The Beauty Myth (34 page)

Health makes good propaganda. “‘Proof’ that women’s activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman’s own business, as the face and the body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?

Respected institutions are participating, as they did in the last century, in this cultural policing of women through reclassification: In 1978, the American Medical Association made the claim that preoccupation with beauty was the same as preoccupation with health. Dr. Arthur K. Balin, president of the American Aging Association, declared to
The New York Times
that “it would benefit physicians to look upon ugliness not as a cosmetic issue but a disease.” In professional plastic surgery journals, it is impossible to see where the surgeons differentiate between the cutting open of the cancerous and the healthy breast. Dr. Daniel C. Tostesen of Harvard Medical School, who has accepted $85 million from Shiseido for research, is earning his salary on its behalf: There is, he asserts, a “subtle and continuous gradation” between health and medical interests on the one hand, and “beauty and well-being” on the other. Such dicta affect women more than men, as they are meant to; it is women who are the main surgical patient pool and the buyers of Shiseido products (no mention is made of
the physical appeal, or lack of it, of Drs. Balin and Tostesen). When the surgeons convene conferences to discuss “the deformities of the aging face,” the profile on the announcement is invariably female.

A man is “deformed” if a limb or feature is missing or severely skewed from the human phenotype. Where women do not fit the Iron Maiden, we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth’s double standard for the function of the body. A man’s thigh is for walking, but a woman’s is for walking and looking “beautiful.” If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that their bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

The tragedy of this reclassification is that for most of our history, women have indeed suffered from illness—prolapsed uteri, early death from ovarian cysts, untreatable venereal diseases and vaginal infections; poor hygiene, ignorance, shame, and compulsory yearly pregnancy took their toll. Compared with that, women are now miraculously, unprecedentedly well—but the myth denies us the experience of our wellness. Only a generation after the physical dis-ease of femaleness had ended, the new possibility of ease in the female body was ruined for women by the beauty myth.

Recycled rhetoric about female disease insults women’s healthy bodies: When a modern woman is blessed with a body that can move, run, dance, play, and bring her to orgasm; with breasts free of cancer, a healthy uterus, a life twice as long as that of the average Victorian woman, long enough to let her express her character on her face; with enough to eat and a metabolism that protects her by laying down flesh where and when she needs it; now that hers is the gift of health and well-being beyond that which any generation of women could have hoped for before—the Age of Surgery undoes her immense good fortune. It breaks down into defective components the gift of her sentient, vital body and the individuality of her face, teaching her to experience her lifelong blessing as a lifelong curse.

As a result, fully able women may now be less satisfied with their bodies than are disabled people: “Physically handicapped people,” reports a recent study quoted in
The New York Times
, “generally express an overall satisfaction about their bodies”—while able-bodied women, we saw, do not. One San Francisco Bay area woman in four would undergo cosmetic surgery given the chance. The word “deformed” is no longer used in polite discourse, except to describe bodies and faces of healthy normal women, where cosmetic surgeons’ language constructs out of us the new freak show.

How healthy is the Surgical Age? Smoking is on the decline in all groups but young women; 39 percent of all women who smoke say they smoke to maintain their weight; one quarter of those will die of disease caused by cigarette smoking—though, to be fair, the dead women’s corpses will weigh on average four pounds less than will the bodies of the living nonsmokers. Capri cigarettes are advertised as “the slimmest slim.” The late Rose Cipollone, whose husband sued the tobacco industry for her death from lung cancer, started smoking as a teenager because “I thought I was going to be glamorous or beautiful.”

Liquid fasts have caused at least sixty deaths in the United States, and their side effects include nausea, hair loss, dizziness, and depression. Compulsive exercise causes sports anemia and stunted growth. Breast implants make cancer detection more difficult. Women delay mammograms for fear of losing a breast and becoming “only half a woman.”

The myth is not only making women physically ill, but mentally ill. Attie and Brooks-Gunn in
Gender and Stress
assert that dieting is a chronic cause of stress in women; stress is one of the most serious medical risk factors, lowering the immune system and contributing to high blood pressure, heart disease, and higher mortality rates from cancer. But even worse, the beauty myth in the Surgical Age actually duplicates within women’s consciousness the classic symptoms of mental illness.

Schizophrenics are characterized by a disturbed sense of body boundaries. A neurotic’s body image is erratic, extremely negative or positive. Narcissists feel that what happens to their bodies does not happen to them. Psychotics have the feeling that parts of their body are falling apart. They display repetitive rubbing, self-mutilation, and fears of sliding into nothingness and disintegration. Surgical expectations and weight fluctuations subject women to weak body boundaries. The stress on appearance gives them erratic, extremely negative or positive views of themselves. A torrent of media images show the female face and body split into pieces, which is how the beauty myth asks a woman to think of her own body parts. A number of beauty practices require of her repetitive rubbing and self-mutilation. When she ages, she is asked to believe that without “beauty” she slides into nothingness and disintegration. Is it possible that by submitting women to the experiences symptomatic of mental illness, we are more likely to become mentally ill? Women are the majority of sufferers from mental illness by a significant majority.

