The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  I don’t pretend to have the agenda; I know only that some of the problems have changed. I’ve become convinced that there are thousands of young women ready and eager to join forces with a peer-driven feminist third wave that would take on, along with the classic feminist agenda, the new problems that have arisen with the shift in Zeitgeist and the beauty backlash. The movement would need to deal with the ambiguities of assimilation. Young women express feelings of being scared and isolated “insiders” as opposed to angry and united outsiders, and this distinction makes backlash sense: The best way to stop a revolution is to give people something to lose. It would need to politicize eating disorders, young women’s uniquley intense relationship to images, and the effect of those images on their sexuality—ir would need to make the point that you don’t have much of a right over your own body if you can’t eat. It would need to analyze the antifeminist propaganda young women have inherited, and give them tools, including arguments like this one, with which to see through it. While transmitting the previous heritage of feminism intact, it would need to be, as all feminist waves are, peer-driven: No matter how wise a mother’s advice is, we listen to our peers. It would have to make joy, rowdiness, and wanton celebration as much a part of its project as hard work and bitter struggle, and it can begin all this by rejecting the pernicious fib that is crippling young women—the fib called postfeminism, the pious hope that the battles have all been won. This scary word is making young women, who face many of the same old problems, once again blame themselves—since it’s all been fixed, right? It strips them of the weapon of theory and makes them feel alone once again. We never speak complacently of the post-Democratic era: Democracy, we know, is a living, vulnerable thing that every generation must renew. The same goes for that aspect of democracy represented by feminism. So let’s get on with it.

  Women learned to crave “beauty” in its contemporary form because we were learning at the same time that the feminist struggle was going to be much harder than we had realized. The ideology of “beauty” was a shortcut promise to agitating women—a historical placebo—that we could be confident, valued, heard out, respected, and make demands without fear. (In fact, it is doubtful whether “beauty” is the real desire at all; women may want “beauty” so that we can get back inside their bodies, and crave perfection so that we can forget about the whole damn thing. Most women, in their guts, would probably rather be, given the choice, a sexual, courageous self than a beautiful generic Other.)

  Beauty advertising copy promises that sort of courage and freedom—“Beachwear for the beautiful and brave”; “A fresh, fearless look,” “A funky fearlessness”; “Think radical”; “The Freedom Fighters—for the woman who isn’t afraid to speak up or stand out.” But this courage and confidence will not be real until we are backed by the material gains that we can achieve only by seeing other women as allies rather than as competitors.

  The 1980s tried to buy us off with promises of individual solutions. We have reached the limit of what the individualist, beauty-myth version of female progress can do, and it is not good enough: We will be 2 percent of top management and 5 percent of full professors and 5 percent of senior partners forever if we do not get together for the next great push forward. Higher cheekbones and firmer bustlines clearly won’t get us what we need for real confidence and visibility; only a renewed commitment to the basics of female political progress—to child-care programs, effective antidiscrimination laws, parental leave, reproductive choice, fair compensation, and genuine penalties against sexual violence—will do so. We won’t have these until we can identify our interests in other women’s, and allow our natural solidarity to overcome the organizational obstacles put forward by the competitiveness and rivalry artificially provoked among us by the beauty backlash.

  The terrible truth is that though the marketplace promotes the myth, it would be powerless if women didn’t enforce it against one another. For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women, in the way we see and behave toward other women.

  Generational Collaboration

  The links between generations of women need mending if we are to save one another from the beauty myth, and save women’s progress from its past historical fate—the periodic reinvention of the wheel. Gill Hudson, editor of Company, reveals the extent to which the beauty backlash has propagandized the young: Young women, she says, “absolutely don’t want to be known as feminists” because “feminism is not considered sexy.” It would be stupid and sad if the women of the near future had to fight the same old battles all over again from the beginning just because of young women’s isolation from older women. It would be pathetic if young women had to go back to the beginning because we were taken in by an unoriginal twenty-year campaign to portray the women’s movement as “not sexy,” a campaign aimed to help young women forget whose battles made sex sexy in the first place.

  Since young women will not be encouraged by our institutions to make the connections, we can get past the myth only by actively exploring more useful role models than the glossies give us. We are sorely in need of intergenerational contact: We need to see the faces of the women who made our freedom possible; they need to hear our thanks. Young women are dangerously “unmothered”—unprotected, unguided—institutionally and need role models and mentors. The work and experience of older women gain scope and influence when imparted to students, apprentices, protégés. Yet, both generations will have to resist their externally ingrained impulses against intergenerational collaboration. We are well trained, if young, to shy away from identification with older women; if older, at being a little hard on young women, viewing them with impatience and disdain. The beauty myth is designed artifically to pit the generations of women against one another; our consciously strengthening those links gives back the wholeness of our lifespans that the beauty myth would keep us from discovering.

