But we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden; a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is. Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive? Admiration can include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.

How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipation, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.

How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.

A generation ago, Germaine Greer wondered about women: “What will you do?” What women did brought about a quarter century of cataclysmic social revolution. The next phase of our movement forward as individual women, as women together, and as tenants of our bodies and this planet, depends now on what we decide to see when we look in the mirror.

What will we see?

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

We do not need to change our bodies, we need to change the rules. Beyond the myth, women will still be blamed for our appearances by whomever needs to blame us. So let’s stop blaming ourselves and stop running and stop apologizing, and let’s start to please ourselves once and for all. The “beautiful” woman does not win under the myth; neither does anyone else. The woman who is subjected to the continual adulation of strangers does not win, nor does the woman who denies herself attention. The woman who wears a uniform does not win, nor does the woman with a designer outfit for every day of the year. You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all. The woman [who wins] calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

Rivalry, resentment, and hostility provoked by the beauty myth run deep. Sisters commonly remember the grief of one being designated “the pretty one.” Mothers often have difficulty with their daughters’ blooming. Jealousy among the best of friends is a cruel fact of female love. Even women who are lovers describe beauty competition. It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman’s body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will. At present, “beauty” is an economy in which women find the “value” of their faces and bodies impinging, in spite of themselves, on that of other women’s. This constant comparison, in which one woman’s worth fluctuates through the presence of another, divides and conquers.

To get past this divisiveness, women will have to break a lot of taboos against talking about it, including the one that prohibits women from narrating the dark side of being treated as a beautiful object. From the dozens of women to whom I have listened, it is clear that the amount of pain a given woman experiences through the beauty myth bears no relationship at all to what she looks like relative to a cultural ideal.

While the “beautiful” woman is briefly at the apex of the system, this is, of course, far from the divine state of grace that the myth propagates. The pleasure to be had from turning oneself into a living art object, the roaring in the ears and the fine jetspray of regard on the surface of the skin, is some kind of power, when power is in short supply. But it is not much compared to the pleasure of getting back forever inside the body; the pleasure of discovering sexual pride, a delight in a common female sexuality that overwhelms the divisions of “beauty”; the pleasure of shedding self-consciousness and narcissism and guilt like a chainmail gown; the pleasure of the freedom to forget all about it.

Only then will women be able to talk about what “beauty” really involves: the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on a carousel, hostility and scepticism from other women, adolescence extended longer than it ought to be, cruel aging, and a long hard struggle for identity. And we will learn that what is good about “beauty”—the promise of confidence, sexuality, and the self-regard of a healthy individuality—are actually qualities that have nothing to do with “beauty” specifically, but are deserved by and, as the myth is dismantled, available to all women. The best that “beauty” offers belongs to us all by right of femaleness. When we separate “beauty” from sexuality, when we celebrate the individuality of our features and characteristics, women will have access to a pleasure in our bodies that unites us rather than divides us. The beauty myth will be history.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

The terrible truth is that though the marketplace promotes the [beauty] myth, it would be powerless if women didn’t enforce it against one another. For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

The ideology of “beauty” was a shortcut promise to agitating women—a historical placebo—that we could be confident, valued, heard out, respected, and make demands without fear.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

Young women express feelings of being scared and isolated “insiders” as opposed to angry and united outsiders, and this distinction makes backlash sense: The best way to stop a revolution is to give people something to lose. [The anti beauty myth/feminist movement] would need to politicize eating disorders, young women’s uniquely intense relationship to images, and the effect of those images on their sexuality—it would need to make the point that you don’t have much of a right over your own body if you can’t eat. It would need to analyze the antifeminist propaganda young women have inherited, and give them tools, including arguments like this one, with which to see through it. While transmitting the previous heritage of feminism intact, it would need to be, as all feminist waves are, peer-driven: No matter how wise a mother’s advice is, we listen to our peers. It would have to make joy, rowdiness, and wanton celebration as much a part of its project as hard work and bitter struggle, and it can begin all this by rejecting the pernicious fib that is crippling young women—the fib called postfeminism, the pious hope that the battles have all been won. This scary word is making young women, who face many of the same old problems, once again blame themselves—since it’s all been fixed, right? It strips them of the weapon of theory and makes them feel alone once again. We never speak complacently of the post-Democratic era: Democracy, we know, is a living, vulnerable thing that every generation must renew. The same goes for that aspect of democracy represented by feminism.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

When faced with the [beauty] myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? What is the context? When someone discusses a woman’s appearance to her face, she can ask herself. Is it that person’s business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

It is often said that we must make fashion and advertising images include us, but this is a dangerously optimistic misunderstanding of how the market works. Advertising aimed at women works by lowering our self-esteem. If it flatters our self-esteem, it is not effective. Let’s abandon this hope of looking to the index fully to include us. It won’t, because if it does, it has lost its function. As long as the definition of “beauty” comes from outside women, we will continue to be manipulated by it.

