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.