The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  There is a genre of pornography that centers on hurting and cutting women’s breasts. It is frightening that what seems to be considered erotic about breast surgery is not that it makes women appear to have bigger or better natural breasts—no one seems interested in pretending that they look natural; nor that it makes women more “womanly”; not even that it makes the breasts more “perfect.” What frightens is that the surgery itself is being eroticized. A Hungarian magazine features local beauties’ breasts alongside the surgeons who constructed them; Playboy has featured the surgery of Mariel Hemingway and Jessica Hahn—not so much the breasts; the surgery. It is frightening to see that now, in a woman-fearing era, the thought of scientists cutting open, invading, and artificially reconstructing the breasts of women appears to be emerging as the ultimate erotic triumph.

  The artificial reconstruction of the breast may now have become eroticized for women too. It is only after two decades of beauty pornography curtailing female sexuality that a sexually dead breast can be seen and felt to be “better” than one that is sexually alive. The same tacit censorship that edits images of women’s faces and body shapes also edits images of the female breast, keeping women ignorant about what breasts are actually like. Culture screens breasts with impeccable thoroughness, almost never representing those that are soft, or asymmetrical, or mature, or that have gone through the changes of pregnancy. Looking at breasts in culture, one would have little idea that real breasts come in as many shapes and variations as there are women. Since most women rarely if ever see or touch other women’s breasts, they have no idea what they feel like, or of the way they move and shift with the body, or of how they really look during lovemaking. Women of all ages have a fixation—sad in the light of how varied women’s breasts really are in texture—on “pertness” and “firmness.” Many young women suffer agonies of shame from their conviction that they alone have stretch marks. Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong, and to steal from her the full and exquisite eroticism of the nipple.

  The trend toward breast surgery is created by a culture that blocks out all breasts that are not the Official Breast, calls the imagery left over from this editing “sex,” keeps women ignorant of their own and other women’s bodies, and provides a little-monitored service that distributes for several thousand dollars (“Each?” “No, both”) the permissible replacement to frantic women.

  In a television ad for an American cosmetic surgeon, the actress on screen purrs with the smile of the well-satisfied woman. Nothing on her face looks unusual. It is understood that she is not talking about her face. Women are not cutting their breasts open for individual men, by and large, but so that they can experience their own sexuality. In a diseased environment, they are doing this “for themselves.” Most are married or in stable relationships. Fully a third are mothers whose breasts have, in the surgeon’s words, “atrophied” after pregnancy. Their partners “categorically deny” they encouraged the operations, and protest that they never criticized their lovers’ breasts.

  This sexual mutilation is not about relations between real men and women. It is about women’s sexuality trapped in the beauty backlash, in spite of men who may love them. Soon, not even a loving partner will be able to save many women’s sexuality from the knife. Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

  What is it about the Official Breast that makes it cancel out all other breasts? Of all shapes and sizes, it best guarantees adolescence. Very young girls, of course, have small breasts, but so do many mature women. Many mature women have large breasts that are not “firm” and “pert.” The breast that is high but also large and firm is most likely to belong to a teenager. In a culture which fears the price of women’s sexual self-confidence, that breast is the reassuring guarantee of extreme youth—sexual ignorance and infertility.

  Freud believed that repression of the libido made civilization; civilization depends at the moment on the repression of female libido: In 1973, Psychology Today reports, one fourth of American women surveyed were unhappy with the size or shape of their breasts. By 1986, the number had risen to a third; it was not women’s breasts that had changed in the meantime.

  This is why many women increasingly can’t care that surgery does things to their breasts that might repel a sexual interest that is merely human—rigidification that turns them to the consistency of hard plastic. Women report (at least, articles on surgery report that women report) new sexual fulfillment after the operation, even if their breasts are nerve-dead and rock-hard. How can that be? Many women’s sexuality is becoming so externalized by beauty pornography that they may truly be more excited by sexual organs that, though dead or immobile, visually fit into it.

  So breast implants, even if they feel bizarre to her lover and cut off sensation in herself, may in fact “free” a woman sexually. They look official. They photograph well. They have become artifact—not-woman—and will never change, the beauty myth’s ultimate goal. Plastic body parts won’t stop here.

  Surgeons are not expected to elicit what will make the woman beautiful in her own eyes, but to guarantee her that they will impose on her body the culture’s official fantasy. They seem to have no illusions about their role. An ad in a surgical journal shows a hairy male hand squeezing a glutinous implant. Gel (made, incidentally, by the manufacturers of napalm) bulges out between its fingers. The text asserts that the product “feels natural”—to the squeezing hand.

  Medical ethics treats interference in male sexuality as an atrocity. Depo-Provera, a drug that lowers the libido of male criminals, is controversial because it is barbaric to intervene in male sexuality. But female sexuality is still treated by institutions as if it were hypothetical. Not only do factory-produced breasts endanger women’s sensual response; many other procedures harm it too. (The Pill, for example, which was supposed to make women “sexier,” actually lowers their libido, a side effect of which they are rarely informed.) A risk of eyelid surgery is blindness; a nose job risks damage to the sense of smell; numbness accompanies face-lifts. If the surgical ideal is sensual, there must be other senses than the usual five.