But these facts are not very useful to women, because there is a double standard for “health” in men and women. Women are not getting it wrong when they smoke to lose weight. Our society
does
reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty “fixes” that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs is more highly rewarded socially than a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her “Health”; if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

The prime of life, the decades from forty to sixty—when many men but certainly most women are at the height of their powers—are cast as men’s peak and women’s decline (an especially sharp irony since those years represent women’s sexual peak and men’s sexual decline). This double standard is not based on health differences between middle-aged men and women, but on the artificial inequality of the beauty myth. The hypocrisy of the use of “health” as a gloss for the Surgical Age is that the myth’s
true message is that a woman should live hungry, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.

The Surgical Age’s definition of female “health” is not healthy. Are those aspects defined as “diseased” actually sick?

You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that if a woman is healthy she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes after decades of laughter, closing together like fans as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of “serious lesions,” or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion, and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life, and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

If you could make a million dollars a year—the average income of cosmetic surgeons in the United States—by doing so, then female fat can easily enough be called a disease. Or it can be seen for what it is: normal, since even the thinnest healthy women have more fat than men. When you see the way women’s curves swell at the hips and again at the thighs, you could claim that that is an abnormal deformity. Or you could tell the truth: 75 percent of women are shaped like that, and soft, rounded hips and thighs and bellies were perceived as desirable and sensual without question until women got the vote. Women’s flesh, you
could acknowledge, is textured, rippled, dense, and complicated; and the way fat is laid down on female muscle, on the hips and thighs that cradle and deliver children and open for sex, is one of the most provocative qualities of the female body. Or you could turn this too into an operable condition.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female—the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin—is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman’s life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable conditions—
so that
women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an “ideal” be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characterisic
does not
exist on the woman’s body, and how much of a female life
does not
show on her face?

It cannot be about women, for the “ideal” is not about women but about money. The current Surgical Age is, like the Victorian medical system, impelled by easy profits. The cosmetic surgery industry in the United States grosses $300 million every year, and is growing annually by 10 percent. But as women get used to comfort and freedom, it cannot continue to count on profit from women’s willingness to suffer for their sex. A mechanism of intimidation must be set in place to maintain that rate of growth, higher than that of any other “medical specialty.” Women’s pain threshold has to be raised, and a new sense of vulnerability imbedded in us, if the industry is to reap the full profit of their new technology acting on old guilt. The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

“The myth of female frailty, and the very real cult of female hypochondria that seemed to support the myth, played directly into the financial interests of the medical profession,” according to Ehrenreich and English. In the nineteenth century, competition in the medical profession rose. Doctors were frantic to ensure a reliable patient pool of wealthy women, a “client caste,” who could be convinced of the need for regular house calls and lengthy convalescences. Suffragists saw through to the real impetus behind women’s invalidism—the doctor’s interests and the unnatural conditions that confined women’s lives. Mary Livermore, a suffragist, protested “the monstrous assumption that woman is a natural invalid,” and denounced “the unclean army of ‘gynecologists’” who “seem desirous to convince women that they possess but one set of organs—and that these are always diseased.” Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi traced women’s ill health directly to “their new function as lucrative patients.” As Ehrenreich and English put it: “As a businessman, the doctor had a direct interest in a social role for women that required them to be sick.”

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women’s magazines.

The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they take their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad space: The October 1988 issue of
Harper’s and Queen
is typical, in pairing a positive article on surgery with the same amount of space, on the same pages, of surgical advertising. In
The New York Times
health supplement of July 1989, advertising for regulated fasts, fat farms, weight-loss camps, surgeons, and eating disorder specialists fills over half the commercial space. By September 1990, the quid pro quo was solid: a woman’s magazine provided an uncritical piece in an issue supported by full-page, full-color surgical advertising. The time has arrived when the relationship among cosmetic surgery, ad revenue, risks, and warnings is re-creating cigarette advertising’s inhibitions on antismoking journalism before the Surgeon General took his stand. With
journalists given little incentive to expose or pursue them (indeed, they are given incentive not to: The premier cosmetic surgeons’ organization offers a $500 journalism prize, 2 free plane tickets included), the surgeons’ status and influence will continue to rise. Tending cultural, not biological, needs, they may well continue to accumulate power over women’s social and economic life or death; if so, soon they should be what many seem to want to be: little gods, whom no one will wish to cross.