Bad News, Good News
[In the following excerpt, Rapping offers an unfavorable assessment of The Beauty Myth.]
Is it the best of times or the worst of times? Have we come a long way, baby, or are we systematically being beaten back to ground zero by the right-wing goon squads? On any given day, depending on the headlines or my phone messages, I'm likely to believe either one. The times are certainly a-changing, but who's on first? The horrors of the Reagan-Bush era—increased feminization of poverty, terrifying threats to reproductive rights, reported increases in sexual violence—certainly chill the blood. And yet, there's no denying the amazing gains made by women, particularly white middle-class women, for which second wave feminists can take much credit. Many young women can, and do, expect to live lives of far greater independence, choice and realizable ambition than did my generation.
The authors [Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf] of these two angry, militant books [Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women and The Beauty Myth, respectively]—both in their twenties—certainly don't suffer from my sense of middle-aged muddle about things. They are absolutely certain that things couldn't be worse for women, that all we have struggled for is in danger of going down the drain as we speak, that there is a monster loose upon the land which looks, acts and talks very much like a full-blown conspiracy of powerful woman-haters whose boots are already in our faces.
It would be easy, and gratifying, to give both these books glowing reviews. It's encouraging and exciting to find such signs of renewed passion and urgency on the part of the twenty-somethings in these days of waning feminist activism, of so many young women who have reaped the bounties of the second wave retreating nervously from the very term “feminist.” And it's hard to disagree with their main thrusts. Who hasn't felt a sense of panic at the threats against our fragile gains, of rage at the cruelty of the ascendant right-wing misogynists, of sorrow at the suffering that so many of us still endure daily? And yet, while my first response to both books was exhilaration, as I read on, in both cases, I became gradually more irritated and even bored. …
The Beauty Myth is […] interesting and useful. Rather than taking on the entire universe of discourse, Wolf sticks to a narrower focus and a more manageable thesis. She argues, convincingly, that in the wake of women's gains in the public sphere, the male power structure has upped the ante on the one area in which feminists have had least success: the struggle against socially enforced standards of physical appearance. Women—or at least white middle-class women—have indeed entered the worlds of business, power and thought in unprecedented numbers, but we suffer enormously, both psychologically and socially, for our failures to be ever more thin, youthful and commercially “beautiful.”
Wolf calls the new discriminatory criteria the Professional Beauty Qualification (PBQ), and she needed only to begin listing its manifestations to arouse a shock of recognition in me. There is no question that women today are expected, by the media, by employers and by themselves to achieve levels of physical “perfection” unheard-of before. Wolf is good with statistics, and when she tells us that models used to be eight percent thinner than the average woman but today are a substantial 23 percent thinner, she is simply naming a trend that, once pointed out, seems obvious. The same is true of her statistics on eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and money and hours spent on diet products and programs and exercise equipment and activity.
This is one of those books that, at least in its early sections, changed my perception of myself and the world, if only temporarily. Suddenly every magazine, every friend, every shopping trip looked a bit different, a bit ominous even. Wolf is both more perceptive and more clever than Faludi. She points up, nicely, that articles in women's magazines today (contrary to Faludi's wholesale dismissal) are in fact filled with feminist assumptions and perspectives, but that for that very reason they are forced to balance their feminist messages with advertising and beauty articles that instill more and more anxiety about appearance, in order to sell the products of the advertisers on whom magazines depend.
So far, this makes a lot of sense. Wolf's account of the beauty industries themselves works on a very obvious level of economic analysis. After all, we're dealing with big business, both selling commodities and keeping women out of top positions. Unfortunately, Wolf doesn't leave well enough alone. In the last two-thirds of the book she goes so far afield theoretically and rhetorically that her book begins to sound like a jeremiad about the end of the world. Like Faludi, she omits all opposing analyses and statistics in her map of an unbearably oppressive social and psychological environment.
The worst section is the one on pornography. Oh, how I wish she'd let that one go. She ignores the voluminous amount of important theoretical debate around this issue and takes an uncritical, unexamined Andrea Dworkin/Women Against Pornography line. Assumptions about causal relationships between sexual imagery and violence are presented as gospel; and issues of female sexual freedom and repression, as well as the complexities of, and disagreements about, media reception and use—both so thoroughly a part of any informed feminist discussion of this matter by now—are simply ignored. Nowhere in the book does she seem aware of the complexities of class, race and sexual preference that have so preoccupied feminists in recent years—although attention to these would significantly undermine her homogenizing account. It is as though feminist debate had stopped in 1975.