We claimed the freedom to age and remain sexual, but that rigidified into the condition of aging “youthfully.” We began to wear comfortable clothing, but the discomfort settled back onto our bodies. The seventies’ “natural” beauty became its own icon; the 1980s’ “healthy” beauty brought about an epidemic of new diseases and “strength as beauty” enslaved women to our muscles. This process will continue with every effort women make to reform the index until we change our relationship to the index altogether.

The marketplace is not open to consciousness-raising. It is misplaced energy to attack the market’s images themselves: Given recent history, they were bound to develop as they did.

While we cannot directly affect the images, we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them, look directly at one another, and find alternative images of beauty in a female subculture; seek out the plays, music, films that illuminate women in three dimensions; find the biographies of women, the women’s history, the heroines that in each generation are submerged from view; fill in the terrible, “beautiful” blanks. We can lift ourselves and other women out of the myth—but only if we are willing to seek out and support and really look at the alternatives.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

Talking about the beauty myth strikes a nerve which, for most of us, is on some level very raw. We will need to have compassion for ourselves and other women for our strong feelings about “beauty,” and be very gentle with those feelings. If the beauty myth is religion, it is because women still lack rituals that include us; if it is economy, it is because we’re still compensated unfairly; if it is sexuality, it is because female sexuality is still a dark continent; if it is warfare, it is because women are denied ways to see ourselves as heroines, daredevils, stoics, and rebels; if it is women’s culture, it is because men’s culture still resists us. When we recognize that the myth is powerful because it has claimed so much of the best of female consciousness, we can turn from it to look more clearly at all it has tried to stand in for.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

For a woman to go public means she must face being subjected to invasive physical scrutiny, which by definition, as we saw, no woman can pass; for a woman to speak about the beauty myth (as about women’s issues in general) means that there is no right way she can look. There is no unmarked, or neutral, stance allowed women at those times: They are called either too “ugly” or too “pretty” to be believed.

For us to reject the insistence that a woman’s appearance is her speech, for us to hear one another out beyond the beauty myth, is itself a political step forward.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

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 self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from category “woman” to category “ugly,” and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face. The free market will compete to cut up women’s bodies more cheaply, if more sloppily, with no-frills surgery in bargain basement clinics.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[…] the technology exists for wealthy white couples to rent the uteri of poor women of any race to gestate their white babies. Since childbirth “ruins” the figure, the scenario of rich women hiring poor ones to do their ungainly reproductive labor is imminent. And cosmetic surgery has given us little reason to doubt that when the technology exists for it, poor women will be pressed to sell actual body material—breasts or skin or hair or fat—to service the reconstruction of rich women, as people today sell their organs and blood.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, extremely graphic and explicit text descriptions of the reality and aftermath of undergoing face lifts, stomach stapling and liposuction.

​Seriously, don’t press read more if you don’t feel comfortable reading about violence being inflicted on women. I cannot stress how cruel and heartless these descriptions of surgical violence are.

Excerpts from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

Face Lifts:

Face-lifts cause nerve paralysis, infection, skin ulceration, “skin death,” scar overgrowth and postoperative depression. “What a shock! I looked like a truck had hit me! Swollen, bruised, pathetic … I looked freakish … about this time, I was told, many women begin to cry uncontrollably.” “It’s quite painful afterward, because your jaw feels dislocated. You can’t smile, your face aches … I had terrible yellow bruising and trauma.” “An angry infection … hematoma … a half-circle bruise and three distinct lumps, one the size of a giant jawbreaker…. Now I enjoy putting on makeup!” Those are quotes in women’s magazines from women who have had face-lifts.

Intestinal Bypass / Intestinal Stapling / Stomach Stapling:

In the 1970s, intestinal bypass surgery (in which the intestines are sealed off for weight loss) was invented and it multiplied until, by 1983, there were fifty thousand such operations performed a year. Jaw clamps (in which the jaw is wired together for weight loss) were also introduced in the feminist 1970s, and stomach stapling (in which the stomach is sutured together for weight loss) began in 1976. “As time went on,” reports Radiance, “the criteria for acceptance became looser and looser until now anyone who is even moderately plump can find a cooperative surgeon.” Women of 154 pounds have had their intestines stapled together. Though the doctor who developed it restricted the procedure to patients more than 100 pounds overweight, the FDA approved it for “virtually anyone who wants it.”

