The Beauty Myth

by Naomi Wolf

  But it is also in men’s interest to undo the myth because the survival of the planet depends on it. The earth can no longer afford a consumer ideology based on the insatiable wastefulness of sexual and material discontent. We need to begin to get lasting satisfaction out of the things we consume. We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.

  The environmental crisis demands a new way of thinking that is communitarian, collective and not adversarial, and we need it fast. We can pray and hope that male institutions evolve this sophisticated, unfamiliar way of thinking within a few short years; or we can turn to the female tradition, which has perfected it over five millennia, and adapt it to the public sphere. Since the beauty myth blots out the female tradition, we keep a crucial option for the planet open when we resist it.

  And we keep options open for ourselves. We do not need to change our bodies, we need to change the rules. Beyond the myth, women will still be blamed for our appearances by whomever needs to blame us. So let’s stop blaming ourselves and stop running and stop apologizing, and let’s start to please ourselves once and for all. The “beautiful” woman does not win under the myth; neither does anyone else. The woman who is subjected to the continual adulation of strangers does not win, nor does the woman who denies herself attention. The woman who wears a uniform does not win, nor does the woman with a designer outfit for every day of the year. You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all. The woman wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.

  A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission—to eat; to be sexual; to age; to wear overalls, a paste tiara, a Balenciaga gown, a second-hand opera cloak, or combat boots; to cover up or to go practically naked; to do whatever we choose in following—or ignoring—our own aesthetic. A woman wins when she feels that what each woman does with her own body—unforced, uncoerced—is her own business. When many individual women exempt themselves from the economy, it will begin to dissolve. Institutions, some men, and some women, will continue to try to use women’s appearance against us. But we won’t bite.

  Can there be a prowoman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What has been missing is play. The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends upon it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter. Once you play for stakes of any amount, the game becomes a war game, or compulsive gambling. In the myth, it has been a game for life, for questionable love, for desperate and dishonest sexuality, and without the choice not to play by alien rules. No choice, no free will; no levity, no real game.

  But we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden; a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is. Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive? Admiration can include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.

  How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipation, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.

  How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.

  A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.

  A generation ago, Germaine Greer wondered about women: “What will you do?” What women did brought about a quarter century of cataclysmic social revolution. The next phase of our movement forward as individual women, as women together, and as tenants of our bodies and this planet, depends now on what we decide to see when we look in the mirror.

  What will we see?

  Notes

  The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  The Beauty Myth

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  10 Cosmetic surgery: Standard and Poor’s Industry Surveys (New York: Standard and Poor’s Corp., 1988).

  10 Pornography main media category: See “Crackdown on Pornography: A No-Win Battle,” U.S. News and World Report, June 4, 1984. The Association of Fashion and Image Consultants tripled its membership between 1984 and 1989 alone (Annetta Miller and Dody Tsiantar, Newsweek, May 22, 1989). During the five or six years prior to 1986, consumer spending rose from $300 billion to $600 billion.

  10 Thirty-three thousand American women, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, 1984: Wooley, S. C., and O. W. Wooley, “Obesity and Women: A Closer Look at the Facts,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly, vol. 2 (1979), pp. 69–79. Data reprinted in “33,000 Women Tell How They Really Feel About Their Bodies,” Glamour, February 1984.

  10 Recent research shows: See Dr. Thomas Cash, Diane Cash, and Jonathan Butters, “Mirror-Mirror on the Wall: Contrast Effects and Self-Evaluation of Physical Attractiveness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, September 1983, vol. 9, no. 3. Dr. Cash’s research shows very little connection between “how attractive women are” and “how attractive they feel themselves to be.” All the women he treated were, in his terms, “extremely attractive,” but his patients compare themselves only to models, not to other women.

  11 Very little to me: Lucy Stone, 1855, quoted in Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Putnam, 1981), p. 11.

  12 A doll: Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1970), pp. 55, 60.

  12 Myth: See also Roland Barthes’s definition: “It [myth] transforms history into nature. . . . Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 129.

  Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s definition of “a myth of origin” is relevant to the beauty myth: A myth of origin, writes Ann Oakley, “tends to be worked hardest in times of social strain, when the state of affairs portrayed in the myth are called into question.” Ann Oakley, Housewife: High Value/Low Cost (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 163.

