The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  A more pervasive effect of this atmosphere, the prevalence of sexual violence and the way it is linked to women’s beauty, is that women—especially, perhaps, young women who grew up with such violent imagery—are made to fear and distrust their own beauty and feel ambivalent about physically expressing, in dress, movement, or adornment, their own sexuality. Today, perhaps more than ever before, when young women dress in a sexually provocative way they are made to feel that they are engaged in something dangerous.

  The Sexuality of the Young: Changed Utterly?

  It seems that exposure to chic violence and objectifying sexual imagery has already harmed the young. Theorists of eros have not come close to realizing the effect of beauty pornography on young people. Gloria Steinem and Susan Griffin separate pornography from eros—which makes sense if eros comes first in the psychosexual biography. Rape fantasies may be insignificant, as Barbara Ehrenreich believes, for those who grew up learning their sexuality from other human beings. But young people today did not ask for a sexuality of pleasure from distance, from danger: It was given to them. For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today’s children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

  Something ugly seems to be happening to young people’s sexuality as a result: The effort to retrain sex into violence may be nearly won. Hilde Bruch calls young women born after 1960 “the anorexic generations.” Since obscenity laws were relaxed in the the 1960s and children born after 1960 have grown up in an atmosphere of increasingly violent and degrading sexual imagery (from which young women are withdrawing through anorexia), we must recognize young people born after 1960 as “the pornographic generations.”

  Young women now are being bombarded with a kind of radiation sickness brought on by overexposure to images of beauty pornography, the only source offered them of ways to imagine female sexuality. They go out into the world sexually unprotected: stripped of the repressive assurance of their sexual value conferred by virginity or a diamond ring—one’s sexuality was worth something all too concrete in the days when a man contracted to work for a lifetime to maintain access to it—and not yet armed with a sense of innate sexual pride. Before 1960, “good” and “bad,” as applied to women, corresponded with “nonsexual” and “sexual.” After the rise of beauty pornography and the sexual half-revolution, “good” began to mean “beautiful-(thin)-hence-sexual” and “bad” meant “ugly-(fat)-hence-nonsexual.”

  In the past, women felt vulnerable, in the prenuptial bed, to pregnancy, illegal abortion, and abandonment. Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.

  The thirty-year education of the young in sex as stylish objectification or sadomasochism may have produced a generation that honestly believes that sex is violent and violence is sexual, so long as the violence is directed against women. If they believe that, it is not because they are psychopaths but because that representation in mainstream culture is the norm.

  Twelve percent of British and American parents allow their children to watch violent and pornographic films. But you don’t have to watch either kind of film to tune in. Susan G. Cole notes that MTV, the rock video channel in the United States, “appears to be conforming to pornographic standards” (the Playboy channel simply broadcasts its selections on “Hot Rocks”). With the evolution of rock videos, both sexes sit in a room together watching the culture’s official fantasy line about what they are supposed to do together—or, more often, what she is supposed to look like while he does what he does, watching her. This material, unlike the version of it in glossy magazines, moves, complicating young women’s sexual anxieties in relation to beauty in a new way, as it adds levels of instruction beyond the simple pose: Now they must take notes on how to move, strip, grimace, pout, breathe, and cry out during a “sexual” encounter. In the shift from print to videotape, their self-consciousness became three-dimensional.

  So does their sense of being stylishly endangered. Sex killers are portrayed on MTV as male heroes: The Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler” is a paean to the Boston Strangler (“I’ll stick my knife right down your throat”); Thin Lizzy sings “Killer in the House” about a rapist (“I’m looking for somebody . . . I might be looking for you”); Trevor Rubin sings “The Ripper.” Motley Crue’s videos have women as sexual slaves in cages. In Rick James’s video he rapes his girlfriend. In Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” a gang stalks a lone woman. Duran Duran shows female figures in chains, and their “Girls on Film,” observes Susan G. Cole, “look as if they’ve just stepped out of an X-rated film.” In Alice Cooper’s show, reports The Guardian, “a life-sized, woman-shaped doll lies on the floor in front of him, handcuffed, wearing ripped fishnets and a leotard. She appears to have been choked to death by a plastic hose.” “I used to love her,” sings Guns ’n’ Roses, “but I had to kill her.” Criticism of rock’s extremism exposes one to the charge of being reactionary. But by resorting to these images, it is rock music that is being reactionary. Images of strangled women, women in cages, do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliché of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh.

