by Naomi Wolf
To dwell on the teeny tiny death risk, a surgeon might say, is to overreact: The deaths are a fraction of a percentage of the whole. Surely—for a medically necessary operation. But for the reconstruction of healthy young women? How many will die before it is too many, before we draw around ourselves a line of safety? Fourteen dead women and counting, each of whom had a name, a home, and a future. And each of whom had healthy concentrations of flesh where fat distinguishes female from male sexual development; for which all the rest had to be staked on the wheel, all gambled for double or nothing and, for these fourteen women, all lost. When is it appropriate to notice blood on a doctor’s hands? Will we go on to twenty? To thirty? To fifty healthy women dead before we feel resistance, before we question the process that has women gamble their lives for a “beauty” that has nothing to do with us? At this rate, those deaths will be just a matter of time. Liposuction is the fastest-growing procedure in a field that triples every other year. Before this trend escalates until it can never again be considered appropriate, now is the time to stand back and notice fourteen dead bodies, real ones, human ones. Fourteen women dead was enough for Kenya, but not for the United States.
What is liposuction (assuming you live through it)? If you are reading one clinic’s advertisement, it looks like this:
FIGURE IMPROVEMENT BY IMMEDIATE SPOT FAT REDUCTION. . . . One of the most successful techniques is that developed to refine and reshape the figure. With Lipolysis/Suction assisted Lipectomy a tiny incision is made in each area of excess fat. A very slender tube is then inserted and by gentle, skillful movements aided by a powerful and even suction this unwanted (and often unsightly) fat is removed—permanently.
If you are reading an eyewitness account by journalist Jill Neimark, it looks like this:
[A] man force[s] a plastic tube down a naked woman’s throat. He connects the tube to a pump that, for the next two hours, will breathe for her. Her eyes are taped shut, her arms are stretched out horizontally and her head lolls a little to the side. . . . She’s in a chemically induced coma known as general anaesthesia . . . what comes next is almost unbelievably violent. Her surgeon . . . begins to thrust the cannula in and out, as rapid as a piston, breaking through thick nets of fat, nerves and tissue in her leg. The doctor is ready to stitch her up. Nearly 2,000 millilitres of tissue and blood have been sucked out of her, any more would put her at risk for massive infection and fluid loss leading to shock and death. . . . He peels the tape back from her lids, and she stares at him, unseeing. “A lot of people have trouble coming back. Bringing someone out of anaesthesia is the most dangerous part of an operation.” . . . [which] can lead to massive infection, excessive damage to capillaries and fluid depletion resulting in shock and coma.
Liposuction shows the way to the future: It is the first of many procedures to come for which all women will be eligible by virtue of being women.
Eugenics
Women are surgical candidates because we are considered inferior, an evaluation women share with other excluded groups. Nonwhite racial features are “deformities” too: one British clinic offers “a Western appearance to the eyes” to “the Oriental Eyelid,” which “lacks a well-defined supratarsal fold.” It admires “the Caucasian or ‘Western’ nose,” ridicules “Asian Noses,” “Afro-Caribbean Noses (‘a fat and rounded tip which needs correction’)”, and “Oriental Noses (‘the tip . . . too close to the face’)”. And “the Western nose that requires alteration invariably exhibits some of the characteristics of (nonwhite) noses . . . although the improvement needed is more subtle”. White women, together with black and Asian women, undergo surgery not as a consequence of selfish vanity, but in reasonable reaction to physical discrimination.
When we examine the language of the Age of Surgery, a familiar degradation process echoes. In 1938, German relatives of deformed infants requested their mercy killings. It was an atmosphere in which the Third Reich stressed, writes Robert Jay Lifton, “the duty to be healthy,” asked its people to “renounce the old individualist principle of ‘the right to one’s own body,’” and characterized the ill and weak as “useless eaters.”
Recall the reclassification process and how it moves, once violence begins, from narrow to wide: The Nazi doctors began by sterilizing people with chronic disabilities, then with minor defects, then “undesirables”; finally, healthy Jewish children were placed in the net because their Jewishness was disease enough. The definition of sick, expendable life soon became “loose, extensive, and increasingly known.” The “useless eaters” were simply put on a “fat-free diet” until they starved to death; they had “already been fed insufficiently and the idea of not nourishing them was in the air.” Remember the characterization of parts of women as already wounded, numb, deformed, or dead. “These people,” the Nazi doctors declared of “undesirables,” “are already dead.” A language that categorized the “unfit” as already less than alive eased the doctors’ conscience: They called them “human ballast,” “life unworthy of life,” “empty shells of human beings.” Remember the use of “health” to rationalize bloodshed; the doctors’ worldview was grounded in what Robert Jay Lifton calls “the healing/killing reversal.” They stressed the therapeutic function of killing deformed and weak children as a means to heal the body politic, “to ensure that the people realize the full potential of their racial and genetic endowment” and “to reverse racial decay.”
