Chapter Four
The Beauty Context
Looks, Social Theory, and Feminism

Is it possible for most women today to live unhampered by judgments about our appearance? Are we free of looks-ism? Decidedly not, not yet, neither in the United States nor in most places around the world where rewards to beauty still collude with sexist injustices. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman," Simone de Beauvoir bravely declared as she tied the development of femininity to bodily objectification.^[1] Central to that process was the creation in women of heightened concerns about approval from gazing male others. Will he love me if I look this way or that? Could I contentedly look on myself? What emphasizes my better features, or best hides my haunting inadequacies? How can I avoid losing my attractiveness as I face inevitable aging, decay, death?

The Second Sex was published in 1949, over a decade before second-wave feminism confronted America in the 1960s and 1970s, and long before gender bias was widely acknowledged. But, in the interim, has much really changed? Have we really "come a long way, baby," as the woman in the Virginia Slims ad absurdly intones? Or, perhaps, matters have shifted in the opposite direction. Alongside the emergence of feminism and feminisms, women's studies, men's studies, gender sections of bookstores, discourses about discourses on sex, postmodernism, and embodiment—when it comes to looks, our situation may have worsened

right in front of our eyes. This chapter's purpose is to explore how such an ironic predicament itself became possible, and why.

Looks-ism: An Overview

I do not employ the word looks-ism devoid of irony, but rather with some skepticism about the infinite multiplication of "isms" conceivable amid human interaction. So many isms have been generated that one wonders whether oppression itself, its most common contours and general motivations, has been banished as a focal point for intellectual scrutiny. No, I mean to highlight something else by referring to looks-ism as a phenomenon discriminatory insofar as it sets up categorical divisions, placing far greater importance for one sex than the other on the cultivation and maintenance of particular bodily appearances to gain love, status, and recognition. The term compels recognition that beauty expectations are systemic; it insists that they are anything but arbitrary or merely idiosyncratic. Instead, such expectations conform to Emile Durkheim's simple yet far-reaching definition of a "social fact." These are aspects of the world that exist above and beyond the ability of individuals to control; their existence is verified even more when one attempts to defy than to accommodate oneself within them. As social facts, then, beauty expectations exist prior to us, thick and weighty though by no means unalterable.^[2]

Of course, in an excessively individualistic culture permeated by the commodification of just about everything, the counterargument can be made that appearance-based exhortations and rewards routinely affect everyone , and not just women.^[3] In this regard, too, the term looks-ism allows for flexibility, insofar as women (and other men) often judge men as well by looks-based criteria. Furthermore, in a lawyerlike defense it could be added that among beauty's by-products are to be found playful pleasures as authentic as painful tyrannies. But despite the democratic potential of looks-ism—and even its increasingly universal application—its force remains extraordinarily gender-specific. As such, it would be foolish, and suspiciously so, to contend that appearance-based exhortations and rewards do not still carry differential meaning, effects, and consequences for women. For women, the evaluation of looks has been systematically bound to the asymmetries of gender as a whole. Whether a woman is "lovely" or "homely" has affected prospects of marriage and heterosexual companionship, states that

themselves have been differently touted to women than to men. It is hard to underestimate the pervasive influences of this cultural divergence on both women and men's day-to-day feelings and experiences. For instance, it remains immensely more likely that a sixty-year-old heterosexual woman who for whatever reason finds herself alone—perhaps divorced, widowed, or simply as a result of life choices—will worry, and have reasons to worry, about her chances of finding sexual and emotional companionship than will a man of the same age. He, in general, still sees his options as relatively open and fluid; she fears being seen as ridiculous or sexually undesirable.

Thus, looks-based assessments are commonly linked to our ability to achieve the kind of emotional happiness that all human beings commonly seek. Simultaneously, the possible shapes of such satisfaction have been constricted both by sex and by presuppositions about heterosexuality that grew up alongside sexism.^[4] For looks have been unequally connected to women's very sense of themselves, to traditional expectations and to the force of tradition, to whether we believe ourselves to be attractive or unattractive human beings in general. Though in many situations these existential realities affect men, they usually do not determine men's lives.^[5] This structured and constructed social fact appears in all societies where male domination prevails, and is thus found almost everywhere. Consequently, whether we refer to expectations about appearance in material or ideological terms—whether we prefer to speak of an institutionalized "fashion-beauty" complex or an enculturated "beauty myth" (the terms favored by feminist authors Sandra Bartky and Naomi Wolf, respectively)—looks-ism poses special problems for women, though by no means only for women nor for all women identically.^[6] The problem of looks-ism is especially applicable to heterosexual women, though the rigid expectations we will see that it creates—about youth, about race, about some body types rather than others—may be felt in a variety of ways potentially detrimental to all women, and indeed to all human beings.

Keeping this usage in mind, we can proceed to investigate the claim that women's situation in terms of looks-ism has gotten worse. Indeed, evidence from many sources suggests that women's concern about looks has intensified in recent years. Confirmation can be gleaned both from without and within, by stepping back to survey the wider social landscape or by turning inward to examine personal experience. In Unbearable Weight (1993), feminist philosopher Susan Bordo describes an eightfold increase in the number of inquiries received by the

New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia between 1980 and 1984, after experts on eating disorders in the 1970s had proclaimed anorexia to be rare. Other statistics that Bordo cites are equally disturbing: 1 of every 200 to 250 women between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two suffers from anorexia; 12 to 33 percent of female college students struggle with induced vomiting, diuretics, and laxatives. Strikingly, too, 90 percent of anorectics are women, as are 80 percent of those who have their intestines partially removed to help control their weight.^[7]

Nor is anorexia confined mostly to a narrowly defined group, as was for many decades too casually presumed. Recent research shows that eating disorders reach across categories.^[8] According to sociologist Rebecca Thompson, both overeating and undereating affect women of differing races, classes, and sexual orientations. This goes against the medical establishment's conventional wisdom about anorexia, historically believed to predominate only among white and middle- to upper-class teenagers. However, Thompson's interviews show not only that a much more varied group of women experience eating problems but that they attribute these problems' genesis to complex sources: to a range of biases and frustrations broader than feelings about their looks alone. The reasons they offer include, and sometimes center on, traumatizing experiences of discriminations related to race, class, or both. Still, Thompson's research confirms that eating disorders continue to manifest themselves in largely gender-skewed forms. Thus whether racism, poverty, childhood sexual abuse, or looks-ism per se is felt to have been its major stimulus, anorexia still disproportionately affects and threatens the health of women.^[9]

There are also signs that anorexia is affecting girls at younger and younger ages; it is no longer rare for eight-, nine-, or ten-year-olds to fret about their weight.^[10] Such worries bear little relation to medical well-being, fitness, or even conventional standards of good looks. For instance, in a 1984 Glamour poll of 33,000 adult women, 75 percent stated that they were too "fat," although 30 percent were under their medically thought-to-be-optimal weight (and only 25 percent were above).^[11] Other sources also suggest that such self-critical attitudes are frequently—and, indeed, more frequently of late—to be found among adolescent girls as well. Take another recent popular cultural indicator, a 1995 best-seller titled Reviving Ophelia; this book's commercial success is in itself revealing. The author, clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, emphasizes that social pressures are creating more severe depression,

suicidal feelings, and anorexic tendencies in this generation of young girls than in prior generations. Despite the changes since the 1960s, and the "lip service paid to equality," discrimination remains a reality and the cultural changes of the last decade have made adolescence even more difficult. High on the list of the pressures cited by Pipher is the desire to be beautiful, which she found commonly expressed as appearance has grown increasingly important:

In the last two decades, we have developed a national cult of thinness. What is considered beautiful has become slimmer and slimmer. For example, in 1950 the White Rock mineral water girl was 5 feet 4 thin inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. Today she is 5 feet 10 inches and weights 110 pounds.

Girls compare their own bodies to our cultural ideals and find them wanting. . .. The social desirability research in psychology documents our prejudices against the unattractive, particularly the obese, who are the social lepers of our culture. A recent study found that 11 percent of Americans would abort a fetus if they were told it had a tendency to obesity. By age five, children select pictures of thin people when asked to identify good-looking others. . . .

Girls are terrified of being fat, as well they should be. Being fat means being left out, scorned and vilified. . .. Almost all adolescent girls feel fat, worry about their weight, diet and feel guilty when they eat. . . .

Particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, there's been an explosion of girls with eating disorders. When I speak at high schools, girls surround me with confessions about their eating disorders. When I speak at colleges, I ask if any of the students have friends with eating disorders. Everyone's hand goes up. Studies report than on any given day in America, half our teenage girls are dieting and that one in five young women has an eating disorder.^[12]

Pipher's concerns have also been confirmed by academic researchers. In a 1990 study of Seventeen magazine, Kate Peirce concluded that the feminist movement may have influenced editorial content in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By 1985, however, 60 percent of the editorial copy that year was devoted to beauty, fashion, cooking, and decorating.^[13] One finds this situation confirmed anecdotally as well, through the stories and lives of friends or associates who have young daughters concerned about their weight, noses, or hair, often at even earlier ages than mothers in their thirties or forties recall themselves worrying. For instance, when I mentioned the subject to a former professor who lives with a well-known feminist writer and activist, he urged me to please send him a copy of whatever I wrote on this topic. Even though their ten-year-old daughter is by conventional standards considered "very

pretty," she is already cautious about her weight and sharply criticizes her mother's nose as allegedly much too large. Another colleague, who has herself suffered lifelong discrimination because of her weight, suggested that I interview her four-year-old niece for this essay. Not only did this small child continually mock her aunt's "fatness," but during several visits to restaurants she modestly ordered for herself only a "diet Coke and garden salad."

Even as worries about looks commence in young women ever earlier, these anxieties also seem to be enduring longer at the other end of the life cycle, accentuating concerns as women age. Cosmetic surgery is the most obvious case in point. There is currently a boom in this field, both in the United States and Europe. In Backlash (1991), Susan Faludi notes that cosmetic surgery is the fastest-growing subspecialty in American medicine; in The Beauty Myth , Wolf estimates that operations doubled every five years in the United States before tripling between 1984 and 1986 (the rate has doubled every decade in Britain).^[14] In Germany, over 100,000 cosmetic surgery operations are annually performed; in the Netherlands, between 10,000 and 20,000. Back in the United States, more than two million procedures were undertaken in 1988, a figure even more striking in that it registers an increase from 590,550 in 1986.^[15] According to Kathy Davis, using 1987 data, 90 percent of the operations are performed on women: virtually all breast corrections, 91 percent of face-lifts, 86 percent of eyelid reconstructions, and 61 percent of all nose surgery. In all, women are undertaking nine times more operations than are men.^[16]

A study by Eugenia Kaw yields similar results, concluding that 20 percent of all cosmetic surgery patients in the United States in 1990 were African American, Latino, or Asian American; over 60 percent of this group were women.^[17] As Thompson's interviews suggested, racism can play a crucial role; Naomi Murakawa has pointed out that many Asian American women turn to blepharoplasty, or double eyelid surgery, for reasons that have at least as much to do with race as with gender. According to Murakawa, the imposition of racialized standards often generates the feeling that unless Asian women live up to white Western ideals of beauty, they will not feel valued or accepted.^[18]

This development can be seen just as clearly by examining the data of everyday experiences, anecdotal evidence, the testimony of inner feelings. One only has to casually regard the walls of New York City's subway cars, or skim through the pages of the Village Voice, New York magazine, or the LA Weekly , to find more advertisements for free plastic

surgery consultations than would have been seen just a decade ago. Whether self-identified as feminists or not, women more often than men are finding the will, time, and money to surgically alter their bodies. The perception that such desires are becoming increasingly common figured prominently among the inspirations of Kathy Davis's excellent interview-based study on women's reasons for undertaking cosmetic surgery in the Netherlands, perhaps the only society in the world to have included this surgery among its national health insurance benefits.^[19] As Davis recounts, she decided to write a book after conversing with a friend who was

an attractive, self-confident, successful professional woman. She was also a feminist. To my surprise, she told me over coffee that she was about to have her breasts enlarged. I must have looked fairly flabbergasted, as she immediately began defending herself. She said that she was tired of putting up with being flat-chested. She had tried everything (psychoanalysis, feminism, talks with friends), but no matter what she did, she simply could not accept it. She saw no other solution but to do something about it. Finally, she said, she was going to "take her life in her own hands."^[20]

Nor is it difficult to find such stories closer to one's own life, to one's own mind-and-body. Expressing feelings reminiscent of those described by Davis's interviewees, a dear friend of mine who is single and in her late fifties told me how she felt much better—ten years younger, able to see herself again as a sexualized being, not ashamed to meet men—after her face-lift and having the skin tightened beneath her chin. These elective medical technologies, which when first developed were usually available only to the upper class, have recently become accessible to persons on a fairly tight budget like my friend's, going down in relative price over time just like VCRs or computer software. To be sure, in her case much saving was required, and the cost of such operations is still not even close to being comfortable for many single women, given their average incomes and the enormous disparities of class in the United States.^[21]

Nevertheless, it would be a gross exaggeration to imply that more women than not wish to technologically remold their/our bodies. Greater numbers do so now than in previous decades, but for most people an operation is often frightening, unaffordable, deemed unnecessary, or just plain unwanted. For both sexes cosmetic surgery remains an exception, albeit a growing one, to the rule.^[22] Not so misleading is the same statement, however, when applied to cosmetics alone. When it comes to the popularity of beauty aids of all sizes, kinds, and prices,

most women partake of their advertised magic, hoping to produce at least temporarily beautifying effects. Signs of expansion, not diminution or even stabilization, are to be found here. The cosmetics industry has been remarkably profitable, managing to grow and thrive steadily through the fitful stops and starts of late-twentieth-century capitalism. In Labeling Women Deviant (1984), sociologist Edwin Schur estimates 1979 expenditures on cosmetics and personal hygiene products as follows: cosmetics, nearly $3 billion; women's hair products, nearly $2 billion; women's fragrances, close to $2 billion; skin preparations, approximately $1.5 billion; and diet aids, close to $400 million.^[23] Compare this with figures a little over a decade later when Wolf estimates the diet industry in 1990 to be a vast $33 billion business, the cosmetics industry to gross $20 billion annually, and cosmetic surgery to gross $300 million.^[24]

By this point, perhaps I can rest my case, or at least the part of my case that frames my larger concern: the still asymmetric problem posed by beauty expectations—by "1ooks-ism"—for many women, and therefore for contemporary feminism. This ongoing dilemma seems to have worsened in certain ways; at minimum, the situation has not altered. Based on this social knowledge, then, what ought to or can be done? Before considering that question, a good deal of analytic ground must first be covered. Thus the next section takes up a whole complex of reasons for so much interest continuing to be placed, and investments made, in beauty as we know it. This segment explores a number of theoretical possibilities, ranging from biology to the social, cultural, economic, and back again. Why, and whence, these hugely common concerns about dieting, and dieting ever younger? Why, and whence, the determination to look younger, and to keep doing so at older and older ages? What alternative explanations can be credibly entertained, gender-related and not?

At the same time, "Why Looks-ism?" addresses another question that I may seem to have foreclosed prematurely, assuming rather than demonstrating a negative, doomsaying view. How do the statistics and anecdotes above justify my contention that things have "worsened"? Clearly, I am making a value judgment, stubbornly and unfashionably, though in this era the epistemological validity and power of ethical claims have themselves been jeopardized, and those making them thrown on the defensive. Some might argue that perhaps our beauty system, our present situation, isn't so bad after all. Yet, as we will see, not only do our society's obsession with and overvaluation of looks

create gender-skewed damages, but beauty expectations for everyone are illusory in the extreme. Above all, paradoxically and by no means obviously, looks-ism is not what it appears .

Society has confiated beauty and attraction , enmeshing them so closely together that we become utterly alienated from our full experiencing of the latter because of the supposed power of the former. In the process, the concept of "beauty" too has become contaminated and oversimplified to the point where it must be totally rethought. Thus throughout this chapter, I argue for both the desirability and necessity of a different understanding of attraction . Though some people will find this revision of greater relevance than others, in principle, its application is not limited to people of only some social backgrounds and sexual orientations. Rather, dominant ideas and illusory notions are likely to restrict the cultural imagination available to all members of a particular society.

For our ongoing elevation of looks to a disproportionately privileged position does not accurately capture what are people's actually far more diverse, complicated, and multidimensional experiences of intense attraction to one another. We are frequently stimulated by someone's energy and movements in thought and body, by subtle responses evoked through an interplay of emotional, intellectual, physical, spiritual, and psychological factors. Moreover, such stimulations occur on levels at once social, cultural, and symbolic, so that the attraction is rarely to beauty per se even initially , the moment at which even those sympathetic to my contention might be dubious. But initial attractions may be already richly symbolic: the way a given woman, a given man, moves and sets off diverse associations in one's mind as well as body can explain even "love" or "lust" at first sight.

In what follows, by no means do I intend to posit a merely utopian critique, but I mean to render our notions of beauty and attraction more complex and indeed realistic. For there is little point in recommending an alternative vision impossible to be lived in the world as we know it. Instead, I will investigate the fascinating question of how looks-ism succeeds so brilliantly at maintaining what strikes me as a quite remarkable sham, a rather amazing mass deceit. Although in its tremendous oversimplifications it does not come close to matching our experience, it is nevertheless sustained from without and frequently reproduced from within. How and why does looks-ism manage to stay so central to our beliefs and experiences about attraction in spite of contravening evidence of a much more complex day-to-day reality—that is, of love, erot-

icism, desire including but also regularly and already transcending reactions to conventional "looks"?

Nothing in the following sections should be taken to mindlessly deny the relevance to this discussion of fitness and bodily well-being, of considerations about health. Without doubt, at certain levels of under- or overweight, the quality and even continuance of life itself can be put at risk. Likewise, it would be silly to overlook the enormous pleasures to be found in various forms of exercise, in bodily control and discipline, in athletic and musical exertions that link mental and bodily dynamics and practices. Becoming attracted to a "fit" person may incorporate mental as well as bodily dimensions even if we do not explicitly admit that we are drawn to a characterological manifestation, to a symbolic representation in bodily form of our own projected yearnings for control and discipline . But, as Susan Bordo has also noted, more than meets the eye is culturally operative here as well. Clearly, looks-ism goes well beyond mere considerations of health. Those who are "obese" in the United States know only too poignantly that the social attitudes they encounter commonly do not reflect kind and disinterested medical concerns but disdain, repugnance, and sometimes even hate. The intensity of such reactions cannot be explained on the grounds of health or fitness alone. Similarly, current interest in fitness, and women's (sometimes men's) growing interest in cosmetic surgery, frequently transcends simple considerations of health, even turning into just the opposite—to behaviors that gravely and often obsessively endanger health and even survival. Such efforts may become symbolic rituals to find, through looks, forms of love and attention originally frustrated or denied elsewhere.

Such caveats apply not only to "Why Looks-ism?" but to the following section, "Why Looks-ism Now? " Here, too, a range of interlocking theses explore precisely why the situation may have intensified in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. It is certainly possible that in other societies, analogous cultural and socioeconomic developments may be fostering comparable anxieties about bodily appearances; I will leave it to readers to assess whether this analysis applies elsewhere. Since beauty expectations continue to be mostly aimed at women, in whom they produce varying consequences, the final section ("Beauty—For Women and Feminists") examines complicated divisions that come into being along overlapping social axes, from the good woman/bad woman dichotomy on through class, race or ethnicity, and age. Such an analysis is necessary so that we can circle back to explore our opening

dilemma in the chapter's concluding section: "What Has Been and Can Be Done?"

One last cautionary note before continuing: with regard to beauty, our historical context is a highly contradictory one. On the one hand, the very existence of feminism has made women ostensibly more aware of and sensitized to potential damages wrought by sexism and gender-biased looks-ism. After all, The Beauty Myth and Backlash resonated with contemporary readers, quickly becoming best-sellers in the early 1990s and bringing both Wolf and Faludi commercial name recognition. This response attests both to how much remains to be done and to feminism's immense and ongoing accomplishments, to the historic changes that have gradually been taking hold. Yet on the other hand, we just as surely know that the Virginia Slims ad lies: we haven't come anywhere near far enough (except in margins, niches) to overcoming not only beauty expectations but also many other vestiges of sexism as they affect all women, poor and well-to-do, across race and ethnicity and sexual orientations. But then what are we to do amid such insufficient and incomplete changes—how to survive, how nonetheless to enjoy those pleasures available to us? Understandably, many women may pragmatically conclude that looks-ism is simply something we have to live with into the foreseeable future; in any case, maybe it has some benefits, if only for some of us and some of the time. Maybe it's not so bad after all . . . maybe we can devise feminist reinterpretations, feminist reappropriations . . .?

Yet even more important to emphasize is a thought-provoking resemblance between contemporary debates about beauty and the other "sex debates" and "sex wars" that have likewise occupied feminists since the late 1970s and early 1980s.^[25] These could more specifically be dubbed sex versus sexism debates, since the "sides" have repeatedly broken down along the following similar lines. On one side are generally found those feminists who underscore women's needs and rights to pleasure (emotionally, bodily, sexually) at the moment , even as and if the larger male-dominated society that surrounds us remains violent or inequitable, showing class and racial as well as gender bias overall. On the other side are those who emphasize the need to transform male-dominated social structures, to consistently indict patriarchy, even if in the process less attention is paid to encouraging whatever personal pleasures women can find and take now .

Thus experiencing pleasures in the present has been set against objecting to inequities still lingering from the past. And it is a theme, a

split, that over the last decades has shaped the discussion of a succession of substantive issues: whether pornography should remain uncensored, or not; whether sadomasochistic sexuality should be practiced, or not; whether prostitution ought be legitimized as "sex work" or remain illegal; whether violence against women in American society has been paid too much attention, or not nearly enough.^[26] The current feminist debate over our present subject, beauty, is therefore by no means exceptional in its structure. Is the quest for beauty really such a severe problem or not? Moreover, this debate seems to be intensifying. In other words, feminist disagreement over what beauty means for women seems to be heightening in a way that parallels the very phenomenon examined —that is, the way in which looks-ism continues to survive and even to grow as a hugely ambivalent source of pains and pleasures for women in general. As we will see in "Beauty—For Women and Feminists," this may redound to the benefit of the "beauty myth," leaving the basic idea of beauty still unexamined and waiting to be born.

