The ugly side of 'beauty'
By Trisha Reimers
Selling "beauty" is big business. It's profitable and it's everywhere.
But the whole idea that there is such a thing as an ideal beauty standard, let alone that women should try to live up to this ideal, is a myth. "Beauty" sells cars, boats and caravans. It's a money-making machine for the fashion and cosmetics industries. But it is a complete fabrication.
The myth is pushed through movies and television, through magazines and newspapers (especially those targeted at women), through art, even through the education system. Countless articles in countless magazines tell us "how to get Demi Moore's body in two weeks". Women can supposedly never be young, thin or beautiful enough.
The ideal put before us is the super-model or the screen star. There are more than 2 billion women; only 10 of them are super-models. And (fortunately) there is only one Demi Moore.
From a very young age, women are taught to judge their worth by how well they stack up against an utterly unrealistic ideal. Young girls are never taught that if their Barbie dolls were real women, they'd be too thin to have a menstrual cycle.
What this means for women is demonstrated by a few statistics:
- Anorexia nervosa is thought to affect 1-5% of women. Bulimia affects a similar number, but may affect as many as one in six tertiary students. More than 90% of cases are adolescent girls or young women.
- 1987 studies of Australian adolescents revealed that dieting and weight control practices are undertaken by 20-45% of adolescent boys and girls, and may begin as young as eight years old.
- A 1994 survey found that at any time at least 30% of women in Australia are on some sort of diet. Fifty-seven per cent had attempted to lose weight in the previous 12 months.
- In a 1993 Tasmanian survey, 79% of women said they were over their preferred weight. According to the ABS's 1989 National Health Survey, however, only 30% of Tasmanian women were really overweight.
Our conception of beauty is presented as "natural beauty", as if this is what it is everywhere and at all times. But throughout history, at different times and in different places, the definition of beauty has varied considerably.
Today it is tall, painfully thin, usually white young women with high cheek bones, but in other societies large women or women with small feet were considered attractive. The beauty ideal is constructed to suit particular interests, today as much as ever.
Convincing women that they can never be thin/young/beautiful enough and that they can never have quite good enough skin/hair/make-up/clothes means that women will inevitably feel less confident about their body and their appearance. It also means that they will feel the need to buy more of these things.
Beauty and self-esteem are taken from us, turned into a commodity, repackaged and sold back to us.
Selling beauty means selling things and making money. The US diet industry is worth $33 billion per year, the US cosmetic surgery industry $300 million. There's even $3 million annually made in sales in Australia of breast implants, in spite of all the evidence of the damage they do to women's health.
This is without factoring in the tens of billions of dollars made by the fashion and cosmetics industries, all on the back of those glossy magazine advertisements of impossibly "beautiful" women (who are routinely computerised and air-brushed in any case). Big bucks indeed.
The culture of female physical beauty does more than sell things to and for women. Advertisements that do not use women's bodies to help sell their product aren't that common any more. Women appear in ads as accessories to an ever increasing range of products — from cars to holidays, from cleaning products to food. Sex sells, and the more a product can be linked with popular conceptions of physical attractiveness, the better.
The women's movement has done much since the 1970s to lift the lid on the corporations that profit from sexism — and to assert that women can, through collective action and struggle, be strong and confident in themselves, freed of the tyranny of "beauty".
This has had a big impact on sales, however — so these industries had to "reinvent" themselves. They took up the language of liberation — you can get liposuction because you "choose" to as an "independent" woman; you can "choose" more (and, funnily enough, higher priced) clothes, not because you have to, but because you can; now women are in control.
The women's magazines have taken up this refrain, and have written volumes on the "beauty myth" and how women should "just be themselves". But on the facing page is another ad for Clairol or Calvin Klein.
Some have raised this brand of hypocrisy to an art form. The Body Shop even produced a little booklet to give out with all purchases with its critique of sexism in the beauty industry. Why? Well, it helps sell its beauty products. The campaign does not say, "Stop wasting your money"; it says, "Spend your money more wisely, with us". It does not say, "Buying products will not increase your self-esteem"; it says, "Buy self-esteem direct, from us".
Part of being actively feminist is challenging the rules for how women should look. We have to oppose a culture which commodifies everything, from self-esteem to beauty, and forces us to buy it back. We have to oppose an economy based on making money from misery and sexism. And we have to say that we want a society where what women look like is less important than what we think and what we're prepared to organise and fight for.
[Trisha Reimers is a member of Resistance in Perth and is the 1999 women's officer for the University of Western Australia Students' Guild.]