Intestinal stapling causes thirty-seven possible complications, including severe malnutrition, liver damage, liver failure, irregular heartbeat, brain and nerve damage, stomach cancer, immune deficiency, pernicious anemia, liver failure, and death. One patient in ten develops ulcers within six months. Her mortality rate is nine times above that of an identical person who forgoes surgery; 2 to 4 percent die within days, and the eventual death toll may be much higher. Surgeons “aggressively seek out” patients, and “have no trouble getting patients to sign informed consent forms acknowledging the possibility of severe complications and even death.”

One is not surprised by now to learn that 80 to 90 percent of stomach and intestinal stapling patients are female.

Liposuction:

Liposuction is the fastest-growing of cosmetic surgeries: 130,000 American women underwent the procedure [in 1989], and surgeons sucked 200,000 pounds of body tissue out of them. According to The New York Times, […], 11 women have died from the procedure. At least 3 more have died since that article was written.

What is liposuction (assuming you live through it)? If you are reading the Poutney Clinic’s brochure, it looks like this:

FIGURE IMPROVEMENT BY IMMEDIATE SPOT FAT REDUCTION…. One of the most successful techniques is that developed to refine and reshape the figure. With Lipolysis/Suction assisted Lipectomy a tiny incision is made in each area of excess fat. A very slender tube is then inserted and by gentle, skillful movements aided by a powerful and even suction this unwanted (and often unsightly) fat is removed—permanently.

If you are reading an eyewitness account by journalist Jill Neimark, it looks like this:

[A] man force[s] a plastic tube down a naked woman’s throat. He connects the tube to a pump that, for the next two hours, will breathe for her. Her eyes are taped shut, her arms are stretched out horizontally and her head lolls a little to the side…. She’s in a chemically induced coma known as general anaesthesia … what comes next is almost unbelievably violent. Her surgeon, Dr. Leigh Lachman, begins to thrust the cannula in and out, as rapid as a piston, breaking through thick nets of fat, nerves and tissue in her leg. The doctor is ready to stitch her up. Nearly 2,000 millilitres of tissue and blood have been sucked out of her, any more would put her at risk for massive infection and fluid loss leading to shock and death…. He peels the tape back from her lids, and she stares at him, unseeing. “A lot of people have trouble coming back. Bringing someone out of anaesthesia is the most dangerous pan of an operation.” … [which] can lead to massive infection, excessive damage to capillaries and fluid depletion resulting in shock and coma.

Men usually think of coercion as a threatened loss of autonomy. For women, coercion often takes a different form: the threat of losing the chance to form bonds with others, be loved, and stay wanted. Men think coercion happens mainly through physical violence, but women see physical suffering as bearable compared with the pain of losing love. The threat of the loss of love can put someone back in line faster than a raised fist. If we think of women as the ones who will jump through hoops of fire to keep love, it is only because the threat of lovelessness has been used so far against women rather than against men as a form of political crowd control.

Women’s desperation for beauty is derided as narcissism; but women are desperate to hold on to a sexual center that no one threatens to take away from men, who keep sexual identity in spite of physical imperfections and age. Men do not hear in the same way the message that time is running out, and that they will never again be stroked and admired and gratified. Let a man imagine himself living under that threat before he calls women narcissistic. Fighting for “beauty,” many of us understandably believe we are fighting for our lives, for life warmed by sexual love.

With the threat of lost love comes the threat of invisibility. Extreme age shows the essence of the myth’s inequality: The world is run by old men; but old women are erased from the culture. A banned or ostracized person becomes a nonperson. Ostracism and banning are effective, and leave no proof of coercion: no bars, no laws, no guns. Few can bear being treated as if they are invisible. Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

When women talk about surgery, they speak of “flaws” they “cannot live with,” and they are not being hysterical. Their magazines ask: “Is there life after 40? Is there life after size 16?” and those questions are no joke. Women choose surgery when we are convinced we cannot be who we really are without it. If all women could choose to live with themselves as themselves, most probably would. Women’s fears of loss of identity are legitimate. We “choose” a little death over what is portrayed as an unlivable life; we “choose” to die a bit in order to be born again.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

Are women less hungry, less bloody, if we act as our own torturers?

Most people will say yes, since women do it to themselves, and it is something that must be done. But it is illogical to conclude that there is a different quality to blood or hunger or second-degree burning because it was “chosen.” Nerve endings cannot tell who has paid for the slicing; a raw dermis is not comforted by the motive behind its burning. People respond illogically when confronted with beauty’s pain since they believe that masochists deserve the pain they get because they enjoy it.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth