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The Beauty Myth

How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

Naomi Wolf

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality. —Virginia Woolf

Product Details

Pub. Date: October 2002 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Format: Paperback, 368pp Sales Rank: 50,245

Series: Harper Perennial ISBN-13: 9780060512187 ISBN: 0060512180 Edition Description: Reprint

Synopsis

The bestselling classic that redefined our view od the relationship between beauty and female identity.

In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

Annotation

In this controversial national bestseller, feminist scholar Naomi Wolf argues that there is one hurdle in the struggle for equality that women have yet to clear--the myth of female beauty. She exposes today's unrealistic standards of female beauty as a destructive form of social control and a reaction against women's increasing status in business and politics.

Publishers Weekly

This valuable study, full of infuriating statistics and examples, documents societal pressure on women to conform to a standard form of beauty. Freelance journalist Wolf cites predominant images that negatively influence women--the wrinkle-free, unnaturally skinny fashion model in advertisements and the curvaceous female in pornography--and questions why women risk their health and endure pain through extreme dieting or plastic surgery to mirror these ideals. She points out that the quest for beauty is not unlike religious or cult behavior: every nuance in appearance is scrutinized by the godlike, watchful eyes of peers, temptation takes the form of food and salvation can be found in diet and beauty aids. Women are ``trained to see themselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs'' and must learn to recognize and combat these internalized images. Wolf's thoroughly researched and convincing theories encourage rejection of unrealistic goals in favor of a positive self-image. (May)

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Contents

iiiEpigraph

1Introduction

9The Beauty Myth

20Work

58Culture

86Religion

131Sex

179Hunger

218Violence

270Beyond the Beauty Myth

292Acknowledgments

293Notes

329Bibliography

337Index

About the Author

Praise

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

When The Beauty Myth was first published, more than ten years ago, I had the chance to hear what must have been thousands of stories. In letters and in person, women confided in me the agonizingly personal struggles they had undergone—some, for as long as they could remem- ber—to claim a self out of what they had instantly recognized as the beauty myth. There was no common thread that united these women in terms of their appearance: women both young and old told me about the fear of aging; slim women and heavy ones spoke of the suffering caused by trying to meet the demands of the thin ideal; black, brown, and white women—women who looked like fashion models—admitted to knowing, from the time they could first consciously think, that the ideal was someone tall, thin, white, and blond, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly “perfect,” and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not.

I was grateful to have had the good luck to write a book that connec- ted my own experience to that of women everywhere—indeed, to the experiences of women in seventeen countries around the world. I was even more grateful for the ways that my readers were using the book. “This book helped me get over my eating disorder,” I was often told. “I read magazines differently now.” “I’ve stopped hating my crow’s feet.” For many women, the book was a tool for empowerment. Like sleuths and critics, they were deconstructing their own personal beauty myths.

1

While the book was embraced in a variety of ways by readers of many different backgrounds, it also sparked a very heated debate in the public forum. Female TV commentators bristled at my argument that women in television were compensated in relation to their looks and at my claim of a double standard that did not evaluate their male peers on appearance as directly. Right-wing radio hosts commented that, if I had a problem with being expected to live up to ideals of how women should look, there must be something personally wrong with me. Inter- viewers suggested that my concern about anorexia was simply a mis- placed privileged-white-girl psychodrama. And on daytime TV, on show after show, the questions directed to me often became almost hostile—very possibly influenced by the ads that followed them, pur- chased by the multibillion-dollar dieting industry, making unfounded claims that are now illegal. Frequently, commentators, either deliberately or inadvertently, though always incorrectly, held that I claimed women were wrong to shave their legs or wear lipstick. This is a misunderstand- ing indeed, for what I support in this book is a woman’s right to choose what she wants to look like and what she wants to be, rather than obeying what market forces and a multibillion-dollar advertisersing industry dictate.

