At last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. In the two decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role.
The opening lines of the book subtly situate the thesis. The beauty myth is a constructed response to the losses endured by the patriarchy resulting from the feminist movement and the demand for equal rights for women. The trek toward gender equality had finally reached the point where there was no going back; progress was inevitable. So the only means of fighting against that progress was to turn it against itself, undermine its strengths and compromise its weaknesses. Or, put another way, the beauty myth exists because of the women’s movement, not in spite of it.
“Though I may have dismissed intellectually the statement that I was too unattractive, nonetheless in the core of my psyche I felt that something about my face was difficult, if not monstrous, to behold.”
Christine Craft was a local TV news anchor who was fired—according to her—on the grounds that she was “too old, too unattractive and not deferential to men.” Her overview of the case quoted above, however, reveals the sinister underpinning of how the beauty myth not does, but must work. By propagandizing the value of attractiveness, it subtly becomes a self-replicating, self-fulfilling prophecy. The women who recognize it for the power play it is must inevitably still give in to it just to keep up with the competition who don’t recognize they are being manipulated. By any reasonable objective view, Christine Craft could never be considered “monstrous” regardless of one’s subjective view of attractiveness. And yet got sucked into the myth.
In 1981, American film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert denounced “women in danger” films as an antifeminist backlash; a few years later, they praised one because it lets “us” really know “how it feels to abuse women.”
Wolf is especially observant—and critical—of the transformation in cinematic presentation of women under threat by male killers in films of the late 1970’s and 1980’s. Prior to this, the viewer was almost always encouraged to identify with the victim. (Think the Psycho shower scene.) The arrival of the “slasher movie” in the 1970’s turned things completely around; now the viewer is not only encouraged to identify with the killer, but actually forced to do so through the means of point-of-view cinematography in which the audience is literally watching the murders take place through the eyes of the killer. Wolf argues that this is no mere accidental evolution of filmmaking technique, but rather a direct response to the empowerment of women in real life. At first, Siskel and Ebert agreed, taking this transformation in technique to task for its psychological suggestiveness. Wolf’s point, however, is that what outrages at first becomes acceptable and eventually instructive through the process of normalization. Siskel and Ebert are symbols of this ability to normalize deviancy by desensitizing. And that is the systemic foundation of the beauty myth.
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
The real tragedy of the beauty myth is that while it exists simply for the purpose of consolidating patriarchal power against feminism and equal rights, it could not be sustained with the complicity of women, including feminists. Wolf uses the infamous tagline from a hair product commercial as evidence for her central contention that dividing women and putting them against each is “core of the myth—and the reason it was so useful as a counter to feminism.” The goal is to create an artificially constructed competition between women in which “beauty” has, ironically, been defined and redefined by men and the strongest evidence supporting the argument that women have fully bought into the myth is sales. Not only has the cosmetics industry more than weathered the storm of feminist backlash against makeup, but it has since been joined by the weigh-loss and cosmetic surgery industries as three of the most profitable on the planet.
