by Lisa Jervis
The new housework workout passes itself off as an ideal health plan for the busy modern woman, but it’s another permutation of this resurgence in nostalgia for more traditional gender roles. It’s a new and compelling justification to make the daily drudgery bearable: It’s good for us. It will ward off a fat butt, flabby arms, and deadly disease. And it’s man’s best friend, too, allowing him to keep his housework hours minimal while women mop and scrub their way to tight abs and unmutated uterine cells.
But is the road to health really paved with dust rags? While some chores surely do burn calories and tone muscles, that’s not the whole story. A 2002 study conducted by Nanette Mutrie, professor of exercise and sport psychology at the University of Strathclyde, looked at the effects of various forms of exercise—including housework—on depression in both women and men. As she told Scotland’s Sunday Herald: “With vigorous exercise, the effect is clear: The more you do, the better it is for well-being. With housework, it is the opposite. The more you do, the more depression you report.”
I made a mental note to share this information with Kathy next time I saw her. Maybe then she’d think twice about spreading the gospel of aerobic vacuuming. Then again, it might be hard to convince her that housework isn’t healthy, since the depression study had barely registered in the media. I couldn’t find it reported in a single American newspaper: While stories about housework’s cancer-fighting qualities zipped around the globe, almost no one seemed interested in the inconvenient news that the unpaid, tedious, and necessary drudgery performed largely by the world’s women might be making them depressed.
And it’s not so hard to guess why. If we were to acknowledge that housework, rather than constituting an all-purpose female health tonic, might actually be harmful to women, we might find ourselves faced with an uncomfortably strong case for major social change: Men might be asked to take on a larger portion of the housework and child care. Companies might come under increased pressure to offer their employees—both male and female—more flexible, family-friendly schedules. Martha might even see sales go down for her Tuscan table linens and make-your-own-wrapping-paper kits.
The housework workout, on the other hand, asks nothing of men, employers, the government, or corporate America—its message is for women alone. It knows you’re tired, overworked, and overscheduled, and let’s face it, the men in your life aren’t likely to help out anytime soon. It’s a tool to balance all the competing demands on your time without inconveniencing anyone else. Its time-tested advice? Adapt. Multitask. Try harder. And remember what your mother (or popular culture) taught you: Keep up your body and your home, or risk everything.
6
Beauty Myths and Body Projects
SINCE 2002, WHEN VOGUE BEGAN AN ANNUAL TRADITION OF producing its “Shape” issue, I’ve looked forward with perverse pleasure to its appearance on the newsstand. Vogue, for eleven months out of the year content to ignore the existence of any bodies besides those of the razorboned lovelies in its editorial pages, deigns to branch out in this special issue, celebrating—if I may quote from the cover of the April 2005 issue—“Every Body: Tall, Short, Thin, Curvy, or Pregnant.”
Insert derisive snorting sounds here. A more accurate description would read: “Tall (and skinny); Short (and skinny); Thin (clinically anorexic); Curvy (breasts or booty, but probably not both); or Pregnant (horrifying yet temporary fat suit).” Vogue long ago perfected the process of erasing overweight folks from existence—even the all-powerful Oprah was tasked with losing twenty pounds before being allowed onto the cover in 1908—but their bizarre taxonomy of body types willfully insists not only that certain body types simply don’t exist, but that you get to have only one to begin with. There’s no mention, God forbid, of short and curvy ladies, nor any of the other odd proportions most of us possess.
It’s pretty tempting to see this yearly conceit as parodic, as if the staff of The Onion had infiltrated Condé Nast for a month just to see if we were paying attention. Certainly nobody turns to Vogue for a realistic look at, as queenpin Anna Wintour put it in the 2005 Shape issue’s editor’s letter, “the beautiful variety of our female forms.” But each year, it seems like the rest of pop culture is falling more and more in line with Vogue’s suspended reality, pushing inconvenient bodies out of the picture as it elevates one standard of beauty (with a few mild variations) above all.