Overall, though, audiences (more publicly than privately) seemed to feel that questioning beauty ideals was not only unfeminine but almost un-American. For a reader in the twenty-first century this may be hard to believe, but way back in 1991, it was considered quite heretical to challenge or call into question the ideal of beauty that was, at that time, very rigid. We were just coming out of what I have called “The Evil Eighties,” a time when intense conservatism had become allied with strong antifeminism in our culture, making arguments about feminine ideals seem ill-mannered, even freakish. Reagan had just had his long run of power, the Equal Rights Amendment had run out of steam, wo- men’s activists were in retreat, women were being told they couldn’t “have it all.” As Susan Faludi so aptly showed in her book Backlash, which was published at about the same time as The Beauty Myth, News- week was telling women that they had a greater chance of being killed by terrorists than of marrying in mid-career. Feminism had become “the f-word.” Women who complained about the beauty myth were assumed to have a personal shortcoming themselves: they must be fat, ugly, incapable of satisfying a man, “feminazis,” or—horrors—lesbians. The ideal of the time—a gaunt, yet full-breasted Caucasian, not often found in nature—was

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assumed by the mass media, and often by magazine readers and movie watchers as well, to be eternal, transcendent. It seemed important bey- ond question to try somehow to live up to that ideal.

When I talked to audiences about the epidemic of eating disorders, for instance, or about the dangers of silicone breast implants, I was often given a response straight out of Plato’s Symposium, the famous dialogue about eternal and unchanging ideals: something like, “Women have always suffered for beauty.” In short, it was not commonly understood at that time that ideals didn’t simply descend from heaven, that they actually came from somewhere and that they served a purpose. That purpose, as I would then explain, was often a financial one, namely to increase the profits of those advertisers whose ad dollars actually drove the media that, in turn, created the ideals. The ideal, I argued, also served a political end. The stronger women were becoming politically, the heavier the ideals of beauty would bear down upon them, mostly in order to distract their energy and undermine their progress.

Some ten years later, what has changed? Where is the beauty myth today? It has mutated a bit and, thus, it bears looking at with fresh eyes.

Well, most satisfyingly, today you would be hard-pressed to find a twelve-year-old girl who is not all too familiar with the idea that “ideals” are too tough on girls, that they are unnatural, and that following them too slavishly is neither healthy nor cool. American Girl magazine, aimed at nine-year-olds, discusses the benefits of loving your body and how misguided it is to try to look like Britney Spears in order to be happy. Junior high schools bring in eating-disorder lecturers and post collages of destructive beauty ideals in their hallways. I would say that when what started as an outsider’s argument becomes the conventional wis- dom of a Girl Scout troop, it is a sign of an evolution in conciousness. The time was right; girls and women were ready to say no to something they found oppressive. This is progress.

In spite of this newly developed media literacy, however, I’ve also noticed that it is now an increasingly sexualized ideal that younger and younger girls are beginning to feel they must live up to. The notorious Calvin Klein ad campaigns eroticized sixteen-year-olds when I was a teenager, then eroticized fourteen-year-old models in the early nineties, then twelve-year-olds in the late nineties. GUESS Jeans ads now pose what look like nine-year-olds

Introduction / 3

in provocative settings. And the latest fashions for seven- and eight- year-olds re-create the outfits of pop stars who dress like sex workers. Is this progress? I doubt it.

Any number of high school and college projects I have seen—ranging from a CD about “looking perfect” to a senior thesis about the African American beauty myth as it relates to hair—have analyzed media images of women and have taken apart ideals. Even pop culture has responded to women’s concerns: take the TLC music video for the song “Unpretty,” for example, which shows a woman tempted to have breast surgery simply to please the demands of a boyfriend but who then decides against it. Yet while The Beauty Myth has definitely empowered many girls and women easily to critique mass culture’s ideals, there are many ways in which that one step forward has been tempered by various steps back.

