The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  The upsurge in violent sexual imagery took its energy from male anger and female guilt at women’s access to power. Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped. Even if we never seek out pornography, we often see rape where sex should be. Since most women repress our awareness of that in order to survive being entertained, it can take concentration to remember. According to a Screen Actors Guild study in 1989—a year in which female leading roles made up only 14 percent of the total—a growing number of the roles for women cast them as rape victims or prostitutes. In France, TV viewers see fifteen rapes a week. That has a different effect on the audience than, for example, seeing murders: One person in four is unlikely to be murdered. But even if she avoids pornography, a woman will, by watching mainstream, middle-brow plays, films, and TV, learn the conventions of her threatened rape in detail, close up.

  Rape fantasies projected into the culture are benign, we’re told, even beneficial, when commentators dismiss them through what Catharine MacKinnon has satirized as “the hydraulic model” of male sexuality (it lets off steam). Men, we are given to understand, are harmlessly interested in such fantasies; women are harmlessly interested in them (though many women may have rape fantasies for no more subtle psychological reason than that that image of sexuality is the primary one they witness). But what is happening now is that men and women whose private psychosexual history would not lead them to eroticize sexual violence are learning from such scenes to be interested in it. In other words, our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it.

  Beauty Pornography and Sadomasochism

  The current allocation of power is sustained by a flood of hostile and violent sexual images, but threatened by imagery of mutual eroticism or female desire; the elite of the power structure seem to know this consciously enough to act on it. The imposition of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism from the top down shows in obscenity legislation. We saw that the language of women’s naked bodies and women’s faces is censored. Censorship also applies to what kind of sexual imagery and information can circulate: Sexual violence against women is not obscene whereas female sexual curiosity is. British and Canadian law interprets obscenity as the presence of an erect penis, not of vulvas and breasts; and an erection, writes Susan G. Cole in Pornography and the Sex Crisis, is, “according to American mores . . . not the kind of thing a distributor can put on the newsstands next to Time.” Masters and Johnson, asked in Playboy to comment on the average penis size, censored their findings: They “flatly refused,” worrying that it would have “a negative effect on Playboy’s readers,” and that “everyone would walk around with a measuring stick.”

  This version of censorship policed the same decades that saw the pornography industry’s unparalleled growth: In Sweden, where the sale of violently misogynist pornography is defended on the grounds of freedom of expression, “when a magazine appeared with a nude male for a centerspread, [the authorities] whisked [it] off the stalls in a matter of hours.” Women’s magazine Spare Rib was banned in Ireland because it showed women how to examine their breasts. The Helena Rubinstein Foundation in the United States withdrew support from a Barnard women’s conference because a women’s magazine on campus showed “explicit” images of women. Several art galleries banned Judy Chicago’s collaborative show, The Dinner Party, for its depiction of the stylized genitals of heroines of women’s history. The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was attacked by Congress for sponsoring an exhibit that displayed erect penises. The Ontario Police Project P held that photos of naked women tied up, bruised, and bleeding, intended for sexual purposes, were not obscene since there were no erect penises, but a Canadian women’s film was banned for a five-second shot of an erect penis being fitted with a condom. In New York subways, metropolitan policemen confiscated handmade anti-AIDS posters that showed illiterate people how to put a condom over an erect penis; they left the adjacent ads for Penthouse, displayed by the New York City Transit Authority, intact. Leaving aside the issue of what violent sexual imagery does, it is still apparent that there is an officially enforced double standard for men’s and women’s nakedness in mainstream culture that bolsters power inequities.

  The practice of displaying breasts, for example, in contexts in which the display of penises would be unthinkable, is portrayed as trivial because breasts are not “as naked” as penises or vaginas; and the idea of half exposing men in a similar way is moot because men don’t have body parts comparable to breasts. But if we think about how women’s genitals are physically concealed, unlike men’s, and how women’s breasts are physically exposed, unlike men’s, it can be seen differently: women’s breasts, then correspond to men’s penises as the vulnerable “sexual flower” on the body, so that to display the former and conceal the latter makes women’s bodies vulnerable while men’s are protected. Cross-culturally, unequal nakedness almost always expresses power relations: In modern jails, male prisoners are stripped in front of clothed prison guards; in the antebellum South, young black male slaves were naked while serving the clothed white masters at table. To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.

  How Does It Work?

  These images institutionalize heterosexual alienation by intervening in our fantasy lives. “So powerful is pornography, and so smoothly does it blend in with the advertising of products . . . that many women find their own fantasies and self-images distorted too,” writes Debbie Taylor in Women: A World Report. Romantic fiction, she points out, is “seldom sexually explicit, tending to fade out . . . when two lovers touch lips for the first time.” The same sexual evasiveness is true of nearly all dramatic presentation of mainstream culture where a love story is told. So rare is it to see sexual explicitness in the context of love and intimacy on screen that it seems our culture treats tender sexuality as if it were deviant or depraved, while embracing violent or degrading sex as right and healthy. “This leaves,” Taylor says, “the sexual stage,” in men’s and women’s minds, “vacant, and pornographic images are free to take a starring role. The two leading actors on this stage are the sadist, played by man, and the masochist, played by woman.”

  Until recently, the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, and private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people’s bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies’ mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time and deep in the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination. The locus of fantasy of a lucky man holds no robots; of a lucky woman, no predators; they reach adulthood with no violence in the garden.