Every facet of our popular culture reflects images of women, from preening starlet to big-screen action heroine to reality-show ugly duckling to yummy mummy, that regular gals are meant to emulate. A picture of Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, or Angelina Jolie in a magazine is no longer enough; the magazine is sure to tell us where Halle’s stylist buys her clothes, where Jennifer goes for her electric-current facials, and how to duplicate Angelina’s tantric-sex glow with makeup. Puzzling through these varied representations of idealized women is, for many, a lifelong obsession that begins when they first become aware of the power of image.
Girls learn from a young age that whatever soothing, self-esteembuilding stuff their parents say about how it’s what’s inside that counts, their primary cultural value rests squarely on the physical. In the introduction to her 2004 play The Good Body, Eve Ensler writes of traveling the world and meeting with women everywhere who, no matter who they were or what they did, hated some part of themselves. “There was almost always one part that they longed to change, that they had a medicine cabinet full of products devoted to transforming or hiding or reducing or straightening or lightening. Just about every woman believed that if she could just get that part right, everything else would work out.”
This is the crux of the body project, this belief that changing our bodies can make everything better, lighter, less problematic. It’s been happening for as long as any woman can recall—check out Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s book The Body Project for ample historical evidence—and it’s been expressed in the most heartbreaking literature (Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye), the trashiest television (The Swan), and the many outlets in between. These days, with such a cornucopia of problem-solving technology available to those who are inclined and can afford to nip, tuck, whiten, tan, straighten, melt, and mold themselves to perceived perfection, it’s become increasingly hard to find cultural validation for just, you know, liking ourselves as we are. Witness the scene from an early season of Sex and the City, where our heroines sit in a circle, bemoaning their “problem” areas: “I hate my thighs,” sighs Charlotte; “I’ll take your thighs and raise you a chin,” snarks Miranda. When it’s Samantha’s turn, she admits the shocking truth: “I love the way I look.” And though we’re supposed to grudgingly admire Samantha’s ease with her physical self, we’re also supposed to acknowledge that she’s blatantly broken the code of ladies’ body talk: There is always, always a fault.
In 2004, Dove spearheaded its much-ballyhooed Campaign for Real Beauty with a study called “The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report,” which was coauthored by Susie Orbach and Nancy Etcoff, professors and authors of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and Survival of the Prettiest, respectively. The study queried thousands of women in ten countries on their definition of beauty and on the impact its cultural imperatives have on their lives. Eighty-five percent of the women polled felt that every woman has at least one beautiful attribute, but only 2 percent described themselves as beautiful. There could hardly be a starker demonstration of our internalized struggles over bodies and beauty.
But thankfully, the subject is more than a locus of dissatisfaction and competition. For many girls and women, it’s often the catalyst for a burgeoning feminist consciousness. When we’re young, it takes hold as we listen to our mothers complain about their own graying hair or wobbly arm fat, or suffer teasing from classmates when we change for gym. Later on, it resurfaces when we look at magazines and find a whitewashed parade of size-o stick figures who look nothing like us; when we see a fat or hairy woman who, contrary to everything we’ve been taught, is indisputably gorgeous; when we unde
rstand that the consumer-beauty machine gleefully fosters a climate of intense, looks-based competition between all women, all our lives. “Hips, lips, tits, power!” was a riot grrrl war cry that came up from the underground in the early ’90s, and those who heeded it understood: The real—and really scary—revolution comes when women refuse to buy into the notion of our chronic imperfection and flaunt instead the confrontational bombast of our physical selves. All women know, deep down, that our crooked noses, big ol’ badonkadonks, and nonwhitened teeth have little impact on the larger world; what’s important is that we cease to be so thoroughly, literally sold on our potential to uphold a standard of improbable physical purity.