Three examples vividly illustrate the current deepening of feminist debate about beauty. First, the emergence of a so-called Madonna phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s had to do with many things, but a debate over looks was close to its core. When teaching during the academic year 1990-91, I was shown three senior theses whose central focus was whether or not Madonna could properly be called a feminist. Following the publication of Madonna's own book Sex (1992), moreover, a group of academics contributed essays to a 1993 volume titled The Madonna Connection . It presents a range of opinions on the extent to which Madonna helps, or harms, the broader gendered problem I have been dubbing "looks-ism." Thus, for instance, Cathy Schwich-tenberg writes admiringly of Madonna: "Through strategies of simulation, she transforms the 'truth' of gender into drag, a dialectical fragmentation between two terms, and then fissures this destabilized sex identity further by means of splitting and displacement to advance a prodigious sexual plurality. In more general terms, her disingenuous figuration says much about the political promise of postmodern strategies."^[27]

Susan Bordo disagrees, calling attention instead to the illusion that Madonna can indefinitely remake herself. For Bordo, Madonna may be a "postmodern heroine" but not necessarily an admirable one, nor a good role model for young women already confronting sexist biases. In watching Madonna, one forgets the huge amount of work that was required to discipline her body and maintain the image of "Madonna";

instead, Bordo stresses the material limits within which even a Madonna has no choice but to operate, pointing out her eventual subordination to conventional beauty norms and cults of thinness:

Madonna has been normalized; more precisely, she has self-normalized. Her "wanna-bes" are following suit. Studies suggest that as many as 80% of nine-year-old suburban girls (the majority of whom are far from overweight) are making rigorous dieting and exercise the organizing discipline of their lives. They don't require Madonna's example, of course, to believe that they must be thin to be acceptable. But Madonna clearly no longer provides a model of resistance or "difference" for them. . . .

Indeed, the video's (Open Your Heart) postmodern conceits, I would suggest, facilitate rather than deconstruct the presentation of Madonna's body as an object on display. . .. On this level, any parodic or de-stabilizing element appears as utterly, cynically, mechanically tacked on, in bad faith, a way of claiming trendy status for what is really just cheesecake—or, perhaps, pornography.^[28]

Bordo's final words are even more decisive:

Turning to Madonna and the liberating postmodern subjectivity that McClary and others claim she is offering: the notion that one can play a porno house by night and regain one's androgynous innocence by day does not seem to me to be a refusal of essentialist categories about gender, but rather a new inscription of mind/body dualism. . .. This abstract, unsituated, disembodied freedom, I have argued in this chapter, celebrates itself only through the effacement of the material praxis of people's lives, the normalizing power of cultural images, and the sadly continuing realities of domination and subordination.^[29]

We can take a second, more recent, example. In Reshaping the Female Body (1995), Kathy Davis also places her book within a particular feminist debate over beauty—this time concerning her specific focus, cosmetic surgery. She found that when she appeared on panels to present her research conclusions—that given the lack of change in attitudes, a state of affairs that many women are quick to comprehend, cosmetic surgery can be "empowering"—audiences reacted critically. She notes that they approved Kathryn Morgan's view on cosmetic surgery as the more properly feminist one.^[30] In the tradition of other "sex debates," Morgan takes a far more censorious attitude toward cosmetic surgery and Davis's perspective, stressing the patriarchal attitudes that are reinforced every time a particular woman undertakes surgical changes to her body.

The third group of examples bring us to the time of my writing these

pages, the summer of 1996; coincidentally, interest in the subject of beauty was itself highly visible. Many journalists were asking why cosmetic surgery is gaining in popularity and noting the huge amounts of money being spent to alter supposedly imperfect bodies.^[31] Others hailed the emergence of a new beauty ideal in the "body custom-built for athletics," a look that allows women both to sport muscles and to be attractive.^[32] Around the same time, Nancy Friday's Power of Beauty also appeared, a 552-page text that could hardly be further from Naomi Wolf's earlier observations in The Beauty Myth or give better evidence of growing debate. For Friday argues that the "old feminist" attitudes toward sex and beauty have alienated many potential feminists over the last twenty years:

Why did a book like Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth rally women from college campuses across the country? It offered the standard panacea for all of women's ills: Big Bad Men made me pursue beauty, starve my body. As much media coverage as the book received, it didn't detract women from the heated pursuit of beauty that had started up again in the mid-eighties. Nor did it deter the author from fondly including men in her next book, who turn out to be beloved, wanted, needed.

Beauty/sex/men will be that route by which we exit the old feminism. It is a good road; well argued, written about, and practiced, it is already taking us into a more modern feminism. Writers like Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Nadine Strossen, to name a few, have already put their published voices on the line; puff-balls of smoke from the old feminist headquarters label them "pseudo" feminists, post-feminists, "faux" feminists, silly girlish names that betray the weaknesses of the old guard.

Thus, Friday argues, Gloria Steinem "excommunicates" Paglia "from 'her' feminism" because the critic has the temerity to disagree with her and to be "much in favor of beauty, power and sex."^[33]

While Friday's book hardly offers a full-fledged theory, its ideas certainly capture the flavor of a historical moment in which assumptions about beauty are not changing. What appears to be a more coherent ideology surfaced in Newsweek's cover story of 3 June 1996: "The Biology of Beauty: What Science Has Discovered about Sex Appeal." Quoting several anthropologists and psychologists, Geoffrey Cowley states: "when it comes to raw sex appeal, a nice chin is no match for a perfectly sculpted torso—specially from a man's perspective. Studies from around the world have found that while both sexes value appearance, men place more stock in it than women. And if there are social reasons for that imbalance, there are also biological ones. . .. The new beauty research does have troubling implications. First, it suggests that we're

designed to care about looks, even though looks aren't earned and reveal nothing about character."^[34]

Thus, not only is there growing debate within feminism about beauty but the topic seems at the same time to have become linked to a wider 1990s willingness to rediscover and revalidate sociobiological perspectives. This tendency, which appears cyclically, is usually attached to politically conservative impulses. In the 1990s biological analyses have been applied to a wide range of issues from crime to welfare—witness the reception of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's Bell Curve (1994)—before this more recent application to beauty.

In the case of feminism, however, I sense that arguments over beauty have been unwittingly shaped by the either/or conceptual framework that has characterized sex debates over the course of the 1980s and the 1990s.^[35] In beauty, like the other issues dividing feminists, is symbolized a need to move beyond such intellectual and political polarization. For, of course, Madonna can and may indeed still believe in feminist goals; of course, women can feel empowered, and still be feminists, when turning to cosmetic surgery because they fear loss of social value in day-to-day life. Simultaneously, it is also true that Madonna is likely to have a hard time not being affected by the problems she parodies while aging herself: can and will there be a "Madonna" when she is sixty-five?

So, too, considerations of biological health and socially constructed sexism are simultaneously enmeshed within the phenomenon I have been calling looks-ism. There is truth in both —all—of these statements. But so what? Such dichotomous perspectives can lead us to concentrate on the wrong questions—"wrong" insofar as such either/or oppositions generate inadvertently depolicitizing effects. For once this has been said and done, then what —where do we go from here? Instead of asking "Is Madonna a feminist?" we can concentrate more productively on the social conditions that give rise to this dilemma in the first place. Rather than raise a divisive and guilt-engendering question, "Can the woman who undertakes cosmetic surgery be a feminist?" it is much more useful to focus on ensuring that women have every reason to feel, in our society, that it is possible to still be viewed as attractive when aging without such surgery . Unless we insist that the problem be posed in such a way that we focus our criticism and calls for change on collective practices and representations, and not simply on individual decisions, we risk perpetuating an unacceptable state of affairs. We risk maintaining the status quo simply by asking too much of those individuals and too little of that still highly discriminatory society.

In the end, then, we have to come back to the issue of what is to be done. How can we create a future that no longer engenders beauty expectations in a way that harms both sexes, one more than the other (affecting women and men through other social distinctions, too, notably race and class, which frequently overlap)? How can expectations about appearance be transformed beyond recognition, a change that potentially benefits all human beings? For even if not consciously or explicitly recognized, a paradox is there, lurking in our social unconsciousness: as looks-ism begins to die, only then can erotic attraction start fully and democratically to thrive.

Why Looks-ism?

When broaching the topic of beauty expectations in a recent undergraduate class, I told my students about a conversation with a close friend. This man, who is very sympathetic to feminism, had asked me some months earlier if I knew Naomi Wolf personally. If so, he would be grateful for an introduction since he believed he had fallen in love. "How could you have fallen in love," I inquired only half-jokingly, "when you have never even met this person?" "But I have just seen her picture on the back cover of The Beauty Myth ," my friend replied. The combination of that glimpse of a very attractive woman with long brown hair and the feminist intelligence demonstrated in the book had sealed his infatuation.

I believe my friend allowed me to tell this tale in a classroom, as he agreed to its retelling here, because we both realized the irony of his yearning for the author of The Beauty Myth on the basis of her looks. And yet, as we both also understood, it was not just her looks at all. My friend is unconventional and progressive in most of his views, and many women think him "cool": a leftist, political, with fond memories of the 1960s, thoughtful, articulate; certainly, he would not have become infatuated with simply anyone—not with a Phyllis Schlafly nor Margaret Thatcher, no matter how beautiful they might or might not have been. Rather, the fact that Wolf wrote The Beauty Myth and was a feminist made the idea of being attracted to her that much more appealing. It was not a politically incorrect attraction; it potentially as-suaged inklings of guilt in someone who intellectually understands, and sincerely agrees with, most feminist indictments of sexism and its ills.

Yet from the standpoint not only of this generally pro-feminist male but also of our present inquiry into what this implies for American

culture generally, infatuation with Naomi Wolf is significant for allowing the question of beauty to appear to be in question (as it may indeed be—but only in theory, not necessarily in our practices). Moreover, where does this dilemma leave Wolf herself—what if this particular female author had not been conventionally attractive? Could she still have written The Beauty Myth , and would the book have been marketed to mass audiences? One could argue that if Wolf had been by conventional criteria unattractive, her perspective would have been vulnerable to the accusation that she was simply crassly self-interested in her protests against biases related to looks.

My point is twofold. First, feminists find ourselves in a contradictory bind, in a potentially no-win situation not of our own creation. Ironically, Wolf's looking attractive can reinforce rather than subvert the beauty myth she intends to attack. On the other hand, if she weren't considered good-looking, could she have defied the problem her own book so astutely depicts?^[36] If Wolf were not at least reasonably attractive by conventional criteria, no one might have ever heard of her or her indictment in the first place. Second, such seemingly "personal" data are an important part of the phenomenon at hand, both—to put it in academicized terms—methodologically and theoretically. This point is worth reiterating, since our subject is neither abstract nor impersonal, involving feelings and thoughts we experience as well as analyze. In and beyond ourselves, both, we are deeply implicated in our opening query about why evaluations of beauty still permeate the lives of women, seeping into our self-conceptions and the conceptions of others.

One possible explanation for looks-ism can be culled from the above story, and from others like it. I have often discussed the genesis of attractiveness, not only with my Naomi Wolf-infatuated friend but also with other male colleagues and intimates, family members and friends, since the subject matter fascinates me as an academic and, over the course of a lifetime, as a woman. There is usually agreement that looks are high, if not uppermost, on the list of what is initially and crucially attractive to men about women. One could characterize this as frequently a necessary if not a sufficient precondition for being perceived as a potential sexual and intimate partner. While women often respond similarly to men, feminist analyses of gender from de Beauvoir onward anticipate a different tendency that is often experientially confirmed. For women, looks are often one of a number of factors that allow men to be perceived as attractive, including—and these are sometimes more important, singly or in combination—the possession of power, intellect,

and prestige. In other words, looks are not rigidly fixed, not nearly so much a sine qua non of male attractiveness to women. This becomes even clearer with age: men forty and over do not generally suffer loss of heterosexual appeal to the same extent as still, too often, do women their age.

Given this little-changed social context, it is not surprising at all that women are turning more and more often to cosmetic surgery. Their action could be interpreted as a rational strategy to maintain or improve their ability to continue feeling valued, loved, and attended to in a world still inequitably divided by gender. Paul Willis has described British youth's accurate "penetration" of the dismal situation that confronts them at school and in a class-sundered society (an interesting choice of words in our present context);^[37] women's realization that expectations surrounding beauty have not changed, which leads to their pragmatic accommodation to a still discriminatory status quo, seems likewise perceptive.

Moreover, if men are pushed further on the question of why certain kinds of women's looks are consistently deemed attractive, or what this means, or how it comes to be, I have noticed that often their answers become vague, peculiarly unintellectual, almost mystical. Sometimes men I have spoken with become uncharacteristically silent or inarticulate. Others become defensive, petulant, annoyed, even angry, as though I were inquiring into something that ought be taken for granted by and clear-cut to both of us. These responses often contrast sharply with the surplus rationality and logical thinking that are supposed to be the main by-products of socialized masculinity (and masculinities).^[38] "I don't know why I feel this way but there isn't anything that can be done about it. . .. This is just how I am, and I'm going to be this way for the rest of my life" is one such less than perfectly cogent response from a person who would otherwise enthusiastically engage with me in academic debunking of rigid, essentializing categories. Another male colleague, a Marxist-influenced sociologist, offered, "She's just beautiful—I don't know why, she just is," an emotional, impatient answer that cuts off explanation (as though it were a self-evident Althusserian determination "in the last instance"). In an extremely poignant example, a husband, much to his dismay and terrible anguish, found that he could no longer feel aroused by a beloved spouse of many years who had lost one "beautiful" breast to a mastectomy. It was cruel for him to be left with lifelong guilt, as it must have been even more excruciatingly cruel for his wife, yet certainly his sexual feelings were not—how could they

be?—simply alterable at will. His body seemed as though separate from him, as though possessed of customary habits or a mind of its own.

Implicit in these answers is the belief that feminine beauty just is , mysterious and irrational, justified in itself like the mountains or the skies or the trees. It seems to exist in a realm of transparency, which one is foolish—possibly inspiring anger—to doubt or malign. Beauty, by this interpretation, is a cult. But this is hardly a satisfying explanation; instead, such beliefs obscure precisely what they purport to illuminate. For if the appeal of beauty really were so naturally inexplicable—if it were simply like the moon or the trees—how is it possible that only some homogenized standards of beauty (in the contemporary United States these include thinness, youth, whiteness) become culturally favored over others for reasons we know to be quite sociologically explicable in terms of dominant cultural biases?

Then, too, how and why is it that criteria of feminine beauty and fashion shift noticeably from historical era to era (from the 1950s to the 1990s, for instance) or from society to society (from Japan to France to Iran), or both, like variations on the common theme of discriminatory beauty standards themselves? How could this occur if the phenomenon of beauty were merely "natural" rather than socially created and sustained, and therefore no more simply im mutable than changeable simply at will?^[39] And it seems silly to think that the body could "choose" independently of the mind when we know the two to be profoundly interrelated. Rebelling against the long insistence within Western civilization on dualisms, on separating mind from body in a hierarchical fashion that alleges the superiority of mind over body, mind over matter, social theories of "the body" have become exceedingly hot topics in the late 1990s.^[40] We are rightly, and radically, interested in "bringing the body back in." It is equally important, however, that we do so in a way that does not in reaction tend to veer to the opposite extreme, making it fashionable to privilege body over mind or to force mind under body so that we are unwittingly involved in reinventing the wheel. Unless we explicitly recognize a dialectical interconnectedness between the two—how our minds constantly affect our bodies and vice versa, each dimension related, but not reducible to a mere effect of the other—it may look as though we are changing more than we are, or as though this question of appearance is wholly intractable.

I suspect there is an explanation-behind-the-explanation that provides our first rationale for looks-ism's persistence. Hidden beneath claims that attraction to women's beauty "just is" may be hard-to-

admit beliefs that something about this particular phenomenon is biologically anchored . Could it be that large numbers of men, and also women (why would we necessarily be different in this regard, steeped as we all are in the same overlapping cultural influences?), secretly harbor suspicions that something about attraction, about beauty, is indeed natural or biological, stubborn and maybe even eternally fixed? If there is the slightest ring of truth in such a suggestion, it would be stronger than the "just is" thesis formulated above. For if we believe looks-ism to be natural and unchangeable, we should not be particularly surprised that it has become so—and in such a way as to render predictable, not at all anomalous, any finding that "beauty myths" keep repeating themselves cyclically through history, time and time again. The belief itself would have the power to create "tradition," achieving its own self-fulfilling prophecies.

It is interesting to speculate about whether this argument may be difficult to "prove" empirically—a difficulty that becomes quite predict-able—because of its validity. For who these days wants to admit to being driven by biological thinking, especially among persons who agree on logical grounds alone that looks-ism remains sexist and problematical in its social ramifications? Rather, a subtle biologism may continue to constitute looks-ism's best-kept, because potentially most embarrassing, secret. Otherwise, looks-ism would have to be acknowledged as one of the last holdouts of an ideology of the "natural" in a universe increasingly committed to just the opposite: to socially moldable and plastic possibilities; to rapid scientific and technological innovations; to social theories that tend to celebrate de- and reconstructions; to beliefs in the possibility of uprooting other discriminatory isms, including racism and sexism as amply manifested in contexts other than this one, because they have rested on similar specious ideologies. Many feminist ideas obviously have now gained more legitimacy than ever precisely because we no longer respond to claims of biological determinism nor rely on assumptions making it likely that such claims will become self-fulfilling.

Thus, it may be especially difficult to openly discuss—whether in public, political life, in philosophically and theoretically oriented circles, or even in private conversations—any subject matter that is felt or suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, to contain "biological" or "natural" dimensions. Such reluctance may become itself a problem, even if in other ways it has quite justifiable origins; there has been excellent reason to fear that "sociobiological" discussions, past and present,

only provide ammunition for ex post facto justifications of beliefs that were actually based a priori on race- or gender-related biases. But still, what if feelings that beauty's appeals are biologically based and somehow natural nonetheless exist, politically correct or not—feelings that cannot be easily acknowledged or admitted to? That very denial might drive such feelings underground and thus render impossible any internal and dialectical transformation, making the cult of beauty even more powerfully alive for having to remain quiet, unarticulated, and inadmissible. In addition, the kind of furtive biologism and defensiveness that now burden the topic may also be reflected in the trouble encountered by any messenger annoying enough to broach it: to wit, the uncharacteristically impatient reactions of male friends to questions about beauty, and perhaps the reactions to reading this. We may find ourselves surprisingly angered and even scandalized by efforts to penetrate beauty's "mystery," reactions that suggest investments more deeply seated than we consciously know.

But why would beauty be sensed to have a biologically based or natural component? Let me supply a devil's advocate who assumes there is a biological/natural basis for differentially valuing certain sorts of women's looks. What would that biological/natural basis be? "Instinct, species survival, vestiges of a primordial and utterly animalistic drive," I hear my imaginary champion responding. "Women are biologically capable of bearing children in only the first half of their lives. Name me one society you know in which women become sexier as they age, where social attitudes and images eroticize those who are older as much as or more than women who are young," he or she continues, becoming more animated. "Name me one place anywhere around the world where women's breasts are valued and eroticized more when sagging than when they are relatively upright, rounder, and pointier. Isn't that because it is only with a younger woman that it is possible to repro-duce—and thus this is the appearance that excites men for good, justifiable, life-affirming, and species-protecting reasons?" (This presumes, as does my devil's advocate, that heterosexuality too is self-evidently natural.)

To which I would respond, as would a number of other feminists, that it ought by now to be plain that sexuality and reproduction are only sometimes related. Technological developments have been rendering even that connection no longer necessary. Once seemingly inevitable ties between reproduction and heterosexuality have been breaking

down as well; it is now common for women who are lesbians to have babies through artificial insemination or adoption; advocates of gay marriage are challenging older definitions of family. Moreover, even if species survival were once an issue, human beings have long been in no danger of becoming extinct worldwide: today, more likely sources of concern are overpopulation and immigration. Yet societies without population shortages have not moved away from looks-ism, gradually diminishing the value they previously accorded feminine beauty.

Overall, instead, the trend in advanced industrial societies has been to sever ancient bonds between sexuality and reproduction. Sexuality has become associated with far more varied joys than simply reproductive ones: with the liberation of diverse erotic practices, with the assertion of legitimacy and freedom for gay and bisexual as well as "straight" men and women. Now, of course, millions of people turn to sex far more frequently in search of pleasure than procreation. How, then, could a drive toward reproduction explain persistent cultural preferences for younger rather than older female bodies? And how, therefore, can my devil's advocate continue to justify his or her preference for breasts that do not "sag" (a clearly pejorative term that has lost none of its negative value, even though the tie between sex and reproduction has been loosened)? On the contrary, if looks-ism originally came into being because of reproductive imperatives, we ought to be finding that it is now withering away—not thriving. The evolution of culture and society itself ought to be rendering a biological need for set standards of beauty increasingly obsolete.

Moreover, in terms of sexual potency and pleasure , it is well known that male sexuality tends to peak around the late teenage years, whereas female sexuality tends to peak much later, well into a woman's late thirties and early forties. So how and why did it transpire that our cultural representations and values do not reflect these facts? By such physiological criteria, as society has steadily moved in the direction of valuing sexual pleasure and not simply reproductive functions, the older woman's body (if anyone's) should be eroticized rather than the younger adolescent girl's; our social norms ought to approve of matches between older women and younger men, rather than the double standard of approving only the opposite pairing. But in spite of such physiological (literally biological) evidence, contemporary societies are still much more likely to value young women's bodies, indicating that the

problem may indeed have little to do with biology, or biology alone: rather, it is likely that power plays a crucial role. For it may be well-to-do men—those possessing cultural, economic, and political capital—who hold greater power to put forth their own social constructions of biology . If many men believe that it is with younger women that greater physiological pleasures are possible, then that social construction itself can begin to create self-fulfilling effects in the minds and bodies of those very same men, as well as in others'. And yet this "biologically based" belief itself remains overwhelmingly cultural in its formation.