  Protecting one’s fantasy life is becoming daily more difficult, especially for the young. The beauty barrage peoples the fantasy locus of a woman with “beautiful” naked ghosts that claim her territory, turning a dim private space into a movie set where famous strangers who have nothing to do with her display themselves. The purpose of the beauty myth of the 1980s was to people the sexual interior of men and women with violence, placing an elegantly abused iron maiden into the heart of everyone’s darkness, and blasting the fertile ground of children’s imaginations with visions so caustic as to render them sterile. For the time being, the myth is winning its campaign against our sexual ind
ividuality, the most movingly personal images that take their associative power from our earliest childhood, our clumsy adolescence, our first loves. It is making certain that men and women, just freed to find one another, will be sure to miss.

  The usual discussions about pornography center on men and what it does to their sexual attitudes toward women. But the parallel effect of beauty pornography on women is at least as important: What does that imagery do to women’s sexual attitudes toward themselves? If soft-core, nonviolent, mainstream pornography has been shown to make men less likely to believe a rape victim; if its desensitizing influence lasts a long time; if sexually violent films make men progressively trivialize the severity of the violence they see against women; and if at last only violence against women is perceived by them as erotic, is it not likely that parallel imagery aimed at women does the same to women in relation to themselves? The evidence shows that it does. Wendy Stock discovered that exposure to rape imagery increased women’s sexual arousal to rape and increased their rape fantasies (though it did not convince them that women liked force in sex). Carol Krafka found that her female subjects “grew less upset with the violence [against women] the more they saw, and that they rated the material less violent” the more of it was shown to them.

  In a study of women in the United States, Dr. E. Hariton found that 49 percent had submissive sexual fantasies. Legal decisions are being made out of the propagation throughout the culture of the rape fantasy: In 1989 a U.K. civil suit brought by a woman raped by her physiotherapist was denied because it was suggested that she had fantasized the rape and that such fantasies are common among women. Violent sexual imagery is also redefining the idea of sex in the law: When another young British woman brought rape charges against a police officer, the bruises and contusions on her body, and the abrasions of his truncheon held against her throat, were ruled to be consistent with a consensual “amorous tussle.”

  The debate continues about whether classic pornography makes men violent toward women. But beauty pornography is clearly making women violent toward ourselves. The evidence surrounds us. Here, a surgeon stretches the slit skin of the breast. There, a surgeon presses with all his weight on a woman’s chest to break up lumps of silicone with his bare hands. There is the walking corpse. There is the woman vomiting blood.

  Sexual Battle: Profit and Glamour

  Why this flood of images now? They do not arise simply as a market response to deep-seated, innate desires already in place. They arise also—and primarily—to set a sexual agenda and to create their versions of desire. The way to instill social values, writes historian Susan G. Cole, is to eroticize them. Images that turn women into objects or eroticize the degradation of women have arisen to counterbalance women’s recent self-assertion. They are welcome and necessary because the sexes have come too close for the comfort of the powerful; they act to keep men and women apart, wherever the restraints of religion, law, and economics have grown too weak to continue their work of sustaining the sex war.

  Heterosexual love, before the women’s movement, was undermined by women’s economic dependence on men. Love freely given between equals is the child of the women’s movement, and a very recent historical possibility, and as such very fragile. It is also the enemy of some of the most powerful interests of this society.

  If women and men in great numbers were to form bonds that were equal, nonviolent, and sexual, honoring the female principle no less or more than the male, the result would be more radical than the establishment’s worst nightmares of homosexual “conversions.” A mass heterosexual deviation into tenderness and mutual respect would mean real trouble for the status quo since heterosexuals are the most powerful sexual majority. The power structure would face a massive shift of allegiances: From each relationship might emerge a doubled commitment to transform society into one based publicly on what have traditionally been women’s values, demonstrating all too well the appeal for both sexes of a world rescued from male dominance. The good news would get out on the street: Free women have more fun; worse, so do free men.

  Male-dominated institutions—particularly corporate interests—recognize the dangers posed to them by love’s escape. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. Women who have broken out of gender roles have proved manageable: Those few with power are being retrained as men. But with the apparition of numbers of men moving into passionate, sexual love of real women, serious money and authority could defect to join forces with the opposition. Such love would be a political upheaval more radical than the Russian Revolution and more destabilizing to the balance of world power than the end of the nuclear age. It would be the downfall of civilization as we know it—that is, of male dominance; and for heterosexual love, the beginning of the beginning.

  Images that flatten sex into “beauty,” and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring that men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism, their separate versions of loneliness.

  Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, in Re-Making Love, point out that the new market of sexual products demands quick-turnover sexual consumerism. That point applies beyond the sexual accessories market to the entire economy of consumption. The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5-trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

  Though the survival of the planet depends on women’s values balancing men’s, consumer culture depends on maintaining a broken line of communication between the sexes and promoting matching sexual insecurities. Harley-Davidsons and Cuisinarts stand in for maleness and femaleness. But sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart’s desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

  Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women’s dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror’s mercury, antierotic for both men and women.

  But even more powerful interests than the consumer index depend on heterosexual estrangement and are threatened by heterosexual accord. The military is supported by nearly one third of the United States government’s budget; militarism depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children. Men who loved women would shift loyalties back to the family and community from which becoming a man is one long exile. Serious lovers and fathers would be unwilling to believe the standard propaganda of militarism: that their wives and children would benefit from their heroic death. Mothers don’t fear mothers; if men’s love for women and for their own children led them to define themselves first as fathers and lovers, the propaganda of war would fall on deaf ears: The enemy would be a father and partner t
oo. This percentage of the economy is at risk from heterosexual love. Peace and trust between men and women who are lovers would be as bad for the consumer economy and the power structure as peace on earth for the military-industrial complex.

  Heterosexual love threatens to lead to political change: An erotic life based on nonviolent mutuality rather than domination and pain teaches firsthand its appeal beyond the bedroom. A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It’s true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, child-care, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.