The Beauty Myth Read online

  The likelihood of backlash in some severe form was underestimated because the American mind-set celebrates winning and avoids noticing the corollary, that winners win only what losers lose. Economist Marilyn Waring concedes that “men won’t easily give up a system in which half the world’s population works for next to nothing” and recognizes that “precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.” Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women agrees: A real meritocracy means for men “more competition at work and more housework at home.” What the aspirational message ignores is the reaction of that half of the ruling elite who hold jobs that belong by right of merit to women and who, if women were to move freely up the ladder, would inevitably lose them.

  The awesome potential of this immigrant group must be thwarted, or the traditional power elite will be at a disadvantage: A white male child of the upper class is by definition someone who does not have to do two jobs or three at once, who does not feel the craving for education that comes with a heritage of illiteracy as old as written history, and who is not angry about being left out.

  With what can the power structure defend itself against this onslaught? First, it can try to reinforce the Second Shift. Sixty-eight percent of women with children under eighteen are in the American work force, up from 28 percent in 1960. In the United Kingdom, 51 percent of mothers of dependent children work for pay. Forty-five percent of working women in the United States are single, divorced, widowed, or separated and are the sole economic support of their children. The failures of American and even European state-funded child care act as an effective drag on the momentum of this immigrant group. But those women who can afford to have been hiring poorer women to do their domestic work and take over their child care. So, the tactic of obstruction from lack of child care became inadequate to hold back the class of women from whom the power structure had the most to fear. What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.

  Throughout the West, women’s employment was stimulated by the widespread erosion of the industrial base and the shift to information and service technologies. Declining postwar birthrates and the resulting shortage of skilled labor means that women are welcome to the labor pool: as expendable, nonunionized, low-paid pink-collar-ghetto drudges. Economist Marvin Harris described women as a “literate and docile” labor pool, and “therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.” The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool’s workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives. At a higher level, women middle managers are acceptable as long as they are male-identified and don’t force too hard up against the glass ceiling; and token women at the top, in whom the female tradition has been entirely extinguished, are useful. The beauty myth is the last, best training technique to create such a work force. It does all these things to women during work hours, and then adds a Third Shift to their leisure time.

  Superwoman, unaware of its full implications, had to add serious “beauty” labor to her professional agenda. Her new assignment grew ever more rigorous: the amounts of money, skill, and craft she must invest were to fall no lower than the amounts previously expected—before women breached the power structure—only from professional beauties in the display professions. Women took on all at once the roles of professional housewife, professional careerist, and professional beauty.

  The Professional Beauty Qualification

  Before women entered the work force in large numbers, there was a clearly defined class of those explicitly paid for their “beauty”: workers in the display professions—fashion mannequins, actresses, dancers, and higher-paid sex workers such as escorts. Until women’s emancipation, professional beauties were usually anonymous, low in status, unrespectable. The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

  What is happening today is that all the professions into which women are making strides are being rapidly reclassified—so far as the women in them are concerned—as display professions. “Beauty” is being categorized, in professions and trades further and further afield from the original display professions, as a version of what United States sex discrimination law calls a BFOQ (a bona fide occupational qualification) and Britain calls a GOQ (a genuine occupational qualification), such as femaleness for a wet nurse or maleness for a sperm donor.

  Sex equality statutes single out the BFOQ or GOQ as an exceptional instance in which sex discrimination in hiring is fair because the job itself demands a specific gender; as a conscious exception to the rule of equal opportunity law, it is extremely narrowly defined. What is happening now is that a parody of the BFOQ—what I’ll call more specifically the PBQ, or professional beauty qualification—is being extremely widely institutionalized as a condition for women’s hiring and promotion. By taking over in bad faith the good-faith language of the BFOQ, those who manipulate the professional beauty qualification can defend it as being nondiscriminatory with the disclaimer that it is a necessary requirement if the job is to be properly done. Since the ever-expanding PBQ has so far been applied overwhelmingly to women in the workplace and not to men, using it to hire and promote (and harass and fire) is in fact sex discrimination and should be seen as a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act in Great Britain. But three new vital lies in the ideology of “beauty” have grown during this period to camouflage the fact that the actual function of the PBQ in the workplace is to provide a risk-free, litigation-free way to discriminate against women.

  Those three vital lies are: (1) “Beauty” had to be defined as a legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power. (2) The discriminatory purpose of vital lie number one had to be masked (especially in the United States, with its responsiveness to the rhetoric of equal access) by fitting it firmly within the American dream: “Beauty” can be earned by any woman through hard work and enterprise. Those two vital lies worked in tandem to let the use of the PBQ by employers masquerade as a valid test of the woman’s merit and extension of her professional duties. (3) The working woman was told she had to think about “beauty” in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women’s movement. This last vital lie applied to individual women’s lives the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction. In the 1980s it was evident that as women became more important, beauty too became more important. The closer women come to power, the more physical self-consciousness and sacrifice are asked of them. “Beauty” becomes the condition for a woman to take the next step. You are now too rich. Therefore, you cannot be too thin.