  Divide and Conquer

  The fact is, women are not actually dangerous to one another. Outside the myth, other women look a lot like natural allies. In order for women to learn to fear one another, we had to be convinced that our sisters possess some kind of mysterious, potent secret weapon to be used against us—the imaginary weapon being “beauty.”

  The core of the myth—and the reason it was so useful as a counter to feminism—is its divisiveness. You can see and hear it everywhere: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” (L’Oréal). “I really hate my aerobics instructor—I guess hatred is good motivation.” “You’d hate her. She has everything.” “Women who get out of bed looking beautiful really annoy me.” “Don’t you hate women who can eat like that?” “No pores—makes you sick.” “Tall, blonde—couldn’t you just kill her?” Rivalry, resentment, and hostility provoked by the beauty myth run deep. Sisters commonly remember the grief of one being designated “the pretty one.” Mothers often have difficulty with their daughters’ blooming. Jealousy among the best of friends is a cruel fact of female love. Even women who are lovers describe beauty competition. It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman’s body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will. At present, “beauty” is an economy in which women find the “value” of their faces and bodies impinging, in spite of themselves, on that of other women’s. This constant comparison, in which one woman’s worth fluctuates through the presence of another, divides and conquers. It forces women to be acutely critical of the “choices” other women make about how they look. But that economy that pits women against one another is not inevitable.

  To get past this divisiveness, women will have to break a lot of taboos against talking about it, including the one that prohibits women from narrating the dark side of being treated as a beautiful object. From the dozens of women to whom I
have listened, it is clear that the amount of pain a given woman experiences through the beauty myth bears no relationship at all to what she looks like relative to a cultural ideal. (In the words of a top fashion model, “When I was on the cover of the Italian Vogue, everyone told me how great I looked. I just thought, ‘I can’t believe you can’t see all those lines.’”) Women who impersonate the Iron Maiden may be no less victimized by the myth than the women subjected to their images. The myth asks women to be at once blindly hostile to and blindly envious of “beauty” in other women. Both the hostility and the envy serve the myth and hurt all women.

  While the “beautiful” woman is briefly at the apex of the system, this is, of course, far from the divine state of grace that the myth propagates. The pleasure to be had from turning oneself into a living art object, the roaring in the ears and the fine jetspray of regard on the surface of the skin, is some kind of power, when power is in short supply. But it is not much compared to the pleasure of getting back forever inside the body; the pleasure of discovering sexual pride, a delight in a common female sexuality that overwhelms the divisions of “beauty”; the pleasure of shedding self-consciousness and narcissism and guilt like a chainmail gown; the pleasure of the freedom to forget all about it.

  Only then will women be able to talk about what “beauty” really involves: the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on a carousel, hostility and scepticism from other women, adolescence extended longer than it ought to be, cruel aging, and a long hard struggle for identity. And we will learn that what is good about “beauty”—the promise of confidence, sexuality, and the self-regard of a healthy individuality—are actually qualities that have nothing to do with “beauty” specifically, but are deserved by and, as the myth is dismantled, available to all women. The best that “beauty” offers belongs to us all by right of femaleness. When we separate “beauty” from sexuality, when we celebrate the individuality of our features and characteristics, women will have access to a pleasure in our bodies that unites us rather than divides us. The beauty myth will be history.

  But as long as women censor in one another the truths about our experiences, “beauty” will remain mystified and still most useful to those who wish to control women. The unacceptable reality is that we live under a caste system. It is not innate and permanent; it is not based on sex or God or the Rock of Ages. It can and must be changed. The situation is closing in on us, and there is no long term left to which to postpone the conversation.

  When the conversation commences, the artificial barriers of the myth will begin to fall away. We will hear that just because a woman looks “beautiful” doesn’t mean she feels it, and she can feel beautiful without looking it at first glance. Thin women may feel fat; young women will grow old. When one woman looks at another, she cannot possibly know the self-image within that woman: Though she appears enviably in control, she may be starving; though she overflows her clothing, she may be enviably satisfied sexually. A woman may be fleshy from high self-esteem or from low; she may cover her face in makeup out of the desire to play around outrageously or the desire to hide. All women have experienced the world treating them better or worse according to where they rate each day: while this experience wreaks havoc with a woman’s identity, it does mean that women have access to a far greater range of experience than the snapshots “beauty” takes of us would lead us to believe. We may well discover that the way we now read appearances tells us little, and that we experience, no matter what we look like, the same spectrum of feelings: sometimes lovely, often unlovely, always female, in a commonality that extends across the infinite grids that the beauty myth tries to draw among us.