Remember the trivializing language of the surgeons; when the German doctors culled children by syringe, it was “not murder, this is a putting-to-sleep.” Remember the unqualified surgeons’ bureaucratic obfuscations; the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Diseases, Lifton writes, “conveyed the sense of a formidable medical-scientific registry board, though its leader . . . had his degree in agricultural economics. . . . these ‘observation’ institutions . . . provided an aura of medical check against mistakes, when in fact no real examination or observation was made.” Medical experimentation was justified on “creatures who, because less than human, can be studied, altered, manipulated, mutilated or killed—in the service . . . ultimately of remaking humankind.” Remember numbness; both victims and experimenters existed in a state of “extreme numbing,” for in “the Auschwitz atmosphere . . . any kind of experiment was considered possible.”
As Lifton writes: “The doctor . . . if not living in a moral situation . . . where limits are very clear . . . is very dangerous.”
Progressive dehumanization has a stark, well-documented pattern. To undergo cosmetic surgery, one must feel and society must agree that some parts of the body are not worthy of life, though they are still living. These ideas are seeping into the general atmosphere with a nasty stench of eugenics, for the cosmetic surgeon’s world is based on biological supremacy, something Western democracies are not supposed to admire.
The Iron Maiden Breaks Free
Women are in jeopardy from our current misunderstanding of the Iron Maiden. We still believe that there is some point where surgery is constrained by a natural limit, the outline of the “perfect” human female. That is no longer true. The “ideal” has never been about the bodies of women, and from now on technology can allow the “ideal” to do what it has always sought to do: leave the female body behind altogether to clone its mutations in space. The human female is no longer the point of reference.
The “ideal” has become at last fully inhuman. One model points out in Cosmopolitan that “the ideal today is a muscular body with big breasts. Nature doesn’t make women like that.” And, in fact, women no longer see versions of the Iron Maiden that represent the natural female body. “Today,” says Dr. Stephen Herman of Albert Einstein College of Medicine Hospital, “I think, almost every popular model has had some type of breast augmentation operation.” “Many models,” another women’s magazine concedes, “now regard a session with the plastic surgeon as part of their job requirement.” Fifty million Americans watch the Miss America pageant;
in 1989 five contestants, including Miss Florida, Miss Alaska, and Miss Oregon, were surgically reconstructed by a single Arkansas plastic surgeon. Women are comparing themselves and young men are comparing young women with a new breed that is hybrid nonwoman. Women’s natural attractions were never the aim of the beauty myth, and technology has finally cut the cord. She says, I feel bad about this; he cuts. She says, What about this here; he cuts.
The specter of the future is not that women will be slaves, but that we will be robots. First, we will be subservient to ever more refined technology for self-surveillance, such as the Futurex-5000, or Holtain’s Body Composition Analyzer, a portable fat-analysis machine with infrared light, and a hand-held computer that applies electrical currents through electrodes placed at wrists and ankles. Then, to more sophisticated alterations of images of the “ideal” in the media: “Virtual reality” and “photographic re-imaging” will make “pefection” increasingly surreal. Then, to technologies that replace the faulty, mortal female body, piece by piece, with “perfect” artifice. This is not science fiction: the replacement of women has begun with reproductive technology. In Great Britain and the United States, research is well under way to develop an artificial placenta, and, according to science writers, “we are now moving into an era when we will have the scientific and technical knowledge to deny women the opportunity to reproduce, or to reproduce only if they use the genetic materials of others.” That is, the technology exists for wealthy white couples to rent the uteri of poor women of any race to gestate their white babies. Since childbirth “ruins” the figure, the scenario of rich women hiring poor ones to do their ungainly reproductive labor is imminent. And cosmetic surgery has given us little reason to doubt that when the technology exists for it, poor women will be pressed to sell actual body material—breasts or skin or hair or fat—to service the reconstruction of rich women, as people today sell their organs and blood. If that seems grotesquely futuristic, cast yourself back just ten years and imagine being told that the invasive alteration on a mass scale of women’s breasts and hips would come to pass so soon.
Technology will continue radically to destabilize the social value of the female body. Products are being developed to predetermine sex, with success rates of 70–80 percent; when such products are available one can expect, based on gender preferences recorded worldwide, that the ratio of women to men will drop precipitously. In the near future, warns one group of scientists, “women could be bred for particular qualities, like passivity and beauty.” Adjustable breast implants are now a reality, allowing women to be adapted for each partner’s preferences. The Japanese have already perfected a lifelike geisha robot with artificial skin.
But the first signs of the mass production of the female body are still the exception; the mass production of the female mind is pervasive. Women are the drugged sex: Between 1957 and 1967, consumption of psychotropic drugs (sedatives, tranquilizers, antidepressants, appetite reducers) increased by 80 percent, and 75 percent of the drug users are female. By 1979, 160 million prescriptions were written for tranquilizers, over 60 million for Valium alone. Sixty to 80 percent of those prescriptions went to women, and Valium abuse is reported as the most common drug problem that hospital emergency services deal with. Today, in Great Britain and the United States, twice as many women as men take tranquilizers; a scandal in Canada is the overprescribing of tranquilizers to women. In all three countries, women are the main subjects of electroshock treatment, psychosurgery, and psychotropic drugs.