The devil's advocate position presumes that explicit overvaluation of certain kinds and shapes of youthful bodies through the promulgation of social and cultural norms is necessary to ensure species survival. Yet why wouldn't the opposite proposition even more convincingly demonstrate the presence of ongoing biological imperatives, if indeed they existed? If such attraction is really natural and instinctive, and assuredly known to be such, then it would not be necessary to prize any one set of appearance characteristics more than others. If we were so sure it was natural, like the sun and the moon, why not then thoroughly democratize our images of women's (and, for that matter, men's) looks? The best proof of the biological argument would be to build a society in which it had become quite commonplace to see in movies and on magazine stands images of men and women of various shapes and sizes staring back at us, old and middle-aged and young, blessed with skin in wonderfully varied hues, interestingly and heterogeneously represented as though valuable and valued (as advertising aims to make us feel). For what possible harm could ensue from so transforming our imagery if we knew looks-ism to be securely anchored in biology anyway? Men would flock en masse to younger women no matter what we did, and then only to women with the exact same looks that are now held up to us as worthy of emulation. My devil's advocate should be rushing to bring about such changes, I would insist: only then would he or she be able to prove beyond debate that a biological thesis is correct, that looks-ism is natural and beauty "just is."

But, as far as I know, not many people who share the opinions of my devil's advocate are rushing to advocate such experimentation in social science. Rather, as we have seen, few people these days call for changing the social fact that only certain kinds of bodily images and representations dominate our cultural landscape—which means that perhaps my devil's advocate isn't really so sure that looks-ism is natural, after all.

And thus one of the best possible responses is that contemporary looks-ism would not be so visible, so ostentatious, if biology alone could explain its persistence. That which is social is so symbiotically intermeshed with the biological that the two are virtually indistinguishable. They have become overdetermined in such a way that even the possibility of separating biology from culture can be asserted or defended only with great difficulty.

I suspect that my devil's advocate somehow secretly knows this and thus may hold onto his (or her) biological claims for dear life. For if it is impossible to extricate the social and cultural from the biological even if we wished to, then change is possible. If these two levels—social/biological, biological/social—constantly and unavoidably interact with one other in dialectical fashion, then we can conceive and re-create the world in the most humane fashion possible. There is every reason to expect, not simply to hope, that in the long run conscious intentions will affect unconscious thought processes, slowly seeping into our psychic, bodily, and sexual associations. One would only cling stubbornly to a predominantly biological argument if there were vested interests and powerful habits that one wished to keep in place and to protect. Many men (and some women) could then go on asserting that beauty "just is," even though this does not have to be the case.

Thus, when we try to understand our interrelated topics of looks-ism and beauty, it is key to examine how biological arguments are used self-fulfillingly, effectively ensuring that gendered power remains in place. Biology is not destiny, • la Freud, but certainly becomes destiny when that is how it is defined. Remember again, as I would remind my devil's advocate, that biological arguments were once used to maintain the impossibility of ever changing gender asymmetries. Stephen Goldberg wrote of the supposed inevitability of patriarchy; not so long ago, Norman Mailer attacked Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) not only on the grounds of its author's looks but because she dared to ignore her biologically ordained role.^[41] And not much earlier, people held that biology prevented women from doing so-called men's work. By now such beliefs have been dislodged, revealed as having been both false and ideologically self-serving. However, while it is commonplace to accept that gender inequality itself is not biologically based, has the debate shifted, focusing instead on beauty—clearly a last bastion of sexist distinctions and discriminations?

Some readers may be disappointed to find a sociologist entertaining

and then immediately squelching considerations related to biology. Re-admitting biology is arguably a refreshing change from the kind of radical social constructionism that predictably represses from sight any bodily, physiological, or material considerations that do not neatly accord with the worldview of the constructionist in question. To those readers, and to my devil's advocate who perhaps is still not convinced that biology can be ruled out as a major explanation for looks-ism's stubborn perpetuation, I point out that the particular case made in favor of a biological explanation was relatively weak , even on the grounds of biology itself .

For someone who continued to insist that heterosexual attraction is natural and based on ongoing needs for species reproduction and survival would still have to account for our basic question: why looks-ism? All that follows from this view of naturalness is that heterosexual attraction itself is presumed to have a biological basis; it implies no particular requirement about the form heterosexual attraction needs to adopt. Indeed, there is nothing about changing the cultural favoritism shown, say, thinness over obesity, or bigger breasts as opposed to smaller ones, that has anything whatsoever to do with reproductive necessity. People can, and do, reproduce themselves perfectly well across a huge range of divergent looks. In fact, biology suggests that a cultural obsession with thinness ought even to be discouraged, since at anorexic levels menstruation has been known to diminish or stop, which hinders reproduction. To be sure, biological considerations of species survival do suggest that men would be attracted to women prior to menopause, when reproduction is still possible. But since such concerns have diminished markedly in modern society (and since changes in technology and culture have enabled those who are neither heterosexual nor all that young to biologically reproduce or to adopt offspring), perhaps ongoing attraction to youth is based on an altogether different biological reality.

Perhaps, then, our devil's advocate may be barking up the wrong biological tree even when he or she falls back upon arguments about "nature"; to the extent that any biological basis for looks-ism continues to exist, it may have less to do with reproduction than we first presumed. Rather, insofar as looks-ism manifests itself in the form of attraction to youth, this may reflect human beings' still very immense fear of death , a fear related to biology that, unlike concerns about reproductive survival, there is no reason to think has or will become less well-founded in the foreseeable future.

If fear of death is indeed operative, then the theoretical picture changes in exceedingly important ways. For in that case, looks-ism's eventual obsolescence would also entail having to confront the attitudes that keep us oriented toward habitually avoiding, rather than accepting, reminders of our mortality. Moreover, this shift in emphasis forces us to recall that looks-ism is not in itself essentially gender-specific . It has only become so because of previously existing structures of power: in particular, patriarchal modes of social organization to which looks-ism by now is firmly affixed. Yet there is nothing gender-specific about the fear of death. Had women ever held similarly unequal and differential powers, perhaps we too would have much more frequently evinced attraction to younger men, younger women, on the basis of this similarly human appeal. (In numerous individual cases, of course, women can and do make this choice at present, preferring younger men or younger women.)^[42] For by associating with youth, any human being may feel less fearful of intimacy because supposedly more shielded from loss, relatively protected from the reminders of existential uncertainty that mark our bodies—no matter how illusory or ineffective such feelings of protection might be.

And therefore, we are also reminded of the need to return to much more explicitly social explanations of looks-ism, but now in such a way that we do not have to repress considerations of a "natural" dimension of life altogether so that they are not conflated with commonplace biases related to sex, heterosexuality, and race. Reconsiderations of biology need not categorically be denied. However, as we are about to see, no longer is a biological theory required , strictly speaking. Thus, for now, the best way to proceed may be to retrace our steps, bracketing considerations of nature and the biological at least for the time being (as we did with references to looks-ism itself) while we return to the social, the cultural, the sociological. And a good place to recommence may be to consider how huge numbers of little boys and little girls growing up in contemporary societies are likely to imbibe looks-ist propensities simply by looking around.

We can go back again to de Beauvoir, to the enormous power and impressive pulls of social processes that traditionally urge us to "become" gendered women or men. And we can add to de Beauvoir's insights other, specifically anthropological observations about the development of Western science. As Emily Martin points out in the edited volume Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (1990):

Historically in the West, vision has been a primary route to scientific knowledge. We speak of "knowledge as illumination, knowing as seeing, truth as light"; throughout Western thought, the illumination that vision gives has been associated with the highest faculty of mental reasoning. Recently, however, the role of vision has come to seem problematic. Some have singled out reliance on vision as a key culprit in the scrutiny, surveillance, domination, control, and exertion of authority over the body, particularly over the bodies of women.^[43]

All that little boy and little girl have to do, after all, is to stare up at any or most billboards, to turn on the television and watch commercials, to surf the visual kaleidoscope presented by cable or the Internet. They could simply go to the movies, on the way surveying the magazines in any bookstore or newsstand. Or, when older, they could gaze upon and become understandably influenced/aroused by those body types which are more likely than others to be featured in the bulk of dominant pornography, or which are regularly to be seen pornographically posed in a range of other forms of mass media.^[44]

When yet a child, she or he, he and she, could continue strolling down the street and could watch men watching women's bodies, sensing which kinds were ranked higher as they passed by or what kind of clothes were most likely to increase or decrease the likelihood of commentary (and perhaps wondering why such commentary was offered so often by males in public and in groups). A child might psychically incorporate such incidents, noticing how frequently in everyday life one can see a man looking at a woman, eyeing her up and down, more or less surreptitiously, in an elevator or a restaurant. Though how come, the child might wonder, she isn't doing that anywhere near as much—why doesn't everyone get to be sexual when they feel like it? How come it's okay for him to do this so often when she hardly does it ever at all? Or these children may notice how football games watched every Sunday by their dads do not involve women as central to their action, only as parties who must look "pretty" when rooting on the side.

Then there are the sorts of influences traceable back to political economy, to the "fashion-beauty complex" as Sandra Bartky has creatively described it.^[45] In addition to the influence of media and culture on gender, another quite plausible explanation for looks-ism's perpetuation is social, revolving around not patriarchy alone (thus far analyzed too often in isolation) but also capitalism and its systemic drives. For beauty clearly is big business: there are deep-seated economic, in addition to

psychic, investments in looks-ism as we know it. Think back to the figures cited above, to what Wolf approximated to be a $33 billion- a-year diet industry, a $20 billion -a-year cosmetics industry, a $300 million -a-year cosmetic surgery industry, and a $7 billion -a-year pornography industry. By now the last estimate ought be revised upward closer to $10 billion .^[46] Once established as businesses profitable on these mind-bogglingly massive scales, how could corporate entities not become driven by their own sociocultural aims and motives, to the point that questions of biological or natural origins become indeterminable or irrelevant?

If Marx was onto something, or if we even just heed John Kenneth Galbraith noting capitalism's brilliance at creating not just new commodities but freshly perceived needs,^[47] then we can safely anticipate that looks-ism will not be withering away any time soon. There would be too many reinvestments involved (again, of a purely economic kind) for beauty to transform into anything other than an achievement sworn to be made possible through the faithful application of dazzlingly new invented products, technological procedures, or cosmetic advances. This may help explain, in part, why the fashion-beauty complex has also begun to spread its tentacles toward men, more than at other times in capitalism's gendered past. As we have seen, this complex has not so far managed to draw in men in anything approaching the numbers of female consumers; the extent of future efforts and the degree of their success remain to be seen. When it comes to beauty, the question of whether to honor traditional gender ideologies or to dismiss them as impediments to maximizing profits may strike corporate managers as still unresolved and confusing. At present, though, it seems clear that companies like Clinique continue to gear the lion's share of their advertising attentions toward women even as managers and executives market Clinique for Men.

If Jonathan Swift were alive and could be commissioned to satirize this issue, what vision might he have invented to illustrate this social explanation of contemporary looks-ism's persistence—to illuminate the political economy of beauty? Perhaps he would encourage us to think of a fictionally outrageous but telling situation, in which suddenly everyone decided to see how the universe looked if we stopped buying and using all diet aids, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and pornography (following, for argument's sake, the order of Wolf's listing). Suppose we could get everyone to agree to do this on a global basis, for approximately two years. My point is not that such a boycott can, or ought to,

happen; I am no reborn Luddite, sadly and hopelessly trying to stave off contemporary developments as workers once tried to halt the Industrial Revolution, nor have I forgotten about the question of playful pleasures activated by appearances—the fun many people, women and men, can and do sometimes experience in dressing up, wearing makeup, and looking and being looked at. Rather, it serves to emphasize the profundity of these social influences by imagining life abruptly stripped of them. For what indeed would happen as a result of our modest proposal? How would the world now appear?

At first glance, the ramifications of this proposition seem analogous to those of dismantling, or greatly diminishing the budgets of, our military-industrial complexes. In both cases, many jobs would be lost. However, whereas cutting back a military-industrial complex could free public funds for job creation or other kinds of economic redistribution, the business of beauty is private. Thus, there might not be much effort to find new jobs for the great number of people displaced if there were no longer any beauty-related business to be done, when billions of dollars had changed hands before. Think too of the research and development that goes into creating additional lines and products and of the implications for advertising and advertisers. Think of the huge numbers of experts who would find themselves out of work because their livelihoods revolved around Foucaultian "regimes" of diet, hair, makeup, or sexiness.^[48]

This would all take place in a globalizing economy that thrives and increasingly depends on service- and information-oriented industries. Looks-ism's demise, even if only temporary, would depress these businesses. Their bad fortune would only add to the anxieties already circulating as the next century approaches, its arrival anticipated with not only hopes but trepidation: fears of unemployment, and of jobless futures,^[49] would likely be that much more aggravated; we might feel more strongly that science and technology not only routinely bring astounding wizardry but also cause human economic obsolescence. With this, our modest proposal seems already on the verge of metamorphosing from a dream into a nightmare from which we would be only too glad to awaken. Already, we might be ready to welcome back our intense desires to appear beautiful.

But I suspect that we have only scratched the surface of what might be revealed if the fashion-beauty complex disappeared for even a short time. For this line of reasoning may have taken us toward a too-limited social theoretical framework, one that unwittingly brings functionalist

and Marxist strands of thought into perverse coalition. We may therefore be overlooking insights offered by later developments in contemporary social theory rather than incorporating them into our survey. The most important of these is the understanding that large, external structures and the relative freedom of an individual's personal choices (or "agency") both matter; both must be considered. Once again, beauty demands attention not only to external effects but to our inner feelings about looks.

For a given advertising firm owned by a multinational corporation cannot force people to buy the particular beauty products it touts. All advertisers can do is attempt, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to influence an unpredictable process that is highly risky for entrepreneurs precisely because individual agency exists and matters. After all, it was in the interests of its own survival that capitalism developed the admirable resiliency for which it has so often been complimented (including, perhaps most notably, in the prescient writings of Marx himself). Thus, with regard to beauty, perhaps advertisers would have already gone further toward changing a looks-ist status quo if they were convinced that such change was profitable, necessary, and desired by their clients. Clearly, some smaller-scale variant of our Swiftian boycott could have taken place long ago, when the beauty industry was less entrenched; just as clearly, it did not. Analyzing the beauty system seems to leave us no choice but to look at the matter both ways, dialectically—from the outside in as well as from the inside out. Looks-ism is indeed a social fact foisted upon us from without, but at least to some degree we also re-create it in turn. Our next question, then, ought to be why we might wish to reinvent looks-ism ourselves in the aftermath of its slipping away. It is possible that we would experience nostalgic longings for the present beauty system quite apart from the economic anxieties suggested by our Swiftian speculations—even if, for example, forms of guaranteed income existed or lost jobs were sure to be replaced. Would we indeed miss the beauty system? If so, why might we want it back? Our investigation here must likewise turn back, but now to a focus on the pleasures possibly constructed by our current beauty system, not merely its pains.

Let's return, then, to the social explanation of socialization itself. Consider how accustomed that little boy and little girl have become to gazing at advertisements on billboards, on cable TV, or in magazines, to internalizing what has long been familiar in the outside world. The Swiftian boycott threatens to strip the world of certain stimulations,

not just of certain problems. To those who have been acculturated in a commodified society, things may seem lacking in color, in sights and sounds, in sensuality and sexuality; the world may look repressed and repressive, downright prudish, lacking in accustomed visual joys. We may find ourselves free-associating, and not very enthusiastically, to pre-1980s images of Communism with a capital C—to the People's Republic of China under Mao, or to the Soviet Union before and even after its breakup—seen in shades of gray, economically deprived, bored and boring, insistent on a massive sameness. Then, too, would we have as much to laugh about, to show or share with girlfriends or boyfriends, about how we have done or redone our hair, our eyes, our outfits? What about shopping, in city boutiques or suburban malls? These activities can be viewed in not merely economic but also social/psychic terms as modern occasions for establishing or demonstrating intimacy, whether with friends, family members, or any small group on which one relies for day-to-day comfort and feelings of belonging.

But simply considering even these feelings about relative sensual and sexual deprivation that might result from looks-ism's disappearance does not take us far enough into the social analyses capable of explaining from within our subject's persistence. For perhaps an additional and even more important possibility is that without looks-ism, an important means of making social distinctions among ourselves would be lost.^[50] Without looks-ism, we find ourselves shorn of an entire classification system—the system of beauty, ancient and by now indeed profoundly familiar to us—through which we are used to gaining, maintaining, or losing a sense of class . "Class" is a concept that can benefit greatly from being construed in a sense much wider than the purely economic, as the case of beauty makes abundantly clear. It sometimes refers to money, of course, but not exclusively or even primarily. As exemplified through the beauty system, this idea of class needs a significant revision and extension even beyond what Max Weber suggested. Weber expanded the idea of class to include how much one stands to lose or gain in terms of possessing other social "goods" that relate to status and recognition, but he devoted little attention to thinking about pleasures related to procuring bodily happiness and—most critically of all—love, as a form of class.^[51]

With this line of thought, an earlier one now also becomes clearer, namely, the provocative idea that looks-ism may not be what it appears. For the beauty system as we know it may have far less to do with the

physical characteristics around which it is supposed to center (i.e., the given shape of a nose or a breast, the presence or absence of wrinkles or weight) than with the much broader cultural meanings that looks succeed in symbolizing. Regularly, and repeatedly, looks-ism is attached to something else , to something other ; it points beyond its own parameters, amounting in the process to much more than only what appears. So reinterpreted, looks-ism emerges as paradoxical indeed, distinctively talented at distracting us through its surface glitter, making us less likely to glimpse a whole complex of feelings, desires, and thoughts to which this classification system nonetheless alludes.

For instance, say a young working-class male is going to a party with a "beautiful" or "gorgeous" young woman he has met, someone he knows his friends are likely to call among themselves a "babe." To him, she resembles a movie star or pop culture icon—perhaps Cindy Crawford or Whitney Houston. But is it really his date's actual physiognomy, her "look," that is making this young man feel so good, excited, proud, even in love as he dresses and scents himself to go out on a date? It would seem difficult to argue that it could be only this, for that would require a predictably clear-cut, one-on-one correlation between specific socially valued physical characteristics and our very individual experiences of sexual, emotional, and mental connection and satisfaction. For all we know, when taking into account these multifaceted criteria, our working-class man might find himself far more compatible, or even much more pleased on what strike him as "purely" physiological grounds alone, with someone who is considered quite plain. Here, then, is one of looks-ism's interesting sleights of hand. Despite its ties to a classification system that facilitates making restrictive and exclusionary distinctions, the beauty system nevertheless manages to convey the impression that it promotes a culture broadly conducive to sexual and erotic stimulations, seeming genuinely to encourage the possibilities of fulfillment in general .

Perhaps it is indeed the panoply of meanings to which his date's "gorgeous" looks have become attached that account for much of this young man's pleasure as he prepares for his date? Or is he excited by both the physical and social aspects of attraction, which once more have become so enmeshed that it is no longer evident to him—nor to us—which is which? At the very least, as we have seen, it is safe to conclude that social influences cannot be ruled out in societies in which looks-ism provides powerful criteria for routinely categorizing and assessing

women's worth. Thus we should not be at all surprised if some of his pleasure stems from expectations that the artificial value of her "gorgeousness" in the outside world might become psychically self-fulfilling as it slowly becomes attached, and accruing, to him. Perhaps he is happy because he anticipates his friends' approval, or because she reminds him of a star (and thus of the larger world's often positive valuations); perhaps it is the very idea of her long, lovely hair, or the particular way she dresses, that makes him think, "Yes, this is my type, the type of woman with whom I would like to be seen." In this instance, analyzing looks-ism may point us not only toward gender but also back in the direction of distinctions made on the traditional economic grounds of class. It is in the context of loss of value experienced elsewhere that this particular young man may be especially eager to keep beauty alive, and to re-create a sense of worth otherwise unavailable to him.^[52]

Of course, it would be foolish to surmise that only young working-class males are affected by such richly significant symbolism. Images of beautiful young women—on the arm of a wealthy older gentleman, or sitting in a three-star restaurant next to a captain of industry, or emerging from a car with a man who heads an organized crime operation—are by now so familiar as to constitute their own sort of Hollywood-promoted cliché. But clichés are rarely total fabrications. It is still easy to find younger women in the roles of sexual and intimate companions, perhaps mistresses or wives, of well-to-do older men. And, as already suggested, it remains less common—though certainly also not unusual or scandalously aberrant, particularly in societies now sensitized by feminism—to encounter similar associations between younger men and well-to-do older women that reverse the more conventional gendered pattern.^[53]

For we are still in a world in which one of the rewards, and outward visual manifestations, of masculine power once achieved involves money, prestige, and influence reliably converting into sexual access to "beautiful" women's bodies. But here again we are faced with the same question implicitly posed by the young man's desires. Is it a particular body per se to which that older man, that captain of industry or organized crime head, finds himself so drawn, and which he surveys with a much-cultivated appreciation? Or is it the very social fact of certain bodies having come to be viewed, throughout a given culture, as something prizable, so that perhaps there is a challenge in assessing and "winning" such bodies, a game which is not altogether dissimilar to

sport? For, indeed, the sort of body viewed as the epitome of value is likely to be just the sort a powerful man in that culture begins to think he wants, he deserves—he now desires to "have."

But, as has been insightfully observed in the work of R. W. Connell,^[54] this prerogative of masculinity is not available to all. Rather, it usually presumes even further and added forms of social differentiation being made between men (as analogously exist between women): in contemporary societies, most commonly these relate to race, economic class, and sexual orientation. Thus, access to women's bodies is a reward especially to be expected for those possessing what Connell dubs "hegemonic masculinity." By this term, which helps fine-tune our theoretical understanding of gender's complexities, he means the particular form of masculinity that becomes most highly valued in a given culture, time, and place. In many societies, certainly including our own, hegemonic masculinity is associated not only with "handsomeness" (a point that, because of looks-ism, I would downplay in importance more than did Connell) but far more significantly with privileges that result from possessing money, power, or whiteness. Thus, hegemonic masculinity by definition embraces precisely what we have been discussing: the anticipated ability of this form of masculinity to facilitate intimate association with women whose looks are considered most valuable in particular (sub)cultural or society-wide settings.

