[In the following excerpt, Greene offers a favorable assessment of The Beauty Myth.]

Those who are living through change may be the last to know it, until something we read brings things together in a way that makes us see that yes, things really are different—it's not just us growing older. These books [Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Susan Faludi's Backlash]—both written by young women, both bristling with indignation—demonstrate that something has changed profoundly in the culture's attitudes toward and representations of women, that we are undergoing a “cultural onslaught” that is the more “remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon at all.” Both books contextualize this backlash in relation to earlier backlashes—in the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and the fifties—and both explain its ferocity in economic terms.

Just when women were making some progress toward equality, just when we were mobilizing against job discrimination and sexual harassment, the Reagan Administration began dismantling federal programs and blocking progressive legislation. Just when young women were supporting feminism in record numbers, the media declared the advent of a “post-feminist” generation and began publishing scare stories (the man shortage, the infertility epidemic, career-woman burnout) and promoting retrotrends (nesting, cocooning, the “New Traditionalism”). No, it's not a conspiracy, but neither is it innocent: Both these books show how legal setbacks, put-downs from mass media and Hollywood, denunciations from political and religious leaders, fire-bombings of women's clinics, rape, and a beauty ideal that eroticizes violence are all parts of the same picture—of “a counterassault on women's rights” that is intensifying in nastiness and volume.

Women earn 60 cents to a man's dollar; and, as Wolf points out, the economies of industrialized countries depend on this “pool of cheap female labor.” Thus in addition to the lucrative industries preying on women—the ＄33-billion-a-year diet industry, the ＄20 billion cosmetics industry, the ＄300 million cosmetic surgery industry and the ＄7 billion pornography industry—there are powerful economic incentives for keeping women subordinate. By defining women's value in terms of appearance and making it depend on male approval, the Beauty Myth keeps us anxious, insecure and vulnerable, while also affirming a man's right to confer judgment—that last bastion of male privilege. An ideology that makes us feel “worth less” became even more necessary when feminism was beginning “to make us feel worth more.”

Wolf analyzes the Beauty Myth as a form of social coercion that took over from where the Feminine Mystique left off, as “a direct consequence of, and a one-to-one check and balance upon” women's new rights and powers. Whereas the women's movement gave us some control of our minds, bodies and sexuality, the Beauty Myth wrested this control away, barraging us with “time-consuming and mind-consuming fictions” that drain our energies and absorb our attentions. Whereas feminism challenged the stereotype that we were defined by our appearance, the Beauty Myth insists that a woman is her body and that her body is unsatisfactory. Whereas the sexual revolution promoted women's discovery and experience of sexuality, suddenly the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23 percent below that of ordinary women in a new ideal that keeps us off-balance, food-obsessed, hungry; and a new “beauty pornography” linked self-worth to sexuality at the same time that it degraded female sexuality.

The more legal and material gains we made in the world, the more foolish and insecure we were made to feel in our bodies, and the more strictly and cruelly beauty images were forced upon us. The ideal of female beauty that has evolved in recent years—excessively thin, shockingly young and erotically degraded—is a direct response to our new powers. There is nothing arbitrary about any of these qualities: Each aspect—youth, thinness, erotic degradation—performs important work of social control. Dropping “the official weight one stone below women's natural level and redefining a woman's womanly shape” as “fat” plunges women into endless, time- and energy-consuming cycles of dieting and bingeing and produces self-hate such that the norm now is to be a sufferer of some form of eating disorder: More people die of anorexia in a year than died of AIDS from the beginning of the epidemic until the end of 1988.

Nor is it an accident—as Faludi points out—that this ideal flies in the face of demographics: that the ideal beauty is in her late teens or early 20s at the very time when the largest proportion of the female population is entering middle age. It was no misunderstanding that prompted the fashion industry to push baby-doll lines, bubble skirts, party-girl gowns, miniskirts and pouf dresses, at a time when the average American woman was 32, weighed 143 pounds and wore a size 10 or 12; infantile imagery promotes “a retreat from female adulthood” and “bears a vindictive subtext.” As Wolf emphasizes, the devaluing of older women also eradicates female power. Whereas older men move into positions of prominence—and power is eroticized for men but not for women—older women have to be made to disappear. Making our aging appear unseemly, unsightly, unacceptable assures that we will. Moreover, it performs the crucial work of cutting the links between generations of women and assuring that power is not passed on. This is why the caricature of the Ugly Feminist appears with every backlash—to scare young women away from identifying with older women and prevent the transmission of authority. The Beauty Myth not only sets women in competition with one another on a daily basis but sets younger women against older, which is part of the reason the struggle for women's rights has to begin anew with each generation.

