The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  American-based cults “transformed the passivity, spiritual hunger, and desire for order” of their followers into “a profitable business form specializing in quick capital.” That is true of the weight cult as well.

  For deprogramming to be successful, the case must be made to the cult escapee that what she has undergone “is real and powerful,” while assuring her that the craziness came from without. That approach makes sense for would-be escapees from this cult too. Women trapped cannot be deprogrammed until the case is made to them that the madness is imposed from outside the self, and that it affects their minds through time-worn, third-rate psychological sleights of hand. If those women who long to escape can believe that they have been subjected to a religious indoctrination that uses the proven techniques of brainwashing, we can feel compassion for ourselves rather than self-loathing; we can begin to see where and how our minds were changed.

  The Social Effect of the New Religion

  The international consequence of indoctrinating newly enfranchised women into the Rites of Beauty is that we once more are being politically sedated. Three elements used by the Rites—hunger, fear of a chaotic future, and indebtedness—have been used throughout the world by political leaders who want to keep an aggrieved population humble and quiescent.

  The Rites of Beauty maintain this sedatedness in women through their daily premise of eternal deferral.

  The religion says that a woman’s beauty is not her own, just as the old creed said her sexuality belonged to others. She is guilty of transgression if she desecrates that beauty with impure substances, rich foods, cheap lotions. What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her but to God. But what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin, worthy of any abuse. She is to touch her skin reverently, as the “beauty” of a smooth youthful face is God-given. But she may wring, beat, and electrocute her woman’s thighs, the proof of her prodigal ways.

  This prevents women from fully inhabiting the body, keeping us waiting for an apotheosis that will never arrive. It is meant to keep us from being at ease in the flesh or in the present, those two erotically and politically dangerous places for a woman to be; mourning the past and fearing the future, pacified.

  Deferral is the bedrock of religions that need an obedient population of worshipers: The worshiper puts up with any injustice, oppression, or abuse—any hunger—because there will be pie in the sky when you die. Deferral religions have been the province of women because they keep them occupied with a life that is not this one, and supply them with miniature versions of power that leave real power uncontested. The State has encouraged women in these activities, from the woman-dominated Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Rome and the Mary worship of the Middle Ages to the Rites of Beauty today.

  Before the beauty backlash, this state of deferral, of being always prepared, had at least some mortal orientation: One was always ready to be seen by the rescuing man. Marriage was the consummation; and, afterward, a status in the community through one’s husband and children. The goal of preparedness, however repressive, was at least going to be won in this life and on this body.

  The number of women is multiplying for whom that deferral means that there can be no release in this life. The new religion is in some ways even darker than the old. Earlier believers knew that death brought release and fulfillment; today’s are forbidden to imagine freedom in this life or the next. Our life is a never-ending test, a morass of temptation and trial, with which they must struggle forever: “Once that weight is lost, accept the fact that watching yourself is a lifelong obligation.” This life, we learn, is a vale of tears. It gives life itself a compromised meaning: The woman who dies thinnest, with the fewest wrinkles, wins.

  The good bridesmaids in the New Testament hoarded their oil for the bridegroom, but the bad ones burned their fuel. Women are urged to feel we must hoard our pleasure for beauty’s sake; anorexics fear losing the margin of gratification saved up in the gap below “normal” weight; and women hoard shoplifted beauty products, money, food, and rewards. We are asked to believe we will at any moment be called to account and found wanting, and cast into outer darkness: poor old age, loneliness, lovelessness.

  Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism describes how despair of the future leads people to fixate on youth. The Rites teach women to fear our own futures, our own wants. To live in fear of one’s body and one’s life is not to live at all. The resulting life-fearing neuroses are everywhere. They are in the woman who will take a lover, go to Nepal, learn to skydive, swim naked, demand a raise, “when she loses this weight”—but in the eternal meantime maintains her vow of chastity or self-denial. They are in the woman who can never enjoy a meal, who never feels thin enough, or that the occasion is special enough, to drop her guard and become one with the moment. They are in the woman whose horror of wrinkles is so great that the lines around her eyes shine with sacred oil, whether at a party or while making love. Women must await forever the arrival of the angel of use, the bridegroom who will dignify the effort and redeem the cost; whose presence will allow us to inhabit and use our “protected” faces and bodies. The expense is too high to let us fire the wick, to burn our own fuel to the last drop and live by our own light in our own time.

  Where the Rites of Beauty have instilled these life-fearing neuroses in modern women, they paralyze in us the implications of our new freedoms, since it profits women little if we gain the whole world only to fear ourselves.

  Sex

  RELIGIOUS GUILT SUPPRESSES women’s sexuality. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey found, in the words of political analyst Debbie Taylor, that “religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man’s sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman’s enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.” Older patriarchal religions have sought, from Egyptian clitoridectomy and the Sudanese bamboo vaginal shaft and shield to the chastity belt of Germany, to control, as Rosalind Miles charges, “all women via a technique which betrays a conscious determination to deal with the ‘problem’ of women’s sexuality by destroying it wholesale.” Beauty’s new religion has taken on this tradition.

