It is rare that my mind is blown these days. So I was more than pleasantly surprised when my mind was blown reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, a national bestseller way back in the 1991 for Christ’s sake. What is important about this book is not necessarily that it says something new, but that she spells out with great clarity and provides telling historical context to our present obsession with female beauty, making clear that it is based not in sexuality but in the maintenance of male supremacy.
The “beauty myth” is basically summarized in the idea that women are worth their looks, which not only puts another ridiculous burden on women who already work longer and harder for less money than men (or for free, remember house work!), but individualizes experiences of sexism and substitutes bodily excuses for actually causes—if only I had looked right, if only she didn’t wear that, if only I was thinner, etc—and at the same time divides women by creating a constant undercurrent of ‘sexual’, spectacular (i.e. looks-based) competition…which is not really about sex, or sexual pleasure, but about playing in a power game for men that men don’t have to participate in (or at least not really).
And her response to action is remarkably interesting, noting that what is missing from all of this is play: “Can there be a pro-woman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What is missing is play. The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends upon it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter”. She calls for spectacular ’sexuality’ to be replaced by real sexuality, the one that is pleasurable, and goes on to call for (along with substantive changes that give power to women) the creation of a non-competitive form of beauty. In many ways her reference for this are the homo-social behaviors that exist among men, which among other things combat loneliness, promote self-esteem, provide an outlet for sensuality, and create gender solidarity such that sexual competition is present only in actual competition as opposed to using appearance to pre-judge a woman’s “language, political allegiance, worthiness, or aggression”. Not to mention trying to imagine an “erotics of equality” or of aging.
The incredible thing about this is that it has the potential to completely destroy the core division between feminists today—appearance (!)—and hence allow us to move beyond it to what the beauty myth is all about anyway—power relations. In this way Wolf has transformed the bland liberal ‘everyone should do what works for them’ into a deep wellspring of potential solidarity. And while this in no way eliminates some contentions issues, abortion for instance, or eliminates the need for new (or the revitalization of old) strategies, it provides the basis to move from individual alienation and individual blame to the collective action necessary to build the movement we need, and to do it in a way that is both sexual and serious, playful and political, for as she rightly points out a integrated person is both of these things and letting either side exclude the other is the whole thing we are trying to get away from in the first place…
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A Masculine Post-Script:
2 Things. 1) This spectacular destruction of collective solidarity is not just a female thing, rather the domination of image-based politics generally is the basis of the weakness of change making efforts in building communities and in changing or creating institutions. 2) I just want to make very clear the importance of these issues for my own (male) sexuality, and that for me, and I imagine many other men as well, the creation of a sexuality of equality, one that does not fall cold into the positions of actor and object, power and submission is both deeply refreshing and well, a turn on.
Of course we haven’t addressed here how the idea that ‘sexuality is the innermost truth of the individual’ has the same, individualizing effects, and enacts both a medicalization of social problems, reducing issues of power and oppression to sexual deviance or need or inadequacy, and its corollary, the Hollywood daydream, after all, if nothing else, we postmoderns are well aware that love doesn’t conquer all…
