TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030491/0304630.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 116 lines

                                                                                IDEAS, Page 68

The Bad Side of Looking Good


A young American author causes a storm by arguing that women
have become victims of a punishing cult of beauty

By EMILY MITCHELL -- Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York


    Beauty is a conspiracy of pain forced upon women. Anorexia,
induced by the pursuit of attractiveness, turns girls into
something resembling skeletons. In the boardroom and in the
bedroom, women are entrapped by a cult that is the equivalent
of the iron maiden, a medieval torture instrument that impaled
its captives on iron spikes.

    These are only some of the assertions of The Beauty Myth
(Morrow;  $21.95), a provocative work by San Francisco-born
Naomi Wolf, 28, that is being published in the U.S. this
spring. Already, and as might be expected, reaction is divided.
Fans of the work call it daring and disturbing, but when it
appeared in Britain last fall, many critics dipped their pens
in acid, variously describing it as lurid and dishonest, and
slamming the author as a "clever child." Others have extolled
it as a feminist handbook for the '90s.

    Among other things, Wolf, a Yale graduate in literature,
contends that today's women have been victimized in
unprecedented ways by a "violent backlash against feminism that
uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against
women's advancement." This victimization produces deep inside
women "a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsession, terror
of aging and dread of lost control."

    The beauty myth of Wolf's title is reinforced, she argues,
by a global industry worth billions that could be far better
used for social purposes; for example, the money spent on
cosmetics each year could finance 2,000 women's health clinics
or pay for three times the amount of day care offered by the
U.S. government. In addition, cosmetic surgery has boomed by
playing on questionable ideas of health and sickness. Wolf
chronicles the multiple ways that mass-culture images of women
in advertising and pornography undermine female sexual
self-worth. As a result of this bombardment, women learn, even
as young girls, that sexual attraction is the "desire to be
desired."

    As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1986, Wolf had planned to
write about the theme of beauty in literature. The Beauty Myth
began taking shape when she heard someone remark that she had
won the scholarship because of her looks. Says Wolf: "I had an
image of the documents I had presented to the committee -- my
essay, a book of poems I had written, letters of recommendation
-- and the whole of it being swept away by that one sentence."
Once she learned that other female Rhodes scholars had had
similar tales told about them, she developed a new theme: that
discussions of feminine beauty are actually about undermining
women's achievements.

    A number of other personal experiences went into the book.
As a junior high school student, Wolf was anorexic, as were
many of her peers. She has combined those painful memories with
alarming statistics in a chapter about eating disorders titled
"Hunger," which argues that those ailments can be traced to a
"cult of thinness" inculcated into women at an early age. Girls
will continue to starve, she warns, until they are made to feel
valuable with or without the excuse of beauty.

    Those personal touches have been the focus of much
hostility. A reviewer for London's Independent on Sunday
accused Wolf of steamrollering her experiences "into a theory
which takes no account of what has been happening in the rest
of the Western world." A.S. Byatt, author of the best-selling
novel Possession and a former University of London lecturer,
agrees that images of beauty oppress women, but she is dubious
about Wolf's notion of a conscious conspiracy. Instead, she
says, the beauty business is pandering to dreams.

    Pioneer feminist Betty Friedan dismisses the book as an
"obsolete rehash" and criticizes Wolf for dwelling on
superficialities rather than coming to grips with the
modern-day political challenges that confront females. While
Friedan agrees that women often go to extremes in their pursuit
of good looks, enduring repeated face-lifts and possibly
risking their health by having silicone injected into their
breasts, she thinks Wolf's book distorts the relationship
between feminism and beauty. Women, she says, do not have to
choose between the two, but can delight in a frivolous
enjoyment of fashion without becoming a slave to it. In
contrast, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, an associate professor of
women's studies at Cornell University, who wrote a 1988 history
of anorexia titled Fasting Girls, welcomes Wolf's book as
another expose of the kind of self-inflicted damage that women
undergo as a matter of course. "At this moment," she says,
"looking good is the only coherent philosophy of the self that
women are offered."

    Instead of surrendering to the myth, Wolf is calling, if
vaguely, for nothing less than its overthrow. The first step,
she says, is to recognize the underlying issues of domination
and female competition. Then she exhorts women to refuse to
suffer any longer for the sake of an ideal beauty in which
adornment and style are a source of pain rather than pleasure.
That is both an old challenge and a tall order.