By Mandi Curties
and Corina MacKay
Why is it that you can be a successful business woman, wife, mother, intelligent, creative and caring yet still feel bad about yourself for not being beautiful? It is the "beauty myth", the belief that to be a complete woman, you must conform to the beauty industry's strict ideal.
After all, they have the most to gain: the $33 billion-a-year diet industry, the $300 million-a-year cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry all have an interest in promoting insecurity.
The Beauty Myth is also the name of US feminist Naomi Wolf's masterwork, which promises to be one of the more influential feminist texts, drawing together as it does the many facets of being a woman in the 1990s. Disparate areas such as the images of women, women in the workforce, the role of women's magazines, dieting, advertising, the cosmetics industry, pornography, rape, date rape, violent sex, anorexia, bulimia, and plastic surgery are linked in this incredibly well-researched book.
The Beauty Myth may be the handbook of the third wave of feminism. It is an attempt to win back the ground that has been lost in a generation to an idea as repressive of women as any that have gone before. This book makes horrifying claims about the real cost of the beauty myth to women and backs them up with a phenomenal amount of evidence.
The portrayal of women in the media through millions of images impossible for women to achieve only makes women feel bad about themselves. The only two professions in which women earn more money than men are modelling and prostitution. Beauty is used as a means of assessment instead of talent. The higher women climb up the rungs of professional hierarchies, the harder the beauty myth works against them.
The myth of "beauty" leads to women being obsessed with their appearance, resulting in plastic surgery, anorexia and bulimia. The cosmetics industry plays on women's insecurities and makes billions out of products which don't do anything at all. Cosmetic advertisers are able to gag magazine editors when they try to write about the issues they don't agree with, such as growing old gracefully.
Pornography links violence and sex so often that young people are starting to think that the two are inseparable. Advertising and films serve to glamorise rape. Doctors perform more and more intrusive cosmetic surgery and make millions of dollars, while hiding the fact that many women die from it. All of these things and more are discussed by Wolf; all women and men should read her book.
Thanks to the University of Queensland Bookshop, we were able to obtain a short interview with Naomi Wolf for the UQ student paper, Semper. We started by asking how she wrote the book.
This is not something I recommend, but I used to start at eight o'clock at night and drink red wine and work through the night, and then as it got to two or three o'clock in the morning, I'd switch to
Obviously a hell of a lot of work went into it.
It really did, I was manic, I was driven. I did a draft for my publishers and they said, "You don't have enough hard evidence here, why should I believe this?".
Of course I know that women lack credibility. You can say that every woman I know has an eating disorder, but that's anecdotal evidence. Unless you have not only one study but six studies to back you up, you will be questioned. You'll notice that every time I make a generalisation, especially a radical generalisation, I back it up with six different studies that might come to different numerical conclusions, but when put together point to something concrete. I never want to have to do research like that again.
Have you always been interested in this subject?
In women's issues, yes. I think it's one of those things that occupies the back of most of our brains, most of the time, not on a very conscious level just because it doesn't make any sense.
On thing the book did for me was bring together so many different areas which I'd thought a lot about but never really linked. Things like eating disorders and dieting and anorexia — I'd never thought about them in an academic sense. The book really validated that for me as an area that should be studied and have attention brought to it.
That's exactly what I'd hoped to do. All of these issues are treated as if they're trivial or else embarrassing, and that's how women are silenced, by having major things that happen to them be too shameful or beneath notice to bring up. That's why I say that anorexia and bulimia have to be dealt with on an administrative level with public recognition; it's as serious as a drug epidemic. What happens to women's issues is we're told it's our personal problem, we're told "Oh, form a support group, girls".
This is about politics. Do you know I was really happy about what one reader said: that it took these issues out of the aegis of sexual taste and into the realm of human rights. That's exactly what I wanted. We all know this stuff, but linking it together to see where there's a political problem is an important use for it.
There's an incredible guilt involved in promoting the beauty industry.
Yes, "Its my fault, I'm neurotic." I took my premise that women aren't stupid, and if women aren't stupid and are obsessive about something so trivial, then it can't be that trivial, and in fact I found out that it wasn't trivial at all.
I had to dress models for a fashion parade once and all the models spoke about was what plastic surgery they'd had and what they wanted done. I hadn't realised it was so widespread until I read your book. Do you see women's magazines as pushing the beauty myth?
In the chapter on women's magazines I am pretty incoherent. I think takes women seriously, which it doesn't, women's magazines are our only mass culture. They do popularise feminist ideas more than mainstream culture does. You know: how to care for your health and how to take care of your finances. But, because advertisers pay the rent, they're not free to tell the truth about the beauty myth or lead women too far away from their preoccupation with mirrors.
What about violent pornography? Do you think it's getting worse?
A lot of research shows that pornography desensitises you, and I think that happens to us all in all nations, not generalised violence but sexual violence against women in particular. There's no ceiling to it.
Women become desensitised. One of the things I encourage women to do is resensitise; to be aware there is a glamourised rape scene, to think about it. That way our dollars won't go into supporting this. They put rape scenes into movies because it's good box office, it's purely gratuitous. I've got quotes from film directors saying, "Yes, it's rape footage and it sells".
We have to make rape not good box office. We have to use our dollars to support films which portray women in three dimensions, or portray rape, like in Thelma and Louise, as something that hurts and is harmful and not entertaining, and not enjoy films which glamorise rape.
Given the prevalence of the beauty myth and all its horrible manifestations, do you think women really want to overcome it?
I don't think women want to race into reactionary puritanism, and in fact I think that's one mistake feminism often makes.
Censorship from the left is just as bad as censorship from the right. I don't want anyone telling me what I should do with my face and who I should sleep with.
I think the third wave of feminism is going to have to be more tolerant of women's choices — who I sleep with, what I wear, all of these things. In the '50s, you would have said, "Are you sure women want to overthrow the feminine mystique?" Their whole identities are structured around homemaking and children. I think women want a choice. I think women want to feel good about themselves.