The Beauty Myth

National Review, July 8, 1991 by Mary G. Gotschall

IN The Beauty Myth, a provocative new feminist tract which should take its place alongside such polemics as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Naomi Wolf argues that American women are enslaved by the cultural edict to be beautiful. They are victims of an impossible standard. The pressure, according to Miss Wolf, has become relentless during the past decade, as women have begun competing head-on with men in the professional sphere.

For Naomi Wolf, the beauty business isn't just a ploy by Madison Avenue to make a buck. What truly powers the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic-surgery industry, and the $7-billion pornography industry, she argues, is a far more insidious and destructive agenda. It is a political tool to keep women down: "The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power."

According to Miss Wolf, the myth has a number of uses. It pits women against one another, thereby diluting their political influence; as she puts it,

What women look like is considered important because what we say is not." It stokes the consumerist engine of our economy, where women shoppers play a pivotal role; and it enables employers to get away with paying women less than men. Indeed, Miss Wolf charges that the success of Western economies is linked to the chronic underpayment of women.

The author notes the historical roots of this problem. The modem beauty myth can be traced to the social upheaval following industrialization, around 1830, when a new class of literate, idle women was suddenly in a position to challenge male dominance. The upshot, she concludes, is that Women are mere beauties' in men's culture so that culture can be kept male."

The beauty myth-in Miss Wolf's view-transforms women into self-destructive, fearful, even paranoid creatures who have a love-hate addiction to food, a negative body image, poor self-esteem, and tenuous relationships with the men in their lives. They frequently become anorexic or undergo dangerous cosmetic surgery to achieve the perfect body. They pursue this fruitless quest with the zealotry of religious fanatics, and yet they are doomed to fail because they are pursuing a chimera.

The author cites a raft of data to prove her point. She notes that cosmetic surgery is the fastest-growing medical specialty in America, and she claims 10 per cent of women are afflicted by eating disorders-a marked rise during the last decade. And many of these women are among the best educated in American society. Miss Wolf rails against the frauds perpetrated by the cosmetics industry, and roundly criticizes women's magazines for their docile collusion in this fraud.

Ultimately, Miss Wolf ascribes all of modern women's social ills to the beauty myth, including the rise in rape, mental illness, and sexual abuse of children during the last decade. In so doing, she falls into the trap of oversimplification.

Women's stature in modern society is the product of a confluence of factors, and the beauty myth" is merely one of them. One must also weigh such factors as the force of tradition, our evolution from a "hunter-gatherer" society, the legal and political system, institutional pressures, religion, portrayals of beautiful women in Western art, biological and physiological functions, and innate sex differences. The list goes on and on.

Beyond that, I would argue that much of what Miss Wolf criticizes in our culture springs from basic animal drives. Among many species, one sex uses decoration to entice the other to mate. Male birds, for example, sport colorful plumage to attract females. There is a competition to attract the strongest, most desirable mates with the best genes. Women's pursuit of beauty serves a similar reproductive agenda. On the most fundamental level, it is a behavior that has evolved as part of a competitive courtship ritual to attract a powerful male and mate with him. Until recent times, this mating ritual was all-important to women, who relied upon it for their economic survival as well as that of their children. Thus, women beautify themselves to ensnare men. The beauty industry has correspondingly sprung up as a response to the way women conduct their half of the mating dance.

There is also scientific evidence indicating that there are cognitive differences between men and women, which in turn manifest themselves in different styles of communication and behavior. Deborah Tannen chronicles some of these communication differences in her current book, You Just Don't Understand. From an early age, boys are object-oriented and girls are person-oriented; from these different orientations flow correspondingly different behavior. And ornamentation may be one such difference. Women take pleasure in adornment.

Women have free will, contrary to Miss Wolf's assertion, and they are not forced to buy beauty products. They choose to do so. If this were not so, fashion and the beauty industry would not thrive. The capitalist system is driven by the bottom line and not by politics. If women stopped buying beauty products and services, the industry would die, as other industries have died in the past.