The body policeThe body police
A couple of weeks ago, Portmans fashion company launched a new, outrageous television advertisement.
The ad begins like a community service announcement addressing the social pressures on young women to look "good" — "But at what cost?", the narrator asks. In answer, the ad cuts to zippy catwalk mode: "Shirts and skirts only $29.95 at Portmans".
Almost all women watch television, read magazines and books and live their everyday lives subject to enormous social pressure to meet the feminine ideal.
The mass media barrage about women's body image includes telling us what to wear, what to eat (or not eat), what to pluck or wax or shave, what to cake on our faces and bodies, how to smell, how our hair should look, ad infinitum. It tells us how we can be "perfect".
An article in the July 12 Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald was particularly revealing. Without even a hint of criticism, the author describes the secret behind the success of Venezuelan women in world beauty contests — a school run by beauty "expert" Osmel Sousa.
Twenty-eight women are selected to attend the school every year. They undertake six months of intensive grooming, workouts, diets, orthodontic work and plastic surgery. The women are prodded, poked, starved, operated on, criticised and judged.
As one aspiring beauty queen said: "Being a Miss [Venezuela] is about being a product, and a product must sell as well as possible".
Beauty queens generate big bucks for the beauty industry. They are part of the process of railroading women in general into the search for unnatural and unattainable "perfection" by spending billions of dollars on cosmetics, clothing, weight loss products and plastic surgeons.
Aside from the profits generated by this con, the beauty myth has the added advantage for the powerful in this sexist society of keeping women focused on that extra bit of flab on their thighs instead of looking up and realising that any society that makes women feel so bad about such meaningless things is truly sick and must be changed.
If we believe most of what we hear, women today have made it. They are now assertive and successful (some are even making it in the boardrooms and parliament) and are largely free to choose, to accept or reject the traditional female role. If women choose to strive to be beautiful, that is their prerogative.
Past generations of feminists campaigned for real choices for women, for equality in school, work and the home, and against limiting sex roles.
These goals were only partially won and are now under serious attack. The current cuts to child-care, jobs and education, the attacks on abortion access and affirmative action, and the re-emergence of proudly sexist ads like Portmans' are all part and parcel of a more generalised backlash against the earlier gains of feminists.
More women do need to exercise their prerogative: not to conform, but to blast apart the idea that women are no longer oppressed and to work with others to fight for genuine choices in all areas for all women.
By Marina Carman