The culture has transformed—“mutated” might be a better word—since Bitch first ran stories, in the late ’90s, about the growing normalization of cosmetic surgery that was starting to make new lips and calves seem like just your everyday consumer acquisitions. Our outrage then seems almost quaint now, in a time when head-to-toe surgical overhauls pass for heartwarming family entertainment on shows like Extreme Makeover. In another ten years, we’ll probably look back on the current insanity and mumble about how we didn’t know the half of it. The beauty myth that Naomi Wolf once described as a “violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement” has changed only in its intensification and the increasing violence that surgery calls for. Even those of us who have long been aware of it still fall prey to its pervasive call—my lipstick collection alone can testify. But many women have themselves changed, becoming more media literate and quicker to see the marketing of cosmetics and weight loss as consumer shills engineered to take our stores of energy and turn them inward toward those “problem” areas.
The tricky thing about feminism, though, is that its rhetoric is these days so easily twisted to uphold the very things we wanted to change in the first place. To wit: Feminism is all about personal choices, and if breast implants or colored contact lenses are a choice, they must be feminist, right? Right? It’s sometimes a chore to peel away the many layers of personal choice, cultural conditioning, ethnic imperative, and outside opinion that inform our spectrum of body projects. But such a task is eminently worthwhile, and as more women and girls learn to separate what they want from what they’re told they need, we’ll all get what’s best for us.—A.Z.
Plastic Passion
Tori Spelling’s Breasts and Other Results of Cosmetic Darwinism
Andi Zeisler / FALL 1998
IT SEEMS LIKE PEOPLE HAVE STARTED TALKING ABOUT HAVING cosmetic surgery the way they used to talk about having children—as an abstract inevitable, something that will occur at some unspecified time in the future. As a society, we’ve grown inured to the concept of cosmetic surgery and blase about its presence in our daily lives. It’s played for laughs in culture both high (a New Yorker cartoon) and low (your average sitcom). It’s standard fodder for daytime talk shows, free weeklies and ads on public transportation hawk it aggressively, and the entertainment glossies make sure we know exactly what Demi Moore’s breasts are up to. Its terms have invaded the vernacular—we’re no more surprised to see a magazine with the cover line “Your Kitchen Needs a Face-Lift!” than we are to hear that Cher had another rib removed.
And we’re not just hearing about other people’s operations; where cosmetic surgery was once mainly the province of wealthy socialites, aging movie stars, and strippers, it’s now an equal-opportunity proposition, complete with TV commercials and low-cost financing plans hawked on the Internet. The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons reports that, over the past five years, the rate of breast-augmentation surgeries has more than tripled, liposuctions have doubled, and liposuctions performed on men have tripled. Cosmetic surgeries in general have increased by more than half since 1992. In our society, it’s no longer nature that determines who’ll be the fittest—it’s the surgeons, and the people with the money to pay their astronomical bills.
There’s plenty that’s disturbing about this kind of cosmetic Darwinism. There’s the classism and racism inherent in the body-reshaping industry, for one, and the eugenic implications of a world full of people with bodies and faces that reflect a fashion-model ideal. Surgery and the fashion/beauty industries have informed each other from the start, and this union, along with long-standing Hollywood associations, has plenty to do with why lots of us deride cosmetic surgery as vain, shallow, and devoid of personal meaning, especially when compared to its hipper body-modification counterparts of tattooing and piercing. When a grown woman undergoes twenty-plus operations to transform herself into a giant Barbie doll (as frequent talk-show guest Cindy Jackson did) or compares cosmetic surgery to tuning up the car (as Loni Anderson has), is it any wonder?
The evolution of cosmetic surgery into pop culture touchstone ensures that there’s now less stigma attached, but it also means that we’re seeing a lot more media coverage of it that pushes a downright whimsical agenda. A recent issue of Vogue features “Calf Masters,” a piece that asks, “Are you ready for spring’s capri pants and pleated schoolgirl skirts? Are your legs?” and then swings right into a perky evaluation of surgical options (including calf implants and inner-knee liposuction) for optimum capri-pant effect. Not that this kind of thing is unprecedented; most women’s magazines start running their get-ready-for-summer exercise features around March, but those generally stop short of suggesting going under the knife in order to make the most of one’s bikini. The ease with which Vogue proposes a spendy operation for the sake of a fleeting trend points to the classism implicit in cosmetic Darwinism, but also embodies a shift in the M.O. of the cosmetic surgery shill. Glossy magazines, despite their overstock of waferthin models, have generally shouldered the responsibility of urging their readers to think carefully and at length about what a big, expensive, and possibly dangerous undertaking surgery is. An article like “Calf Masters,” by contrast, downplays the dangers of the gee-whiz fashion-forward thrill.
