By Bec Beirne (Sydney)
You only need to glance at any mainstream media outlet to see that the "beauty myth" is alive and flourishing. The recent increase in the amount and blatancy of sexist advertising in Australia is a measure of the concerted backlash against feminism, within which the efforts to pacify and control women via the beauty myth play a major role.
Surrounding women with images of women as sex objects is a powerful method of subjugation. It tells women that the path to happiness, respect, self-confidence and worthiness is to match as closely as possible the ideal of feminine beauty.
Yet that ideal has absolutely no connection with reality. To achieve anything like the appearance of the average model (who is white, 178 centimetres tall and weighs 50 kilos), the overwhelming majority of women would have to diet permanently, wear extremely high heels, use various contraptions or have surgery to restructure her body shape, and use skin bleaches and other cosmetics 24 hours a day.
To a less extreme degree, this is what most women do. The consequences for them range from constant feelings of insecurity, through chronic depression, mutilation and scarring, to potentially fatal eating disorders.
Hundreds of thousands of women in Australia alone suffer at some stage in their lives from the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia. The age of women who are on diets and/or have an eating disorder is declining: at any one time, 81% of 10-year-old girls in the United States are on a diet. That the vast majority of girls this young believe that they are "fat" indicates how successful the sexist perpetrators of the cult of "beauty" have been.
Even those who fit the prescribed ideal closely are made to feel that they must try harder. Frequently, interviews with super-models or "beautiful" celebrities emphasise the things they hate about themselves: "my bum is too big", "my thighs are too fat", "my lips are too thin" and so on.
Instead of questioning why such insecurities exist, the media praise these women for their willingness to be "ordinary", to reveal how that they hate their bodies, and by extension themselves. The underlying message is that no woman can ever be truly beautiful; all must strive harder to attain the ideal.
The creation among women of constant insecurity about their appearance lays the basis for corporations to extract billions of dollars every year from women fighting an unwinnable battle for "perfection". Skin creams, make-up, depilatory agents, hair products, teeth whiteners, nail polish, not to mention the magazines, fashionable clothes and dieting aids, all cost women enormous amounts of money, time and energy.
The massive queues of women trying to get their hands on Cellasene, a new, "natural" (and expensive) diet drug, showed how far women have been convinced they should go to remove fictitious cellulite. Cosmetic companies' advertising campaigns, such as Revlon's new "Feel like a woman" campaign, leave no doubt as to the message being sent to women, and fashion companies' perpetual "new look" propels women into purchasing entire new wardrobes at least once a year.
These campaigns all have one thing in common: the message that if you don't have the right make-up, the right clothes, the right hair, the right body, you cannot feel like, or be, a real woman.
But it is not only through the sale of "beauty" products that the capitalists reap mega-profits from sexist stereotypes. They also use women's bodies to sell every commodity a consumer might want. Thus, "beautiful" women are draped over everything from cars and drainpipes to carpets in advertisements, or used to sell items face-to-face. Sometimes, the product for sale isn't even visible in advertisements: breasts are used to represent mugs of beer, thighs become mobile phones. In fact, it is the fantasy of also owning the woman when he buys the product that is being sold to consumers.
The reduction of women to little more than physical objects to be judged, "improved on" and used as props to sell goods and services is denigrating and damaging for women because it ignores, even tries to obliterate, their essence as human beings: their intellect and personality.
Until we live in a non-sexist society that puts all people's health and well-being before the pursuit of private profits, women will not be free of the beauty myth — every successful campaign against the private profit system is a blow to the capitalists' "beauty" prison.