This recent history of woman as pharmaceutical subject sets the stage for “a new era of ‘pharmaceutical cosmetics,’” including Lilly Industries’ antidepressant drug Fluoxetine, awaiting approval by the FDA, which will be marketed as a weight-loss pill. The Guardian reports that another, the adrenalinelike ephedrine, speeds metabolic rate, and a third, DRL26830A, thins subjects down while inducing “transient tremors.” Though of course “there is concern within the pharmaceuticals industry that they could create serious ethical problems,” industry spokesmen are already prepared for “setting the stage for more ‘cosmetic’ rather than medical use.” Women take drugs, one drug agency quoted in the article reports, “in order to be seen as feminine. The ‘feminine’ woman . . . is slim, passive, deferential to men and ‘does not exhibit emotions such as anger, frustration or assertiveness.’” The new wave of cosmetically directed mood enhancers may solve the problem of women once and for all, as we dose ourselves into a state of perpetual cheerfulness, deference, passivity, and chronically sedated slimness.
Whatever the future threatens, we can be fairly sure of this: Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from category “woman” to category “ugly,” and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face. The free market will compete to cut up women’s bodies more cheaply, if more sloppily, with no-frills surgery in bargain basement clinics. In that atmosphere, it is a matter of time before they reposition the clitoris, sew up the vagina for a snugger fit, loosen the throat muscles, and sever the gag reflex. Los Angeles surgeons have developed and implanted transparent skin, through which the inner organs can be seen. It is, says one witness, “the ultimate voyeurism.”
The machine is at the door. Is she the future?
Beyond the Beauty Myth
CAN WE BRING about another future, in which it is she who is dead and we who are beautifully alive?
The beauty myth countered women’s new freedoms by transposing the social limits to women’s lives directly onto our faces and bodies. In response, we must now ask the questions about our place in our bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society.
What is a woman? Is she what is made of her? Do a woman’s life and experience have value? If so, should she be ashamed for them to show? What is so great about looking young?
The idea that a woman’s body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven’t taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately adapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body? Is there a difference between fashions in clothing and fashions in women’s bodies? Assuming that someday women can be altered cheaply, painlessly, and with no risk, is that to be what we must want? Must the expressiveness of maturity and old age become extinct? Will we lose nothing if it does?
Does a woman’s identity count? Must she be made to want to look like someone else? Is there something implicitly gross about the texture of female flesh? The inadequacy of female flesh stands in for the older inadequacy of the female mind. Women asserted that there was nothing inferior about their minds; are our bodies really inferior?
Is “beauty” really sex? Does a woman’s sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she’s a person, or must she earn that right through “beauty,” as she used to through marriage? What is female sexuality—what does it look like? Does it bear any relation to the way in which commercial images represent it? Is it something women need to buy like a product? What really draws men and women together?
Are women beautiful or aren’t we?
Of course we are. But we won’t really believe it the way we need to until we start to take the first steps beyond the beauty myth.
Does all this mean we can’t wear lipstick without feeling guilty?
On the contrary. It means we have to separate from the myth what it has surrounded and held hostage: female sexuality, bonding among women, visual enjoyment, sensual pleasure in fabrics and shapes and colors—female fun, clean and dirty. We can dissolve the myth and survive it with sex, love, attraction, and style not only intact, but flourishing more vibrantly than before. I am not attacking anything that makes women feel good;
only what makes us feel bad in the first place. We all like to be desirable and feel beautiful.
But for about 160 years, middle-class, educated Western women have been controlled by various ideals about female perfection; this old and successful tactic has worked by taking the best of female culture and attaching to it the most repressive demands of male-dominated societies. These forms of ransom were imposed on the female orgasm in the 1920s, on home and children and the family in the 1950s, on the culture of beauty in the 1980s. With this tactic, we waste time in every generation debating the symptoms more passionately than the disease.
We see this pattern of the self-interested promotion of ideals—eloquently pointed out in the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English—throughout our recent history. We must bring it up to date with the beauty myth, to get it once and for all. If we don’t, as soon as we take apart the beauty myth, a new ideology will arise in its place. The beauty myth is not, ultimately, about appearance or dieting or surgery or cosmetics—any more than the Feminine Mystique was about housework. No one who is responsible for the myths of femininity in every generation really cares about the symptoms at all.
The architects of the Feminine Mystique didn’t really believe that a floor in which you could see yourself indicated a cardinal virtue in women; in my own lifetime, when the idea of menstrual psychic irregularity was being clumsily resurrected as a last-ditch way to hold off the claims of the women’s movement, no one was really vested in the conviction of menstrual incapacity in itself. By the same token, the beauty myth could not care less how much women weigh; it doesn’t give a damn about the texture of women’s hair or the smoothness of our skin. We intuit that, if we were all to go home tomorrow and say we never meant it really—we’ll do without the jobs, the autonomy, the orgasms, the money—the beauty myth would slacken at once and grow more comfortable.