To illustrate this symbolic facet of looks-ism in relation to masculinities , one could point to the importance of public appearances themselves, of being seen with a "beautiful" woman—walking along a grand avenue, or sitting in a restaurant, or getting out of a car. These are all simultaneously moments of public display, of being seen and in particular being seen by other men . Of course, such public displays produce their own sense of enjoyment, no matter how much they may differ from what is being experienced existentially, in private. For whatever separates the life experiences of an organized crime chief from those of a Fortune 500 corporation's chief executive officer, both are likely to know the sense of importance that follows noticing, from the corner of one's eye, other men noticing—and not just underlings, but coequals too—the stunning woman who is accompanying them in public one night.

Here, then, is a second sleight of hand, a second symbolic allusion that resonates well beneath the surface of beauty expectations. On its face, looks-ism seems to be about distinctions between women: what a particular woman is wearing, how she is wearing her hair, how nice

may or may not seem her breasts, how thin or fat she is. But such assessments of women's looks are even more fundamentally driven by the character and symbolic meaning of relations between men , relations that are differentiated along lines of class as well as race (although such distinctions are relatively ignored and underanalyzed, since theoretical attentions often follow the direction of the surrounding culture—i.e., toward women).^[55] In its most sexist incarnations, then, looks-ism becomes tautological: it involves the power to make precisely the sort of distinctions between masculinities that its own classification system enables. So with regard to our Swiftian scenario and the question of why we might re-create looks-ism if deprived of it, at least one facet of a response now becomes clearer. The loss of looks-ism could place masculinity itself at a loss, removing a criterion by which its internal processes of definition and differentiation historically became possible. Without it, a person attempting to be masculine might suddenly feel disoriented, revealing the extent to which looks-ism is bound up with our usual perceptions, feelings, and thoughts about gender.

And it would likewise be foolish to presume that these constructs have symbolic meaning only to men. For how could all of this not apply equally to the social creation of femininity and femininities? To women, too, a given look can represent many things that include but go far beyond whether a particular man is handsome or "cute." A given woman, too, may like the idea of a particular look. If she is heterosexual, perhaps his earring in one ear makes him look '6os-ish and free and she likes that, or his longish hair or wire-rimmed glasses evoke left/ liberal or intellectual associations that she appreciates (and she, too, thinks to herself, "This is my type"). Another woman may be drawn to a man's conservative, clean-shaven appearance or the neat-looking cut of his suits. However, precisely because of the unequal and asymmetric ways in which gender has grown, many women are likely to perceive such symbolic meanings at once similarly and quite differently. Many women will realize that the social worth currently figured into hegemonic masculinity accords relatively less value strictly to looks and relatively more to economic or political power; position and prestige; allegedly to whiteness (in still largely racist social contexts, like our own); and perhaps to those statuses which rise with possession of scientific, technological, or other forms of intellectual know-how.

By extension, looks-ism per se may not be nearly as much in the interest of women's vicarious symbolic pleasures as it is seems to be in men's . If increased importance is to accrue to women because of their

association with a particular male partner, it is less likely to occur on the basis of his handsome masculine looks alone.^[56] Thus women may be more likely than men to already realize that "looks" are not entirely or even predominantly about physical appearance. Yet even if appearances thus become relatively less important to women, they need not be perceived as any less important for women. Clearly, many women understand that this remains a large part of what men across divergent classes, races, and statuses differentially value. In societies still permeated by gender, attraction itself—to men as well as women, with the differences observed above—becomes not only mysterious but often predictably and sociologically skewed. We now are better-equipped theoretically to understand our empirical observations about gender and attractiveness. However, much more needs to be said about looks-ism's ramifications for and between women, a central question in the context of gendered asymmetries and other complex social distinctions.

Yet first we must make one more round of inquiry into symbolic distinctions. For our project of investigating looks-ism's persistence has now moved from one kind of social theoretical explanation capable of encompassing many levels (including that of "political economy") toward another. From the notion of economic class as promulgated by Marx, we have moved into the territory of more complex formulations related to capital such as those proposed a century later in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu is well known for showing that modern capital is a multifaceted phenomenon, far more complex than can be discerned from the predominantly economic concept of class that characterized earlier Marxist theory. Thus, capital can assume many forms, from investing in machinery to investing in ourselves. Moreover, such self-investment can itself take different forms, depending on whether individuals are attempting to accumulate academic credentials by using their minds or to realize value by disciplining their bodies (in this latter instance, developing "bodily capital").^[57] With this, not much of a leap is required to see that a social classification system could easily begin to surround looks when viewed as a phenomenon that becomes valuable in three overlapping ways: as a commodity, as Marx describes it; as a form of capital, as Bourdieu depicts; and as both, at once commodified and capitalized on.

Indeed, looks falls into each of these three categories simultaneously. In the first sense, looks can be taken to signify a valued possession; it is a commodity, a characteristic or "thing" that one either personally does or does not "have," according to a given society's criteria of value. This

is a sociological restatement of the thesis that beauty "just is": it is what my friend believes, despite the seeming contradiction with his feminist sympathies, Naomi Wolf to "own"; or what that working-class young man, in common with the corporate and crime bosses, believes his date (and, by extension, himself) to "possess." Thus understood, looks can be categorized among those traits Talcott Parsons deemed "ascribed" by and at birth, for it is something we cannot merit but find ourselves simply to be .^[58] This account helps explain a given person's guilty hesitance to admit he or she is a looks-ist: enlightened societies are supposed to favor achievement over ascription, the latter being associated with feudalism and certainly not with modernity or postmodernity. One may be able to alter the cultural assessments by which a given trait is treasured, but not the trait itself. In other words, I can change whether I live in a racist culture, but not my present skin color; I could conceivably alter age discrimination, but not my actual age; I could affect some hypothetical culture that happened to favor small noses (for whatever historical or idiosyncratic reasons) but not very easily my own nose size.

But the second sense, cultural capital, also is highly relevant—clearly capital of the bodily kind, which is most relevant to beauty and looks, can be increasingly worked at and worked for : looks are not merely ascribed but more and more frequently achieved . Here, we are firmly on contemporary soil as we enter the rapidly changing world of "techno-science." For one can, after all, change one's nose to some extent through surgery; indeed, given the growing sophistication of technology that Davis and Wolf describe, one can alter a wide gamut of other bodily features as well. Under some (and only some) circumstances, one can work to look younger or to try to "pass" as whiter. The present-day popularity of health clubs, fitness, and exercise relates not only to staying well but of course to consciously remolding—sometimes to the point of obsession—looks and bodily appearances. I may be especially motivated to achieve a certain look: perhaps if I work out four times a week, I can make myself thinner (and often, to a gratifying extent, I succeed); if I use this machine or that every other day, perhaps I can tone my arms or widen my chest or flatten my stomach (and to some extent, this too is often true—I can). Alternatively, if I use a certain beauty procedure, maybe I can straighten my hair in the way most valued by a society in which looks-ist and racist standards have coalesced. And what is cosmetic surgery if not the embodiment of technology's remarkable new abilities to approximate our bodies more closely to dominant cultural specifications of attractiveness, of femininities, of

age? Such specifications certainly also apply to race, as one particular surgery currently demonstrates: "correcting" the eyelids of Asian American women, an operation increasingly found where Caucasian eye shapes are held to be "better."^[59]

Clearly, then, looks and beauty are part of a system of cultural capital, not simply a priori possessions but things that many individuals seek to accumulate. Yet beauty as we know it is even more complicated. On many occasions, it involves both that which is ascribed and achieved, both that which is commodified as well as that which is capitalized on. This leads to a quite mad, because self-contradictory, relationship between these two aspects of social valuation. When it comes to beauty, I sometimes try to appear as if I were a thing: I may be working to achieve a look that would have been most desirable if simply ascribed by nature (think how frequently hairdressers receive requests from their clients to make their hair "look natural"). Translating this into social theoretical terminology, one could say in Parsonian language that looks-ism often demands that an illusion of ascription be achieved; in Bourdieu's vocabulary, that cultural capital is enlisted in the service of trying to appear a (commodified) thing. Thus, I may energetically try to transform myself from an active agent into a relatively inert look, or passive appearance; I may vigorously work at masquerading in the costume, or guises, of an image. If I am a model, I may put on makeup in order to pose for hours in front of a camera for a static photo or even, since we are in a sophisticated and health-conscious age, to give the appearance of vigorous activity (though from within a visual form that is by its very structure still-like).

From this perspective, too, looks-ism is not what it appears. In a philosophical sense, its views are backward: the specific kinds of social distinctions it makes are opposite to those one would propose on the grounds of maximizing human happiness alone. Looks-ism tends to favor the achievement of passivity over the activities of achievement; it favors essences over existences. In so doing, looks-ism effects a third sleight of hand, an especially clever one insofar as it is extraordinarily subtle. For contrary to all expectations, looks-ism tends also to prefer death over life , according higher social valuation to images of stasis than to existing faces of change. The paradox is striking, for looks-ism purports to prefer youth precisely to avoid death and associations with deathliness.

Yet in a culture that values the ascribed appearances of youth or the sense conveyed by thinness of limitless control over one's body, no one

can win. No matter how one tries to play cards of science and technology in the service of looks-related goals, the house eventually prevails. Because the rules insist on seeming to defy death or to gain limitless control, human players invariably lose. Thus, what appears to be the triumphs of science and technology, our society's highest exemplars of objective rationality, may amount to just the opposite: the victory of a quite extraordinary irrationalism. The ongoing maintenance of looks-ism therefore demands a strategy of indefinite postponement rather than the exposure of social and cultural expectations that are themselves maddeningly impossible.

Via this argument, looks-ism emerges as not particularly in anyone's human interest, at the same time the world is not likely to look this way at all. However collectively short-sighted we deduce contemporary looks-ism to be, its maintenance also continues to be experienced to be in some people's immediate self-interest if not in others': in that of men more than women, no doubt; in that of people whose color is white more than those not white; in that of some men more than others, when class and race are both figured in, as well as some women much more than others (as we will soon analyze more specifically); and, certainly, in that of the youthful rather than the elderly. Yet even the ability to feel valued throughout the whole of one's life, as death's inevitability is becoming more and more apparent on the body's surfaces, eventually manifests latent social power. It is a power that the man going on sixty, especially if rich and white, is likely to realize with far greater ease than can many women or less well-to-do men, who by contrast sense their general life prospects slipping away rapidly with age.^[60] If, for instance, I am a forty-five-year-old actress who can afford it, I may feel impelled to go through five, six, or seven face-lifts over the remainder of my lifetime, hoping to resuscitate my looks and to seem eternally youthful and lively, only to find in the process that my face begins to look strained and strangely masklike anyway.^[61] In this case, I have been condemned to deny death in a way that amounts quite fundamentally to a cruel denial of life: for the only way to stay forever young is either to be a thing or to die early.

But this is getting ahead of ourselves, straying from an issue that now can and needs to be reconceived: how both the pleasures and pains of beauty ought at this point be more intelligible as we experience them from within . For the beauty system provides a powerful raison d'être for many persons, a seductive representational system through which myriad social distinctions—masculinities, femininities, classes, races,

sexual orientations—can be melted down to common currency, as though a brand of money. Looks-ism is thereby the occasion of particular drives and the cause of certain motivations. For some, we saw that it provides a source of value that one can or does have; for others, it constitutes a mode of calling, something one can work hard for or at .

Therefore, delving into distinctions as a social explanation of looks-ism's persistence is akin to seeking what continues to fuel the tenacious perseverance of class itself, understanding "class" in the wide-ranging and multifaceted sense already discussed. And so the theme of looks-ism pointing past its own boundaries emerges yet again. But this time, it is the subject of beauty itself that becomes theoretically symbolic , hinting at a psychic and social problem that also remains little understood, whether in the works of Marx, the writings of later Marxists, and even the significant reworkings of Bourdieu: why, and whence, our ongoing drives and desires to sustain inequitable social distinctions in the first place?

For until we have better comprehended this question—the dilemma of oppression itself, far too complicated to more than tease out here—there may indeed be reason for concern that we would reinvent something like beauty outside ourselves, when or if we were to find it missing inside ourselves. Our topic thus offers a fascinating instance of a dialectical process. Looks-ism as a social fact exerts weighty influences a priori; as unavoidably existential "agents," we continually re-create it in turn. Indeed, we have no choice but to perpetually re-create something ; this point about performativity partly explains the keen interest in Judith Butler's 1990 work of feminist theory, Gender Trouble .^[62] According to a dialectical analysis, things cannot possibly stay still; history most definitely does recur in one sense and in another most definitely cannot recur. Nor can looks-ism continue without some sort of participation by both women and men, in roles that regularly change and transform.

What I have been calling looks-ism's sleights of hand can now, and for a fourth time, be again apprehended. For perhaps this is its most brilliant performance of all: looks-ism repeats itself by appearing not to repeat itself . Change does happen, as particular looks do transform over time: one minute we like the round voluptuousness of a Sophia Loren, at another the androgynous childlike look of a Kate Moss; advertisers may slowly begin to discriminate less against women of color (as long as a given women reflects, at least to some degree, generally accepted and white-influenced norms of beauty). Women may seem to have more

autonomy: Madonna inserts more feminist allusions into her performances than ever did, or could, a 1950s figure like Marilyn Monroe, to whom in the 1990s she consciously alludes. But the earlier question remains: will Madonna be able to remake herself until she is seventy, or eighty? Will any woman be able to conquer the deeper problems of looks-ism that subsist beneath the surface, and the structural limitations it imposes?

Therefore, in common with other classificatory systems, beauty regularly bequeaths and relies on both pains and pleasures; it routinely sustains both "winners" and "losers." Within these systemic terms, someone always seems to come out all right; because of social changes, the identity of that "someone" may even alter to some degree. But despite this apparent similarity, the closely symbiotic relationship in U.S. culture between looks and age discrimination means that, again, no one is entirely immune. If sexiness, if attractiveness, if vibrancy of life itself becomes associated mostly or only with the bodies of younger people in a given society, then "winners" in this case eventually all become "losers." In this sense, analyzing looks-ism is distinctive insofar as it points social theory closer toward glimpsing a possible connection between attitudes of denial toward death and our investments in rigid "class" systems per se. For a privileged person may tell himself, for example, that he can hold onto his money forever, or that his (white) racial coloring will indefinitely accord him benefits. And of course, to a good extent, this has been the case in class- and race-stratified societies. But it is also the case that even if money helps greatly in keeping death at bay, an unavoidable and quite material limit to this immunity is nevertheless built in to the supposedly immune person's life.

For now, however, this limit faced by all human beings is not likely to be perceived. Most people are much more accustomed to focusing on how the removal of our current schema of looks would take away a popularly agreed-upon basis for social distinctions, one that is especially comforting because it is so familiar and ancient. And it would do this at a historical moment when human beings particularly need and desire such familiar distinctions, even if we have little sense of why. Practically speaking, then, the woman whom looks-ism deems ugly might be happy if we were to do away with such discriminations, but what about the person generally agreed in a given time and place to be beautiful? Those who are older might be delighted by reduced age discrimination, but what about those who feel subtle surges of power

from delighting in the knowledge that they are still young (a form of relative security that may be especially cherished, given that youth is often such a terribly in secure state)? What about the person who has spent much of her life working to look a certain way, devoted to dieting? Might she feel that her efforts were meaningless, that she now had no calling, under newly democratized circumstances? Would the woman who saved for cosmetic surgery relax, now that standards had themselves become relaxed, or would she feel surprised at her own disappointment when the apparent justification for her efforts was gone? And what of the man who feels that his value is bolstered by his looks, or his muscles, however speciously; or who has become accustomed, amid the prejudices of racism, to having exaggerated sexual prowess attributed to him. Might he, too, feel contradictory pulls if looks-ism seemed to be withering away? And then, of course, the man who feels proud to have that beautiful woman on his arm—would he, too, experience inklings of loss, now uncertain of what drives him, when he thought he knew so surely before?

Such reactions are all possible—perhaps they are likely to occur. Thus when we consider each of these social, psychic, and cultural reasons, whether alone or especially together, it becomes crystal clear why looks-ism might indeed linger from past until present, long after it had lost any bioevolutionary justification. Indeed, it would be surprising if looks-ism were not persistent, if second-wave feminism had found soon after its arrival on the American scene that the beauty system was easy to transform, offering no resistance to change. This would have been astounding regardless of which explanation(s) we find most credible—whether we attribute looks-ism's longevity to the depth of gender socialization as it affects psychic perceptions (including, of course, perceptions about that which is or is not biologically determined); or we seek a powerful cause in capitalism's politics and economies, in drives toward profit simultaneously affected by gender and class; or whether we accord greatest analytic significance to beauty's symbolic meanings, both social and psychic, as it facilitates complicated and customary distinctions all around us. At this point in our argument, the Swiftian vision of a beauty-free world seems most preposterous, not our present social arrangements. The former recedes back toward where we found it, in the realm of that which was, after all, only imagined.

We have covered a good deal of ground in considering why looks-ism in general would be extremely difficult to uproot. Yet by no means

have we gone analytically far enough: at least two critical and thorny issues have barely been touched. Even though it is clearer at this juncture why looks-ism hasn't changed much , the initial observation about its worsening remains nearly as puzzling as when we began. Consequently, a different question ought next to be formulated: in the concrete social context of 1980s and 1990s America, not so much why looks-ism at all, but "why looks-ism now "?

This again raises the question of feminism's own complex influence, kept bracketed thus far in the discussion. But both feminist movements and beauty have remained very much alive in the United States over the last few decades, since the second wave was born amid the other social movements of the 1960s. As we noted when we began with Naomi Wolf, beauty thrives even in the mode of seeming to have changed. At the same time, the need to appear transformed itself suggests that to simply dismiss feminist influences would be as extreme and inaccurate as to see these influences as having been entirely successful. Thus, a second unexplored issue now ought to be considered: for although we have shown the difficulties incumbent on altering a social fact, such "facts" are by no means unalterable. An analysis is necessary to assess what has or has not been attempted, and what remains yet to be tried. Thus, we will return to feminism, to its important contributions and remaining tasks, not only because of beauty biases' enormous ramifications for women and for all human beings but because feminism has a key part to play in the desired change.

Why Looks-ism Now ?

There are three possible answers to the question this section poses, the first following logically from the preceding discussion of looks-ism as a symbolic classification system. We will again start from Naomi Wolf's arguments in The Beauty Myth , but now also bringing in the organizing concept of Susan Faludi's Backlash . The success of both books in part reflected feminism's burgeoning mainstream legitimacy. Published only a year apart (in 1991 and 1992, respectively), they suggested similar responses to why looks-ism might be worsening at precisely this historical moment rather than another.

Wolf and Faludi argued that by 1990, second-wave feminism was suffering from the by-products of its successes even more than its possible failures. Far from being passé, feminism was all too relevant. It was being punished for uncovering social truths and accurately predicting

trends much more than for its "errors," of which it was also accused in the conservative years inaugurated along with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Precisely because feminism's call for change resonated profoundly with many women, it also generated impulses to protect the traditional and the familiar. It is therefore not surprising to find vigorous social reactions against feminism beginning to unfold. A number of social movements rose in the 1980s and 1990s with the express purpose of opposing feminist gains, not only the Right to Life movement but also Republican organizing that defined itself against feminism in shaping its "defense" of "family values."

In the United States of the 1980s and 1990s, then, not only the notions of feminism but those of antifeminism have filled the air. Faludi vividly depicted an onslaught of backlashes, a sense of reaction that unified an otherwise diverse range of cultural, political, and economic developments and events. For Wolf the "beauty myth" epitomized backlash at its most insidious. It was by no stretch of the imagination coincidental, Wolf argued, that this beauty myth was being trotted out, resuscitated, and given new injections of life just as feminism, too, was taking cultural hold. Wolf agreed with the observation above that looks-ism is much more than it appears; it is being used to hinder women's social progress. Her very thesis was an explicitly historical one. Recall The Beauty Myth's powerful opening pages:

It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth. . . . The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable: It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things' that feminism did for women materially and overtly.^[63]

Thus, whether we call it a beauty myth or looks-ism, the effort to maintain and now advance expectations about women's appearance was anything but accidental. Rather, those expectations were contributing to keeping women in their/our conventional places just when they/ we were moving out of them. Women might then circle around rather than move ahead, held back by deep-seated ambivalences: perhaps if we become too powerful, we will not be loved. And, although all hu-

man beings crave love and recognition, this very need is of course itself already gender-skewed, so that women are likely to feel its potential loss as especially punitive and depressing. Better then, as Wolf suggests society was implicitly warning, either be pretty and attractive by conventional standards or work very hard at becoming and staying that way—even if the standards themselves are biased, impossible to meet, or both.

But Wolf's and Faludi's interrelated explanations are also capable of illuminating the other side of our coin; if useful, they ought apply correspondingly to men. And, indeed, backlash does suggest why looks-ism would swell with new symbolic meanings both for men and women. Men, too, might find themselves acting more "looks conscious," now that the appeal of assessing women's looks was even more overdetermined. Adding to the beauty myth's older seductions were new desires to maintain power by asserting compensatory comforts.

By criteria both symbolic and material, by the 1990s women as a group had certainly begun to accumulate more cultural capital than ever before in U.S. history. This does not mean that opportunities were not, as they continue to be, hugely discrepant among women as a group, immensely different depending on whether a particular woman is poor or well-to-do, or faces overlapping prejudices, including those of race and homophobia as well as gender. Nor have the gains come close to erasing earlier gaps: when viewed as a group, women still earn only seventy cents to every dollar earned by men.^[64] Yet, despite such ongoing collective inequality, for many men the very idea of feminism—and the relative inroads that they quite correctly perceived women making—had started to pose a novel threat. With women entering, and excelling in, spheres previously open only to men, older turfs of masculinities were being disturbed; prerogatives of power were being dislodged, whether many men liked it or not. A man could no longer rely on the certainty of defining himself as at least relatively secure vis-à-vis women, no matter what his race or class.