The porn chapter is followed by others as rhetorically hyperbolic and theoretically simplistic. Wolf's analysis of what she sees as women's religious relationship to the worship of physical perfection is clever but ultimately unconvincing. She finds any number of parallels in ritual and attitudes between beauty regimens and Christian religious practices: women feel the same guilt about eating as they used to feel about sex; they “confess” to their diet group as they once confessed to priests; and so on. But Wolf so exaggerates the extent and significance of this kind of thing that her melodramatic descriptions begin to resemble The Story of O. It is as though women were sealed up in some claustrophobic counter-universe where the concern with beauty was the only operating variable.
This tendency to overstate horrors continues in the chapter on cosmetic surgery. The descriptions are predictably nauseating and distressing, but ultimately become a bit absurd, as the gothic prose raises the stakes ever higher. It is indeed appalling that “at least 67 women are dead so far” as a result of elective cosmetic surgery. But Wolf makes it sound as if all women have already entered the world of The Handmaid's Tale. Surely we are oppressed by beauty standards, but walking down the street in a dress and heels is not akin to traversing hot coals barefoot. And yet Wolf makes it sound like it is. “Enough pain makes people numb,” she writes, in a lengthy passage of which these are only brief excerpts:
Look at a done-up woman walking down a street … wearing a costume, part flamenco dancer, part Carmen … She painted her face for an hour … Her legs in black silk are numb from the windchill. The deep parting of her dress is open to a blast of wind. Her achilles tendons … are throbbing. …
(p. 249)
As I read page upon page of such purple prose I began to feel I was in a time warp. It was as though the year was 1957 and The Feminine Mystique needed to be written because we were all chained to the kitchen, gasping for breath in our Merry Widows. The impulse to sound the call to the crusades is admirable. The backlash, to be sure, is real and frightening. But the fact is, these are far more confusing and contradictory times than Faludi and Wolf seem to admit. Some of us like to wear sexy pumps and dresses on occasion. Others of us wear only pants, jackets and flat shoes and do fine. This really isn't the fifties, and all is really not lost.
In fact, what most troubled me in these books was that they seemed so out of touch with the mass of women—especially young women—in their dogmatic puritanism, as to turn off readers to what's really valuable in them. There are reasons, both theoretical and pragmatic, for feminists to back off a bit from this kind of ultra-correct rigidity. Because these are hard times, economically, politically and emotionally, and the feminist revolution dreamed of in the sixties is still not on the horizon, women have good reasons for making certain kinds of compromises in their personal and professional lives. The media are not entirely wrong about some of the “trends” they report, and to say they always are, as Faludi does, is to risk credibility and possibly scare a new generation of women who are hurting and confused away from feminism.
The same is true of our relation to fashion, cosmetics and even pornography. Most women get pleasure from adorning themselves. They do not, in fact, feel pain or numbness when dressed fashionably. They feel a whole lot of different things, I suspect, which they are not willing to give up for an abstract revolution. Many use pornography in ways they feel fine about and which, in any event, many feminist theorists interpret very differently from Wolf and Faludi.
More and more such “yes, but's” jumped into my head as I read these books. In a truly weird and surprising way, by the time I finished reading, I felt better about women's situation than I had in a long time. True, I thought mostly about more privileged women, like my own daughter, who is of Wolf and Faludi's generation and whose professional and personal life—not to mention her mental health—are so far superior to mine at her age that she could be a walking ad for the results of the second wave. If we are so much more aware and so much more outraged over what's left to be done, it's at least partly because our expectations have risen almost from zero to infinity.
How was it possible for these two women to write books so oblivious to the ferment in feminist theory, so locked into an ideologically dated world? At least one possible reason strikes me as particularly relevant to academic feminists. In the years since the second wave began, a troubling gap has developed between academic and public discourse. So much of the important work on sexuality, fashion and popular culture, for example, which should have informed and enriched the analyses of these two young writers, appears in esoteric academic journals and in language accessible only to initiates of theory-talk. Among the many contradictions of the current age, one of the most depressing perhaps is that women have gained power within the academy even as our involvement in the larger public battle diminishes.
Backlash will probably be widely read and discussed. The Beauty Myth has already made an explosion in the media; Naomi Wolf has been on more than a handful of talk shows that I've seen and her book has had plenty of publicity. She is perceived as speaking for feminism and, in the vacuum left by the rest of us, she has a right to that title. I think we need to think about that some. Second-wave feminism began in the sixties with a public agenda and a political project—to transform the world. That project is still our primary responsibility—or should be. Faludi and Wolf, to their credit, have taken on that challenge, at a time when few of us seem to be thinking in those terms. But they are going to need a lot of help in order to get it right.
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