  Unfortunately, musical originality is not the only thing at stake: MTV sets the beauty index for young women today. If the women depicted in mass culture are “beautiful” and abused, abuse is a mark of desirability. For young men, “beauty” is defined as that which never says no, and that which is not really human: The date-rape figures show what lessons that teaches.

  In 1986, UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth reported that 30 percent of college men said they would commit rape if they could be sure of getting away with it. When the survey changed the word “rape” into the phrase “force a woman into having sex,” 58 percent said that they would do so. Ms. magazine commissioned a study funded by the National Institute for Mental Health of 6,100 undergraduates, male and female, on thirty-two college campuses across the United States. In the year prior to the Ms. survey, 2,971 college men had committed 187 rapes, 157 attempted rapes, 327 acts of sexual coercion, and 854 attempts at unwanted sexual contact. The Ms. study concluded that “scenes in movies and TV that reflect violence and force in sexual relationships relate directly to acquaintance rape.”

  In another survey of 114 undergraduate men, these replies emerged:

  “I like to dominate a woman.” 91.3%.

  “I enjoy the conquest part of sex.” 86.1%.

  “Some women look like they’re just asking to be raped.” 83.5.%

  “I get excited when a woman struggles over sex.” 63.5%.

  “It would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman.” 61.7%.

  In the Ms. survey, one college man in twelve, or 8 percent of the respondents, had raped or tried to rape a woman since age fourteen (the only consistent difference between this group and those who had not assaulted women was that the former said they read pornography “very freque
ntly”). Researchers at Emory and Auburn universities in the United States found that 30 percent of male college students rated faces of women displaying emotional distress—pain, fear—to be more sexually attractive than the faces showing pleasure; of those respondents, 60 percent had committed acts of sexual aggression.

  Women are faring badly. In the Ms. study, one in four women respondents had had an experience that met the American legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Among the 3,187 women surveyed, in the preceding year, there had been 328 rapes and 534 attempted rapes; 837 women were subjected to sexual coercion, and 2,024 experienced episodes of unwanted sexual contact. Date rape shows, more than rape by a stranger, the confusion that has been generated in the young between sex and violence. Of the women raped, 84 percent knew the attacker, and 57 percent were raped on dates. Date rape, thus, is more common than left-handedness, alcoholism, and heart attacks. In 1982, an Auburn University study found that 25 percent of undergraduate women had had at least one experience of rape; 93 percent of those were by acquaintances. Of Auburn men, 61 percent had forced sexual contact on a woman against her will. A St. Cloud State University study in 1982 showed that 29 percent of the women students had been raped. Twenty percent of women students at the University of South Dakota had been date-raped; at Brown University, 16 percent had been date-raped. Eleven percent of Brown men said they had forced sex on a woman. The same year at Auburn University, 15 percent of male undergraduates said they had raped a woman on a date.

  Women are four times more likely to be raped by an acquaintance than a stranger. Sexual violence is seen as normal by young women as well as young men: “Study after study has shown that women who are raped by men they know don’t even identify their experiences as rape”; only 27 percent in the Ms. study did so. Does their inability to call what happened to them “rape” mean that they escape the aftereffects of rape? Thirty percent of raped young women, whether or not they called their experience rape, considered suicide afterward. Thirty-one percent sought psychotherapy, and 82 percent said the experience had permanently changed them. Forty-one percent of the raped women said they expected to be raped again. Posttraumatic stress syndrome was identified as a psychological disorder in 1980, and is now recognized as common among rape survivors. The women who don’t call their rape by its name still suffer the same depression, self-hatred, and suicidal impulses as women who do. Their experiences are likely to imprint young women sexually: In the Ms. study, 41 percent of the raped young women were virgins; 38 percent were between fourteen and seventeen at the time of the attack. For both the rapists and the victims in the study, the average age at the time of the rape was eighteen and a half years old. College women are having relationships that include physical violence: Between 21 and 30 percent of young people report violence from their dating partner.

  Among younger adolescents, the trend is even worse. In a UCLA study of fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, the researchers wrote that “we appear to have uncovered some rather distressing indications that a new generation is entering into the adult world of relationships carrying along shockingly outmoded baggage.” More than 50 percent of the boys and nearly half the girls thought it was okay for a man to rape a woman if he was sexually aroused by her. A recent survey in Toronto reports that children are learning dominance and submission patterns at an earlier age: One in seven boys in grade 13 reported having refused to take no for an answer, and one in four girls of the same age reported having been sexually forced. Eighty percent of the teenage girls reported that they’d already been involved in violent relationships. According to Susan G. Cole, “In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex is. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.”

  Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events. The boys may even be unaware that what they are doing is wrong; violent sexual imagery may well have raised a generation of young men who can rape women without even knowing it. In 1987 a young New York woman, Jennifer Levin, was murdered in Central Park after sadomasochistic sex; a classmate remarked dryly to a friend that that was the only kind of sex that anyone he knew was having. In 1989, five New York teenagers raped and savagely battered a young woman jogger. The papers were full of stunned questions: Was it race? Was it class? No one noticed that in the fantasy subculture fed to the young, it was normal.

  These figures show that much AIDS education has been utterly naive. If a quarter of young women have at some point had control denied them in a sexual encounter, they stand little chance of protecting themselves from the deadly disease. In a speakout on sexual violence at Yale University, the most common theme was a new crime that has been largely ignored: when a woman stipulates a safe, or nonpenetrative, sexual encounter, but the man ejaculates into her against her will. AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires. Only when that happens will sex in the age of AIDS be free of the aura of terror it now seems to carry on so many college campuses.

  In recent literature and films by young people, sexual violence or alienation is the hallmark. In Steven Soderbergh’s film sex, lies, and videotape, the hero can’t make love to a real woman but masturbates to women’s videotaped sexual confessions; in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, bored rich kids watch snuff films—and a preadolescent girl, bound on a bed, and raped repeatedly, is a background image throughout; in Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York, women are sexual slaves in exchange for housing (the Bloomingdale’s ad based on the novel asks if you are “a slave to your boyfriend”); in Susan Minot’s Lust, the heroine describes her promiscuity as making her feel “like a piece of pounded veal”; the heroine of Catherine Texier’s Love Me Tender seeks out increasingly violent sexual humiliation (“Like the times we did it so hard,” sings Sinead O’Connor, “there was blood on the wall”). Romantic, intimate sexual love in the culture of the young is mostly confined to gay relationships, as in the novels of David Leavitt, Michael Chabon, and Jeanette Winterson. It is as if, in an ambience of violent heterosexual imagery, the young have retreated into a dull, aching sexual estrangement that is beyond warfare; more like daily life in a militarized town, in which civilians and soldiers have little more to say to one another.

  Evidently such imagery is bad for sex. Is it good for love?

  Beauty Against Love

  Under the Feminine Mystique, men were kept ignorant of the details of women’s sexuality and of childbirth. New fathers were kept in hospital waiting rooms. Apart from protecting himself from venereal diseases and shotgun weddings, a man left contraception to women. Menstruation was taboo. The dirtier aspects of housekeeping and child rearing were kept from men. These details were part of women’s sphere, which separated them from men with a line they were not to cross. For a man to come in contact with the “female mysteries” of reproduction and domesticity was, it seemed, to put himself at the mercy of an emasculating magical power: It was supposed to make men pass out or become Milquetoasts or just make a terrible mess. So when the frazzled Papa handed Baby in exasperation to smug Mama, he was handing her the tribute of his ignorance, her expertise. She naturally knew best. Crossing the gender line subjected men to ridicule.

  Today, many men feel free to be real fathers. Those who are glad of what their fathering has given them can look back at this scenario and see how it excluded them from something precious. Because the old-fashioned tribute left the drudgery to women, it seemed that the joke was on them. But because the tedium and hassle of “women’s mysteries” are inseparable from the joy, the joke was on men too. Not long ago, the division of la
bor where these tasks are concerned was considered biological and changeless. It changed.

  Today, the “women’s mysteries” surrounding beauty in sexuality, beauty as sexuality, seem biological and changeless. They too are cloaked in flattery that manipulates women while they seem to give men the better sexual deal. They too burden women with obligations while keeping men, through peer pressure, far from a source of joy. A man today must face ridicule from other men if he joins his partner beyond the beauty myth. At the moment, the joke’s on both of them. But that too can change.

  The beauty mysteries that occupied the space vacated by the Feminine Mystique now constitute the topics that women censor in themselves. At least one major study proves that men are as exasperated with the beauty myth as women are. “Preoccupation with her appearance, concern about face and hair” ranked among the top four qualities that most annoyed men about women. These mysteries are what men do not know how to discuss with women whom they are trying to love without doing them harm. They put back what was nearly lost when women left their status as marital slaves: suspicion, hostility, incomprehension, obsequiousness, and rage.

  Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable.

  He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn.