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- IDEAS, Page 68The Bad Side of Looking Good
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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