When this book was first written, in 1991, silicone breast implants were routinely inserted into women’s bodies, and pornography was influencing popular culture in such a way that women were newly anxious about the size and shape of their breasts. If it seems odd that an anxiety, such as one about breast shape, for example, can arise and flourish among millions of women at once, think about how powerful sexual imagery is. Because of the new influence of pornography on fashion, millions of women were suddenly seeing “the perfect breast” everywhere and, consequently, started to worry about their own, nat- urally “imperfect” breasts. The phenomenon persisted until the focus of the beauty myth moved on to the next anxiety. Many women respon- ded to this new breast ideal by scheduling breast implant surgery, while advertisers for the surgery became a new ad market for women’s magazines, which, as a result, ran one uncritical “puff piece” after an- other on breast operations. When The Beauty Myth raised the alarm about silicone’s—and the surgery’s—side effects, there was very little general awareness of its dangers.

Now, more than a decade later, silicone’s dangers have been all too thoroughly documented. Breast implant manufacturers were faced with substantial legal action, and thousands of articles exposing the dangers of silicone implants have been published since the mid-nineties. By the year 2000, silicone breast implants had been taken off the general market. Again, not coincidentally, these days one rarely reads about breast-size anxiety. Why? Because increased scrutiny of the procedure has led to legal action, which closed down the expanding market for breast im- plants. There is no longer an ad budget driving

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magazine articles about breast-size anxiety, articles that once fed that anxiety and created even more demand for the product.

That is the glass half-full. Now, the glass half-empty. The influence of pornography on women’s

sexual sense of self—which was just beginning to take hold at the time this book was first written—has now become so complete that it is al- most impossible for younger women to distinguish the role pornography plays in creating their idea of how to be, look, and move in sex from their own innate sense of sexual identity. Is this progress? I do not think so.

When this book first came out, general public opinion considered anorexia and bulimia to be anomalous marginal behavior, and the cause was not assumed to be society’s responsibility—insofar as it created ideals and exerted pressure to conform to them—but rather personal crises, perfectionism, poor parenting, and other forms of individual psychological maladjustment. In reality, however, these diseases were widely suffered by many ordinary young women from unremarkable backgrounds, women and girls who were simply trying to maintain an unnatural “ideal” body shape and weight. I knew from looking around me in high school and at college that eating disorders were widespread among otherwise perfectly well balanced young women, and that the simple, basic social pressure to be thin was a major factor in the devel- opment of these diseases. The National Eating Disorders Association confirms National Institutes of Health statistics in pointing out that 1 to 2 percent of American women are anorexic—between 1.5 and 3 mil- lion women—and that, of these, sufferers typically became anorexic in adolescence. NIH also notes that the death rate for anorexia, .56 percent per decade, is about 12 times higher than the annual death rate due to all causes of death among females ages 15 to 24. Anorexia is the biggest killer of American teenage girls. I knew, from personal experience and from looking at women all around me, that eating disorders were a vi- cious cycle: Starving or vomiting became addictive behaviors once you started. I knew that the social expectation to be so thin as to be unlikely to menstruate was a sick ideal, and that you often had to become sick to conform to it. Disordered eating, which was undertaken to fit a dis- ordered ideal, was one of the causes of the disease, and not necessarily, as popular opinion of the day held, a manifestation of an underlying neurosis.

Now, of course, education about the dangers of obsessive diet-

Introduction / 5

ing or exercise is widespread, and information about eating disorders, their addictive nature, and how to treat them is available in every bookstore, as well as in middle schools, doctors’ offices, gyms, high schools, and sororities. This, now, is progress.

Yet, on the down side, those very disorders are now so wide- spread—and, in fact, almost destigmatized by such intense publi- city—that they have become virtually normal. Not only do whole sor- orities take for granted that bulimia is mainstream behavior, but models now openly talk to Glamour magazine about their starvation regimes. A newspaper feature about a group of thin, ambitious young women talking about weight, quotes one of them as saying, “Now what’s wrong with throwing up?” And “pro-an” Web sites have appeared on the In- ternet, indicating a subculture of girls who are “pro-anorexia,” who find the anorexic look appealing and validate it. This is definitely not progress.

When the beauty myth was analyzed in the early nineties, the ideal was, as I have noted, quite rigid. Older women’s faces were almost never portrayed in magazines, and if they were, they had to be air- brushed to look younger. Women of color were seldom shown as role models unless they had, like Beverly Johnson, virtually Caucasian fea- tures. Now, there is much more pluralism in the myth; it is now, one can almost say, many beauty myths. A seventeen-year-old African American model, with African features and dark skin, is reported in the New York Times as being the face of the moment. In the same vein, Benetton ads feature models in a rainbow of skin hues and with a myriad of racial and ethnic features. A fiftyish Cybill Shepherd is a cover girl, and the adored plus-size model Emme hosts E’s Fashion Emergency. Women of color feel freer to wear traditional ethnic hairstyles and clothing in professional settings, and the straightening comb is not the obligatory burden it was in the early nineties. Even Barbie has been redesigned with a more realistic body type and now comes in many colors. Looking around, there is a bit more room today to be oneself.

There is also more consumer protection against the worst assertions of the beauty industry than there was in the days when this book first appeared. Today, anti-aging creams, for example, can no longer make absurd claims for their products, as they did a decade ago. Ten years ago, cosmetics companies regularly declared that their youth creams “erased” signs of age, “restructured” skin on a “cellular” level, and “renewed” tissue “from within”—all of which are physically impossible, since their ingredients were not able to penetrate the epi-

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dermis. This misrepresentation went so far that the Food and Drug Administration finally took action. Ten years ago, too, as a result of the cosmetic companies’ ad pressure, women’s magazines rarely featured the faces of women older than twenty-five, and you seldom saw the least hint of a wrinkle. On another front, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on the diet-program hype of the nineties. They alerted diet programs that they must not misleadingly promise permanent weight loss results without sufficient studies to back up those results. Consumer advocacy even took a weight-loss pill called Fen-Phen off the market for causing heart-related fatalities.

Consumer and FDA action saved women money, but it also sparked a new, more stress-free era for women worried about their age. Now, since ad pressure is driven less by anti-aging creams than by the new spending power of older women, the fastest-growing segment of affluent consumers in the nation, women’s magazines, TV shows, and even Hollywood filmmakers have discovered that there is a plethora, not a dearth, of fabulously charismatic women over forty to glamorize. Be- cause of the aging of our role models, women of any age seem somewhat less paralyzed about the dreaded approach of their fortieth or even fiftieth birthdays, and it is no coincidence that women today by no means equate aging with the immediate erasure of their identities as vibrant, sensual women, worthy of love and high style. The influence and prevalence of “plus-size” models in the fashion and cosmetic in- dustry is growing rapidly. Women of color are some of the most admired of fashion icons.

So has beauty-myth pluralism taken the day? Not by a long shot. The beauty myth, like many ideologies of femininity, mutates to meet new circumstances and checkmates women’s attempts to increase their power. Kate Betts confessed, in the New York Times Style section, to having removed accomplished actress Renée Zellweger from the cover of Vogue because she was “too fat” after having gained some weight—that is, having become the size of the average woman—for her role in Bridget Jones’s Diary; newspapers speculated that model Elizabeth Hurley was fired as Estée Lauder’s spokeswoman because, at thirty-six, she was “too old”; and the average fashion model now is even thinner than were the Amazons of the eighties and nineties.