  The fixation on “beauty” of the 1980s was a direct consequence of, and a one-to-one check and balance upon, the entry of women into powerful positions. The triumphs of “beauty” ideologies in the eighties came about as a result of real fear, on the part of the central institutions of our society, about what might happen if free women made free progress in free bodies through a system that calls itself a meritocracy. To return to the metaphor of the transformer, it is the fear that the force of an unmediated current of female energy on a female wavelength would break down the delicate imbalance of the system.

  The transformer’s middle link is the aspirational ideology of the women’s magazines. In providing a dream language of meritocracy (“get the body you deserve”; “a gorgeous figure doesn’t come without effort”), entrepreneurial spirit (“make the mos
t of your natural assets”), absolute personal liability for body size and aging (“you can totally reshape your body”; “your facial lines are now within your control”), and even open admissions (“at last you too can know the secret beautiful women have kept for years”), they keep women consuming their advertisers’ products in pursuit of the total personal transformation in status that the consumer society offers men in the form of money. On one hand, the aspirational promise of women’s magazines that they can do it all on their own is appealing to women who until recently were told they could do nothing on their own. On the other, as sociologist Ruth Sidel points out, the American Dream ultimately protects the status quo: “It discourages those at the bottom from developing a viable political and economic analysis of the American system [substitute: the beauty myth], instead promoting a blame-the-victim mentality . . . a belief that if only the individual worked harder, tried harder, he [she] would ‘make it.’” But the myth of entrepreneurial beauty, of woman against nature, hurts women in the same way as the original model hurts men—by leaving out the words “all else being equal.”

  The transfer is complete—and, coincidentally, harmful—when through this dream, women’s minds are persuaded to trim their desires and self-esteem neatly into the discriminatory requirements of the workplace, while putting the blame for the system’s failures on themselves alone.

  Women accepted the professional beauty qualification more quietly than other labor pools have reacted to unreasonable, ricocheting, unnegotiated employer demands. The PBQ taps reserves of guilt that have not had time to drain: For the more fortunate professional women, this can be guilt about wielding power, or about “selfish” pleasure in commitment to creative work; for the great majority who are the underpaid sole or joint supporters of children, it can be guilt about being unable to provide more, the wish to make every last effort for their families. The PBQ channels residual fears: For the middle-class woman recently valued for her willingness to conform to isolation in the home, life in the street and the office has uncharted anxieties, subjecting her as it does to public scrutiny that her mother and grandmother avoided at all costs. Working-class women have long known about brutal exploitation in the workplace that “beauty” might deflect. Women of all classes know that achievement is considered ugly and punished accordingly, and few women of any class have been used to controlling much money of their own.

  Accustomed to viewing beauty as wealth, women were open to accepting a direct financial reward system that replaced the indirect reward system of the marriage market. The equation of beauty with money was not examined closely, and the power placebo of beauty was redefined to promise women the sort of power that money, in fact, gives men. Using a logic similar to that with which housewives in the 1970s added up the market value of their housework, women saw that the “meritocratic” system was too imbalanced for an isolated woman to challenge it. One part of women’s psyche may have been anxious to be recognized for the work, the talent, and the money already required of them in assembling their image. And another part may have been aware that, given the dull, unglamorous nature of most women’s work, the PBQ injects a dose of creativity, pleasure, and pride into the job that is usually missing from the job itself.

  By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values. Throughout the decade, as money’s ability to buy time for comfort and leisure was abandoned in the stratospheric pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, the competition for “beauty” saw a parallel inflation: The material pleasures once presented as its goals—sex, love, intimacy, self-expression—were lost in a desperate struggle within a sealed economy, becoming distant and quaint memories.

  The Background of the PBQ

  Where did the PBQ begin? It evolved, like the beauty myth itself, alongside women’s emancipation, and radiates outward to accompany women’s professional enfranchisement. It spreads, with women’s professionalization, out of American and Western European cities into smaller towns; from the First World to the Third World; and West to East. With the Iron Curtain drawn back, we are due to see an acceleration of its effects in the Eastern bloc countries. Its epicenter is Manhattan, where many of the women who have risen highest in the professional hierarchies are concentrated.

