lilislilit: переводы

→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.

→For the first time new technologies could reproduce—in fashion
plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures—images of how
women should look. In the 1840s the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful” women
first appeared in mid-century. Copies of classical artworks, postcards
of society beauties and royal mistresses, Currier and Ives prints, and
porcelain figurines flooded the separate sphere to which middle-class
women were confined.

→Though there has, of course, been a beauty myth in some form for as
long as there has been patriarchy, the beauty myth in its modern form
is a fairly recent invention. The myth flourishes when material constraints on women are dangerously loosened. Before the Industrial Re-
volution, the average woman could not have had the same feelings
about “beauty” that modern women do who experience the myth as
continual comparison to a mass-disseminated physical ideal. Before
the development of technologies of mass production—daguerrotypes,
photographs, etc.—an ordinary woman was exposed to few such images
outside the Church. Since the family was a productive unit and women’s
work complemented men’s, the value of women who were not aristocrats or prostitutes lay in their work skills, economic shrewdness,
physical strength, and fertility. Physical attraction, obviously, played
its part; but “beauty” as we understand it was not, for ordinary women,
a serious issue in the marriage marketplace. The beauty myth in its
modern form gained ground after the upheavals of industrialization,
as the work unit of the family was destroyed, and urbanization and the
emerging factory system demanded what social engineers of the time
termed the “separate sphere” of domesticity, which supported the new
labor category of the “breadwinner” who left home for the workplace
during the day. The middle class expanded, the standards of living and
of literacy rose, the size of families shrank; a new class of literate, idle
women developed, on whose submission to enforced domesticity the
evolving system of industrial capitalism depended. Most of our assumptions about the way women have always
thought about “beauty” date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the
cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

→The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely
symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not
appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the
myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and
(until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they
stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “un-
beautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the
links between generations of women must always be newly broken:
Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty
myth truncates for all the female life span. Most urgently, women’s
identity must be premised upon our “beauty” so that we will remain
vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of
self-esteem exposed to the air.

→If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics,
or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and
life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not
about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional
power.

→Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, “beautiful” women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the
situation was reversed: “In every culture, the Goddess has many lov-
ers…. The clear pattern is of an older woman with a beautiful but expendable youth—Ishtar and Tammuz, Venus and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osiris…their only function the service of the divine
‘womb.’” Nor is it something only women do and only men watch:
Among the Nigerian Wodaabes, the women hold economic power and
the tribe is obsessed with male beauty; Wodaabe men spend hours together in elaborate makeup sessions, and compete—provocatively
painted and dressed, with swaying hips and seductive expressions—in
beauty contests judged by women. There is no legitimate historical or
biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women
today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power
structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against
women.

→“Beauty” is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman;the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts. Nor is“beauty” a function of evolution: Its ideals change at a pace far more rapid than that of the evolution of species, and Charles Darwin was
himself unconvinced by his own explanation that “beauty” resulted from a “sexual selection” that deviated from the rule of natural selection;for women to compete with women through “beauty” is a reversal of the way in which natural selection affects all other mammals. Anthropology has overturned the notion that females must be “beautiful” to be selected to mate: Evelyn Reed, Elaine Morgan, and others have dismissed sociobiological asser-tions of innate male polygamy and female monogamy. Female higher
primates are the sexual initiators; not only do they seek out and enjoy sex with many partners, but “every nonpregnant female takes her turn at being the most desirable of all her troop. And that cycle keeps turning
as long as she lives.” The inflamed pink sexual organs of primates are often cited by male sociobiologists as analogous to human arrangements
relating to female “beauty,” when in fact that is a universal, nonhier-archical female primate characteristic.

→None of this is true. “Beauty” is a currency system like the gold
standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the
modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male
dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy
according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression
of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.

→Naomi Wolf
New York City, April 2002

→The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called “beauty” objectively
and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must
want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and
natural because it is biological, sexual, and evolutionary: Strong men
battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful. Women’s beauty must correlate to their fertility, and
since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and
changeless.

→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 could tell the truth about their bodies. In 1962, Betty Friedan quoted a
young woman trapped in the Feminine Mystique: “Lately, I look in the
mirror, and I’m so afraid I’m going to look like my mother.” Eight years
after that, heralding the cataclysmic second wave of feminism, Germaine
Greer described “the Stereotype”: “To her belongs all that is beautiful,
even the very word beauty itself…she is a doll…I’m sick of the masquer-
ade.” In spite of the great revolution of the second wave, we are not
exempt. Now we can look out over ruined barricades: A revolution has
come upon us and changed everything in its path, enough time has
passed since then for babies to have grown into women, but there still
remains a final right not fully claimed.

→This counterforce is operating to checkmate the inheritance of feminism 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 discrimination based on women’s appearances. Patriarchal religion declined; 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 disorders 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 reexert old forms of medical
control of women.

→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 uncontrollable: 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.

→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 released 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.

→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.

→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. Because 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 industry is growing rapidly. Women of color are some of the most admired
of fashion icons.

→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
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.

→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 airbrushed to look younger. Women of color were seldom shown as role
models unless they had, like Beverly Johnson, virtually Caucasian features. 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.

→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, naturally “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.

→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 million 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 vicious 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 disordered 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.