Wolf points out that young people today are bombarded with more images of “impossibly ‘beautiful’ women engaged in ‘sexual’ posturing” than their grandmothers were in a lifetime, and that these images are different not only in quantity but in kind from anything women had to deal with in the past. They glamorize female degradation and masochism in a way that reasserts imaginatively the power inequities that the women's movement challenged. “In a crossover of imagery in the 1980s, the conventions of high-class pornographic photography, such as Playboy's, began to be used generally to sell products,” and “the furious pouting glare of the violated woman” and images of “chic violence” and “designer bondage” entered mainstream advertising. Rock videos, which “set the beauty index” for young women, showing them “how to move, strip, grimace, pout, breathe, and cry out during a ‘sexual’ encounter,” define beauty as “that which never says no,” as that which is abused. Young people are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, inhuman and dehumanizing, and the changes are momentous: “Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud.” It may also be producing a generation that confuses sexuality with violence—a generation for which date rape is “more common than left-handedness, alcoholism, and heart attacks.”

Wolf's chapter “Violence” is not about rape or male violence, however. It is about cosmetic surgery—which makes the point that the violence done to us makes us more inclined to do violence to ourselves. Reading of the self-mutilation women inflict on themselves in breast implants, liposuction and face lifts, I was struck by how numbed we have become to our own pain. Smoking to stay thin, risking death for thinner thighs, killing the breast as a site of sexual pleasure to make it the object of another's pleasure (which is what silicone implants do) indicate new levels of alienation from our bodies. But such practices also make sense in terms of a culture that values a woman's appearance more than her mind, where a woman can still make more money selling her body than her skills (the average streetwalker earns more than a secretary).

The Beauty Myth claims to be about sexuality while actually being repressive of female sexuality, leaving women alienated from their bodies and desires. It purports to be about individuality while in fact reducing “the meaning of women to … formulaic and endlessly reproduced … images,” which then become the “reality” against which women are measured and found wanting. It claims to be about freedom while actually being about control, and it disguises its coercions in the language of choice, the language of feminism: Now you can choose to have perfect breasts, higher cheekbones. But in fact it leaves us no choice—we will only have a choice when the loss of “beauty” does not mean the loss of esteem, self-esteem, identity, love.

Wolf urges that we exercise real choice and learn to see differently. Her book shows how we might rethink beauty, the body, and—in a powerful and moving passage—how we might re-envision age:

You could see the signs of female aging as diseased. … 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. … 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. … 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.

Wolf suggests that we turn to women's films, novels and art to discover alternative images of beauty and unalienated female desire.¹ Second-wave feminism produced many such works,² and Wolf urges young women to draw on them and to forge intergenerational links that will strengthen them in coming together in a third wave.

Both Faludi and Wolf try to get women to recognize their power. Both books do what feminist classics—Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique—did: They name and identify the problem and give us a new way of seeing. If they are at times prone to exaggeration and hyperbole, so too were de Beauvoir and Friedan. I do wish Faludi had more fully acknowledged Wendy Kaminer's A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality and other analyses of the backlash that cover some of the same ground that she does—for example, Katha Pollitt's [“Being Wedded Is Not Always Bliss,” September 20, 1986]. And I also wish she had found a way of discussing Carol Gilligan that did not blame her for what reactionary forces made of her. But what is enormously important is that both books move the discussion outside academic feminist discourse, which has tended to become turgid, inward-looking and politically ineffectual, and into a more public arena.

I'm delighted that these books were written by young women, that they are being marketed enthusiastically for large audiences, that they are available even in Southern California bookstore chains, that the authors are appearing widely on talk shows. I love their indignation—both books crackle with energy and anger. What they do not note—and so I will—is that it's the success of feminism (as much as its failures) that has fueled this energy: It's precisely because feminism has taught us to expect more—that things might be better—that these young women are so angry. So they give us a new way of viewing the legacy of feminism of which the authors may not be aware. I think there are a lot of women out there who will get the message—since these books appeared, Clarence Thomas happened along like Exhibit A—and I hope they will help re-ignite the women's movement to face the challenges that still confront us.

Notes

1. Wolf's description of aging reminds me of the Canadian film Strangers in Good Company, by Cynthia Scott, which accuses on the faces of old women so lovingly that it makes us see their beauty. Films that take women's perspective tend not to become mainstream, however, and Faludi's account of how things work in Hollywood explains why: She describes the chilliness Gwen field encountered with her film Patti Rocks, and the disapproval its independent female protagonist met with, while Fatal Attraction evolved, in response to pressures from its male stars and producers, from a vaguely feminist film into a morality tale that demonized the professional woman.

2. There are dozens of excellent contemporary women writers—Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adrienne Rich, Mary Gordon, to name only a few. In Changing the Story I focus on Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence. Alicia Ostriker's Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Beacon) provides a good overview of contemporary women's poetry. See also Visibly Female: Feminism and Art: An Anthology, edited by Hilary Robinson (Universe).