Beauty and Misogyny

Harmful cultural practices in the West

Sheila Jeffreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317675433
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The new edition of Beauty and Misogyny revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys' uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as it was in 2005 when the first edition of the book was published.

The United Nations concept of "harmful traditional/cultural practices" provides a useful lens for the author to advance her critique. She makes the case for including Western beauty practices within this definition, examining their role in damaging women's health, creating sexual difference and enforcing female deference.

First-wave feminists of the 1970s criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but a later argument took hold that beauty practices were no longer oppressive now that women could "choose" them. In recent years the reality of Western beauty practices has become much more bloody and severe, requiring the breaking of skin and the rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices have not only persisted but become more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing, surgical alteration of the labia and other forms of self-mutilation. The book concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.

A new and thoroughly updated edition of this essential work will appeal to all levels of students and teachers of gender studies, cultural studies and feminist psychology, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health.

1 The ‘grip of culture on the body’

Beauty practices as women's agency or women's subordination

DOI: 10.4324/9781315771458-2

In the 1990s a fundamental disagreement emerged between feminist scholars on Western beauty practices over the extent to which they represent women’s subordinate status or can be seen as the expression of women’s choice or agency. Ideas emerge in particular time periods because of a concatenation of social forces that make them possible. In the 1960s and 1970s the new social movements of feminism, black power, animal liberation, and lesbian and gay politics came into being in response to a mood of hopefulness about the possibility of social change. These social movements were fuelled by a belief in social constructionism and the idea that radical social transformation was possible in the pursuit of social equality. These ideas underpinned the thoroughgoing radical feminist critiques of beauty that emerged from that period.

In the 1980s, however, the ideas of radical feminism, like those of other socially transformative ideologies, were treated to the contempt of right-wing ideologues who called them ‘political correctness’. A new ideology of market fundamentalism was developed to provide the ideological support for the expansion of a newly deregulated rogue capitalism. This stated that the free market, controlled only by the choices of empowered citizens, would create an ideal social and economic structure without interference from the state. Citizenship, in this new worldview, was not about rights but responsibilities, and the citizen was empowered by consumer choice (Evans, 1993).

By the 1990s these ideas about the power of choice influenced the thinking of many feminists too. The idea that women were coerced into beauty practices by the fashion/beauty complex (Bartky, 1990), for instance, was challenged by a new breed of liberal feminists who talked about women being empowered by the feminist movement to choose beauty practices that could no longer be seen as oppressive. The new language that penetrated feminist thinking from the pervasive right-wing rhetoric was that of ‘agency’, ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’. Women became transformed into knowledgeable consumers who could exercise their power of choice in the marketplace. They could pick and choose from practices and products. Feminists who continued to argue that women’s choices were severely constrained and made within a context of women’s relative powerlessness and male dominance were criticized with some acerbity as ‘victim feminists’, i.e. making women into victims by denying their agency (Wolf, 1993).

In this chapter I will examine the ideas of the radical feminist critique of beauty and show how these came to be challenged both by the new liberal feminism and its counterpart in the academy, a variety of postmodern feminism that stresses choice and agency in a similar way. I shall consider the tensions that have developed between the advocates of ‘choice’ and those who emphasize the role of culture and force in exacting women’s conformity to the beauty practices of femininity. I shall conclude with the ideas of some of those feminist theorists and researchers who have provided persuasive explanations of the constraints that restrict the possibilities of women’s agency around beauty practices in male-dominant cultures founded upon sexual difference/deference.

The feminist critique of beauty

Feminist critics of beauty have pointed out that beauty is a cultural practice and one that is damaging to women. For writers such as Andrea Dworkin the most important question was not the extent to which women could express agency and ‘choose’ to wear makeup but what harm beauty practices did to women. Her book Woman Hating is a good example of the powerful critique that radical feminists were making of the notion of beauty in the 1970s (Dworkin, 1974). She analyses the idea of ‘beauty’ as one aspect of the way women are hated in male supremacist culture. Dworkin indicts woman-hating culture for, ‘the deaths, violations, and violence’ done to women and says that feminists, ‘look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it’ (ibid., p. 26).

Dworkin sees beauty practices as having extensive harmful effects on women’s bodies and lives. Beauty practices are not only time-wasting, expensive and painful to self-esteem, but

[s]tandards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom.

(Dworkin, 1974, p. 112)

Beauty standards have psychological effects on women too, because ‘the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one’. Dworkin, like other radical feminist critics of beauty, describes the broad range of practices that women must engage in to meet the dictates of beauty:

In our culture, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement. Hair is dyed, lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed, shadowed; lashes are curled, or false – from head to toe, every feature of a woman’s face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration.

