Reconcilable Differences "nsd0e1909"

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

1. De Beauvoir begins book z of The Second Sex , ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (1952; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1974) with this statement, as she

begins to chronicle the development of the young girl through myriad life stages and social influences (301).

2. See Emile Durkheim, "What Is a Social Fact?" in The Rules of Sociological Method , trans. W. D. Halls, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: Free Press, 1982), 50-59.

3. See, for instance, Susan Bordo's essay on anorexia nervosa, in which she cites three axes that influence social concerns about this particular form of appearance expectations: the "control axis" affects men as well as women because the insecurities that cause it cross gender lines ( Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 148-54).

4. By this I mean the disproportionate importance placed on marriage and coupledom for women (see de Beauvoir's chapter "The Married Woman," in The Second Sex , 475-540). The point is also clearly made in Adrienne Rich's classic essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs 5 (1980): 631-6o.

5. This claim that looks and traditional expectations determine women's lives is in general analytically apt—even if it varies to some extent depending on the position of a particular woman. At one end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the rich woman may be able to evade this imperative; at another, the poor or racialized man may be subject to it. But these exceptions do not undermine the rule itself. As we will see later in more detail, men of differing classes and races feel a common right to evaluate women's bodies. Simultaneously, and ironically, men facing class and race discrimination are more likely to find that they are assessed too much in terms of bodily endowments. see, on this point, Robert Connell's discussion of these difference in Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press 1995), esp. chaps. 3, 8, and 10.

6. Michael A. Messner, for example, in Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon, 1992), shows the different ramifications of looks for men relative to a particular man's class and race position in society. Thus, in certain circumstances, men may find themselves not only judges (of women's beauty) but judged themselves. See also Sandra Bartky, "Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation," in Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990), 40; and Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Morrow, 1991).

7. Bordo, Unbearable Weight , 140, 154.

8. See Becky Wangsgaard Thompson, "'A Way Outa No Way': Eating Problems among African-American, Latina, and White Women," Gender and Society 6 (1992): 546-61.

9. See Thompson, "'A Way Outa No Way,'" and A Hunger So Wide and So Deep- American Women Speak Out on Eating Problems (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Racism is cited not only by Thompson but by several of my students in papers for undergraduate courses.

10. Bordo, Unbearable Weight , 61. In this essay, "Whose Body Is This?" Bordo writes that "this is a culture in which rigorous dieting and exercise are being engaged in by more and younger girls all the time—girls as young as seven or eight, according to some studies."

11. Ibid., 154.

12. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 27, 28, 184, 185.

13. Kate Peirce, "A Feminist Theoretical Perspective on the Socialization of Teenage Girls through Seventeen Magazine," Sex Roles 23 (1990): 491-500.

14. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), 217; Wolf, The Beauty Myth , 251.

15. See Kathy Davis's overview of this boom in Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (New York: Routledge, 1995), 20-21.

16. Ibid., 21.

17. See Eugenia Kaw, "Medicalization of Racial Features: Asian American Women and Cosmetic Surgery," Medical Anthropological Quarterly 7 (1993): 74-89.

18. Naomi Murakawa, "The Politics of Looking: Unveiling Asian Blepha-roplasty and Exposing the Fallacies of Liberal Choice" (senior thesis, Columbia College, 1995).

19. In the introduction to Reshaping the Female Body , Kathy Davis describes the research opportunity she saw when, after the Netherlands had covered cosmetic surgery in its national health insurance plan for many years, budgetary considerations led policy makers to seek cuts in insurance coverage: how would these be made, and on what basis? Observing this decision-making process became part of Davis's research.

20. Ibid., 3.

21. For a good overview of ongoing class stratification among women in the United States, see Ruth Sidel, Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America (New York: Penguin, 1987).

22. An exception to the exception, however, may be found among those women who quite reasonably discover that their jobs seems to demand such surgery: say, a newscaster or actor moving into her forties and fifties whose very livelihood demands looking still young.

