. Swedish pornography earns 300–400 million kronor a year; a sex shop there offers some 500 titles, and a corner tobacconist, 20 to 30 titles. In 1981, 500,000 Swedish men bought pornographic magazines each week; by 1983, every fourth video rented in Sweden was pornographic; and by 1985, 13.6 million pornographic magazines were sold by the largest distributors in corner kiosks. Eighteen million men a month in the United States buy a total of 165 different pornographic magazines generating about half a billion dollars a year; one American man in ten reads Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler each month; Playboy and Penthouse are the most widely read magazines in Canada. Italian men spend 600 billion lire on pornography a year, with pornographic videos representing 30–50 percent of all Italian video sales. Pornography worldwide, according to researchers, is becoming increasingly violent. (As slasher filmmaker Herschel Gordon Lewis said, “I mutilated women in our pictures because I felt it was better box office.”)
To raise the level of pressure once again, this image competition is taking place during worldwide deregulation of the airwaves. In its wake, the beauty myth is exported from West to East, and from rich to poor. United States programming is flooding Europe and First World programs flood the Third World: In Belgium, Holland, and France, 30 percent of TV is American-made, and about 71 percent of TV programs in developing countries are imports from the rich world. In India, TV ownership doubled in five years and advertisers have sponsored shows since 1984. Until a decade ago, most European TV was state-run; but privatization, cable, and satellite changed all that, so that by 1995 there could be 120 channels, all but a few financed by advertising, with revenues expected to rise from $9 billion to $25 billion by the year 2000.
America is no exception. “The networks are running scared,” reports The Guardian [London]. In ten years (1979–89), they lost 16 percent of the market to cable, independents, and video: “The result is a glitz blitz.”
With glasnost, the beauty myth is being imported behind the Iron Curtain, as much to constrain a possible revival of feminism as to simulate consumer plenty where little exists. “Glasnost and perestroika,” says Natalia Zacharova, a Soviet social critic, “. . . seem likely to bring Soviet women contradictory freedoms. Glamour will be one of them.” Her remark was prescient: Reform, Hungary’s revealingly named first tabloid, read by one in ten Hungarians, has a topless or bottomless model on each page. Playboy hailed Soviet Natalya Negoda as “The Soviets’ first sex star.” Nationalist China entered the Miss Universe contest in 1988, the year the first Miss Moscow competition was held, following Cuba and Bulgaria. In 1990, outdated copies of Playboy and women’s glamour magazines began to be shipped to the Soviet bloc; we will be able to watch the beauty myth unfold there in utero. Tatiana Mamanova, a Soviet feminist, responding to a question about the difference between the West and Russia, replied, “The pornography . . . it’s everywhere, even on billboards . . . [it] is a different kind of assault. And it doesn’t feel like freedom to me.”
Censorship
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:
With . . . no intention of duplicating the traditional departments designed around “feminine” advertising categories—recipes to reinforce food ads, beauty features to mention beauty products, and the like—we knew it would be economically tough. (Fortunately, we didn’t know how tough.) Attracting ads for cars, sound equipment, beer, and other things not traditionally directed to women still turns out to be easier than convincing advertisers that women look at ads for shampoo without accompanying articles on how to wash their hair, just as men look at ads for shaving products without articles on how to shave.
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.