  Women blame men for looking but not listening. But we do it too; perhaps even more so. We have to stop reading each others’ appearances as if appearance were language, political allegiance, worthiness, or aggression. The chances are excellent that what a woman means to say to other women is far more complex and sympathetic than the garbled message that her appearance permits her.

  Let us start with a reinterpretation of “beauty” that is noncompetitive, nonhierarchical, and nonviolent. Why must one woman’s pleasure and pride have to mean another woman’s pain? Men are only in sexual competition when they are competing sexually, but the myth puts women in “sexual” competition in every situation. Competition for a specific sexual partner is rare; since it is not usually a competition “for men,” it is not biologically inevitable.

  Women compete this way “for other women” partly because we are devotees of the same sect, and partly to fill, if only temporarily, the black hole that the myth created in the first place. Hostile competition can often be proof of what our current sexual arrangements repress: our mutual physical attraction. If women redefine sexuality to affirm our attraction among ourselves, the myth will no longer hurt. Other women’s beauty will not be a threat or an insult, but a pleasure and a tribute. Women will be able to costume and adorn ourselves without fear of hurting and betraying other women, or of being accused of false loyalties. We can then dress up in celebration of the shared pleasure of the female body, doing it “for other women” in a positive rather than a negative offering of the self.

  And when we let ourselves experience this physical attraction, the marketplace will no longer be able to make a profit out of its representation of men’s desires: We, knowing firsthand that attraction to other women comes in many forms, will no longer believe that the qualities that make us desirable are a lucrative mystery.

  By changing our prejudgments of one another, we have the means for the beginning of a noncompetitive experience of beauty. The “other woman” is represented through the myth as an unknown danger. “Meet the Other Woman,” reads a Wella hair-coloring brochure, referring to the “after” version of the woman targeted. The idea is that “beauty” makes another woman—even one’s own idealized image—into a being so alien that you need a formal introduction. It is a phrase that suggests threats, mistresses, glamorous destroyers of relationships.

  We undo the myth by approaching the unknown Other Woman. Since women’s everyday experiences of flirtatious attention derive most often from men reacting to our “beauty,” it is no wonder that silent, watching women can be represented to us as antagonists.

  We can melt this suspicion and distance: Why should we not be gallant and chivalrous and flirtatious with one another. Let us charm one another with some of that sparkling attention too often held in reserve only for men: compliment one another, show our admiration. We can engage with the Other Woman—catch her eye, give her a lift when she is hitchhiking, open the door when she is struggling. When we approach one another in the street and give, or receive, that wary, defensive shoes-to-haircut glance, what if we meet one another’s eyes woman to woman; what if we smile.

  This movement toward a noncompetitive idea of beauty is already underway. The myth has always denied women honor. Here and there, women are evolving codes of honor to protect us from it. We withold easy criticism. We shower authentic praise. We bow out of social situations in which our beauty is being used to put other women in the shadows. We refuse to jostle for random male attention. A contestant in the 1989 Miss California Pageant pulls a banner from her swimsuit that reads PAGEANTS HURT ALL WOMEN. A film actress tells me that when she did a nude scene, she refused, as a gesture to women in the audience, to discipline her body first. We are already beginning to find ways in which we won’t be rivals and we won’t be instruments.

  This new perspective changes not how we look but how we see. We begin to see other women’s faces and bodies for themselves, the Iron Maiden no longer superimposed. We catch our breath when we see a woman laughing. We cheer inside when we see a woman walk proud. We smile in the mirror, watch the lines form at the corners of our eyes, and, pleased with what we are making, smile again.

  Though women can give this new perspective to one another, men’s participation i
n overturning the myth is welcome. Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance. Both sexes seem to be finding that the full force of the myth derives little from private sexual relations, and much from the cultural and economic megalith “out there” in the public realm. Increasingly, both sexes know they are being cheated.

  But helping women to take the myth apart is in men’s own interest on an even deeper level: Their turn is next. Advertisers have recently figured out that undermining sexual self-confidence works whatever the targeted gender. According to The Guardian, “Men are now looking at mirrors instead of at girls. . . . Beautiful men can now be seen selling everything.” Using images from male homosexual subculture, advertising has begun to portray the male body in a beauty myth of its own. As this imagery focuses more closely on male sexuality, it will undermine the sexual self-esteem of men in general. Since men are more conditioned to be separate from their bodies, and to compete to inhuman excess, the male version could conceivably hurt men even more than the female version hurts women.

  Psychiatrists are anticipating a rise in male rates of eating diseases. Now that men are being cast as a frontier market to be opened up by self-hatred, images have begun to tell heterosexual men the same half-truths about what women want and how they see that they have traditionally told heterosexual women about men; if they buy it and become trapped themselves, that will be no victory for women. No one will win.