23. See Edwin M. Schur, Labeling Women Deviant: Gender, Stigma, and Social Control (New York: Random House, 1984), 77.

24. Wolf, The Beauty Myth , 17.

25. See the introduction; also, see Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995).

26. See chapter 7.

27. Cathy Schwichtenberg, "Madonna's Postmodern Feminism: Bringing the Margins to the Center," in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory , ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg (Boulder: Westview, 1993), 141.

28. Susan Bordo, "'Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture," in Schwichtenberg, The Madonna Connection , 285, 288.

29. Ibid., 288-89.

30. Davis, Reshaping the Female Body , 174, and more generally 174-81. See Kathryn Pauly Morgan, "Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women's Bodies," Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991): 25-53.

31. See, for instance, Lily Burana, "Bend Me, Shape Me," New York , 15

July 1996, 28-34, in which a clearly beautiful reporter describes being told she nevertheless needed $20,000 worth of cosmetic surgery reforms; and Charles Siebert, "The Cuts That Go Deeper," New York Times Magazine , 7 July 1996, 20-35, in which the author attempts to interpret rises in cosmetic surgical operations performed on both men and women. Around the same time, National Public Radio did an hour-long program on the subject of beauty and its meaning for feminists across class and race as well as gendered lines.

32. See Holly Brubach, "The Athletic Esthetic," New York Times Magazine , 23 June 1996, 48-51, written this same summer.

33. Nancy Friday, The Power of Beauty (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 320- 21, 337.

34. Geoffrey Cowley, "The Biology of Beauty: What Science Has Discovered about Sex Appeal," Newsweek , 3 June 1996, 65, 66.

35. It should be emphasized that Davis herself, in treating cosmetic surgery, wishes to avoid such dichotomizing (even if her position eventually becomes perceived, despite her intentions, as taking sides in the debate).

36. See the section on the professional beauty qualification, from the "Work" chapter in Wolf's Beauty Myth , esp. 27-48.

37. Paul E. Willis writes of "lads" who "penetrate" their own situation in Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). But why wouldn't such penetration be possible for women, and perhaps to other groups in situations across gender lines?

38. See the useful work of R. W. Connell in this regard, both in Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) and Masculinities .

39. Regarding the immensity of this cultural influence, see, for example, two recent articles: Melissa K. Rich and Thomas F. Cash, "The American Image of Beauty: Media Representations of Hair Color for Four Decades," Sex Roles 29 (1993): 113-23, and Barry Vacker and Wayne R. Key, "Beauty and the Beholder: The Pursuit of Beauty through Commodities," Psychology and Marketing 10 (1993): 471-93.

40. A good summation of this literature is found in Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (New York: Blackwell, 1984).

41. See Steven Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy (New York: Morrow, 1973), and Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: Little, Brown, 1971), chap. 3, esp. 93-95.

42. See Lois Banner, In Full Power: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Knopf, 1992).

43. Emily Martin, "Science and Women's Bodies: Forms of Anthropological Knowledge," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science , ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), 69.

44. See chapter 3, especially with regard to how a hegemonic pornography can come to dominate a given society.

45. Bartky, "Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation."

46. Wolf, The Beauty Myth , 17 (my emphases); for the $10 billion figure,

see Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (New York: Scribner, 1995), 160.

47. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society , 4th ed. (New York: New American Library, 1985).

48. In this context, see especially Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977) and History of Sexuality , vol. 1, An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

49. See Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

50. I mean "distinction" in the sense used by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

51. See the overview concerning the inadequate exploration of race in classic sociological theory provided by Robert Blauner at the opening of Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Also, see Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922; rpt., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

52. See Connell's explanation of the distinction between hegemonic and marginalized masculinities in Masculinities , chaps. 3, 8, 10.

53. Banner, In Full Power .

54. See Connell, Masculinities , chap. 3, in which hegemonic and marginalized forms of masculinities are distinguished.

55. Jessica Benjamin noted this beautifully when describing the relation between Stephen and Rene, characters in The Story of O . See chap. 2, "Master and Slave," in The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

56. To be sure, in many cases a woman's attraction to a man is indeed primarily based upon looks. However, the man with power but without good looks is able to translate that combination into attractiveness to women far more easily than a woman likely can who has power without good looks.

57. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Social Space and the Genesis of Groups," Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723-44.

58. Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory (New York: Free Press, 1977).

59. Murakawa, "The Politics of Looking."

60. The irony for the many men who fall into this category is especially acute, because (as we have seen) throughout their lives such values of physical attractiveness were not equally important for them as for women.

61. For that matter, if I am a man whose race or class position makes such constructed "bodily capital" only differentially available to him (perhaps a young man of color for whom sports may seem the only way out of the ghetto, given the relative inaccessibility of other forms of social capital), I may find myself suffering from a similar sense of poignant obsolescence and possibilities forever lost as I age—even if gender's own insidious effects allow me some comforts, in terms of the relative power I still have over women.

62. For an explanation of performativity, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 24-25.

63. Wolf, The Beauty Myth , 10-11.

64. Connell does a good job of summing up this lack of progress in "Introduction: Some Facts in the Case," in Gender and Power , 1-11.

65. Again, an important exception to viewing beauty only as a feminist issue can be found in the writings of Becky Thompson.

66. Let me be clear that I fervently believe in the political validity and necessity of affirmative action, especially since the larger class and economic structures of American society have remained largely unaltered despite the existence of legal equality. Yet the same argument I am making about looks-ism holds here too: the strong reaction against affirmative action may in part be because social movements have fought for gender- and race-related interests within too narrowly challenged economic limits.

67. On "mutual recognition," see Benjamin, The Bonds of Love , chap. 1.

68. I think here of a speech given by Betty Friedan on a panel organized by Amitai Etzioni at the American Sociological Association meetings in August 1995. Friedan argued that it had been a mistake for feminists to keep emphasizing distinctively gender-specific issues like violence against women: she proposed taking a recess from doing so. But this is an unfortunately either/or proposition in itself: why can't women press for class-related reforms at the same time they unapologetically keep issues about gender at the surface of public consciousness?

69. Many feminists are already recognizing the need to act on several fronts at once: in political terms, see Kristal Brent Zook, "A Manifesto of Sorts for a Black Feminist Movement," New York Times Magazine , 12 November 1995, 86-89; in academic terms, see Joan Alway, "The Trouble with Gender: Tales of the Still-Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociological Theory," Sociological Theory 13 (1995): 209-28.

70. See the introduction to Aronowitz and DiFazio, The Jobless Future .

71. See Messner, Power at Play , and Connell, Masculinities .

72. Bordo discusses the control axis in her essay on anorexia nervosa in Unbearable Weight , 142, 148-54.

73. See Butler's Gender Trouble for a critique of speciously separating "gender" from "sex" in feminist analyses (e.g., 6-7).

74. I do not mean to imply that no one manages to minimize the effects of looks-ism—but even defining oneself against the beauty system is to acknowledge its prior effects and to admit it is something against which one had to make very strenuous efforts to rebel.

75. I realize, of course, that men experience this split between the sexual and intellectual too: it is simply a part of life that one feels sexual at some moments, intent on projects that have little to do with being sexual at others. But for women, as the discussion of Faludi and Wolf above makes clear, the ability to experience one and the other—intellectuality and sexuality—is often compromised, so that too often a woman feels she must be entirely one or the other in a society structured to be at once sexist and looks-ist.

76. The sociological necessity for which I am arguing is made clear in Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," as well as more generally in the writings of Durkheim.

77. See the "methodology" of life stage development that de Beauvoir approached in parts 4 and 5 of The Second Sex .

78. See, for example, the interesting analysis of this complex question found in Holly Devor's Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 4-7.

79. An excellent description of these projected fantasies can be found in chaps. 5 and 6 of Diana Scully, Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists (New York: Routledge, 1994). Scully shows that convicted rapists were convinced that the women they assaulted had really "wanted it"; she lists the varied mythologies regarding women's sexuality which that projected belief entailed.

80. See, in particular, chap. 3 in Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad, Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (College Park: University of Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), esp. 69-75, 90, 95-97.

81. Ibid.

82. My analysis here is indebted to the analysis of sociological distinctions that is found in Bourdieu's Distinctions . Obviously, I intend to illuminate only the specific question of beauty distinctions in the contemporary U.S. context.