At such a moment, it makes a great deal of sense that the comforts of the familiar become even more alluring than before. For at least looks-ism offered a way to retain gender-differentiated power and control somewhere, in a traditional, familiar form indeed. To be sure, women might now be firefighters, police and corrections officers, lawyers, doctors, dentists. But this did not mean they were necessarily considered pretty or attractive, nor that men would find such defiers of tradition sexually and emotionally desirable. It was, in other words,

still possible for men to make distinctions between women on the basis of looks, whether consciously or unconsciously. Through looks-ism, men could still exact this compensatory symbolic price. In exchange for the relative removal of social barriers that had thwarted women in public , women ought at least to look the way they had before; otherwise, they would find themselves thwarted in private . They should at least match the traditional expectations of appearance in the personal realms of emotionality, intimacy, sexuality, and love. Women would have to compensate to make up for the forms of relative value and recognition taken away from men by continuing to worry, and likely with more anxiety than usually beleaguers men in the late 1990s, "How do I look?"

Thus proceeds one interpretation of why looks-ism has worsened now, and a quite plausible one at that. But as indebted to Wolf and Faludi for these ideas as feminists ought be, their explanation offers only one important component of a fuller response. The backlash thesis proffers a necessary, though not sufficient, explanation of looks-ism as a problem still very much alive in the contemporary United States at this historical moment. Perhaps a better interpretation has to be multifaceted , as is the society from which it springs; it must be able to account for other complex and inequitable discriminations, too, ones to which gender cannot be reduced any more than these other forms of discrimination can be reduced to gender. Indeed, if Wolf and Faludi are right about their backlash thesis, then any intelligent redress likely requires significant attention paid both to gender as an autonomous form of social power and to other social discriminations that create other good reasons why men and women would look to gender for compensatory comforts and recognitions. Even though beauty is usually thought of as being an exclusively feminist issue,^[65] a now past-Wolf line of reasoning suggests that it both includes and goes beyond distinctions of gendered "class" per se . The sources of maintaining looks discrimination must be sought both in and beyond sexism, in the numerous wellsprings of energy that continue to fuel it.

The limitation of powerful arguments like that of The Beauty Myth is the extent to which feminism is envisioned as stuck in a zero-sum game of narrowed socioeconomic proportions; the same zero-sum thinking has also begun to cripple liberal feminist thinking, rendering its insights inadequate, though often accurate as far as they extend. For this structure creates the following dilemma. Either men agree to or are coerced into giving up forms of economic and political power they held

before, allowing women in, so that women can gain but only at the price of men having to lose; or women remain within the old system that demeans them, so that men can enjoy their present power, at the price of women continuing to lose badly.^[66] But clearly the parameters of such an argument need to be challenged and enlarged: rather than staying within a conceptual straitjacket, the horizon of social value, legitimacy, and mutual recognition must itself be expanded,^[67] and in ways which demonstrate that eliminating one form of discrimination can and need not be purchased at the price of perpetuating others.

Thus, nothing about widening a Wolf/Faludi thesis need imply that feminists ought once more to subordinate women's interests to men's. Such a move would of course be preposterous, besides being historically blind.^[68] Second-wave feminism initially emerged out of this very problem: the habit within other 1960s social movements of prioritizing just about any other cause before women's. I am suggesting instead that implicit within feminism's own analyses is an argument to continue practicing a lesson we have already begun to imbibe: the need to think, feel, and act in several ways and on several fronts simultaneously .^[69]

These considerations bring us to a second reason why looks-ism may be worsening now, which should be added to the first. Wolf and Faludi persuasively pinpoint the role of reactions to feminist gains, but they pay little attention to the socioeconomic context of the 1980s and 1990s, which aggravated such reactionary impulses. Yet it is not surprising that looks-ism is worsening at a time when economic insecurities are also increasing—at a moment when globalizing capitalism is leaving huge numbers of people, across varied social strata and circumstances, commonly anxious about their livelihoods. There are many different indicators of this fear.^[70] President Clinton found in 1992 that, despite economic reports showing slight improvements, an overwhelmingly Republican Congress was nevertheless returned in the midterm election; in 1995 John Sweeney was elected as a new AFL-CIO president amid perceptions that change was badly needed, and in France workers rebelled against government-imposed austerity; in 1996 Pat Buchanan unexpectedly threw the Republicans into confusion, winning primaries soon after he began to emphasize the importance of class. Through all these events, a latent sense of doubt was manifested, a feeling that all is not well with the globalizing capitalist political economy. "How can I survive such rapid and bewildering socioeconomic transformations? Will I?" it is hard not to wonder. "Will I be able to

maintain my job? Will there be new ones to be found? What if no 'safety net' is there to reassure me if all else fails?"

Although at first glance someone might wonder what any of these apparently public events have to do with seemingly private assessments of beauty, I would urge that person to look again. For as psychologists of various stripes concur, in times of crisis, people turn for comfort to that which is most habitual. We try to maintain, sustain, to use in the present whatever social distinctions may have helped us to gain recognition, security, attention, and acknowledgment in the past. We may clutch at straws, even straws that fill us with ambivalence, that we somehow suspect or know can only provide temporary relief anyway—even straws that may have been, or may eventually become, partly destructive of us as well. So why would it be surprising that young women in the late 1990s clutch at looks as though at straws? However tradition-based and potentially sexist, at least recognition for looks can yield an immediate sense of gratification, of self-importance, in a world in which other axes of acknowledged worth can by no means be counted on to stand still, to stop shifting. If anything, as young people have every reason to perceive and to fear, the average person's chance of finding self-worth acknowledged in economic terms has also worsened over the same decades during which looks-ism, too, has intensified.

It thus becomes that much more ludicrous to "judge" women who are undertaking cosmetic surgery in ever-increasing numbers. The importance of augmenting or reducing one's breasts, or one's nose, or lifting one's face, or seeking eyelid surgery, is that it indeed represents a socially symbolic effort. Those taking such actions hope to maintain, or to improve, their socially assessed worth in both their own eyes and those of a world that seems intent on whittling away traditional (and even long-standing sexist) sources of value. Similarly, this second point makes useless and socially insensitive any judgment of a young woman who works assiduously to maintain her good looks because she suspects they are all she has to outweigh the disadvantages related to bias against her class or race, or a young man who works hard at maintaining his muscles, attending carefully to his body because he uses it for his living, perhaps as an athlete or as an actor in a pornographic film. As Connell observes, not of hegemonic but now of such marginalized masculinities, some men learn to keep their bodies youthful and in superlative shape because this may seem (or be) the best or sole avenue available for

advancement—maybe even for survival. In this regard, the sorts of race and class disadvantages frequently associated with marginalized masculinities position some men similarly to many women. Opportunities to develop socially valued skills of the mind are rendered relatively inaccessible to men who have thus been marginalized; they are more likely to be valued for skills centered visibly only on the body.^[71]

But, in an equally important respect, the person who becomes marginalized in his masculinity is still structurally positioned so that he may have, or take, gender-specific "privileges." Now we can view a given marginalized man from the other side, not so much from a position of relative powerlessness (which can also render men looked at , their bodies assessed), but also from a common male prerogative of relative power, that of looking . A particular working-class man, or a man who experiences terrible discrimination because of his race and class, may engage in annoyingly sexist comments centered on women's looks. Like an upper-class man in this respect, except that dispossession has put him in possession of a compounded motivation for doing so, he may engage in objectifying or even violently sexist practices, with or without his friends. Thus, the powerlessness of marginalized masculinity may be transformed into its opposite—power through the marginalization of another, of a particular woman or of women generally—creating sexist wrongs that cannot be rationalized away by subsequent explanations, no matter how overdetermined their cause.

Yet though they are not justifiable, we cannot analyze these sexist wrongs if we wholly ignore the class- and race-related pains that their perpetrators are often simultaneously experiencing—their widespread sense of devaluation and lack of recognition. Such acts must be situated within a historical context; it is hardly astonishing if gendered injustices and compensatory sexism have increased in tandem with other social insecurities. In response, feminists may find it necessary to do two things at once, both in theory and in political practice. On the one hand, it is absolutely necessary—a categorical imperative—to condemn terrible and inexcusable acts of sexism; on the other, the existence of men's pain, as well as women's, and the need for redressing such pain's complex sources in and beyond the structures of gender should not be blithely ignored .

Our promised return to an earlier theoretical revision with regard to biology, again not completely forgetting or repressing this dimension of our problem, brings us to the third interrelated explanation for looks-

ism's intensification now . For it is possible that the complexity of looks-ism's historical accentuation also involves increasing fears of death, fears whose intensity we have no reason to believe have diminished or even merely remained the same . Indeed, out-of-control socioeconomic anxieties make us literally as well as figuratively fearful for our lives, apprehensive about our ability to sustain even an outward appearance of liveliness . At such times, we are more likely to take pleasure in the exercising of control . In Unbearable Weight (1993), Susan Bordo cites "control" as one of three theoretical axes helpful in illuminating the obsession with weight characteristic of U.S. culture. Such practices as dieting or exercising enable one to feel that some control can be exerted over one's body even if not over the world outside.^[72] Thus, it is quite explicable why particular criteria of valued feminine beauty—in our case, youth relative to age, thinness relative to weight—are the preferred looks at this historical place and time, the United States of the 1980s and 1990s. These particular looks accord pleasure because we have come to associate them with control; through them, it may feel as though we can defy even the basic facts of life and, by extension, of death.

But again, the impression created by these looks is only illusory. Science and technology have not managed to eradicate contingency, even as they often convey an appearance of unlimited possibilities. And such appearances bear very high costs. A person may find her- or himself noticing that one move aimed at heading off some bodily deterioration requires yet another defensive move, and another. The male athlete trying to stave off the effects of aging may well discover that he has to work harder and harder to maintain a litheness that in any case will never match that of youth. A woman who has one face-lift may discover a few years later that she needs to have one more, and then one more. We may meet the new social standards of thinness, only to find that the new beauty myth requires that we weigh not 120 pounds but 115, and then not 115 but 110.

Thus, looks-ism takes us to the heart of what may indeed be a hugely contradictory historical moment. As we enter a new century, we are enjoying unpredecented technological advances; but at the same time, such changes bring equally unprecedented miseries and uncertainties for and about our lives. We need now to become even more specific about these contradictory tendencies as they affect women most particularly.

Beauty—For Women and Feminists

As we turn from looks-ism's historical persistence to its specific ramifications for women, a reader might wonder where "I" fit into this picture. Given my earlier insistence that there are both theoretical and methodological advantages in examining the topic from within as well as from without, to thereafter exclude myself completely would be a strange omission indeed. Rather, it ought be perfectly relevant to inquire why I felt compelled to analyze the ongoing importance socially accorded to physical appearance in general, and to women's appearance in particular. Was it a mostly psychic pull, originating in strong personal/political feminist commitments, or was it mostly self-interest (because of being conventionally unattractive, perhaps)? Or maybe motivation is a more detached, intellectual matter, so that any "private" relevance is best treated parenthetically (and certainly not required, as a mandatory confession) by any writer who hopes to systematically approach social scientific subject matters. Another possibility is that motivation has many dimensions coexisting in constant play, but in such a way that their relevance varies: recognition of the explicitly personal thus becomes necessary only when its influence in such multiple levels rises most poignantly to the fore.

Leaving myself out of the discussion would be especially unfortunate in the case of beauty, as we have seen that looks-ism refers beyond itself to constitute a form of class. Thus, in this instance quite obviously, the observer upon reflection has little choice but to admit that she or he is part of and influenced by what is being observed. Like any system that compels classification into one socially constructed box as opposed to others (into categories of race, for instance, or gender, or wealth), and whether we like it or not, looks-ism has unavoidable consequences of some sort for any person born and immediately labeled—in this case "female."^[73] And while one need not dogmatically insist that therefore all studies of stratified systems require the observers to reveal their "place" within it, I am convinced that opening my own position to scrutiny here opens the door to a fuller investigation than would otherwise be possible. In the case of beauty, with its distinctive capacity to link questions of mind with the questioning of bodies, we are in the presence of a phenomenon that places everyone in simultaneous positions of student and studied. When it comes to looks, we are all potential participant-observers.

Thus, what more reasonable place to start than with my own hetero-

sexual experiences pertaining to looks-ism, as it produces consequences both systematic and asymmetrical for women? My concern with the topic grows out of a long-standing intuition of the beauty system's potential divisiveness. As far back as I can remember, my own relationship to the beauty system has been what I would characterize as two-sided. From my perspective, the social reality of beauty as a classification system has been easy to glimpse; it has also been a standpoint from which the perception that all women are somehow affected would be difficult to deny.^[74] As a white, lower-middle-class child in an urban elementary and junior high school, I was chubby and often called a "butterball"; by no means was I one of the little girls the boys would develop crushes on, or value as one of the "prettiest" in the class. After puberty, this altered as I became thinner, and by high school and college I was sometimes seen by "boys" as "good-looking." I could eventually understand the seductive appeals of, and heady emotions raised by, on occasion being told, "You're beautiful."

These experiences meant that by college, I was already well aware that being chubby or pretty resulted in different consequences. A set of social distinctions were already being promulgated, already alluding beyond themselves. When I was younger, the beauty system had definitely operated to produce deleterious effects in me, a "fat" little girl; it generated self-doubts and worries about whether and how I would get boys to like me, how I would ever be assured of humanly needed emotional and bodily recognition, of attention, of love. A few years later, I suddenly found myself—as though gratefully inheriting a bundle of money—enjoying just the opposite sensations and impressions. Now I was all right: I was sufficiently attractive; I could get dates, find men who would be glad to sleep with me; maybe one day I could have a long-term boyfriend and eventually a husband after all. Now I was "well enough off" within the terms of the beauty system, and did not have nearly as much reason to fret about its possible perniciousness or my uncertain position. Did I?

For, in other respects, even after high school and college I never lost the sense of the system's duplicitous potential to take away what it bestowed (or vice versa). I had already imbibed how it felt to be seen first as "unattractive," then as "attractive." But I was also learning the different meanings that could accompany going back and forth between these two states, during any one period of my lifetime: sometimes looking "good" but sometimes not good-looking at all; sometimes dressed up, sometimes not; sometimes trying, sometimes not; my looks

sometimes working, sometimes not. In other words, I was gaining a sense of fluctuating back and forth between both states , almost experiencing both at once: appearing relatively endowed by looks at one moment, feeling relatively poorer at the next. And each state brought its own pleasures, but also its pains.

In high school and then sometimes later in college, I would put on makeup and short dresses to look sexy when I went to local dances. I enjoyed being looked at; it felt good to be even an object of appreciative attentions. But there were disadvantages, too. I wondered, for instance, whether my youthfully sexualized persona was betraying the intellectual parts of my being. Then, too, what about the other young women who were still considered "chubby" or were coarsely labeled by young men, called "dogs" or worse? Was I making them feel bad by looking sexy myself, even though I knew just what they felt like? What about my mother, or other older women in my family? Did they feel jealous of me or subtly resentful (feelings that are likely to exist in many women because of the social facts of contemporary looks-ism)? If so, were these emotions directly or indirectly expressed, and was I becoming saddled with awful and lasting guilts from which it might take many years to extricate myself, if indeed I ever could?

And then there was the problem, already mentioned in chapter 3, of trying to have a serious and forceful intellectual conversation when in that "being looked-at" mode of femininity. Can many young women manage it now? Certainly, I was not able to manage it then. The best I could do was generate another persona who looked different (to the point of being unrecognizable, I was sometimes told) when editing the high school paper and then when I started another newspaper in college. With my long hair tightly wrapped into a bun and heavy glasses donned, I would become "worse looking" but also ready to argue aggressively and actively, even furiously, now that I did not look sexy to most men at all. For it felt difficult to exist in both modes at once, incorporating rather than splitting the sexual from the intellectual in one and the same person. At that time, I couldn't have imagined how a woman could become like the great male thinkers whose works we were reading in college courses on Western civilization (a list of thinkers from which, of course, women were and still are often noticeably absent). I could not envision a woman having that sort of confidence and power if she felt gazed-at more than able to gaze assuredly at the world herself.

But such disadvantages also operated in reverse. Just as it was a

problem to feel intellectual when acting sexual, so I perceived it a problem to feel sexual when acting intellectual.^[75] At such times, the situation would somersault. I found myself envious of the young woman who could be sexy (even though I knew, on some level, she was also me). For my intellectual persona did not feel particularly heterosexually attractive, as I sensed that if I projected too much confidence or power, I might not be desirable—except, perhaps, by someone rare and hard to find: a dreamed-of person, someone who had managed to deduce that looks-ism was not necessarily what it appeared. This person would view things in a way that gave greater value to another person's activity over her apparent passivity, so that she became "sexiest " when most the architect of her own destiny. But, in general, if that female newspaper editor was too smart, or too trenchant, perhaps no one would want to caress her; she would be perceived as possibly threatening, as not capable of bestowing on a male companion the kind of competitive edge and comparative superiority by which he had become used to feeling most "a man."

I have personally encountered three dualisms. The first was my experience of feeling ugly and then prettier. The second was what I have just described, this rapid alternation between two points on a looks-ist continuum. Now a college professor, I no longer find it so difficult to meld a sense of "looking good" with feeling intelligent. But now I am facing a third duality that revolves around age. For I can still pass fairly well: some days, going out of my way to work at looks, I can be mistaken for one of my students, possessing the knowledge that I seem (or so I am told) very young, that my looks haven't changed in ten years. But on other days, I will feel that I don't particularly care, wishing instead to dress down and to rebel. When I thus move out of (rather than into) a state of relative attractiveness, I have a sense of liberation at no longer having to bear so much of the burdens of looks expectations; I experience the freedom of knowing I must then define myself by other means. At the same time, there is the worry: Will I still be able to be heterosexually attractive as I age, to find the bodily and not only mental recognitions that, like most people, I have come to cherish? At such moments, I feel utterly able to understand the women interviewed by Kathy Davis who undertook cosmetic surgery. For there is no point in bothering to resuscitate fading looks, I fret, noting a new line here or a new physical change there.

But here the personal, the political, and the intellectual all intersect

in this interpretation of looks-ism. For what I have sensed all along, up until and including the present, is that the various situations and positions in which women find themselves vis-å-vis looks are, and are by definition, co-related . Obviously, as has long been observed, the very existence of something called "masculinity" depends on an opposite pole, "femininity," for its survival, and vice versa; similarly, the existence of "hegemonic masculinity" depends in its turn on subordinated or marginalized versions of manliness. But this is also true of femininities, including their partial definition by and through looks. The existence of the "chubby" woman is always set against the figure of the thinner one, one devalued and the other overvalued in terms of comparable looks-ist worth. My sexualized and less intellectual persona was closely related to her opposite, the split-off intellectual who had difficulty believing herself sexy. And, of course, the greater sexual attractiveness accorded the bodies of younger women tends to accompany (certainly in the contemporary United States) the older woman's body becoming de -eroticized in most mainstream cultural representations. Thus what I am describing is not simply a schizoid set of experiences of a solitary individual. Instead, looks-ism is a social fact that rests on the splitting of women: it could be said to be based upon a schizophrenic social psychology.

Every woman is connected with other women via the beauty system regardless of whether she wishes to be, just as in language a signifier cannot simply be divorced from other signifiers even though on its face it seems unique and wholly individual. The referential system in this case, though, classifies real people as well as words; it alludes simultaneously to minds and bodies, to materialities as well as ideas. Nor can we simply remove ourselves from this interrelationship, even if we try to set ourselves outside it, by judging others' looks negatively or by detaching ourselves from predicaments that seem only to affect them . These multiply positioned personae are all in a sense disconcertingly copresent, even if not immediately apparent. In this regard, any effort I make to dissociate from "them" is also effectively a dissociation from "me": eventually, I am likely to find that my distancing was illusory. I may glory in my thinness now, but my being can be transformed into its demeaned opposite at any moment—perhaps when I become depressed by the circumstances of my life for a while, or lose my sense of being in control. And if being socially, politically, economically, and intellectual powerful is felt by some women to require becoming desexualized, then sexualization for many heterosexual women will also tend to become

associated with social, political, economic, and intellectual powerlessness .

In this regard, the last dualism becomes most striking. For how can I afford to ignore the relationship between looks-ism and age discrimination, between preferences for women's younger bodies and social disdain for women's older ones? As we noted earlier, the house invariably wins, and not even the technological brilliance of our time has yet come close to changing that outcome. As a young woman I will eventually become the old woman constructed as my opposite; to the extent I delude myself otherwise, my opposite is likely to stay haunted by images of me.

Thus to be the beauty system's beneficiary on one side of the coin (and at one moment in time) is always to risk becoming dispossessed on its reverse (and at another); the advantages of one "class" position is at once separable, but also utterly inseparable, from the disadvantages of others. Consequently, the interdependent character of classification systems comes best into relief when one person's situation is viewed relationally , placed in the context of the beauty system as a whole. It was to underscore this relativity—a motive that for me seems necessarily both personal and political, both interested and disinterested, not only abstract and intellectual but also passionate and emotional—that I felt justified in commencing with myself.

But beginning this section with myself is one thing—ending here would be quite another. The distinctions that I have described merit consideration in general as well as in particular, for our subject is indeed a social fact that influences all women, even as the degree of influence varies greatly. In the following I take one analytic step back, classifying this set of divisions between women more systematically.

Distinctions based on (Heterosexual) Looks and Compulsory Heterosexuality

Because of gender discrimination and what Adrienne Rich has called "compulsory heterosexuality," it seems impossible that someone who is born female can entirely escape the imposed character of the beauty system.^[76] From the time she is a young girl and then as judgment can change through various life stages,^[77] women find themselves having to assess personal value in relation to a given culture's dominant expectations and representations of heterosexual looks. Of course, women can always rebel against these expectations, in which case force and energy

must be put into the task of reacting against the potential problem. Short of overt rebellion, though, various "classes" are likely to come into being along this first axis of gender differentiation.