(ibid., p. 112)

Interestingly this list omits cosmetic surgery, which would not make sense today (Haiken, 1997). It omits, too, the ubiquitous use of botulinum toxin (Botox), ‘one of the most poisonous biological substances known’ (Nigam and Nigam, 2010, p. 8), in the form of injections to paralyse women’s facial muscles. Botox treatments show the progress that has been made in making cosmetic surgery and injectable poisons simply alternative forms of makeup in the 30 years since Dworkin embarked upon her analysis. The other oppressive elements of beauty that Dworkin remarks upon are that it is ‘vital to the economy’ and ‘the major substance of male–female role differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman’ (Dworkin, 1974, p. 112). Beauty practices are necessary so that the sexes can be told apart, so that the dominant sex class can be differentiated from the subordinate one. Beauty practices create, as well as represent, the ‘difference’ between the sexes.

Sandra Bartky, who also developed her ideas in those heady days of the 1970s when profound critiques of the condition of women included an analysis of beauty, did address the issue of why women could appear to ‘choose’. She explains why no exercise of obvious force was required to make women engage in beauty practices: ‘It is possible’, she says, ‘to be oppressed in ways that need involve neither physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation; one can be oppressed psychologically’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 23). In support of this she utilizes the work of the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who wrote of the ‘psychic alienation’ of the colonized. The psychological oppression of women, Bartky says, consists of women being ‘stereotyped, culturally dominated, and sexually objectified’ (ibid.). Bartky explains this cultural domination as a situation in which ‘all the items in the general life of our people – our language, our institutions, our art and literature, our popular culture – are sexist; that all, to a greater or lesser degree, manifest male supremacy’ (ibid., p. 25). The absence of any alternative culture within which women can identify a different way to be a woman enforces oppressive practices: ‘The subordination of women, then, because it is so pervasive a feature of my culture, will (if uncontested) appear to be natural – and because it is natural, unalterable’ (ibid.).

The bedrock of this cultural domination is the treatment of women as sex objects and the identification of women themselves with this cultural condition. Bartky defines the practice of sexual objectification thus: ‘a person is sexually objectified when her sexual parts or sexual functions are separated out from the rest of her personality and reduced to the status of mere instruments or else regarded as if they were capable of representing her’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 26). Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves, a process that Catharine MacKinnon calls being ‘thingified’ in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves, and Bartky explains how this works. The wolf-whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without, with the result that, ‘The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man to simply look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle because she must ‘be made to know that I am a “nice piece of ass”: I must be made to see myself as they see me’ (ibid.). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, ‘Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best’ (ibid., p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.

The ‘fashion–beauty complex’, representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, she argues, taken over from the family and church as ‘central producers and regulators of “femininity” (Bartky, 1990, p. 39). The fashion–beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to ‘glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence’, but in fact its aim is to ‘depreciate woman’s body and deal a blow to her narcissism’ so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires ‘either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it’ (ibid.).

Dworkin and Bartky produced their critiques of beauty in the 1970s and early 1980s. The most powerful feminist work on beauty to be published since then, The Beauty Myth (Wolf, 1990), provides an interesting example of how the times had changed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the power of her critique, Naomi Wolf felt it necessary to publish another book within three years, Fire with Fire (1993), which substantially removed the sting from her analysis and set out to distinguish her from the ranks of radical feminists. In her first book, Wolf argued that women are required to engage in beauty practices and that this requirement was tightened in the 1980s as a backlash against the threat of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the greater opportunities, particularly in the workforce, that women were accessing. As she explains, ‘The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us’ (Wolf, 1990, p. 10). Wolf’s analysis suggests that women are coerced into beauty practices by expectations of women in the workplace. Women might have entered workplaces in great numbers in the 1970s, but in order not to threaten men, and in order to meet the requirement that they should be objects for the sexual delight of their male colleagues, they were required to engage in painful, expensive and time-consuming procedures that were not expected of their male counterparts if they wanted to get jobs and keep them. There was a ‘professional beauty qualification’ which accompanied women into the workplace. Interestingly, despite the strength of Wolf’s critique of beauty practices, she does not consider them to be harmful in their own right, only if they are forced upon women rather than freely ‘chosen’. In her last chapter, ‘Beyond the beauty myth’, she asks ‘Does all this mean we can’t wear lipstick without feeling guilty?’ (ibid., p. 270). She answers ‘On the contrary’. She explains:

In a world in which women have real choices, the choices we make about our appearance will be taken at last for what they really are: no big deal. Women will be able thoughtlessly to adorn ourselves with pretty objects when there is no question that we are not objects. Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of expression out of a full range of others.

