NZ: переводы

→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.

→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 onefifth 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.”

→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.

→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.

→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.

→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 explos-
ive fusion of minority consciousness and rage. In women’s easy famili-
arity 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.

→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.

→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.

→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 eco-
nomies 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 atmos-
phere. 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 attain-
ment 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.

→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.

→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.

→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.

→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 ar-
senal 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 hallucin-
ation 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.

→So the fictions simply transformed themselves once more: Since the
women’s movement had successfully taken apart most other necessary
fictions of femininity, all the work of social control once spread out over
the whole network of these fictions had to be reassigned to the only
strand left intact, which action consequently strengthened it a hundred-
fold. This reimposed onto liberated women’s faces and bodies all the
limitations, taboos, and punishments of the repressive laws, religious
injunctions and reproductive enslavement that no longer carried suffi-
cient force. Inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from
inexhaustible but ephemeral housework. As the economy, law, religion,
sexual mores, education, and culture were forcibly opened up to include
women more fairly, a private reality colonized female consciousness.
By using ideas about “beauty,” it reconstructed an alternative female
world with its own laws, economy, religion, sexuality, education, and
culture, each element as repressive as any that had gone before.

→Though these time- and mind-consuming fictions about women’s
natural role adapted themselves to resurface in the post-war Feminine Mystique, when the second wave of the women’s
movement took apart what women’s magazines had portrayed as the
“romance,” “science,” and “adventure” of homemaking and suburban
family life, they temporarily failed. The cloying domestic fiction of
“togetherness” lost its meaning and middle-class women walked out
of their front doors in masses.

→But in spite of middle-class women’s creativity with fashion and
embroidery and child rearing, and, a century later, with the role of the
suburban housewife that devolved from these social fictions, the fictions’
main purpose was served: During a century and a half of unprecedented
feminist agitation, they effectively counteracted middle-class women’s
dangerous new leisure, literacy, and relative freedom from material
constraints.

→Since the Industrial Revolution, middle-class Western women have
been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints. This situation, unique to this group, means that analyses that
trace “cultural conspiracies” are uniquely plausible in relation to them.
The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social
fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere,
the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose
contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual
maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-
class women to act out the roles of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a
conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic; and a
definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-
consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lacemaking.
All such Victorian inventions as these served a double function—that
is, though they were encouraged as a means to expend female energy
and intelligence in harmless ways, women often used them to express
genuine creativity and passion.

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

→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.

→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.