  Numbness

  Enough pain makes people numb. Look at a “done-up” woman walking down a wintry street, branches rattling above her. She is wearing a costume, part flamenco dancer, part Carmen, a self-creation that is fragile and arresting. She painted her face for an hour, blending and shading, and now she holds her head as if it were a work of art. Her legs in black silk are numb from the windchill. The deep parting of her dress is open to a blast of wind, which raises tiny hairs on her skin. Her Achilles tendons are ground by the upward pressure of her black-red spike heels, and are relentlessly throbbing. But heads turn, and keep turning: Who’s that? Each glance is like a shot from a hypodermic. As long as the heads keep turning, she truly is not cold.

  A healthy body’s reflexes lead it to avoid pain. But beauty thinking is an anesthetic, with the ability to make women more like objects by cauterizing sensation. The beauty index is raising our pain threshold to support surgical technologies. To survive the Surgical Age, we do have to keep ourselves from knowing what we feel. The more we suffer, the more psychological resistance there will be to reopening the mental channels we had to block. In the Milgram Experiments of the 1950s, researchers placed subjects’ hands on a lever that they were told would administer electric shocks to people whom they could not see. Then, scientists told them to keep administering increasing levels of shock. The subjects, unwilling to disobey scientific authorities telling them it was right, and cut off from seeing the “victims,” raised the electric currents to fatal levels. A woman learns, in the dawn of the Surgical Age, to relate to her body as the experimental subjects related to
the shock victims. Separated from it, asked not to see it or feel for it as human, she is being taught by scientific authorities to do her worst.

  Electric shock is not just a metaphor. It has been part of the control of women since electricity was in use. Victorian invalids were subjected to galvanic shocks. Electroshock therapy is used typically on women asylum patients, and bears a strong resemblance to the death-and-rebirth ceremonial of cosmetic surgery. Like surgery, it has, claims Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady, “the trappings of a powerful religious ritual, conducted by a priestly masculine figure . . . [its magic] comes from its imitation of the death and rebirth ceremony. For the patient it represents a rite of passage in which the doctor kills off the ‘bad’ crazy self, and resurrects the ‘good’ self”—in poet Sylvia Plath’s vision of electroshock, a good self born again “not of woman.” “For this reason, suicidal patients are often comforted by ECT; upon awakening, they feel that in a sense they have died and been born again, with the hated parts of themselves annihilated—literally, electrocuted.” Gerald McKnight describes an antiaging “therapy” in which electric shocks are applied to the face. Lancôme makes a “contouring product of extreme precision” that promises to “attack unwanted bulges”: It is “the first thermic body contouring shock treatment.” Electric shock has encouraged passivity in political dissidents from the Soviet Union to Chile.

  Now that women are invited to act as their own electroshock operators, there is no point in detailing case after case that has gone disgustingly wrong, or to say again that the surgery is expensive and very very painful, and that the chances are you will turn your body over to someone who is unregulated, unqualified, and not on your side. Neither is there much point anymore in talking about fatalities.

  That apathy is the real issue: The global numbing effect is under way. With every article on surgery that details the horrors of it, as many do, women, ironically, lose a bit more of our ability to feel for our own bodies and identify with our own pain—a survival skill, since with each article, social pressure to undergo those very horrors will have mounted. Women know about the atrocities; but we cannot feel them anymore.

  As the index rises and surgical technologies become more sophisticated, this numbing process will accelerate. Procedures that still sound barbaric to our ears will soon be absorbed into the encroaching numbness. The myth spreads eastward: Procedures that we have come to tolerate in America still sound nauseating in Great Britain and revolting in the Netherlands, but next year British women will be able to keep their gorge from rising and Dutch women will feel merely queasy. Parts of ourselves that we now admire with pleasure will next year be reclassified as fresh deformities. The pain threshold asked of us will rise and rise. This projection is just arithmetic: Cosmetic surgery doubled its rate every five years in the United States, until it tripled in two; it doubles every decade in Britain. A city of women the size of San Francisco gets cut open each year in the United States; in Britain, a town the size of Bath.

  The point is that our numbness is catching up to what the beauty index is asking of us. The reader finishes the article and looks at the pictures: The woman’s face looks as if she has been beaten across the zygomatic ridge with an iron pipe. Her eyes are blackened. The skin of the woman’s hips is a blanket of bruises. The woman’s breasts are swollen out and yellow like hyperthyroid jaundiced eyes. The woman’s breasts don’t move. The blood crusts under the sutures. The reader, two or three years ago, thought these images were alarmist. It dawns on her now, they’re promotional. She is no longer expected to react with the revulsion that she felt at first. Women’s magazines set the beauty index. They’ve given enormous coverage to surgery, partly because very little happens in the world of “beauty” that is at all new. These features have readers believe that we should balk now at nothing, since it seems that other readers, the competition, are braving it. The typical article, which details weeks of grisly pain but ends in happy beauty, provokes in women something like panic buying.