(Ibid., p. 274)

Her analysis does not suggest that there is a problem with the fact that women, and not men, have to do beauty practices at all, only that they are not free to choose to do so. It is this failure to ask the fundamental questions of why beauty practices are connected with women and why any women would want to continue with them after the revolution that makes The Beauty Myth a liberal feminist book rather than a radical feminist one. Her next book, Fire with Fire, made her liberal feminist credentials clear (Wolf, 1993). In this book she asserts that women can not only choose to wear makeup, but choose to be powerful. The material forces involved in structuring women’s subordination have fallen away to leave liberation a project of individual willpower: ‘If we do not manage to … reach parity in the twenty-first century, it will be because women on some level have chosen [her italics] not to exert the power that is our birthright’ (ibid., p. 274).

Wolf’s description of her clear distress at the negative reactions from audiences to the radicalism of her book on beauty may offer a clue as to why she evolved so swiftly into a fully fledged liberal feminist. After publication, she explains, ‘My job involved engaging, on TV and radio programs, with people who represented the industries I was criticizing. Many were, understandably, angry and defensive. Hosts were sometimes confrontational … I was acutely uncomfortable’ (Wolf, 1993, p. 238). Her experience was a shock, because ‘I had always thought of myself as warm, friendly, and feminine’ and ‘after a vigorous debate, I would come home and cry in my partner’s arms’. Wolf’s experience shows how difficult it is to criticize something so fundamental to male-dominant Western culture as beauty practices. Her reaction to it helps to explain why she chose to write Fire with Fire so soon thereafter, a book which appears to contradict the strong message of The Beauty Myth. She set out to create an unthreatening form of feminism and castigate radical feminists. Radical feminists who campaign against male violence become ‘victim feminists’ who ‘identify with powerlessness’, are ‘judgmental’ particularly of ‘other women’s sexuality and appearance’ and ‘antisexual’ (ibid., p. 137). She seeks to soothe the masculine breasts that might have been ruffled by The Beauty Myth by proclaiming, ‘Male sexual attention is the sun in which I bloom. The male body is ground and shelter to me, my lifelong destination’ (ibid., p. 186). Wolf overcompensated for what she may have seen as the youthful folly of writing a book on beauty which threatened the interests of male dominance. She retreated into a firm public/private distinction which exempts the area of ‘private’ life from political scrutiny and turns it into an arena for the exercise of women’s choices.

The personal is political

The feminist critique of beauty starts from the understanding that the personal is political. Whilst liberal feminists tend to view the realm of ‘private’ life as an area in which women can exercise the power of choice untrammelled by politics, radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon seek to break down the public/private distinction which, they argue, is fundamental to male supremacy. This distinction provides men with a private world of male dominance in which they can garner women’s emotional, domestic, sexual and reproductive energies whilst hiding the feudal power relations of this realm behind the shield of the protection of ‘privacy’. The private world is defended from the point of view of male dominance as one of ‘love’ and individual fulfilment that should not be muddied by political analysis. It is a world in which women simply ‘choose’ to lay out their energies and bodies at men’s disposal and remain, despite whatever violence or abuse is handed out to them. The ‘private’ nature of this world has long protected men from punishment because it has been seen as being outside the law that only applies in the public world. Thus marital rape was not a crime in this worldview, and domestic violence was a personal dispute.

Radical feminist critics argued that, on the contrary, the ‘personal’, i.e. the behaviours of this private world, were indeed ‘political’. Recognizing the ‘personal as political’ allowed women to identify, through consciousness-raising groups and the exchange of experiences, that what they took to be their own personal failings, such as hating their plump stomachs or feigning a headache when they wanted to avoid sexual intercourse without their male partner getting angry, were not just individual experiences. They were the common experiences of women, constructed out of the unequal power relations of the so-called private world, and very political indeed. The private world was recognized as the basis of the power men wielded in the public world of work and government. Men’s public power and achievement, their citizenship status (Lister, 1997), depended upon the servicing they received from women in the home. Not only did women provide this vital backdrop to men’s dominance, but they lacked a class of persons who would do the same for them, thus they were doubly disadvantaged in the public world in comparison with men. The concept that the personal is political enabled feminists to understand the ways in which the workings of male dominance penetrated into their relationships with men. They could recognize how the power dynamics of male dominance made heterosexuality in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The ‘grip of culture on the body’: beauty practices as women’s agency or women’s subordination
• 2 Harmful cultural practices and Western culture
• 3 Transfemininity: ‘dressed’ men reveal the naked reality of male power
• 4 Pornochic: prostitution constructs beauty
• 5 Fashion and misogyny
• 6 Making up is hard to do
• 7 Men’s foot and shoe fetishism, and the disabling of women
• 8 Cutting up women: beauty practices as self-mutilation by proxy
• Conclusion: a culture of resistance
• References
• Index