Women’s insecurities about their appearance are not only a way for plastic surgeons to make money, but also a hindrance to the liberation brought about by feminism. Today, women do not need to be relegated to the kitchen to keep them from leadership roles. Simply instilling a constant fear of being unattractive is enough to divert women’s attention from their scientific and professional ambitions to the never-ending quest for beauty.
Naomi Wolf and the Beauty Myth
In 1990, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, one of the most influential feminist works of its time. It came at a pivotal time. Since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in the 1960s, second-wave feminism had brought many positive changes to American women. Women graduated from college, did research, and became professors. Women rose through the corporate ranks and started businesses. Women writers and journalists flourished. But the 1980s also saw the three-term presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was associated with social conservatism.
Conservatism and rebellion
How did the right-wing rule affect women? On the surface, it was not dramatic. Women were not driven out of the labor market, but a “glass ceiling” emerged, inexplicably preventing them from promotion above a certain level. Women were competent, effective, hardworking, and well-educated, but it was still common for men to become bosses, managers, and leaders. At the same time, images of the “ideal” woman proliferated. The goal for American women was no longer career or power, nor was it family. Rather, perfect beauty became an aspiration, constantly reinforced by television, movies, advertising, and the press. Unlike the round, maternal, “domestic” beauty of the 1950s, a new ideal was born: a much thinner, taller woman who underwent plastic surgery. In the 1980s, cosmetic surgery, previously reserved for actresses, models, and the wives of the wealthy, went mainstream in America.
Woolf saw this as a backlash against feminist achievements. No one had deliberately decided to instill in women anxiety about their appearance, but as a “political solution” this manipulation proved very effective. The new ideals were extremely difficult to achieve: large breasts but a flat stomach; narrow hips but a slim waist; as small a nose as possible but large lips and eyes; no wrinkles or signs of aging; no fat, only full breasts. Because nature (in terms of genes and the passage of time) rarely bestowed all these characteristics at once, women began to resort to various, often harmful, habits to avoid weight gain, aging, and ugliness. These were treated as terrible afflictions unique to women.
Photo: Ron Luck / Pexels
The beauty myth and femininity as sin
The ground was fertile for aesthetic medicine to flourish. Since aesthetic medicine was a “medical” practice, the procedures offered had to be linked to health concerns. Small breasts, large noses, wrinkles, and fat on the hips and abdomen thus became pathological symptoms that had to be addressed at all costs. Naomi Wolf also discusses a quasi-religious perception of physical attractiveness, where ugliness was equated with sin. In this interpretation, fasting and painful procedures become a kind of atonement. But what is the root of this sin, which is never committed by men of all shapes and ages, the arbiters of female beauty? Wolf points to natural femininity itself. She gives the example of breast augmentation surgery, popular in the 1980s, which could result in the loss of nipple sensitivity, which is precisely part of the pleasure sought…
Constant Pressure
The shape of the female body is due to the mechanism of reproduction. Women have more adipose tissue in the hips and abdomen than men because of their potential for pregnancy. Only women breastfeed infants, so their breasts and nipples seem to be larger than men’s. This may seem obvious, but in the context of the beauty myth it is not. Pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period are classified as unattractive or ugly. Pregnant women cannot exercise because they are “fat”. In the beauty myth the advice to a woman who has just brought a new human being into the world (perhaps the most beautiful one imaginable) is to remain in seclusion until she has returned to her pre-pregnancy shape by fasting and exercise. The ideal would be to look like she never was pregnant through “abdominal plastic surgery”.
How does this apply to women’s lives? The constant pressure to look good robs them of all pleasure, including sexual pleasure, which, just as in the Victorian era, is based on what men do with women’s bodies to obtain pleasure from them. Woolf argues that if a woman is desired solely for her appearance, then her only participation in sex is in her image, and her “self” is centered on how to best present herself to a partner.
The author asks how it is possible for women who are less than perfect in body and face to enjoy the most fulfilling sex lives. What sets them apart? Her answer, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of today’s body positivity movement, is that the key is self-acceptance, affection, and a love of femininity.
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Beauty myths in the age of social media
Whenever I look at the contents of The Beauty Myth, I always notice that in some ways it is more current than when it was written. Wide hips are now preferable to narrow ones, but the essence of this myth, the extremely strict demands on the female body, is more prevalent than ever before. Today, the fashion for protruding hips does not mean that wide hips, which were once rejected, are accepted, but that fat is sucked from the abdomen and transplanted to the lower part. Today, women in their 40s and 50s and older may appear more often on television, but they must meet two conditions: they must use Botox and hyaluronic acid to avoid looking old. When a woman speaks about any problem, there is a constant stream of comments scrutinizing her appearance in every detail. The self-proclaimed “experts” of the Internet have no doubt that this aspect trumps the substantive content of her message.
Social media has greatly contributed to making the beauty myth even more influential today. It is impossible not to feel uneasy when looking at hundreds of “perfect” female bodies and faces, enhanced by both cosmetic surgery and a multitude of filters. Paradoxically, it is precisely young women who are most highly valued by the beauty myth, and yet who are the most complex, and much more sensitive to ridicule regarding their appearance than older women, because they have not yet learned to be proactive in the beauty myth, to trust their own bodies, and to draw on the experience and knowledge of other women.
Photo: Alora Griffiths / Unsplash
Beauty myths and men
The question of whether the beauty myth also affected men was initially dismissed. Sexuality was the male domain, and it was supposed to be men who determined a woman’s worth, not the other way around. Men were not bound by the obligation to maintain youth, a slim figure, an athletic body, beautiful hair, a certain facial proportions, etc. Every man considered himself an expert on women. This is well illustrated in a meme depicting a pot-bellied man with a proboscis monkey face judging a beauty contest and saying of one of the contestants:
Her nose is too big.
The meme is modern, but it describes today’s generation of 20-something fathers. Today’s young men also criticize women, but their frustration clearly stems from insecurities about appearance. They know they are being judged, and it hurts. They lash out at dating apps for giving them a smaller selection of women to choose from based on appearance. This fuels the narrative that women prefer the few men who mistreat them, and are taking revenge on the masses for not being judged.
There is no empirical evidence for this. Men who treat women as human beings can have successful relationships without being basketball-player tall and square-jawed. And if they could do that, dating apps would be almost unnecessary. In this sense, men do not suffer the same harm as young women who obsessively diet or save up for plastic surgery because they believe the world hates their natural appearance. This attitude has been classified as a mental disorder called “body dysmorphia” – a panicky fear of one’s own ugliness that must be corrected at all costs, including health and life.
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Equal Relationship
But while women are helped by the body positive movement, men are left with complexes. Their most common and positive response is sports, mainly weightlifting. But there are dangers if taken to excess: steroids and high-protein diets for muscle building can quickly wreak havoc on the digestive tract. Moreover, men who are obsessed with muscles develop disorders similar to anorexia and body dysmorphic disorder, known as “vigorexia,” which leads to constant dissatisfaction with their inadequate “big” physique.
It’s hard not to sympathize with young men who are willing to compromise their own physical and mental health in order to attract women. I hope they realise that the key to building successful relationships with women whilst also grooming themselves is to converse on an equal footing. But this sympathy does not extend to the various “losers”, “incels” and “red pillars” who are victimised by women and feminism, and who believe they have the right to promote a deeply dehumanising view of women who should be “punished” through humiliation and mutilation.
Translated by Claudia Tarasiewicz
Polish version: My name is Naomi Wolf.
