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The current state of fashion lends itself to an
unhealthy body image in the majority of young women
today. Every form of visual media, from print, to
television, to movies, to the internet is used to
bombard us daily with unrealistic images of
“perfection.” Yet how often do advertisements,
television shows, and pictures tell us that this look
was achieved through hours of makeup, hair styling, and
airbrushing? How often do we hear that even the
“perfect” looking people we see don’t really look like
that in real-life? Cindy Crawford once said “Even I
don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.”
The expectation to look perfect has not always been
around, it is something that has slowly developed over
the last century. We did not go from last century’s
expectation for young women to our currents expectations
in one step. It was a series of smaller steps, like the
expectation for perfect skin, that stacked up, and
eventually made it harder for each generation of girls
to feel good about themselves. In her book, The Body
Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
(available
here), author Joan Brumberg
discusses the history of these expectations, giving us
insight on how things got like this. It explains how
external forces such as marketing have had a strong, and
adverse in the internal feelings of girls.
Another good book dealing with the subject of societal
expectations of beauty is a book called The Beauty
Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by
Naomi Wolf. The content of this book goes hand-in-hand
with The Body Project, and is a good read for any
woman who wonders why she feels bad about her body. We
have included an excerpt from this book below, please
read it, and if you enjoy it, the full book can be found
here.
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 experimental
and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “unbeautiful”
since women grow more powerful with time, and since the
links between generations of women must always be
broken. Older women fear young ones, young ones fear
old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female
lifespan. 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.
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 beauty myth flourishes when material
constraints on women are dangerously loosened. Before
the industrial revolution, the average woman could not
have had the same feeling about “beauty” that modern
women do who experience the myth as a continual
comparison to a mass disseminated physical ideal.
Before the development of technologies of mass
production-daguerreotypes, 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 developed. Most of our assumptions about the
way women have always thought about “beauty” date from
no earlier than the 30’s when the cult of domesticity
was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.
For the first time, new technologies could reproduce- in
fashion plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and
rotogravures-images of how women should look. In the
1840’s 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.
Since the industrial revolution, middle-class Western
women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as
much 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 role 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 lace making.
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.
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 fiction’s main
purpose was served. During ac century and half of
unprecedented feminist agitation, they effectively
counteracted middle-class women’s dangerous new leisure,
literacy, and relative freedom from material
constraints.
Though these time, and mind-consuming fictions about
women’s natural role adapted themselves to resurface in
the postwar 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.
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 sufficient force. Inexhaustible but
ethereal 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.
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 women 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 a year
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 does not have to
be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the
same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen
calls 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 counter-images.
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 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 face of real women, our faces and voices
and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to those
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 worthless
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 corporate
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
upon us by popular sociology, by magazines and by
fiction to disguise the fact that women in the role of
the consumer has been essential to the development of
our own industrial society….behavior that is essential
for economic reasons is transformed in to 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 19th century. Lucy
Stone herself, whom supporters saw as a “prototype of
womanly grace… fresh and fair as the morning,” was
derived 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 resemble 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
neurosis of life in the female body spread to woman
after woman at epidemic rates. The myth is
undermining-slowly, imperceptibly, without of 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 multi-applianced 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.
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