It may be that one has been born beautiful or extremely good-looking by present social and historical standards, or that one becomes viewed as beautiful at some point in one's life. By this particular measure, that individual is relatively well-to-do, as though a member of an upper middle class. Another woman may find that by contemporary criteria, she is not considered pretty at all, so that her worth will have to be proven otherwise: perhaps through her overall personality, her sense of humor, her intelligence, her competence, or any of a number of other traits by which she tries to distinguish herself quite apart from her looks. This person, relatively class-less if only on the ground of beauty, is likely to experience the looks-ist system as not in her interest at all. But her lack of investment in the system is in some ways an advantage. Unlike the very pretty or beautiful woman, who may feel that she has much to lose in attention and social value, the person considered plain when young may find it less painful to grow older. For she has much less at risk in changing, of anything thereafter being taken away; she has long been used to seeking recognition elsewhere. What was once a detriment thus gradually transforms into a bonus.

Then there will be those who find that they are neither richly endowed nor very deprived in a looks-ist system. Such a woman is caught in between, in a kind of middle class, and that position forces her to make certain decisions. She must ask herself, "Should I work at improving my beauty position—staying thin or trying to do my hair and makeup as best as I possibly can? Or should I concentrate on developing other aspects of myself, since I am not beautiful but still 'well enough off' without having to devote all that much time to my looks?"

The above analysis tends to limit our discussion insofar as, to be judged, one must be affected by the authority and opinions of the party who judges. For a stratification system based on beauty to operate effectively, it must function within a larger power structure that renders this or any other such classification structure meaningful. Of course, within patriarchal societies it is men who as a group still possess precisely such disproportionate influence and authority (even though this authority varies depending both on a given man's personality and also on added social factors such as his sexual orientation, race, and class). What then of women who do not care much about how men judge their physical traits? Women across sexual orientations may value other women's

judgments more than men's. In particular, for many women who are lesbians, the approval of another woman or women is far more important, desired, and sought after. How then will looks-ism appear or disappear? Clearly, looks-ism does not only affect heterosexual women. Such a limitation is far too simplistic and inaccurate, failing to encompass how the rewarding of certain looks as "feminine" leads to a dualism, to other looks becoming demeaned as "not feminine" by contrast. For the looks associated with the straight woman—her hair, her skirts, her fashion styles—are those most likely to meet with approving male attention in a power structure dominated by heterosexuality. Such dualism encourages a potentially huge divide between women, not only between heterosexual women on their continuum of looks class, discussed above, but also between a woman who is straight and her sister who is not. As Rich so brilliantly noted, this tends to enforce compulsory heterosexuality indeed since now the straight woman—whether judged by men as good-looking or plain—may find that she defines herself in contrast with the look of the lesbian "other." And, in this divisive process, looks-ism can serve as quite an effective mechanism, whether deliberately or not. A friend's sixteen-year-old daughter, who is both straight and very pretty by conventional criteria, often discusses shopping and dressing in terms of not wanting to look "like a dyke" if she wears a certain hairstyle or mode of dress. This young woman seeks not just to win approval of her appearance but simultaneously to avoid disapproval . My friend's daughter also operates on the basis of an often extremely mistaken stereotype, assuming that a woman who is lesbian necessarily does not wear makeup or dress in the style she associates with heterosexuality; this may or may not be the case.

Thus, looks-ism acts in the service of patriarchal and heterosexual dictates. In so doing, it tends to increase the amount of discrimination in both the sexist and the heterosexist world in which a woman who loves other women knows that she too must live. Still, this does not yet address how a woman who is lesbian, or bisexual, reacts herself to the social fact of looks-ism. Here I suspect that the relationship between sexual orientation and looks-ism becomes complicated indeed; one must be wary not to veer into essentialist assumptions or overgeneralizations. This is an important layer of our subject matter, though I treat it only briefly; others can and have explored it better and more thoroughly.^[78]

A woman who is lesbian, or bisexual, may well respond to heterosexual looks-ism by giving obvious notice to the world—and especially to

other women, whose perceptions and opinions matter most to her—that she neither conforms nor wishes to conform to a heterosexually "sexy" appearance. Perhaps, like many lesbians, she does not use makeup, nor does she wear clothes or hairstyles generally associated with a heterosexually imposed "beauty myth." Other women who are lesbian may find annoying any generalization that does not recognize one's freedom to dress in ways supposedly associated only with heterosexual women's looks and tastes. In either case, many lesbian and bisexual women who find looks-ism quite dreadful may take special pleasure in being able to by-pass certain oppressively sexist and heterosexist realities, among which looks-ism figures prominently. It is possible that women in this situation also suffer less from the alliance between ageism and looks-ism, which can cause so much damage and loneliness over the course of many heterosexual women's lives.

But here we are beginning to slide into a possible utopianism. One whose sexual orientation is lesbian or bisexual is not automatically unaffected by looks-ism, nor can we assume that she does not place great emphasis on looks as a basis for attraction. Even though her specific experiences (including experiences of discrimination) are likely to be different than those of a woman who is straight, a particular lesbian may still place inordinate importance on other women's appearances as a basis of attraction, whether or not the "looks" that appeal to her reflect dominant heterosexual criteria. Or, on the other hand, women may develop alternative criteria, whether individually or communally, that are creative and relatively independent of the dominant criteria.

Still, these comments sketch only gender- and sex-related distinctions between women as facilitated by looks-ism. I began with divisions between straight and lesbian women, and those among heterosexual women themselves. But the divide is fundamental to the workings of looks-ism, apt to reappear within and to further complicate the categories that follow.

Distinctions Premised on Heterosexuality: The Looks of the "Good Woman" Versus the "Bad Woman"

This distinction is kindred to, but not identical with, my youthful experiencing of a split between intellectual and sexual facets of being. But in this context it is more exactly described as a distinguishing of "madonnas" from "whores," or of "virgins" from "tramps," part of the long history of heterosexual double standards imposed on women. In addi-

tion, this is a split that, unlike the multiple masculinities so usefully identified by Connell, has not been generated with anywhere close to an analogous rigidity for men as for women. Precisely because of the close historical ties between male-dominated societies and sexual double standards, it sounds almost comical to make a distinction between virginal "good" men and men who are nymphomaniacally "bad."

Yet it is well-known that precisely such overtly manifested sexual symbolism is often applied to women, according to whether one tends to look and act like a woman who is "good" or a woman who is "bad." The "bad woman" is, of course, the one who appears to be sexually available (whether she herself has made that choice or not). She is the embodiment of unfettered male fantasy.^[79] Introducing this alleged-to-be "bad" persona requires that our analysis become one level more refined. For now, even female persons born relatively well-to-do on the basis of looks become divided among themselves, as a lesser class within their class is created. For the "bad woman" is likely to be attractive, too (a scandalous member of the same family). In this, she definitely has something in common with her quite differently constructed "good" sister.

Still, it should be remembered that this division between bad and good women comes into being only relationally itself, and indeed in relationship to male fantasy . From the standpoint of many men, what is most characteristic of the attractive "whore," and what makes the prospect of sex with her so steamy, is her being counted upon to "want it"; sex may actually be built mostly around pleasing him , but in a mode in which it seems to be just as hotly craved by her (maybe even more so).^[80] Quite possibly, male clients of sex workers—of "call girls" and prostitutes—would be horrified to discover what several ethnographic accounts have revealed in this regard. Women often say what they know their customers want to hear, having become skilled at feigning sexual performances, a skill in which they sometimes themselves take complicated pleasures.^[81] Moreover, these accounts complicate this bad girl/ good girl distinction so typically imposed on heterosexual women even further. For not infrequently a given prostitute or call girl is even feigning her apparently heterosexual orientation. Here, too, many a male customer is being fooled far more skillfully than he may realize.

In other words, men might be shocked to discover that the situation was not as it appeared—or perhaps many male clients secretly know? In the latter case, perhaps the man finds it is this very performativity

that makes sex with the "bad woman" so damned good. One does not have to worry about the other; because she is "bad," mutual recognition and reciprocity are not, so strictly speaking, required. On the other hand—and again the contrast is by definition—he may find sex with a "good woman" relatively bad (and even if she, too, is good-looking). It is more constrained, not steamy, because it needs to acknowledge the other person's actual likes and dislikes; but it also has the relative advantages of being mutually considerate and respectful and friendly. Of course, each woman's look is likely to correspond to these divided male projections and desires, these unequally empowered fantasies (themselves acquired and enculturated through a long history of systematic and structured gender inequities). Traditionally, the "bad woman" looks sultry, slutty, sexy; the looks of the "good woman" seem more elegant, her clothing tailored, her behavior and manners much more ladylike.

Further complexities arise in this account. This "class" distinction between good and bad within the category of "attractive women" may occur in the same economic class, or it may involve the superimposition of one or more added forms of social differentiation (e.g., economic class and race). Thus the figures of the "wife" and the "mistress," variants of this good woman/bad woman dichotomy, may in a given case involve two women whose social circles are close or overlapping; perhaps the two women had been accustomed to socialize as parts of couples, or perhaps they were even friends. Or it may be that a well-to-do man is "keeping" someone, but a woman who he has assured himself is several cuts above a professional sex worker, someone he consciously chooses because she is relatively classy (say, an expensive mistress as opposed to a woman who works the streets).

Another possibility is that a middle- to upper-class man wishes to maintain simultaneously class and sexual distinctions between himself and the attractive "bad woman" he nevertheless desires. He may sporadically, but purposely, visit prostitutes who are almost certainly working class and undoubtedly poorer than himself. In this instance, it may be that her relatively lower class status combines with what he perceives as excess sexuality to make this woman even more exciting, that much more refreshing than would seem a "bad woman" of a class closer to his own. A panoply of complicated emotions may be involved. Perhaps he feels guilt about his own richer life, so that visiting her is a sexualized sort of "going native," reflecting the fascination with an exotic other that he otherwise represses from daily consciousness; such repressed

feelings are now able to be expressed under these controllable circumstances and in small doses. Or he may take certain pleasures of condescension in the hierarchical situation that, in combination with other feelings, produce psychic and bodily surges of desire. To be sure, such class differences are not alone in these effects. They can be joined to or even replaced by the next set of distinctions.

Distinctions based on Class and Race

As we saw above, obviously some distinctions among the beauty "class" positions have directly to do with economic class: the man who keeps a relatively more elite mistress may enjoy seeing her in expensive Christian Dior black lace lingerie, as opposed to the cheaper and more garish-looking apparel he would be likely to find in an inner-city house of prostitution. Nor are such class divisions limited to bad woman/good woman divisions between women; the two axes of distinction may or may not overlap.

For class in the economic sense is quite capable, all by itself, of creating chasms between women in and through the medium of looks. Examples are so easy to conceive, and plentiful, as to necessitate only the briefest evocation here.^[82] The upper-middle-class woman from the Upper West or East Sides of Manhattan often does not want to be caught looking anything like the working-class woman who shops for her clothes at the Macy's basement in Brooklyn, or even like the lower-middle-class woman who looks for sales at Mandies. Hardly would she order anything from a Sears catalogue, or find herself buying clothes items at J. C. Penney or Wal-Mart. It is much more likely that she would shop in Lord & Taylors, Saks, Bloomingdale's, maybe Talbot's: her tastes may range from Donna Karan designer labels, to a little less expensive but still acceptably recognizable brand-names like Ann Taylor, Ellen Tracy, Jones New York, or Ann Klein. She may be drawn to Bruno Magli, Ferragamo, or Ecco shoes, more concerned (and able to pay for the cost of) these labels than the working-class woman who looks for her shoes at Fayva's or maybe at Coward's. It is most likely a working-class young woman who still teases her hair and wears hair spray, while the upper-middle-class woman is far more likely to want a sleek cut that nevertheless exudes that look of "naturalness." And these examples could be applied to other cultural contexts: the exact names of stores, places, brands might change at the same time a looks-ist class continuum persisted.

In relation to looks-ism, then, class matters enormously. But so do a set of distinctions among women that relate distinctively to race. Racially marked divisions, which overlap with these categories of looks and class, at the time same create a social hierarchy all its own; race has been constructed throughout American history in such a way that it intersects with, yet certainly cannot be reduced to, a mere function of other discriminations. In Western racist societies, it is whiteness that has often been purported to be "good" and other skin colors alleged to be "bad"; like gender bias, racialized thinking splits the world asunder for its own self-interested purposes, manufacturing relative superiority and inferiority. As a number of scholars have carefully noted, U.S. history clearly exemplifies the insidious results of combining two processes of splitting: one good woman/bad woman dichotomy (based on race) becomes enmeshed with another (based on sexuality).^[83] Thus African American slaves were subjected to now familiar blaming-the-victim ideologies in cases of rape.^[84] It was not unusual in the least for white slaveowners to justify violence against female slaves on the basis of racist mythologies concerning sexuality. Nor, as bell hooks has described, was it unusual for white women reformers of the time to incorporate such rationalizations and shiftings of blame into their own worldviews; hooks recounts how white women called for blacks to be sent back to Africa so that white men would not be seduced by "temptresses"—those imaginary beings created by the projections of the powerful themselves.^[85]

In contemporary settings racism continues to operate, but of course much more subtly, working on a number of levels. On one, race creates hierarchically structured criteria for rating female beauty in American society, constituting its own stratified system that sets whiteness at its top. Sometimes a woman of color may become especially sexually desirable within this hierarchy , though perhaps only temporarily, and then at moments that involve exoticizing race. In other words, race-based sexual mythologies persist. Look at a sample of personal ads in the 1990s from cities throughout the United States. It is easy to find men advertising for female sex partners who are Asian or African or Latina Americans, the advertiser being essentially (and in the grips of essentialism) convinced that skin color and racialized difference indicate greater sensuality, or specialized sexual prowesses.

But, as was also true of class, the relationship between race and looks-ism does not depend solely on a bad woman/good woman dichotomy; once again, analyzing looks-ism demands added layers of theoreti-

cal refinement. Since sexism clearly repeats itself across races and ethnicities, anyone who happens to be born a woman and a person of color may find herself categorized within her own racial/ethnic group's hierarchy on the basis of looks (relying on our first set of distinctions, which tends to apply across classes and races). Like a white woman, she too will probably find herself classified as relatively richer or poorer in terms of looks "class." But her situation only partly resembles that of a Caucasian female's; in other respects, it is clearly quite different. For one thing, perhaps a woman of color encounters standards of looks in her subgroup that do not match those dominant in a hegemonically white culture. For instance, as students have told me repeatedly over the years, many African American men do not want women to look at all like such white models as Twiggy or, more recently, Kate Moss. It is not unusual for an African American woman who is much more well-rounded—not "fat" but with an ample behind—to be seen as more beautiful than a white woman whose entire body is "skinny." This point could be elaborated in far greater detail, well beyond what there is room or need to belabor here. For chances are that tastes and standards in beauty may vary between the African American and, for instance, the Afro-Caribbean, with further differentiation depending on which country in the Caribbean is in question, or even which of several cultural subgroups within that particular nation. And the same could certainly be same about other racial and ethnic groups regarding their specific standards of beauty.

Yet what happens to these cultural differences in beauty standards for women among different ethnic, racial, immigrant, and transnational groups in the face of a dominant U.S. (beauty) ideal? How does this potential clash affect a woman of color who may feel vulnerable to judgment according to several standards of beauty and to a complex interaction transacted between them? The beauty situation becomes that much more complicated, and overdetermined, in its ramifications for her. Along with the gendered beauty standards themselves, it is likely that distinctions arising from economic stratification apply to her too. (And how could economic stratification, like beauty, not affect all women in some way, since by definition it ranks all members of a given society?) In other words, this particular woman will of course in some way encounter "class" in terms both of looks and of economics (i.e., as traditionally conceived). But now it appears that a woman whose race subjects her to additional discriminations experiences yet another variety of "class." Now there is one additional level, a whole new set of

complications introduced by the relationship between looks-ism and race. The woman of color must contend not only with the bad woman/ good woman dichotomy, which itself historically was at once racialized and gendered, but also with the maddeningly mixed cultural messages regarding what constitutes beauty, anyway, for a woman who is not white.

How do we then make sense of variations within a larger culture that supposedly values pluralistic diversity? What we have been describing is a society that tends to subordinate reality—diverse and heterogeneous human looks—to paradoxically homogenized artificial standards, whether that valued standard is thinness, youth, upper-class ideals, or whiteness. Yet in the United States, men of other ethnicities, not only African American men, may tend to agree that Kate Moss would not be their ideal of beauty, either. Anyone familiar with Philip Roth's novels has encountered the Yiddish word zaftig to indicate a preference within Eastern European cultures for a woman who looks soft, well-cushioned—who has a little "meat on her bones." Moreover, the devaluation of the older woman's body may not be nearly so rigid or cruelly isolating within the overall aesthetic context of other societies; some women who arrive here from other nations are surprised at the degree to which a cult of youth is everywhere fostered. The newcomer may sense subtle cultural differences and sensibly conclude that women are made to feel even more worthless and valueless as they age in this country than in her nation of origin (though other women from yet other societies may find traditional strictures of gender much easier to challenge here).

Many other examples of variations from the uniform standards exist; however, the vast majority of these examples are united insofar as some kind of overall beauty standard is valued more in women than in men. Variations are real and significant, but so is the common theme that bridges the differences. To generalize for a moment: yes, a given WASP may like the Kate Moss type, placing his tastes at odds with those of a given Italian or Jewish or African American man who favors a version of the more zaftig type. Some men prefer large breasts, others small. And, yes, perhaps women in other societies find the cultural costs of aging less painful. But it is still just as important—and just as true—that most cultures accord differential emphasis to some kind of feminine beauty being achieved as a cultural ideal, even if the particular look that is idealized varies from place to place or from time to time.

Such specific subcultural preferences are still similar in that some looks have become routinely overvalued for women in contrast with the relative demeaning of others, and that looks in general have been routinely overvalued for women relative to men.

But we have by no means exhausted the ramifications of systemic complications introduced by race in relation to looks-ism. For even if, say, a particular man of color knows that his own standards of beauty may be different than dominant ideals, it can be difficult to resist the assault and hugely influential intrusions of commodified U.S. culture. In this sense, looks-ism becomes not only sexist but imperialist in its imposition of white-defined standards. For instance, as recounted in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964) or Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), and then critically retold in Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979),^[86] black men in the United States commonly undergo complex struggles with internalized beauty standards. How does one resist starting to lust after the (attractive) white woman at least as much as the (attractive) black woman? This is a painful problem that may strike many men who have faced racist discrimination as at least, and probably more, troublesome on the grounds of race than gender. For what appears to be more normal, by general agreement across classes and cultures and races and ethnicities, than to desire a "beautiful" woman? The problem here is which beautiful woman one comes to want and why, bracketing for the moment the possibly discriminatory ramifications of desiring a beautiful woman per se. It is how looks-ism becomes specifically racialized , a phenomenon that a particular man may come to resent and be suspicious of, that may make him feel alienated from himself. Does he desire a particular woman because of her positive individual traits, or because of her whiteness—or has the virulence of racism made it impossible for him to assess which is which? He, or any other man who has also faced discrimination in the United States on account of his race, may feel that this is the dilemma of beauty—racism—not so much, or at all, looks-ism itself. Thus, the coexistence of racial and gendered discriminations subtly helps render looks-ism apparently harmless, obscuring the latter's additionally distinctive harms across race on the basis of sex. Looks-ism's deep connection with sexual discrimination may, in this particular instance, become easier to obscure or to rationalize away.

We have now returned yet again to the symbolic meanings of looks-ism as it so often tends to point beyond itself. But now the spotlight is

on how looks-ism's symbolic and vicarious meanings could be expected to unfold in relation to race . For is it really the white woman's particular skin color, her hair, her look, that a given man who has faced racism desires when and if he finds himself desiring her at all? (Earlier, we asked a similar question on the basis of class: was it a particular physiognomy that made the working-class young man so happy in preparing to go out with his "gorgeous" date?) Or is it the way that a person of particular race and gender (say, a white woman) comes to symbolize access to a whole world of recognitions, privileges, and attentions from which many minority men have been forcibly excluded throughout U.S. history? If so, the white woman ironically may take on her own exoticism, that of a woman who is part of a dominant rather than subordinated group. Here again it would be surprising if feelings toward her were simple rather than complicated, if they were not tinged with symbolic wants and possibly symbolic resentments as well.

Still, and again, where does this leave a particular woman of color in relation to all of this? She is likely to know only too well how American looks-ism, which we are slowly beginning to conceive as incorporating gender, class, and race in its systematizing effects, potentially places her in quite a bind indeed. As a woman, she has in common with all women being differentially valued on the basis of looks, on the basis of beauty. But beauty by whose standards? By the standards of her own community (which may tell her one thing) or by the standards imposed upon that community from outside (which may tell her another), or by both as she tries to make sense of their complex interaction? If she deeply understands racism, she may find herself hurt, bitter, enraged, when a man of her own race is more attracted to a white woman. We might recall a particularly effective scene in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1992), in which a group of women of color (whose own skins are a range of hues) engage in a lively round-robin discussion about gendered and racist beauty norms; their conversation occurs soon after the husband of one of the characters has left her for a white woman.

Not only, then, may a (heterosexual) woman who faces discrimination on the grounds of race as well as gender find that she frets about her looks—about whether she will be able to find humanly needed love, recognition, emotional and bodily attentions—but she also faces the dilemma of how to respond to the demands of white looks-ism. In such a potentially alienating situation, faced with this now multiply overdetermined social fact, how should she react? How should she look? If

she is black, for instance, will she, ought she to, spend large chunks of time trying to achieve not just beauty but beauty as defined in white-dominated and racist terms? Should she wear her hair naturally, for example, or straighten it (and, if the latter, will guilt be added to the annoyance of having to worry about looks at all)? Should she worry about whether she is thin enough, or not? Clearly, as the films of Spike Lee evidence, there is reason for concern about black men's internalization of white-dominated assessments of beauty. His female characters are usually not only beautiful but endowed with looks that reflect white-influenced standards of hair and of weight; Lee has expended less effort to present a critical analysis of sexist than of racist biases experienced by African Americans and other women of color.

