The Beauty Myth Read online

  Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women’s freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation—latent fears that we might be going too far. This frantic aggregation of imagery is a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change. The mass depiction of the modern woman as a “beauty” is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, “beauty” is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way “beauty” so directly contradicts women’s real situation.

  And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries—the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7-billion pornography industry—have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their influence on mass culture, to use, stimulate, and reinforce the hallucination in a rising economic spiral.

  This is not a conspiracy theory; it doesn’t have to be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions. Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counterimages.

  The resulting hallucination materializes, for women, as something all too real. No longer just an idea, it becomes three-dimensional, incorporating within itself how women live and how they do not live: It becomes the Iron Maiden. The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim, who died either of starvation or, less cruelly, of the metal spikes embedded in her interior. The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women’s faces and bodies.

  Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced “beautiful” images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel “worth less” was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a ‘higher calling’”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, “has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society. . . . Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue.” As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

  Another hallucination arose to accompany that of the Iron Maiden: The caricature of the Ugly Feminist was resurrected to dog the steps of the women’s movement. The caricature is unoriginal; it was coined to ridicule the feminists of the nineteenth century. Lucy Stone herself, whom supporters saw as “a prototype of womanly grace . . . fresh and fair as the morning,” was derided by detractors with “the usual report” about Victorian feminists: “a big masculine woman, wearing boots, smoking a cigar, swearing like a trooper.” As Betty Friedan put it presciently in 1960, even before the savage revamping of that old caricature: “The unpleasant image of feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image fostered by the interests who so bitterly opposed the vote for women in state after state.” Thirty years on, her conclusion is more true than ever: That resurrected caricature, which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self, became the paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women everywhere. After the success of the women’s movement’s second wave, the beauty myth was perfected to checkmate power at every level in individual women’s lives. The modern neuroses of life in the female body spread to woman after woman at epidemic rates. The myth is undermining—slowly, imperceptibly, without our being aware of the real forces of erosion—the ground women have gained through long, hard, honorable struggle.

  The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll’s house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.

  Work

  SINCE MEN HAVE used women’s “beauty” as a form of currency in circulation among men, ideas about “beauty” have evolved since the Industrial Revolution side by side with ideas about money, so that the two are virtual parallels in our consumer economy. A woman looks like a million dollars, she’s a first-class beauty, her face is her fortune. In the bourgeois marriage markets of the last century, women learned to understand their own beauty as part of this economy.

  By the time the women’s movement had made inroads into the labor market, both women and men were accustomed to having beauty evaluated as wealth. Both were prepared for the striking development that followed: As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women’s advancement.

  A transformer plugs into a machine at one end, and an energy source at the other, to change an unusable current into one compatible with the machine. The beauty myth was institutionalized in the past two decades as a transformer between women and public life. It links women’s energy into the machine of power while altering the machine as little as possible to accommodate them; at the same time, like the transformer, it weakens women’s energy at its point of origin. It does that to ensure that the machine actually scans women’s input in a code that suits the power structure.

  With the dec
ay of the Feminine Mystique, women swelled the work force. The percentage of women in the United States with jobs rose from 31.8 percent after World War II to 53.4 percent in 1984; of those aged twenty-five to fifty-four, two thirds hold jobs. In Sweden, 77 percent of women hold jobs, as do 55 percent of French women. By 1986, 63 percent of British women did paid work. As Western women entered the modern work force, the value system of the marriage market was taken over intact by the labor economy, to be used against their claims to access. The enthusiasm with which the job market assigned financial value to qualifications from the marriage market proves that the use of the beauty myth is political and not sexual: The job market refined the beauty myth as a way to legitimize employment discrimination against women.

  When women breached the power structure in the 1980s, the two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency; it literally became money. The informal currency system of the marriage market, formalized in the workplace, was enshrined in the law. Where women escaped from the sale of their sexuality in a marriage market to which they had been confined by economic dependence, their new bid for economic independence was met with a nearly identical barter system. And the higher women climbed during this period up the rungs of professional hierarchies, the harder the beauty myth has worked to undermine each step.

  There has never been such a potentially destabilizing immigrant group asking for a fair chance to compete for access to power. Consider what threatens the power structure in the stereotypes of other newcomers. Jews are feared for their educational tradition and (for those from Western Europe) haut bourgeois memories. Asians in the United States and Great Britain, Algerians in France, and Turks in Germany are feared for their Third World patterns of grueling work at low pay. And the African-American underclass in the United States is feared for the explosive fusion of minority consciousness and rage. In women’s easy familiarity with the dominant culture, in the bourgeois expectations of those who are middle class, in their Third World work habits, and in their potential to fuse the anger and loyalties of a galvanized underclass, the power structure correctly identifies a Frankenstein composite of its worst minority terrors. Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

  And the old-boy network faces in this immigrant group a monster on a scale far greater than those it made out of other ethnic minorities, because women are not a minority. At 52.4 percent of the population, women are the majority.