On the other hand, certain corners of culture seem ambivalent about participating in such lipo-for-everyone boosterism. This became apparent on a recent episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, which addressed, within one hour, a whole host of issues with an eye toward dramatically presenting the Media Enslavement of Women. Pornography, sex toys, cutting, dieting, sizeism, and cosmetic surgery were trotted out one after another in neat five-minute segments. Cosmetic surgery’s moment in the 90210 spotlight went a little something like this:
KELLY’S MOM: I’m going to have a face-lift next week, and I won’t be able to chew for a while. I’ll be drinking lots of smoothies.
KELLY: You’re kidding me!
KELLY’S MOM: Honey, this is Beverly Hills. We never joke about plastic surgery.
KELLY: Mom, you look great! What are you thinking?
KELLY’S MOM: Forty percent off for people in their forties got me started … and the thought of losing the bags under my eyes sealed the deal.
On its own, the skimpy exchange might have just been filler, but situated within the rest of the topic-heavy hour, it became a firmly antisurgery message (and a marvel of hypocrisy for a television show that sometimes seems to exist solely to display Tori Spelling’s baseball-in-a-sock breast implants). The show’s hastily assembled cosmetic surgery = oppression moral posturing indicates that someone within its chain of command is concerned that perhaps all these years of televised focus on bodily perfection might somehow poison the minds of impressionable viewers, and it’s high time to start backpedaling.
The magazine Living Fit, meanwhile, published the results of a survey in which male and female baby boomers were questioned about their attitudes on cosmetic surgery. The piece, titled “The Unkindest Cut,” aimed to counter the media buzz on a “cosmetic surgery boom” with an emphatic statement that people are really much happier with themselves than we’d all like to think. The main evidence of this, however, isn’t that fewer people are choosing surgery, but that more people are
having what Living Fit refers to as “lunch-hour surgery: non- or minimally invasive wrinkle-fighting procedures like laser skin resurfacing; Retin-A; chemical peels; and Botox, collagen, and fat injections.” The intent seems to be to draw a line in the sand between what is and isn’t cosmetic surgery, and the piece congratulates itself heartily for doing so, with a neat conclusion that the alleged boom is “really more of a boomlet.”
But the distinction between boom and boomlet isn’t the crucial point, is it? It’s as though Living Fit thinks the fact that some folks are choosing to temporarily paralyze their faces with botulism toxin rather than go full-on with the face-lift is somehow indicative of a propaganda-free, antisurgery attitude. But the only thing it’s indicative of is that vanity is still a huge issue when it comes to how people conceptualize/rationalize their body modification. Increasingly sophisticated technology has made cosmetic surgery less taxing and less embarrassing for the people who choose it, but in the process it’s fueling the development of a bizarre moral hierarchy of cosmetic procedures.
Feminism these days is about defining our own terms, being able to adapt former definitions and shift them around to suit us. This is why we not only no longer have to shun lipstick but can actually turn the act of wearing it into a feminist statement (although, to the casual observer, the righteousness of this statement might go unnoticed and we might simply appear to be women in lipstick). And cheery testimony of how the face-lift or the breast implants were “for me”—and, by extension, for feminist self-realization—permeates many a first-person chronicle of surgery.
Elizabeth Haiken, author of Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery, argues that, when it comes to current attitudes about surgery, the practice of dismissing the cultural context and rationalizing it as individual betterment “flattens the terrain of power relations.” In other words, we can talk about doing it for us until our high-end lipstick flakes off, but we should also keep in mind that we probably wouldn’t even be thinking about what life would be like with a new nose or perkier breasts or shapelier inner thighs if it weren’t for a long-standing cultural ideal that rewards those who adhere to it with power that often doesn’t speak its name, but is instantly recognizable to those who don’t have it.