But for a woman who is susceptible to both racial and gender discriminations, the ramifications of looks-ism are potentially damaging indeed. In addition to being divisive on the basis of gender, looks-ism also brings into play racially sexualized dichotomies (as these intersect with common patriarchal splits between bad women and good), class as traditionally conceived, and certainly the racial hierarchies that differentiate "whites" from "others." Only a new designation—looks "class" rather than class?—can do justice to this complex layered situation, which depends for its perpetuation on the demeaning of other colors to elevate the symbolic significance of whiteness. Here, again, looks-ism manages to link the predicament of all women, even if such interconnectedness becomes a cause for serious concern and action only to some. But there is yet another distinction that eventually affects all women in the United States.

Distinctions Based on Age

Enough attention has already been paid to this distinction that only a few points merit addition here. Age discrimination, too, can occur both across and within the categories just mentioned. The degree to which looks-ist distinctions based on age trouble women and create painful divides varies tremendously depending on a number of other social factors, including class, country of origin, and cultural attitudes within ethnic/racial groups. Even within the same class or race or ethnicity, other psychic, educational, and cultural differences regularly shape the attitudes of individual women, differentiating the reactions of one younger person from the next, one particular daughter from another,

one relationship between an elder and younger women from the next.^[87] This gamut of attitudes reflects varying feelings about sexism and gender that affect how women experience processes of aging.

Yet, as we saw in the example of race, such actual diversity does not override the simultaneous existence of homogenizing social forces, which frequently operate to obscure these differences. Reality is subordinated to visual ideals, flaunted and manifested everywhere: in the contemporary United States, the ideals favor thinness, whiteness, and also, of course, youth. The very person who personifies such beauty ideals in the pages of magazines, in newspaper ads, in movies, and on television—the "model"—is usually unable to maintain her career into her forties, fifties, and sixties, seemingly of necessity or as though by definition . So, too, it is a notorious fact of Hollywood that the average forty-or fifty-year-old actress has a far more difficult time finding interesting parts, or parts at all, than a male actor of similar age.^[88] And one more well-known example: the looks of the television news anchor are likely to encounter greater scrutiny as she ages than those of her male counterpart (despite occasional exceptions to this rule).

But perhaps some will immediately object that things are very different now, after feminism, that older women are much more likely to be featured in mass media cultural representations: think of Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon, Elizabeth Taylor, Meryl Streep. And, to some extent, these critics would be right; there are surely some signs of change; Hollywood is beginning to catch up with this well-founded feminist protest. But, unfortunately, this beginning is not nearly enough; even such exceptions still generally operate for the most part to confirm, rather than fundamentally to challenge or to deny, looks-ist expectations about women's looks. For how much painstaking effort must Jane Fonda or Elizabeth Taylor put into maintaining the sort of beauty associated with being in fact many years younger? Then too, since these actresses would have been considered exceedingly attractive even when they were young, offering them as examplars of aging may not hold much comfort for huge numbers of "average looking" women as they grow old.

Moreover, holding up these women to exemplify social change sends a decidedly mixed message. For the implication is that women are now able to exude sexuality when old—but only so long as they continue to look young. Once again, the transformation of looks-ism occurs on the surface only, in relation to its outward form rather than its underlying contents; little actually alters in the guise of seeming as though a good deal has. To a woman who acts, the results must be ironic and infuriat-

ing. Many major male actors, and certainly white male actors, are just "average" looking; whether one calls to mind the admittedly unsexy Woody Allen or envisions Jack Nicholson, James Wood, Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, John Turturro, or Gerard Depardieu, none of these men would be a likely candidate to win a beauty contest judged by criteria of classic male handsomeness. Rather, their ability to win roles is likely to be based on contacts, skill, on the interesting characters they won in earlier films, and on their force of personality, which can compensate for their only mediocre appearances. To be sure, there are many handsome actors. What about Robert Redford and Paul Newman, now also turned directors? What about actors Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner, both of whom would be judged by many women to be "gorgeous"? Yet, even taking many such exceptions into account, clearly a far greater range of men's appearances end up becoming cinematically representable at all ages than one finds in the case of women; it is far more likely that women must be young and beautiful looking if they are to become "starlets" and remain successful female stars.

When considering these looks-ist distinctions based on age, we need to examine most closely their potentially divisive ramifications when it comes to questions of generation . Happily, many women enjoy a wonderful sense of intergenerational solidarity, feelings only strengthened after the advent of feminism. Of late, and at an explicitly political level, there is reason to hope that such linkages are being affirmed even more than in the past, when age discrimination was sometimes complained of within the feminist movement.^[89] For other women though, perhaps not touched by feminism, feelings of competitiveness may continue to do battle, until a time comes when there is no longer a social basis by which such feelings can easily be explained. The problem at present is that looks in relation to age become a matter of the luck of the draw. Whether or not one is born into a household where women love each other across generations, and in defiance of sexism, is a matter of individual chance rather than the outcome of sociological transformation. For this reason, it would be thoughtless to view the phenomenon being described in only individualistic or psychoanalytic terms, as though separable from the world of systemically structured gendered distinctions we have been surveying throughout. Psychology and psychoanalysis themselves must deal with the troubling ramifications of socially structured sexism, of looks-ism, as it comes to affect and split the psyches of individuals.

Feminism may be progressively lessening these generational strains.

Yet it is still not uncommon to discover particular women who, when youthful daughters, felt a sense of jealousy being communicated to them by their mothers; and, once again, this observation may resonate across the categories of social distinctions we have been exploring. Many women can identify with descriptions of a mother who has conveyed a sense of guilt as her psychic legacy, even if quite unintended; indeed, this mother might be horrified if confronted by the discovery of the effects she unwittingly contributed to generating in her own daughter. For perhaps most relevant here is that society has certainly not transformed yet to the point where a large enough proportion of women, of mothers, feel sufficiently fulfilled by their own life circumstances. The immediate cause of dissatisfaction may be sexism alone, or more often sexism in conjunction with a vast array of additional factors that continue to affect men as well, from inadequate education to lack of economic opportunities. When a particular woman, a particular mother, does feel confident that her own life has been fulfilling and secure, the dynamic I describe may not occur at all; instead, the mother may feel recognized through other forms of value, other sources of self-worth, that have little or nothing to do with looks.

In many other cases, however, a mother may indeed have felt herself valued for much of her life on the basis of her looks, her sexual attractiveness, her femininity. But just at the time when she enters middle age and begins to feel increasingly uncertain about that attractiveness—a feeling that, because of gender asymmetries, is more likely to affect her than her daughter's also-aging father, who may be living in the same house—her daughter is blooming, blossoming, entering her "prime." It is the younger woman who garners attentions that earlier might have been hers, who is looked at with desire, becoming relatively valued by the world just as the older woman is becoming relatively devalued. Perhaps she notices her husband or her boyfriend noticing her daughter, gazing more at this attractive younger woman in the household, whereas before he was far more likely to gaze at her. Or perhaps, as in other variations on this structurally age-discriminatory theme, the daughter turns out to be plainer than her mother, who was always the "beauty" in the house. Even in this case, age-ism may eventually take its toll. A friend recently recounted to me her own poignant experience of noticing that somewhere along the way—when her mother turned fifty-three, or maybe fifty-four—men started to respond to the middle-"class"-looking but younger daughter rather than the formerly "rich" but now aging older beauty. In each of these instances, then, looks-ism

creates a material sociological basis on which to anticipate in at least some cases that a given mother may find herself both loving and secretly resenting her daughter, feeling both great affection and a certain amount of jealousy.

And why would she not feel both? For in writing this, I decidedly intend to blame institutionalized sexism, not to fault individual mothers. Of course, we ought not to omit, either, the theoretical importance of believing in degrees of personal responsibility and in the possibility of exerting individual agency. But in the context of looks-ism's continuation at present, society sets up mothers in such a way that we expect them to politely accept—if they are not to be viewed as unpleasant and unhappy individuals, suffering a judgmentalness that only aggravates an already painful loss of recognition—the social facts of age and gender discrimination all around them. But why ought social happiness to depend on or require the heroic efforts of individuals, thus limiting such happiness only to a few? Until there are wider social changes, there is more reason to expect a mother would feel sad and pangs of jealousy toward a younger woman than there is reason to expect from her the opposite.

By logical extension, looks-ism thus also creates a basis for its own ideological reproduction; one could call this a variant on the theme of what Nancy Chodorow has called "the reproduction of mothering."^[90] Viewed now from the standpoint of the younger woman, the daughter understandably enjoys the privileges of youth, even as these advantages may at the same time be saddling her with long-lasting psychic burdens. The daughter may begin to internalize her mother's devalued status in unconscious ways. A number of psychoanalytically oriented feminists have noted this tendency, including Jessica Benjamin as well as Chodorow. Both stress social causes of the daughter's desire to separate from her mother. As the daughter begins to define herself heterosexually (an assumption that limits Chodorow's theory by overlooking the equally important question of daughters who do not), she tends to do so in favor of identifying with the superiorized father against the inferiorized mother (all the while remaining unconsciously tied to the figure of her female parent as well).^[91] But in such a scenario, often applicable at least to a daughter developing a heterosexual orientation, the daughter may find herself at once flattered and embarrassed by the glances of her father or other older men, somehow realizing that they represent a world of looks and gendered power in which her mother competes only at a disadvantage. And, to the extent that her sense of self has become

bolstered, that her sense of value gradually grows and comes to depend upon the differential reinforcement and attentions her budding youthful looks now inspire—how will that younger woman begin to feel as eventually she ages in her turn?

It is certainly possible that the daughter too will later feel in danger of losing the cherished recognitions to which she herself has now become accustomed. Ironically, she may be at risk of turning into her mother, the very person against whom she had defined herself negatively (sensing earlier that only in so doing could she find her own happiness). But as she grows older, she too may find herself beginning to worry about her body, her weight, even if she had never done so before. Now she finds herself wondering, am I sufficiently content with the shape of my breasts and my nose, with my weight? How do my looks compare with younger women's when I look into the mirror to find myself looking not nearly so fresh now as they do—might I need some form of cosmetic surgery indeed?

Amid such stresses, she may start to convey, and again perhaps quite inadvertently, a socially explicable set of resentments similar to those once conveyed to her. And so we find ourselves faced with yet another theory about why and how looks-ism can come to repeat itself over time, in cycles of specifically intergenerational repetition. This theory now encompasses psychic feelings , including those which Freud far too unsociologically and uncritically deemed simply "oedipal" and which, like Chodorow, he failed to adequately investigate in relation to people who are gay and lesbian as well as heterosexual. For just as we have seen that sexism and expectations of appearance are closely intertwined, so now we have found that the "reproduction of gender" and the "reproduction of looks-ism" are also closely related, tied to one another through intrafamilial processes that bring them very much into contact with one another in the process of women's sexual—and, in particular, often their heterosexual—development.

Such intergenerational repetition is likely to have an even more striking effect—and again, in particular, on heterosexual women. Through looks-ism, women's energies become habitually channeled much more into comparative evaluations of one another than into challenges aimed at transforming the looks-ist system overall . Again, looks-ism's tendency is to set up women, encouraging each of us to ask, "Which woman is more or less fortunate than myself within the particular 'class' terms of looks-ism as we know it?" Distinctions of looks in relation to age therefore reflect the recurrent problem this section has been treating

all along. It may be an older woman who worries about her looks-ist worth in comparison with the younger woman and considers how she might be able to look "better" vis-à-vis this other who is receiving more attention. Or perhaps the relatively poorer woman yearns to buy clothes that could make her look classier, or the "bad" woman sometimes feels pangs of envy toward the "good," just as the "good" may have moments when she feels jealous of the "bad." In all of these cases, the dominant emotion many women feel becomes a dissatisfied unhappiness with themselves rather than a sense of anger targeted outside at systemic causes of these predictable divisions. In other words, there is indeed a general problem that weaves together all of the cases I have cited by way of elucidating this argument. In each of the examples, women face authentically different predicaments at the same time looks-ism has created a basis for each to feel some amount of common cause with her relatives (and correlatives): both dimensions contain some truth; both make sense and need to be acted upon. Therefore we can finally conclude our consideration of distinctions with an overarching category.

Distinctions based on Looks-ism

Coming back now full circle to a point made by way of introduction, we observe that the feminist thinking about beauty seems at present to be characterized by a growth of debate about looks-ism itself . This, too, superimposes yet another level of divisions upon those already delineated. In addition to splits between women of differing sexual orientations, between so-called good women and bad, one class and another, or one race and another, there may also have developed through the 1980s and 1990s a tendency to oppose relatively "good" feminists against those who are relatively "bad."

When stepping step back to look at this recent history with analytic distance, we should also again be careful to note that feminist debates have not involved absolute differences so much as disagreements over relative emphases. Still, the latter have sometimes become intense and divisive, providing another example of damaging comparisons made predominantly between women; in this case, some feminists have been judged "better" or the more "authentic" on a range of substantive issues. Resentment about such distinctions in the early 1980s was precisely what led to the feminist "sex debates" examined in chapter 3; and, like the issue of beauty, these too have not yet withered away.

Arguments still persist about whether liking pornography or sadomasochism (chapters 4 and 5), or thinking prostitution ought to be decriminalized (chapter 6), makes one a better or worse feminist. Am I a truer feminist if I believe that women who turn to cosmetic surgery can be better off (the position attributed to Kathy Davis), that cosmetic surgery is intrinsically alienating because of its origins in male-dominated societies (Kathryn Morgan's position), or both (as my own reading of Davis takes her book to have sensibly concluded)? Last but not least in this context, how does a given woman's attitude about whether beauty in general is a good and important thing affect her standing as a feminist? Might that position divide her from others with whom she would otherwise share major, collective feminist concerns?

Initially, by way of introduction, I argued that the question itself can become unproductive insofar as it distracts attention from the still male-dominated context in which debate itself emerged and reemerges. Now that we have considered that context, we can return to this earlier question. Thus this last of our analyzed divides between women related to looks-ism has the potential of being the most important one of all, for it bears most directly on the question of what can or cannot be done about looks-ism as at once a social and a political fact . After all, it is feminists who have been, and remain, the most likely to protest this ongoing human problem, which is faced most of all by women but also by men (for the latter, a problem often similar but also often different).

Moreover, nothing about these observations about the potential traps of divisiveness negates the fact that there already exists a rich theoretical literature produced by second-wave feminism on this subject, about beauty and its systemic rather than merely individual manifestations. By way of concluding this investigation, then, we will return to that literature; without its massive contributions, this entire discussion would have been inconceivable. Exactly what, then, have feminists already said concerning what can or should be done about beauty? Can anything from this history help us discover whether and how we might move beyond our present impasse with regard to looks-ism?

What Has Been and Can Be Done?

In surveying the history of second-wave feminism, it strikes me that three stages of treating beauty can be identified. In an early protest

stage, beauty was viewed as indeed part and parcel of women's general subordination. Feminists knew that looks, that objectification, comprised a key part of discrimination against women, but critiques were at first understandably negative in character; an alternative theory of attraction did not come into being. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of important feminist writings considered the topic in greater depth. While these were highly significant and bold in their visions, in this beauty myth stage most writing about beauty sought to democratize and fundamentally reform—but not necessarily replace—the notion altogether. The disproportionate importance attached to beauty for women was better documented than ever before, as were looks-ism's damaging repercussions along lines of gender, race, and class. The beauty myth was called on to open its gates, so that persons possessing diverse bodies, colors, sizes, and weights could also win approval and recognition under its aegis. Thus, in this stage beauty itself was still discussed as though the concept could be taken for granted and rendered transparent: the idea of beauty tended to be accepted even as its present form was deemed unacceptable.

At present we are in what can be characterized as a beauty debate stage; feminists and other social critics now go back and forth between whether we are "for" or "against" this notion, still virtually unaffected by history. This chapter itself began with typical questions: Are we for or against Madonna or cosmetic surgery? Do we prefer Wolf's Beauty Myth or Friday's Power of Beauty? And while my own viewpoint ought by now to be clear—that a democratized beauty system is preferable to the discriminatory status quo—I also wonder whether looks-ism would finally fade, rather than simply becoming increasingly embroiled in controversy, if we no longer believed in the concept of beauty as we presently think and feel about it. The possible success of a fourth stage yet to come therefore rests on an explicit recognition of just how complex most attraction is, involving far more than simple appearance. Before we can sketch the general outline of such a fourth stage, that of attraction's revitalization beyond the too-confining limits of beauty, we need to retrace the tracks of earlier feminists. Unless looks-ism is placed in historical perspective and significant early contributions acknowledged, we risk having to reinvent the wheel by forgetting significant contributions that came before.

Perhaps the first and certainly the most famous early confrontation with beauty was a demonstration, held outside a convention center in

Atlantic City, New Jersey, against the Miss America pageant in September 1968. As Suzanna Danuta Walters chronicles in Material Girls (1995), second-wave feminism was connected from its beginnings with efforts to focus media attention on the problem of beauty.^[92] In August 1968 "No More Miss America!" was written and distributed to publicize the theory behind the planned protest. Note how its participants conceived of the demonstration:

We will protest the image of Miss America, an image that oppresses women in every area in which it purports to represent us. There will be: Picket Lines; Guerrilla Theater; Leafleting; Lobbying Visits to the contestants urging our sisters to reject the Pageant Farce and join us; a huge Freedom Trash Can (into which we will throw bras, girdles, curlers, false eyelashes, wigs, and representative issues of Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Family Circle , etc.—bring any such woman-garbage you have around the house); we will also announce a Boycott of all those commercial products related to the Pageant, and the day will end with a Women's Liberation Rally at midnight when Miss America is crowned on television.^[93]

When placed in this feminist historical context, the immodest Swiftian boycott imagined earlier may no longer seem quite so utopian. Now the idea of that boycott emerges as strange because conceived from the vantage point of the late 1990s. In the late 1960s, too, certainly the notion was radical, striking those in the media as quite preposterous, even though reporters quickly were intrigued. But to feminists then it obviously did not seem nearly so preposterous a symbolic gesture or idea as a similar political protest would strike feminists now.

To be sure, we should not idealize this history. In the 1960s, too, small radical feminist groups—the Redstockings, the Feminists—disagreed among themselves about whether it was okay to wear makeup or not, and about how to live by feminist principles.^[94] But there was a critical difference: August—September 1968 was still a moment when all parties could easily agree that the larger society, its symbolic ritualized institutions and dominant representations of social "reality," needed to be protested, confronted, and materially changed. In other words, whether or not it was okay to wear makeup, something had to be done about the social facts that had given rise to this divisive dilemma.

September 1968 was a significant historical moment in another respect as well. "No More Miss America!" addressed itself to a wide range of women: "Women's Liberation Groups, black women, high-school and college women, women's peace groups, women's welfare

and social-work groups, women's job-equality groups, pro-birth control and pro-abortion groups—women of every political persuasion—all are invited to join us in a day-long boardwalk-theater event, starting at 1:00 p.m. on the Boardwalk in front of Atlantic City's Convention Hall." Moreover, the second of the ten points protested explicitly took up the question of close connections between discrimination on the basis of looks and of race: "2. Racism with Roses . Since its inception in 1921, the Pageant has not had one Black finalist, and this has not been for a lack of test-case contestants. There has never been a Puerto Rican, Alaskan, Hawaiian, or Mexican-American winner. Nor has there ever been a true Miss America—an American Indian." Other points included protests against "The Unbeatable Madonna-Whore Combination" (i.e., the good woman/bad woman dichotomy discussed above) and "Miss America as Big Sister Watching You" (i.e., the divisions between women on the basis of looks already analyzed).^[95]

Clearly, then, early radical feminists were cognizant of existing divisions between women of class, race, age, sexuality, and generations. They also knew well the role played by beauty expectations in maintaining these divisions and displacing political attentions from society to other women. Therefore, this protest stage against beauty was characterized by their belief that looks-ism simultaneously operated across other complex and equally valid social distinctions to create a broad-based commonality between women at least on this basis. Consequently, to employ the category "woman" was quite analytically and politically precise. Radical feminists did not experience nearly the epistemological self-doubt, the fear of essentialism, that has now begun to accompany and undermine feminists' political usages of the term; on the contrary, placed in historical context, that usage was felt to be necessary.^[96]

Still, we need to consider how beauty was treated in the feminist writings that accompanied and followed these actions in the protest stage. Several distinctive categories of beauty can be discerned within this evolving feminist literature, the unfolding beauty field.

Early Observations About Beauty in Major Texts of Feminist Theory

Early radical feminist writings predated and helped fuel the early political protests just described. Again, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and then later in works including Kate Millett's Sexual

Politics , Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex , and Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey ,^[97] one finds beauty treated not as an independent topic but as inseparable from a broader feminist worldview . One surmises that de Beauvoir deliberately chose not to devote a separate chapter of The Second Sex to "beauty" and "looks." Rather, what we have been calling looks-ism is intricately woven into the fabric of her analysis, in accordance with her general phenomenological views regarding objectified relations and the enculturated demand that women develop a passive "femininity." Similarly, Millett, Firestone, Atkinson, and other theorists showed little interest in analyzing beauty as an isolated issue. Once more, beauty was seen as specifically manifesting the objectification of women broadly conceived; it involved particular psychic and social practices through which women's freedom became limited.

Detailed Studies of Specific Aspects of the Beauty Question

Beginning in the 1970s, however, we also find an explosion of attention being paid to different types of beauty expectations. This includes a literature on thinness, for example, from the work of Kim Chernin on through Susan Bordo's more recent and superlative essays, "Reading the Slender Body" and "Anorexia Nervosa."^[98] Writers on obesity have ranged from Susie Ohrbach and Marcia Millman to, more recently, Becky Thompson, who treats overeating as well as undereating as signs of the social demands that affect women; interest and concern about the question of cosmetic surgery also continue to grow, as we have seen.^[99]

Thus, by the late 1990s, a much wider range of writers were paying close attention to the overlapping effects of beauty and looks-ism. At the same time, the development of subtopics within this larger subject may also be related to a historical shift in the social circumstances in which such writings were and are being penned. In general, the earlier feminist writers mentioned above were not academics; in general, the more recent writers are (an academic tendency, of course, from which by no means could or would I exempt myself). This difference in standpoint correlates to a difference in relative emphases. Writings in the first group focus primarily on the larger political goals of a feminist movement , and then on the question of beauty within this; writings in the second group tend to investigate narrowed specific subsets of the beauty system , and then consider the larger goals of feminist political and social movement issues within these.