  12 Platonic: See Plato’s discussion of Beauty in Symposium. For varying standards of beauty, see
Ted Polhemus, BodyStyles (Luton, England: Lennard Publishing, 1988).

  12 Sexual selection; Darwin . . . was unconvinced: See Cynthia Eagle Russett, “Hairy Men and Beautiful Women,” Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 78–103.

  On page 84 Russett quotes Darwin: “Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a much more abject state of bondage, than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection. . . . As women have long been selected for beauty, it is not surprising that some of their successive variations should have been transmitted exclusively to the same sex; consequently that they should have transmitted beauty in a somewhat higher degree to their female than to their male offspring, and thus have become more beautiful, according to general opinion, than men.” Darwin himself noticed the evolutionary inconsistency of this idea that, as Russett puts it, “a funny thing happened on the way up the ladder: among humans, the female no longer chose but was chosen.” This theory “implied an awkward break in evolutionary continuity,” she observes: “In Darwin’s own terms it marked a rather startling reversal in the trend of evolution.”

  See also Natalie Angier, “Hard-to-Please Females May Be Neglected Evolutionary Force,” The New York Times, May 8, 1990, and Natalie Angier, “Mating for Life? It’s Not for the Birds or the Bees,” The New York Times, August 21, 1990.

  13 Evolution: See Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1986); and Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (New York: Bantam Books, 1979). See especially “the upper primate,” p. 91.

  13 Goddess: Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1988), p. 43. See also Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1976).

  13 Wodaabe tribe: Leslie Woodhead, “Desert Dandies,” The Guardian, July 1988.

  In the West African Fulani tribe young women choose their husbands on the basis of their beauty: “The contestants . . . take part in the yaake, a line-up in which they sing and dance, stand on tip-toe and make faces, rolling and crossing their eyes and grimacing to show off their teeth to the judges. They keep this up for hours, aided by the consumption of stimulating drugs beforehand. Throughout all this, old ladies in the crowd hurl criticisms at those who do not live up to the Fulani idea of beauty.” [Polhemus, op. cit., p. 21]

  See also Carol Beckwith and Marion van Offelen, Nomads of Niger (London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1984), cited in Carol Beckwith, “Niger’s Wodaabe: People of the Taboo,” National Geographic, vol. 164, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 483–509.

  Paleolithic excavations suggest that it has been human males rather than females to whom adornment was assigned in prehistoric societies; in modern tribal communities men generally adorn at least as much as women, and often hold “a virtual monopoly” over adornment. The Sudanese Nuba, the Australian Waligigi, and the Mount Hagen men of New Guinea also spend hours painting themselves and perfecting their hairstyles to attract the women, whose toilette takes only minutes. See Polhemus, op. cit., pp. 54–55.

  14 Technologies: See, for example, Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1986), p. 31. Photograph Academie, c. 1845, photographer unknown.

  17 Powerful industries: Diet items are a $74-billion-a-year industry in the United States, totaling one-third the nation’s annual food bill. See David Brand, “A Nation of Healthy Worrywarts?,” Time, July 25, 1988.

  17 $33-billion-a-year diet industry: Molly O’Neill, “Congress Looking into the Diet Business,” The New York Times, March 28, 1990.

  17 $300-million-a-year cosmetic surgery industry: Standard and Poor’s Industry Surveys, op. cit. 1988.

  17 $7 billion pornography industry, “Crackdown on Pornography,” op. cit.

  17 Vital lies: Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), pp. 16–17, quoting Henrik Ibsen’s phrase: “The vital lie continues unrevealed, sheltered by the family’s silence, alibis, stark denial.”

  18 A higher calling: John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted in Michael H. Minton with Jean Libman Block, What Is a Wife Worth? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), pp. 134–135.

  18 Ugly Feminist: Marcia Cohen, The Sisterhood: The Inside Story of the Women’s Movement and the Leaders Who Made It Happen (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), pp. 205, 206, 287, 290, 322, 332.

  18 Swearing like a trooper: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 79, quoting Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone (New York: Harcourt, 1961), p. 83.

  19 Unpleasant image: Friedan, op. cit., p. 87.

  Work

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  21 U.S. women in work force: Ruth Sidel, Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America, (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 60.