  It started in the 1960s as large numbers of educated middle-class young women began to work in cities, living alone, between graduation and marriage. A commercial sexualized mystique of the airline stewardess, the model, and the executive secretary was promoted simultaneously. The young working woman was blocked into a stereotype that used beauty to undermine both the seriousness of the work that she was doing and the implications of her new independence. Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 best seller, Sex and the Single Girl, was a survival map for negotiating this independence. But its title became a catchphrase in which the first term canceled out the second. The working single girl had to be seen as “sexy” so that her work, and her singleness, would not look like what they really were: serious, dangerous, and seismic. If the working girl was sexy, her sexiness had to make her work look ridiculous, because soon the girls were going to become women.

  In June 1966 the National Organization for Women was founded in America, and that same year its members demonstrated against the firing of stewardesses at the age of thirty-two and upon marriage. In 1967 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission began to hold hearings on sex discrimination. New York women invaded the Plaza Hotel’s all-male Oak Room in February 1969. In 1970, Time and Newsweek were charged with sex discrimination, and twelve TWA stewardesses filed a multimillion-dollar action against the airline. Consciousness-raising groups began to form. Women who had been politicized as students entered the job market, determined to make women’s issues, rather than antiwar and free speech issues, their priority.

  Away from the ferment, but well informed by it, law was quietly being made. In 1971, a judge sentenced a woman on an unrelated charge to lose three pounds a week or go to prison. In 1972, “beauty” was ruled to be something that could legally gain or lose women their jobs: The New York State Human Rights Appeals Board determined, in St. Cross v. Playboy Club of New York, that in one highly visible profession, a woman’s “beauty” was a bona fide qualification for employment.

  Margarita St. Cross was a Playboy Club waitress fired “because she had lost her Bunny Image.” The club’s employment standards ranked waitresses on the following scale:

  A flawless beauty (face, figure, and grooming)

  An exceptionally beautiful girl

  Marginal (is aging or has developed a correctable appearance problem)

  Has lost Bunny Image (either through aging or an uncorrectable appearance problem)

  St. Cross’s male counterparts who did the same work in the same place were “not subjected to appraisals of any kind.”

  Margarita St. Cross asked the board to decide that she was still beautiful enough to keep her job, having reached, she said, a “physiological transition from that youthful fresh, pretty look to the womanly look, mature.” Hefner’s spokesmen told the board that she was not. The board reached its decision through taking Hefner’s word over St. Cross’s—by assuming that the employer is by definition more credible about a woman’s beauty than is the woman herself: that that evaluation was “well within the competence” of the Playboy Club to decide.

  They did not give weight to St. Cross’s expertise about what constitutes “Bunny Image.” In ordinary employment disputes, the employer tries to prove that the employee deserved to be fired, while the employee tries to prove that he or she deserves to keep the job. When “beauty” is the BFOQ, though, a woman can say she’s doing her job, her employer can say she isn’t, and, with this ruling, the employer automatically wins.

  The Appeals Board identified in its ru
ling a concept that it called “standards of near perfection.” In a court of law, to talk about something imaginary as if it is real makes it real. Since 1971, the law has recognized that a standard of perfection against which a woman’s body is to be judged may exist in the workplace, and that if she falls short of it, she may be fired. A “standard of perfection” for the male body has never been legally determined in the same way. While defined as materially existing, the female standard itself has never been defined. This case lay the foundations of the legal maze into which the PBQ would evolve: A woman can be fired for not looking right, but looking right remains open to interpretation.

  Gloria Steinem has said, “All women are Bunnies.” The St. Cross case was to resonate as an allegory of the future: Though “beauty” is arguably necessary for a Bunny to do a good job, that concept of female employment was adapted generally as the archetype for all women on the job. The truth of Steinem’s comment deepened throughout the next two decades, wherever women tried to get and hold on to paid work.

  In 1971 a prototype of Ms. magazine appeared. In 1972 the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was passed in the United States; Title IX outlawed sex discrimination in education. By 1972, 20 percent of management positions in America were held by women. In 1975, Catherine McDermott had to sue the Xerox Corporation because they withdrew a job offer on the grounds of her weight. The seventies saw women streaming into the professions in a way that could no longer be dismissed as intermittent or casual or secondary to their primary role as wives and mothers. In 1978 in the United States, one sixth of the master of business administration candidates and one fourth of graduating accountants were women. National Airlines fired stewardess Ingrid Fee because she was “too fat”—four pounds over the line. In 1977 Rosalynn Carter and two former first ladies spoke at the Houston convention of NOW. In 1979 the National Women’s Business Enterprise Policy was created to support women’s businesses; that very year a federal judge ruled that employers had the right to set appearance standards. By the new decade, United States government policy decreed that the working woman must be taken seriously, and the law decreed that her appearance must be taken seriously. The political function of the beauty myth is evident in the timing of these case laws. It was not until women crowded the public realm that laws proliferated about appearance in the workplace.