A Shift From Images of Women to Woman as Image

As Walters observes in Material Girls ,^[100] a European-influenced explosion of feminist cultural theory in the 1980s and after slowly shifted feminists away from the "images of woman" approach that had characterized earlier and less sophisticated feminist interpretations of various media. Rather than content analysis, "woman as image" came to dominate both film criticism and analyses of other popular culture genres (sitcoms, soap operas, MTV). Among the best-known feminist writers who adopted this newer approach to film theory were Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, and Tania Modleski.^[101] Their writings were greatly influenced by a range of European theory, from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction through the writings of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard.

This shift has been extremely significant with regard to how looks-ism, too, would be studied and newly conceived. For, of course, examining "the look," "the gaze," was virtually emblematic of the new approach. Whereas feminist writers' main interest had previously been what was being produced, now they concentrated on how . Now the germane questions included how images are constructed and what spectator positions are presumed by cultural producers who thereby aid in looks-ism's reproduction both consciously and unconsciously. Narrative theory examined how particular plot lines serve to produce and reproduce sexist presumptions—where, if at all, are resistances or cracks in visually based domination to be found?^[102] Yet this academically oriented feminist approach to beauty has tended to stress analyzing and deconstructing rather than actually transforming dominant and admittedly sexist images. By extension, it is not surprising that these writers paid less attention to protesting and altering power relations and relations of production inside the film and other media industries. As a result of this change in emphasis, it may be harder for us to maintain our sense of looks-ism's capacity to regenerate itself in ways that unavoidably involve both material conditions of images' production and the representational content of images themselves.

Walters describes this shift as taking us away from a notion of ideology (which had been at least partly material in its intellectual orientations) toward a far more abstract and disembodied notion of discourse .^[103] At the same time, relatively speaking, these recent feminist cultural analyses of looks have turned away from the simultaneously theoretical and political motivations that had fueled the writings and

commitments of earlier feminists. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways," said Marx in an oft-quoted if hard-to-live-by declaration, "the point is to change it."^[104] If so, then an earlier concept of feminist praxis may have become subtly distilled in and through this third category of attitudes toward beauty. Nevertheless, the much more sophisticated set of cultural analytic tools associated with this shift also contributed to the steady growth of feminist theory through the 1980s and the 1990s.

Contemporary Reappropriations of Beauty

It would be tremendously misleading to portray the above three categories as encompassing all significant texts produced in the three decades that separate the 1968 "No More Miss America!" from the present. Particularly from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, we can find numerous writings about beauty that depict the issue in a wide context of revolving, evolving, and newly developing feminisms. For instance, beauty appears in Black Feminist Thought (1990) amid sociologist Patricia Hill Collins's concern about the effects of overlapping forms of discrimination on women of color. In one chapter Collins examines media presumptions that continue to typecast African American women on the basis of looks, recycling "bad woman" and "good woman" myths that rest on gendered as well as racial biases.^[105] Sandra Bartky's references to a "fashion-beauty complex" assume a socialist feminist weltanschauung, within which beauty and narcissism are seen as critical to understanding how both gender and class sustain themselves.^[106]

Particularly significant are three other overtly political works, also penned after Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 inaugurated a long era of social conservatism. Because they express a clear-cut commitment to transforming what I have been calling looks-ism through feminist political intervention, they avoid the problems of other more academic critics. In order of publication, they are Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr's Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (1984); Wendy Chapkis's Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (1986); and a work already discussed several times in this chapter, Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (1991).^[107] Each title announces that some sort of power relationship is being analyzed within the book's covers; in each, a desire for change is clear, and each is written to address an audience outside an academic context alone. Note, too, the mixed professional affiliations of these authors:

Wolf is not a professor but a professional writer; Chapkis does not identify herself on her book jacket as an academic, though she presently teaches; and Lakoff and Scherr were teaching at the time. Moreover, Face Value was written by one woman whose background is part Chicana and one woman who is white; more than The Beauty Myth , their book is careful to treat looks-ism in terms of both race and gender.

Yet, despite these decided advantages, one cannot help but wonder whether these contemporary texts made a significant dent in the worsening aspects of looks-ism that we examined as the beginning of this chapter. By the time the writings of Lakoff and Scherr, Chapkis, and Wolf appeared, feminism had already come under a barrage of attack from conservatives. In the 1960s and 1970s, writings by feminist figures like Firestone, Koedt, Morgan, and Atkinson could still be perceived as interconnected, as part of a movement: individual theoretical contributions were rendered doubly powerful for being tied to feminism and its collective political efforts. Later feminist movement activity became much more oriented toward defense, and thus it may have become relatively more difficult for later writings to produce a collective impact analogous to that of the early works. It was more likely that such writings would be instead perceived as the achievements of individuals , regardless of an individual author's intentions. I am by no means implying that these later works had no impact at all. Rather, my point is that shorn of a confident social movement that insists on some type of feminist praxis, it is hardly astonishing that two developments coincided. On the one hand, the publication of political works about beauty was occurring, and calling for significant changes to take place. On the other, and around the same time, looks-ism was worsening in many respects as it actually affected and affects women's lives. Less was changing than it appeared.

It is indeed ironic that only two years after the extraordinarily political and astute The Beauty Myth was published, Naomi Wolf's next book was Fire with Fire (1993), a work that puts forth a very different perspective. From its first chapters, one would barely know that "the beauty myth" was still alive, let alone arguably becoming more powerful. Instead, Wolf now contends that we ought to stop thinking of ourselves as "victims": the times, she concludes, have been changing. My friend who had spotted a small photo of Wolf on the back jacket of The Beauty Myth —the image that had propelled him to fall "in love"—might be amused to notice that the paperback edition of Fire with Fire

prominently displays an even larger picture of this undoubtedly attractive author, now on its front cover. The relevance of "seeing" Wolf had clearly not diminished, or even stayed the same; rather, her good looks had somehow become more important. More precisely, perhaps, any contradiction with the perspective of The Beauty Myth had become easier to ignore. Wolf herself seems to believe that things have improved. She proposes that we begin to think in terms of "power feminism" versus "victim feminism," a move which presumes that women indeed now have sufficient power to be asserted (a presumption that may apply to some women some of the time, but not to many others).^[108]

Consequently, if looks-ism is to become politicized yet again, it is critical first to insist that beauty expectations be altered from without , not only from within . We may draw the opposite of Wolf's conclusion in Fire with Fire: feminism needs to become more rather than less collectively politicized, more rather than less concerned about how to draw on the strength of interlocking theory and social movement activism to revive itself. Of course, we must also remember that Wolf's conclusions are her own; they give us no indication of whether the other authors of the works I have mentioned would agree. Indeed, my reading of Face Value and The Politics of Beauty suggests that Lakoff, Scherr, and Chapkis would probably disagree strongly with the post-Beauty Myth direction of Wolf's thinking. For there is no reason why individual works could not add up to more than the sum of their parts once again, when and if conceived anew within the framework of a revitalized social movement. Moreover, as Walters suggests with regard to media criticism, new approaches may be needed that combine the sophistication of contemporary cultural theory with a commitment to actually changing—not only deconstructing—the form and content of ubiquitous cultural imagery.

However, both this chapter and the feminist history of second-wave treatments of beauty have demonstrated a second point: we also need to reconsider the situation from within the movement, not only in terms of changes required in the external world. The burgeoning feminist social movement provided internal forums where women could talk about, air, and share feelings about the ways that "looks-ism" somehow affected us all. Among the subjects considered by consciousness-raising groups were the problems bequeathed by looks-ism of feeling obsolescent, of having diminished self-esteem. Now, aided by more sophisticated theories of gender and the growth of interest in men's studies, we see more clearly the enormous relevance across gender of such

personal/political opportunities, for the ramifications of beauty expectations damage both sexes, even if in different ways. Men need such forums as much, if not more, than women.

The third point is the most important to emphasize, because it has received the least attention in this history of feminist writings up through and including the strongly assertive works of Lakoff and Scherr, Chapkis, and Wolf in the 1980s and 1990s: looks-ism is not what it appears . For in most writings, as even the conclusions of the more recent works show,^[109] the hoped-for outcome is not the overcoming of looks-ism but its democratization—still on the basis of looks . Looks become not unimportant but more inclusive, allowing new images, new sizes, different colors, ages, shapes, sizes, and genders to be favored. The authors wish to reform the concept; not so clear is that it is being altered fundamentally.

And while it should by now be obvious that I certainly agree with this need for democratization—I called for it earlier and I now call for it again—nevertheless, something more is needed. I fear that many reading this long chapter, sometimes or often agreeing with it on logical, rational, even principled grounds, will nevertheless forget about looks-ism soon after turning the last page, feeling as though it makes little difference in the end. "After all is said and done, beauty just is ," I can still envision such a person concluding, "I strongly doubt that any of this can change me ." But there may be a missing element in the analyses of beauty that, if reasserted, could help diffuse looks-ism by revealing its multiple and complex sleights of hand . This theoretical revision ought to make it harder for looks to stay immune from criticisms of looks-ism, for the status quo to remain. I hope that it will encourage a new understanding of attraction —one that can no longer be equated with, nor reduced far too simplistically to, a mere function of "beauty."

For despite beauty's far too symbiotic associations with attraction and with sexism, which would seem to require that the concept be replaced altogether, democratizing it has generally been the main focus of feminist writers. This is true even of two wonderfully interesting and more recent works about beauty, Sara Halprin's "Look at My Ugly Face! " (1995 ) and Ellen Zetzel Lambert's Face of Love (1995), both of which strongly criticize the term's traditional contents but not so much the term itself.^[110] That beauty is thereby subtly saved, even while being criticized, may result both from a different intention and also perhaps from an unwitting and extremely understandable reluctance on the part of these authors to be perceived as so outlandish that their writings

would never be taken seriously. After all, to challenge a social fact as deeply and profoundly accepted as beauty can and will strike many as quite absurd. To call for replacing the beauty system as we know it is indeed risky, as anyone carrying such a message may provoke great annoyance directed back at the messenger. One who keeps at least the predominant idea of beauty intact may not seem so implausibly radical, so "out there" as to be oddly disinterested or antagonistic toward the obvious joys of visual pleasures, somehow against the erotic joys of seeing. For who, after all, is against the beauties of beauty—even if this is a tautological proposition that takes the concept of beauty itself for granted?

But what is this alternative interpretation at which I have been hinting right from the start, which might alter beauty's content as well as its form? In the end, it strikes me as crucial to emphasize that attraction and eroticism are not nearly so based on mere static, physical looks as we are accustomed to—and by now extraordinarily invested in—believing. Rather, attraction frequently has far more to do with a changing interrelationship, a constant interplay between that which exists within and without us, a movement from our minds to our bodies as well as from our bodies to our minds. Most of all, it involves an unbreakable, constant connection between socially created desires and the incarnation of those desires in particular bodily shapes and forms.

In this fourth stage, attraction's revitalization, we need a concept that is dynamic and relational , highlighting and incorporating—rather than obscuring and denying—the constant connection between appearances and contexts. As we have seen, looks-ism's greatest success and its most insidious danger is in hiding this interrelationship so beautifully, which encourages many people to believe fervently that it is beauty one wants, because beauty itself allegedly bestows pleasure—not what beauty has come to mean as a contemporary form of class. Thus, as we bring to bear the insights of theorists from Durkheim to Marx (applied originally to quite different contexts), we recognize that beauty in contemporary society has become totemic, worshiped as if all-powerful even as the social process of its own creation (and re-creation) is quite cleverly mystified. For the more beauty is accepted at face value, the more people will be inclined to pursue "it" instead of exploring the far more complicated feelings of which looks are ultimately only representative .

And thus if looks-ism itself is to be overturned, we must turn on its head the very concept of beauty. In and of itself, a physical trait is ironi-

cally disembodied, lifeless, and mute—not particularly or necessarily exciting at all. To be sure, it would be overly simplistic to assert that any recognition of physicality, any acknowledgment that biological factors sometimes have an autonomous influence, must be alien to this new concept of attraction. Clearly, the biological fact that extreme overweight is dangerous for health and life will not be affected by a theoretical reconsideration (though one can hope that the pervasive, socially motivated contempt and disgust toward those who are obese will disappear). Nor will a given person cease to discover that sometimes her or his body "fits," or does not "fit," better with another's purely on the basis of physical or sexual criteria. But we need to recognize that questions of attraction are much too complex to be reduced—as at present—to an overreliance on the belief in beauty alone. Biological factors have already been shown incapable of explaining the extreme homogenization of looks and the attendant discriminations that have remained so characteristic and common in modern societies. They cannot explain why, in the late 1990s, beauty expectations have become more restrictive and harmful for women at the same time that concerns about looks are also intensifying in men.

But if beauty is not fundamentally a question of the superiority of one physical trait over another, what is it about? Here, our earlier discussion of class and classification proves extremely useful. Like drives toward wealth and power, deep and ongoing beliefs in beauty may mask even deeper psychic and social hopes that—via our association with certain "looks," whether in ourselves or through others—perhaps we will be able to satisfy needs for legitimacy and recognition that are otherwise not being satisfied in our lives.

And perhaps it is such complex but common pleasures of recognition —not mainly or even predominantly any essence of "beauty"—that people often seek when acting out their desires in relation to looks. When I feel better with a "beautiful" woman or a "handsome" man—or when I feel good that I look "beautiful" or "handsome" myself—at the heart of such pleasure is a sense of security that now, finally, I can or will feel loved and lovable. Now I can be recognized through intimacy and through the multifaceted pleasures of a caress. It is not, then, the shape or size of a given nose or lips, or the exact form of her or his body, that matters most, even though I may fervently tell myself otherwise. Similarly, it is not a given woman's actual "thinness" that so satisfies the corporate executive accompanying her when recognized by other men; not necessarily a man's actual muscles to which another

woman or man is drawn and which provides that companion with satisfaction when they are together; not the blondness or redness of a woman's hair per se that perhaps renders her so sexy to another woman. Indeed, such associations often come later , only after a certain bodily shape or form or sound has already become culturally invested with the power to bestow these recognitions, these legitimations. (In the most American of novels, E Scott Fitzgerald seems to provide a similar insight when he has Gatsby think, at a moment when his obsessive love for and attraction to Daisy became clearest to him, that her voice was "full of money.") Yet I may believe it is the physical shape or trait, not the hopes and dreams previously cathected into that given form, which brings me pleasure.

Thus, the transformation of looks-ism points beyond democratizing looks to a need for democratizing social recognition . Looks-ism appears to be only one of the most common manifestations of this basic human hunger. If so, then the project of challenging looks-ism is indeed profoundly democratic, involving the need for social legitimacy itself to be redistributed—across races, classes, genders, and sexualities, as these frequently come to overlap with "looks"—if greater human happiness and fulfillment are to result. The more we sanely acknowledge the needs of human beings to be recognized in general, and not to be arbitrarily demeaned, the more looks-ism stands a chance of itself being redressed.

For if we assume that this interpretation provides even the germ of a new conception (albeit one left for others to expand), then it also follows that attraction is best viewed dynamically rather than statically , as having far more to do with energy than is often consciously acknowledged. Dynamic drives may become linked to and cathected with particular persons toward whom we are drawn precisely because they are perceived as better able than others to provide pleasurable feelings of the diverse forms of recognition we seek. Of course, seeking recognition and approval is basic to most people's interactions; in and of itself, it is not problematic but rather a satisfying and probably unavoidable part of life. Problems result only when ongoing quests for recognition become artificially restricted by the limits and biases—biases that can be quite destructive to others and ourselves—of our own social imaginations. The difficulty with looks-ism is not that it involves at once mental and bodily pleasures of recognition, but that it has been constructed around spurious and discriminatory demands—that it makes it appear as though only certain people's looks (certain genders, races, classes and not others) have the capacity to make us feel joy and pleasure.

Our new concept of attraction will have to incorporate the self-recognition that results when, for instance, a young man finds himself aroused and excited by someone who is ``gorgeous": even then it is likely that physical traits of beauty or handsomeness per se do not primarily explain that person's immediate and continuing appeal. Faced with such a realization, the young man may attempt to change the conditions that are denying him recognition elsewhere. For if attraction is understood largely in terms of energy and complicated drives to achieve pleasurable recognition from others, then indeed all along it has not been "beauty" but a relationship between looks and complex social meanings that is at the center of erotic desire. Yet, without a new concept of beauty, it may be difficult to recognize explicitly what is nevertheless implicit in the situation—that I want a given person not so much because of her or his looks but because of the socially constructed associations with which I have learned to connect that look. With explicit recognition, however, it then may become possible to make or unmake, change or not change, the totem of beauty in which we are invested.

Also through such explicit realization, statements like "thinness is beautiful" or "overweight is ugly" may increasingly strike us as disingenuous. It is no longer so credible to assert that younger women are sexier than women in their sixties, or that whiteness is a better look to possess, because we have called into question the taken-for-granted presuppositions on which such statements are based . Though this process, the taken-for-granted character of a concept like "gender" itself may be called into question. This is because in the very process of developing a different theory of attraction, we channel attention toward rather than away from understanding our own creative relationship not only to looks and looks-ism in particular but to our cultural constructs in general. It becomes easier to perceive that current social interpretations tend by "idealizing" to impoverish the reality: a much richer and more diverse world of sensual and existential possibilities for social interaction.

We still need to consider just how this change could come about. Certainly, as we have seen, one way is to return to earlier feminist emphases on transforming media images, not just analyzing or deconstructing them. It is important that feminists exert power to produce changes in representation; little boys and little girls still generally grow up believing that "beauty" is only the homogenized looks that continue to dominate contemporary imagery in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. And thus once again we circle back to a point made

much earlier: to transform looks-ism will involve, at least in part, altering how the world looks from without .

But it also will involve altering how we think and feel about the world from within . I am by no means proposing that people never again use the word "beauty" or experience the pleasures with which that term has long been associated. Rather, I hope that we will begin to use this and other related words very differently ; I would wish for the world to be even more "beautiful" than before, and for pleasures to be freed rather than cruelly circumscribed. At the same time, we must beware of the word taking on new automatic usages, promoting new forms of rigidity and unwittingly recycling an old tired notion, thereby perpetuating a looks-ism that brings potential misery to all human beings—especially to women.

Thus if looks constantly point past themselves, as I have argued, then our attraction to one another already includes something more, something other, than what appears. Looks are not what they seem, but obscuring or revealing of much more . For attraction comes not only from the glint or smile or expression of an eye, or the movement of a leg or someone's whole body as it becomes energized and activated in space, in time; not only, or merely, from the pleasure of watching someone dance, or the sensuality of mind and body alive in the surfaces of a finger as it evocatively traces, sometimes slowly or other times more rapidly, its way along the physical contours of another. It is more than this, too, reaching out to encompass the way in which that other personality, outside and in, seems to intermesh with one's own; the mutual understandings that make people feel intimate with one another; the way she or he may remind me of someone else, in ways conscious and unconscious, evocative of history and of culture; and the whole universe of symbolic social meanings that attract me to a given sex, a class, a certain ethnicity, for reasons I may or may not apprehend. It works at multiple levels when one wishes so badly, so desperately, not only with one's body but with one's mind, heart, and perhaps even soul, to make love to another person, him to her (or her to him), or her to her (or him to him), wishing to communicate multifaceted sensations of love.

What I have contended throughout, however stubborn or unfashionable to do so will seem in the end, is that looks-ism has it all wrong . Because it isn't what it appears, anyway, so that in a sense there is no choice but to invent a new way of defining and perceiving the inner and outer wonders, indeed the renewed beauties, all around us. A new conception could allow for different shapes and different sizes; it could

even allow signs of death to become visible on the surfaces of our bodies as we aged because no longer would such changes be seen as reducing sensual pleasures but as extending their reach. Thus, I am proposing not a negative conception but a positive alternative, not to take away visual and sexual joys but to add to the scope of how we perceive pleasure and its depths.

Now we can finally jettison the inelegant term "looks-ism" with which we began in favor of this alternative notion, one that gives renewed meaning to attraction, to love, and to the erotic facets of human existence. Whether we wish to call this new concept simply eroticism, or dynamic attraction, or energism matters less than our recognition that a new name must be sought. Our present vision is far too static, too inert, too prone to favor passivity over activity, essences over existences. Most of all, our present conception is inaccurate , failing to acknowledge the complexities and diversities of the real world in which we exist.

Most ironic, perhaps, is that many people may intuit the grave inadequacies of our present conception. Men and women both may find themselves disappointed when in bed with the beautiful other about whose body they previously dreamed. Many people already have sensed, long before they read any arguments about or analyses of the subject, 1ooks-ism's symbolic allusions well past its surface appearances. And many others already experience that the mysterious character of love, of falling in love, often has little to do in the end (and did it have much to do even in the beginning?) with looks. Then why do we persist in homogenizing illusions? Why not admit explicitly and welcome what we know to be the case in any event, after all is said and done?

The reason cannot be fear of lost pleasures, for I hope by now to have made a fuller case for my initial submission that 1ooks-ism's obsolescence would free, not impede, erotic possibilities, which now are coercively and prematurely foreclosed. Perhaps we are afraid that if we do away with looks-ism in favor of something more like dynamism, we will lose our ability to believe in class, in the comforts of our habitual classification systems? Perhaps we paradoxically fear pleasures and freedom? But just as looks-ism itself had to be invented and reinvented in order to become customary, so too could a more dynamic and less damaging vision become gradually familiar in its place. For to have questioned discrimination on the basis of looks, to have seen such discrimination as intimately connected with sexism, to have closely examined a world where much more of importance is occurring than simply

what appears—all this was a project well worth beginning by feminists and well worth continuing in the maturing and innovative works that have since been produced as feminist and social theories have developed. The point now, though, is not only to reinterpret what is beyond the apparent. The goal, and the hope, of philosophy, of sociology, is also to change the world, not only what but how we see that which is there, right in front of our eyes. From such alteration may result the withering, not the worsening, of those discriminations on the basis of looks that have limited our individual and collective sense of vision.