Nor does the beauty-myth mutation stop with women, although with men, it is driven less by cultural backlash and more by simple market opportunity. As I predicted it would, a male beauty myth

Introduction / 7

has established itself in the last decade, moving from inside the gay male subculture to the newsstands of the nation, and hitting suburban dads with a brand-new anxiety about their previously comfortable midsections. Today, Minoxidil has joined the toothpaste in the suburban guy’s bathroom cabinet. Parallel to the increase in women’s economic and social power, the power gap between the sexes has continued to close, dislodging men from their ages-old position as arbiters, rather than providers, of sexual attractiveness and beauty. Inevitably, a vast market for Viagra opened up. Male fashion, health, and grooming magazines have taken off. Male cosmetic-surgery use has hit record highs. Men are now a third of the market for surgical procedures, and 10 percent of college students suffering from eating disorders are men. Men of all ages, economic backgrounds, and sexual orientations are more worried—some a bit, others more substantially—than they were just ten years ago. Is it progress when both genders can be commodified and evaluated as objects? Only of the most double-edged kind.

If one can draw one firm conclusion, it is that ten years later, women have a bit more breathing space to do what I urged them to do at the end of The Beauty Myth—to make the beauty myth their own. Today, many women have a sense of a measure of freedom to dress up or down, put on lipstick or take it off, flaunt themselves or wear sweats—even—even, sometimes to gain or lose weight—without fearing that their value as a woman or their seriousness as a person is at stake. Not too long ago, we did not make these choices without a bit more trepidation. Incredible to think of now, a decade ago too many of us were asking ourselves, “Will I be taken seriously at work if I look ‘too feminine’?” “Will I be listened to at all if I look ‘too plain’?” “Am I ‘bad’ if I gain weight? ‘Good’ only if I lose every ounce?” If women no longer think this way—or, if they at least know that there is something terribly wrong if they are forced to think this way—it is testimony to the power of an idea in the minds of a lot of women at once; proof of their ability to create lasting change and even a bit more freedom.

You have the power to take that freedom further still. I hope that you use this book in a whole new way—one that no one but you has thought of yet.

Naomi Wolf New York City, April 2002

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The Beauty Myth

At last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. In the two decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role. A gener- ation on, do women feel free?

The affluent, educated, liberated women of the First World, who can enjoy freedoms unavailable to any women ever before, do not feel as free as they want to. And they can no longer restrict to the subconscious their sense that this lack of freedom has something to do with—with apparently frivolous issues, things that really should not matter. Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns—to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair, clothes—matter so much. But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.

9

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us. Many women sense that women’s collective progress has stalled; compared with the heady momentum of earlier days, there is a dispiriting climate of confusion, division, cynicism, and above all, exhaustion. After years of much struggle and little recognition, many older women feel burned out; after years of taking its light for granted, many younger women show little interest in touching new fire to the torch.

During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. Recent research consistently shows that inside the ma- jority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.

It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women re- leased themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control.

The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrolla-

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ble: It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.

This counterforce is operating to checkmate the inheritance of femin- ism on every level in the lives of Western women. Feminism gave us laws against job discrimination based on gender; immediately case law evolved in Britain and the United States that institutionalized job dis- crimination based on women’s appearances. Patriarchal religion de- clined; new religious dogma, using some of the mind-altering techniques of older cults and sects, arose around age and weight to functionally supplant traditional ritual. Feminists, inspired by Friedan, broke the stranglehold on the women’s popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women’s intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood. The sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality; “beauty pornography”—which for the first time in women’s history artificially links a commodified “beauty” directly and explicitly to sexuality—invaded the mainstream to undermine women’s new and vulnerable sense of sexual self-worth. Reproductive rights gave Western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23 percent below that of ordinary women, eating dis- orders rose exponentially, and a mass neurosis was promoted that used food and weight to strip women of that sense of control. Women insisted on politicizing health; new technologies of invasive, potentially deadly “cosmetic” surgeries developed apace to re-exert old forms of medical control of women.

Every generation since about 1830 has had to fight its version of the beauty myth. “It is very little to me,” said the suffragist Lucy Stone in 1855, “to have the right to vote, to own property, etcetera, if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” Eighty years later, after women had won the vote, and the first wave of the organized women’s movement had subsided, Virginia Woolf wrote that it would still be decades before women