  This explains the fierce nature of the beauty backlash. This clarifies why its development has become totalitarian so fast. The pressure on the power elite can be understood by any minority ruler of an agitated majority that is beginning to appreciate its own considerable strength. In a meritocracy worth its name, the gathering gravity of events would soon and forever alter not only who the power holders are, but what power itself might look like and to what new goals it might be dedicated.

  Employers did not simply develop the beauty backlash because they wanted office decoration. It evolved out of fear. That fear, from the point of view of the power structure, is firmly grounded. The beauty backlash is indeed absolutely necessary for the power structure’s survival.

  Women work hard—twice as hard as men.

  All over the world, and for longer than records have been kept, that has been true. Historian Rosalind Miles points out that in prehistoric societies, “the labours of early women were exacting, incessant, varied and hard. If a catalogue of primitive labour were made, women would be found doing five things where men did one.” In modern tribal societies, she adds, “working unceasingly during the daylight hours, women regularly produce as much as eighty per cent of the tribe’s total food intake, on a daily basis . . . male members were and are doing only one-fifth of the work necessary for the group to survive, while the other four-fifths is carried out entirely by women.” In seventeenth-century England the Duchess of Newcastle wrote that women “labour like beasts.” Before the Industrial Revolution, “no work was too hard, no labour too strenuous, to exclude them.” During nineteenth-century exploitation of the factory system, “women were universally worked harder . . . and paid less” than men, “employers everywhere agreeing that women were ‘more easily induced to undergo severe bodily fatigue than men.’” Today the “primitive” five to one ratio of women’s work to men’s has declined to a “civilized” two to one. That ratio is fixed and international. According to the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs: “While women represent 50 percent of the world population, they perform nearly two-thirds of all working hours, receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than 1 percent of world property.” The “Report of the World Conference for the United Nations Decade for Women” agrees: When housework is accounted for, “women around the world end up working twice as many hours as men.”

  Women work harder than men whether they are Eastern or Western, housewives or jobholders. A Pakistani woman spends sixty-three hours a week on domestic work alone, while a Western housewife, despite her modern appliances, works just six hours less. “Housework’s modern status,” writes Ann Oakley, “is nonwork.” A recent study shows that if housework done by married women were paid, family income would rise by 60 percent. Housework totals forty billion hours of France’s labor power. Women’s volunteer work in the United States amounts to $18 billion a year. The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn’t do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.

  What about the New Woman, with her responsible full-time job? Economist Nancy Barrett says that “there is no evidence of sweeping changes in the division of labor within households coincident with women’s increasing labor force participation.” Or: Though a woman does full-time paid work, she still does all or nearly all the unpaid work that she used to. In the United States, partners of employed women give them less help than do partners of housewives: Husbands of full-time homemakers help out for an hour and fifteen minutes a day, while husbands of women with full-time jobs help less than half as long—thirty-six minutes. Ninety percent of wives and 85 percent of husbands in the United States say the woman does “all or most” of the household chores. Professional women in the United States fare little better: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that the women in two-career couples came home to do 75 percent of household work. Married American men do only 10 percent more domestic work than they did twenty years ago. The work week of American women is twenty-one hours longer than that of men; economist Heidi Hartmann demonstrates that “men actually demand eight hours more service per week than they contribute.” In Italy, 85 percent of mothers with children and full-time paid jobs are married to men who share no work in the home at all. The average European woman with a paid job has 33 percent less leisure than her husband. In Kenya, given unequal agricultural resources, women’s harvests equaled men’s; given equal resources, they produced bigger harvests more efficiently.

  Chase Manhattan Bank estimated that American women worked each week for 99.6 hours. In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none.

  Until the 1960s, the convention of referring to unpaid work at home as “not real work” helped to confound women’s knowledge of their hardworking labor tradition. Such a tactic was useless once women began to do work that men recognize as male—that is, as labor worthy of its hire.

  Over the past generation in the West, many of these hard workers also acquired an equal education. In the 1950s, only 20 percent of college undergraduates in the United States were women (of which only a third finished their degrees), compared with 54 percent today. By 1986, two fifths of full-time undergraduates in the United Kingdom were
women. What is a nominally meritocratic system faced with, as women knock at its doors?

  If interwoven in a resilient network spanning the generations, women’s hard work would disproportionately multiply female excellence. The backlash was provoked because even when they were weighted with the “second shift” of domestic work, women still battered inroads into the power structure; and it was provoked because if newly raised female self-esteem were to bring this long-deferred deficit payment for the “second shift” to come due at last, its costs to employers and to the government would be staggeringly high.

  In the United States between 1960 and 1990, the number of women lawyers and judges rose from 7,500 to 180,000; women doctors, from 15,672 to 108,200; women engineers, from 7,404 to 174,000. In the past fifteen years the number of women in local elected office tripled, to 18,000. Today in the United States, women fill 50 percent of entry-level management positions, 25 percent of middle management, comprise half the graduating accountants, one third of the M.B.A.s, half of graduating lawyers and a fourth of doctors, and half the officers and managers in the fifty largest commercial banks. Sixty percent of women officers in Fortune’s survey of top companies average $117,000 a year. Even with two shifts, at this rate, they would still challenge the status quo. Someone had to come up with a third shift fast.