83. See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), and Deborah Gray White, Ar'n' I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).

84. See bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End, 1981), 33.

85. Ibid.

86. See Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X , as told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964); Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968; rpt., New York: Laurel/Dell, 1992); and Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979; rpt., London: Verso, 1990).

87. See Suzanna Danuta Walters, Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), for an account of mothers and daughters that offers an entirely different and much more mutually supportive conception of this relationship. Walters shows that a negative depiction of mother/daughter relationships has frequently characterized popular cultural representations: it has been imposed from without, even though the actual experiences of many mothers and daughters are quite different.

88. In researching other topics, I have carried out several interviews in Los Angeles among women who seek acting jobs after entering their mid-forties and fifties. Their experience of age discrimination is frequently worse than for their male peers.

89. See, for example, reports on a Washington conference attended by 3,000 feminists: Karen de Witt, "New Cause Helps Feminists Appeal to

Younger Women,'' New York Times , 5 February 1996, sec. 1, p. 10, and "Feminists Gather to Affirm Relevancy of Their Movement," New York Times , 3 February 1996, sec. 1, p. 9.

90. Nancy Chodorow's best-known work is The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

91. See not only ibid., especially Chodorow's description of hypersymbiosis as may often affect the development of young girls and their relationships with primary caretakers (usually mothers; 100), but also chaps. 1, 5, and 6 of Benjamin, The Bonds of Love .

92. Suzanna Danuta Walters, Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30-31.

93. "No More Miss America!" is taken from the section titled "Historical Documents" in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement , ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), 584-88. To this reprint, Morgan added a note: "Bras were never burned. Bra-burning was a whole-cloth invention of the media."

94. Interview with Lila Karp, who was in the early 1970s a member of the Feminists. For a more specific history of these groups, see, e.g., Alice Echols's Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and a theoretically and historically important essay by Ellen Willis, "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism," in The 60s without Apology , ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 91-118.

95. "No More Miss America!" 584-85, 586, 587-88.

96. For a good description of current debates over such usages of "woman," see Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially the first two chapters; for a more detailed argument for the term's necessity in historical contexts, see chapter 8 of this volume.

97. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970); and Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links, 1974).

98. These essays themselves respond to the dominant psychological approach that characterizes the "medical model's" approach to anorexia, an individualized lens that ignores the relevance of more sociological and feminist interpretations that stress social construction. See Bordo, Unbearable Weight , 139-65, 185-215. See also Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Perennial Library, 1982), 139-64.

99. On obesity see, in addition to Thompson's works, Marcia Millman, Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America (New York: Norton, 1980), and Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss (1978; rpt., New York: Berkley, 1990). For a sense of the main positions on cosmetic surgery and the relationship between them, see K. Morgan, "Women and the Knife," and Kathy Davis, "Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty," Hypatia 6, no. 2 (1991): 21-43.

100. I have shamelessly lifted the title of this section from chap. I of Walters, Material Girls .

101. See, e.g., Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982), and Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

102. Walters, Material Girls , esp. chap. 3.

103. Ibid., 143, 155.

104. Karl Marx, "Concerning Feuerbach," in Early Writings (New York: Vintage, 1975), 423.

105. See Collins, Black Feminist Thought , chap. 4.

106. Bartky focuses on narcissism in "Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation," 33-44.

107. Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), and Wendy Chapkis, Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (Boston: South End, 1986).

108. See Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It (New York: Ballantine, 1993), esp. part 3, "Victim Feminism versus Power Feminism." See also chapter 7 of this volume.

109. See "Beyond the Beauty Myth," which concludes Wolf's Beauty Myth; chap. 5, "Toward a More Colorful Revolution," which ends Chapkis's Beauty Secrets; and chap. 10, "Some Final Thoughts," in Lakoff and Scherr, Face Value .

110. See, in their entireties, Sara Halprin, "Look at My Ugly Face"! Myths and Musings on Beauty and Other Perilous Obsessions with Women's Appearance (New York: Penguin, 1995), and Ellen Zetzel Lambert, The Face of Love: Feminism and the Beauty Question (Boston: Beacon, 1995).