  A woman in a shelter for battered women once described her legs to me as “all one bruise, like they were covered with purplish tights.” In an interview for a book promoting cosmetic surgery, overheard in a Manhattan coffee shop, a woman who had had liposuction used a similar image. What needs to be explored are not the mutilations, but the atmosphere we now inhabit that makes them make no difference.

  We have entered a terrifying new age with cosmetic surgery. All limits have broken down. No amount of suffering or threat of disfigurement can serve as a deterrent. What is happening to the female body in relation to cosmetic surgery is like what is happening to the balance of life on the planet. We are at a historic turning point.

  The dawn of the Surgical Age in the 1980s did result from some technological advances in the profession. It drew far more energy, though, from the beauty backlash against feminism. The two developments—the means and, more important, the will completely to alter women—has brought us to an extraordinary mental upheaval surrounding life in the female form. With the shift in rhetoric that recast pain and mutilation into diminished language, female consciousness has had to reckon with the sort of destruction of the rules that faced human thinking when the atom was split. With the huge expansion of possibility came a huge expansion of danger.

  If anything on a woman’s body can be changed, something revolutionary—or demonic—has come about in the alternate world of the beauty myth. Does it mean the cruel old economy is blasted apart? That science has indeed opened up a horizon of beauty for all women who can afford it? Does it mean the bitterly rankling caste system, in which some are born “better” than others, is dead, and women are free?

  That has been the popular interpretation: The Surgical Age is an unqualified good. It is the American dream come true: One can re-create oneself “better” in a brave new world. It has even, understandably, been interpreted as a feminist liberation: Ms. magazine hailed it as “self-transformation”; in Lear’s, a woman surgeon urges, “Voilà! You are led to freedom.” This hopeful female yearning for a magic technology that destroys the beauty myth and its injustice—with a “beauty” that is almost fair because you can earn it with pain and buy it with money—is a poignant, but shortsighted, response.

  It is with the same kind of hopefulness that the atom bomb was introduced in the 1950s. The Bomb was presented at the end of total war as a magic equalizer of unequal nations; cosmetic surgery is presented as the miraculous peacekeeper in women’s combat under the beauty myth. It took decades for people to recognize the true impact of the nuclear age on human consciousness. Whether or not it would ever be used again, the Bomb changed forever how we thought about the world.

  With the Age of Surgery, we are at the very first swell of a wave whose end we cannot see. But the cheerfulness with which we are embracing this technology is as shortsighted as the optimism about the Bomb that flooded the market with Atomic beachwear and cartoon characters. With cosmetic surgery, consciousness inside the female body is undergoing a transformation that may mean we have lost the body’s boundaries, so recently defined and defended—and our presurgical orientation inside it—forever.

  We are affected by the Bomb whether or not it is detonated. Whether or not a woman ever undergoes cosmetic surgery, her mind is now being shaped by its existence. The expectation of surgery will continue to rise. Since the beauty myth works in a mappable balance system, as soon as enough women are altered and critical mass is reached so that too many women look like the “ideal,” the “ideal” will always shift. Ever-different cutting and stitching will be required of women if we are to keep our sexuality and our livelihood.

  In 1945, we lost the luxury of taking for granted that the world would outlive the individual. Technology made its destruction imaginable. Around 1990, technology introduced the end of the woman-made female body. A woman began to lose the luxury of taking for granted that she had a face and a body that were hers alone in which she could live out her life.

  Th
e years between the development of the Bomb and the evolution of Einstein’s “new manner of thinking” about war were the most dangerous. Human beings had the means to destroy the world through using new technology in conventional warfare, but had not yet evolved beyond imagining the inevitability of conventional warfare. Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for “beauty,” but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have “anything” done.

  This is a dangerous time.

  New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations. It is a short step from “anything can be done for beauty” to “anything must be done.” What must be worked through before we can start thinking our way to safety is the assertion that women freely choose this pain. We need to ask what “choice” and “pain” mean in relation to women in the Surgical Age.

  Pain

  What makes pain exist? Law theorist Suzanne Levitt points out that in the courtroom, in order to prove harm has been done, you have to prove you are worse off than you were before. But, she says, since there is a “background noise” of harm around them, women aren’t seen to be hurt when they are hurt. The same concept seems to hold true for recognition of the harm done women for beauty’s sake: Since women should be addicted to “beauty,” this life-threatening addiction is not real. Since women should suffer to be beautiful—since our suffering is beautiful—the pain we feel is “discomfort.” Because women’s money is not real money but pin money, and because women are fools for “beauty” and a fool and her money are soon parted, fraudulent practices are not fraud and women’s play money is fair game. Because women are deformed to begin with, we cannot really suffer deformation. Because we are gullible by nature in search of “beauty,” no deception is a scandal.