  Technically, the female sexual organs are what the older religions feared as “the insatiable cunt.” Capable of multiple orgasm, continual orgasm, a sharp and breathtaking clitoral orgasm, an orgasm seemingly centered in the vagina that is emotionally overwhelming, orgasm from having the breasts stroked, and of endless variations of all those responses combined, women’s capacity for genital pleasure is theoretically inexhaustible.

  But women’s prodigious sexual capacity is not being reflected in their current sexual experience. Consistently, research figures show that the sexual revolution has left many women stranded, remote from their full ability to feel pleasure. In fact, the beauty myth hit women simultaneously with—and in backlash against—the second wave and its sexual revolution, to effect a widespread suppression of women’s true sexuality. Very nearly released by the spread of contraception, legal abortion, and the demise of the sexual double standard, that sexuality was quickly restrained once again by the new social forces of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism, which arose to put the guilt, shame, and pain back into women’s experience of sex.

  The sexual urge is shaped by society. Even animals have to learn how to be sexual. It is learning rather than instinct, anthropologists now believe, which leads to successful reproductive behavior: Lab-raised monkeys are inept at sex, and human beings must also learn from external cues how to be sexual. The external cues of beauty pornography and sadomasochism reshape female sexuality into a more manageable form than it would take if truly released.

  Beauty pornography looks like this: The perfected woman lies prone, pressing down her pelvis. Her back arches, her mouth is open, her eyes shut, her nipples erect; there is a fine spray of moisture over her golden skin. The position is female superior; the stage of arousal, the plateau phase just preceding orgasm. O
n the next page, a version of her, mouth open, eyes shut, is about to tongue the pink tip of a lipstick cylinder. On the page after, another version kneels in the sand on all fours, her buttocks in the air, her face pressed into a towel, mouth open, eyes shut. The reader is looking through an ordinary women’s magazine. In an ad for Reebok shoes, the woman sees a naked female torso, eyes averted. In an ad for Lily of France lingerie, she sees a naked female torso, eyes shut; for Opium perfume, a naked woman, back and buttocks bare, falls facedown from the edge of a bed; for Triton showers, a naked woman, back arched, flings her arms upward; for Jogbra sports bras, a naked female torso is cut off at the neck. In these images, where the face is visible, it is expressionless in a rictus of ecstasy. The reader understands from them that she will have to look like that if she wants to feel like that.

  Beauty sadomasochism is different: In an ad for Obsession perfume, a well-muscled man drapes the naked, lifeless body of a woman over his shoulder. In an ad for Hermes perfume, a blond woman trussed in black leather is hanging upside down, screaming, her wrists looped in chains, mouth bound. In an ad for Fuji cassettes, a female robot with a playmate’s body, but made of steel, floats with her genitals exposed, her ankles bolted and her face a steel mask with slits for the eyes and mouth. In an ad for Erno Laszlo skin care products, a woman sits up and begs, her wrists clasped together with a leather leash that is also tied to her dog, who is sitting up in the same posture and begging. In an American ad for Newport cigarettes, two men tackle one woman and pull another by the hair; both women are screaming. In another Newport ad, a man forces a woman’s head down to get her distended mouth around a length of spurting hose gripped in his fist; her eyes are terrified. In an ad for Saab automobiles, a shot up a fashion model’s thighs is captioned, “Don’t worry. It’s ugly underneath.” In a fashion layout in The Observer (London), five men in black menace a model, whose face is in shock, with scissors and hot iron rods. In Tatler and Harper’s and Queen, “designer rape sequences (women beaten, bound and abducted, but immaculately turned out and artistically photographed)” appear. In Chris von Wangenheim’s Vogue layout, Doberman pinschers attack a model. Geoffrey Beene’s metallic sandals are displayed against a background of S and M accessories. The woman learns from these images that no matter how assertive she may be in the world, her private submission to control is what makes her desirable.

  These images above evolved with history: Sexuality follows fashion, which follows politics. During the 1960s era of Flower Power, popular culture had love as the catchword of the hour, with sex its expression; sensuality, frivolity, and playfulness were in vogue. Men grew their hair long and adorned their bodies, highlighting a feminine side that they could explore because women were not yet thinking about their own freedom. Though they appropriated girls’ pleasures, it was still a boys’ party.

  Until the mid-1960s, pornography was primarily a male experience; women’s contact with it was confined to the covers of men’s magazines on newsstands. But in the 1970s beauty pornography crossed over into the female cultural arena. As women became more free, so did pornography. Playboy made its debut in 1958. The Pill was marketed in the United States in 1960, and approved for prescription in Britain in 1961; the British Abortion Act became law in 1967, censorship laws in the United States were relaxed in 1969, and 1973 gave American women the right to legal abortion as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s judgment in Roe v. Wade; most European women had access to legal abortion by 1975.

  The 1970s jolted women into positions of power. As they entered the work force and were caught up in the women’s movement, the nature of what women would desire became a serious issue and a serious threat. The feminine sexual style of the 1960s was abandoned in popular culture, because for women to be sexual in that way—cheerfully, sensually, playfully, without violence or shame, without dread of the consequences—would break down completely institutions that were tottering crazily enough since women had changed merely their public roles.

  In the decade during which women became political about womanhood, popular culture recast tender, intimate sex as boring. Anonymity became the aphrodisiac of the moment: Mr. Goodbar and the zipless fuck and one-night stands. If women were going to have sexual freedom and a measure of worldly power, they’d better learn to fuck like men. The soulless blood-rush of synthesized climax over a repetitive backbeat made disco the perfect music by which to score with a stranger. Helmut Newton’s leather-adorned nudes appeared in Vogue, and David Hamilton’s photographs of naked preadolescents were sold in bookstores. The “ideal” female body was stripped down and on display all over. That gave a woman, for the first time in history, the graphic details of perfection against which to measure herself, and introduced a new female experience, the anxious and minute scrutiny of the body as intricately connected to female sexual pleasure. Soon, “perfection” was represented as a woman’s “sexual armor,” made more urgent an achievement in the 1980s when AIDS intensified an atmosphere that suggested to women that only an inhuman beauty would lead a man to risk his life for sex.

  Deeper Than the Skin

  In a crossover of imagery in the 1980s, the conventions of high-class pornographic photography, such as Playboy’s, began to be used generally to sell products to women. This made the beauty thinking that followed crucially different from all that had preceded it. Seeing a face anticipating orgasm, even if it is staged, is a powerful sell: In the absence of other sexual images, many women came to believe that they must have that face, that body, to achieve that ecstasy.

  Two conventions from soft- and hard-core pornography entered women’s culture: One “just” objectifies the female body, the other does violence to it. Obscenity law is based in part on the idea that you can avoid what offends you. But the terms ordinarily used in the pornography debate cannot deal adequately with this issue. Discussions of obscenity, or nakedness, or community standards do not address the harm done to women by this development: the way in which “beauty” joins pornographic conventions in advertising, fashion photography, cable TV, and even comic books to affect women and children. Men can choose to enter an adult bookstore; women and children cannot choose to avoid sexually violent or beauty-pornographic imagery that follows them home.

  Sexual “explicitness” is not the issue. We could use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing; if there were a full spectrum of erotic images of uncoerced real women and real men in contexts of sexual trust, beauty pornography could theoretically hurt no one. Defenders of pornography base their position on the idea of freedom of speech, casting pornographic imagery as language. Using their own argument, something striking emerges about the representation of women’s bodies: The representation is heavily censored. Because we see many versions of the naked Iron Maiden, we are asked to believe that our culture promotes the display of female sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s bodies, so that only the official versions are visible. Rather than seeing images of female desire or that cater to female desire, we see mock-ups of living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female sexuality. In the United States and Great Britain, which have no tradition of public nakedness, women rarely—and almost never outside a competitive context—see what other women look like naked; we see only identical humanoid products based loosely on women’s bodies.

  Beauty pornography and sadomasochism are not explicit, but dishonest. The former claims that women’s “beauty” is our sexuality, when the truth goes the other way around. The latter claims that women like to be forced and raped, and that sexual violence and rape are stylish, elegant, and beautiful.

  Midway through the 1970s, the punk-rock scene began to glorify S and M: High school girls put safety pins through their ears, painted their lips bruise-blue, and ripped their clothing to suggest sexual battle. By the end of the decade, S and M had ascended from street fashion to high fashion
in the form of studded black leather, wristcuffs, and spikes. Fashion models adopted from violent pornography the furious pouting glare of the violated woman. “Vanilla” sexual styles—loving and nonviolent—came to look passé.

  In the 1980s, when many women were graduating with professional degrees, anger against women crackled the airwaves. We saw a stupendous upsurge in violent sexual imagery in which the abused was female. In 1979, Jack Sullivan in The New York Times identified “a popular genre of thriller that attempts to generate excitement by piling up female corpses.” According to Jane Caputi, who calls the modern period the Age of Sex Crime, film portrayals based on sex abusers became common during the late 1970s and 1980s: Dressed to Kill, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Blue Velvet, 9½ Weeks, Tightrope, Body Double, the list goes on. That decade perfected the “first person” or “subjective camera” shot that encourages identification with the killer or rapist. In 1981, American film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert denounced “women in danger” films as an antifeminist backlash; a few years later, they praised one because it lets “us” really know “how it feels to abuse women.” The Zap underground comics of the 1970s depicted child abuse and rape at gunpoint; by 1989, The New York Times ran a story featuring the new sadomasochism in kids’ comic books, and the British comic Viz began to degrade women sexually in the strip “Fat Slags.” Sex just wasn’t sex anymore without violence. In a world in which both sexes’ guilt and angry fear surrounded the sense that women were getting out of control, the public quickly lost interest in ordinary unharmed nakedness. Presented as more compulsively engaging to the attention of men and, eventually, women, was imagery that played out anxieties from the sex war, reproducing the power inequality that recent social changes had questioned: male dominance, female submission. Female nakedness became inhuman, “perfected” beyond familiarity, freakishly like a sculpture in plastic, and often degraded or violated.