  21 British women in paid work: U.K. Equal Opportunities Commission, Towards Equality: A Casebook of Decisions on Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay, 1976–1981, pamphlet. See also: U.K. Equal Opportunities Commission, Sex Discrimination and Employment: Equality at Work: A Guide to the Employment Provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, pamphlet, p. 12.

  22 Prehistory: Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1988), p. 152.

  22 Modern tribal societies: Ibid., p. 22.

  23 Duchess of Newcastle: The entire quote is: “Women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts and die like worms,” ibid., p. 192.

  23 No work too hard: Ibid., p. 155, quoting Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

  23 Fatigue: Ibid., p. 188.

  23 Humphrey Institute: Humphrey Institute, University of Minnesota, Looking to the Future: Equal Partnership Between Women and Men in the 21st Century, quoted in Debbie Taylor et al., Women: A World Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 82.

  23 Twice as many hours as men: Report of the World Conference for the United Nations Decade for Women, Copenhagen, 1980, A/Conf. 94/35.

  23 Pakistani women: Taylor et al., op. cit., p. 3.

  23 Nonwork: Ann Oakley, Housewife: High Value/Low Cost (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 53.

  23 Rise by 60 percent: Sidel, op. cit., p. 26.

  23 France’s labor power: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (New York: Warner Books, 1987).

  23 Volunteer work: Yvonne Roberts, “Standing Up to Be Counted,” The Guardian (London) 1989 interview with Marilyn Waring, author of If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). See also Waring, p. 69.

  23 Gross national product: Taylor et al., op. cit., p. 4.

  23 Nancy Barrett: “Obstacles to Economic Parity for Women,” The American Economic Review, vol. 72 (May 1982), pp. 160–165.

  24 Thirty-six minutes more: Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989).

  24 Household chores: Michael H. Minton with Jean Libman Block, What Is a Wife Worth? (New York: McGraw-Hill), p. 19.

  24 75 percent of household work: Hochschild and Machung, op. cit., p. 4. See also Sarah E. Rix, ed., The American Woman, 1988–89: A Status Report, Chapter 3: Rebecca M. Blank, “Women’s Paid Work, Household Income and Household Well-Being,” pp. 123–161 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988).

  24 U.S. married men: Claudia Wallis, “Onward Women!,” Time International, December 4, 1989.

  24 Demand eight hours more: Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 6 (1981), pp. 366–394.

  24 Italy: Hewlett, op. cit.

  24 Less leisure: Taylor et al., op. cit., p. 4.


  24 Kenya: Ibid.

  24 Chase Manhattan Bank: Minton and Block, op. cit., pp. 59–60.

  24 U.S. college undergraduates: Wallis, op. cit.

  24 Undergraduates in the United Kingdom: U.K. Equal Opportunities Commission, The Fact About Women Is . . ., pamphlet, 1986.

  25 American women in work force: Sidel, op. cit., p. 60.

  25 Marilyn Waring: Quoted in Roberts, op. cit.

  25 Patricia Ireland: Quoted in Wallis, op. cit.

  26 Women with children in the American work force: Ibid.

  26 United Kingdom mothers: U.K. Equal Opportunities Commission, op. cit.

  26 Sole economic support: Sidel, op. cit.

  26 Marvin Harris: quoted in Minton and Block, op. cit.

  28 Title VII: See Rosemarie Tong, Women, Sex and the Law (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1984), pp. 65–89.

  28 1975 Sex Discrimination Act/Great Britain: See U.K. Equal Opportunities Commission, Sex Discrimination and Employment, especially pp. 12–13: “Sex discrimination where sex is a ‘genuine occupational qualification’ for the job, or for part of the job, because of: (a) Physical form or authenticity—for example, a model or an actor.” See also Sex Discrimination: A Guide to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, U.K. Home Office pamphlet (2775) Dd8829821 G3371, p. 10.

  The Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 in Australia does not cover discrimination on the basis of appearance; as of 1990, the federal attorney general will extend the jurisdiction of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act to cover discrimination on the ground of “age, medical record, criminal record, impairment, marital status, mental, intellectual or psychiatric disability, nationality, physical disability, sexual preference and trade union activity,” but discrimination on the basis of appearance will not be addressed. See also Australia, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, The Sex Discrimination Act 1984: A Guide to the Law, pamphlet, August 1989.