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This took me forever to finish (a whole month OMG!) but it was incredibly worthwhile. I'm so glad I took the time to read it.
If you haven't read it or heard about it, The Beauty Myth is a book that explores how modern culture has adapted the myth/requirement of "beauty" to control women now that women have more power in society than they ever had before, and that ideals of beauty suddenly become more prevalent and demanding right after the feminist wave of the 1970s. In the past there were a variety of structures that controlled women's behavior, like the Victorian ideas of "hysteria" and women as pale sickly creatures to be taken care of, or the domesticity of the 1950s. Wolf makes the argument that women are now controlled by the ideals of beauty, that one must be beautiful to be successful or even loved, and that a lot of huge industries depend on women believing that they are not beautiful: that they need creams and powders and home gyms and weight loss pills and plastic surgery in order to become beautiful and so to "deserve" love and recognition and success. The book is 15 years old now, so a lot of the details she cites are out of date, but so very much of the text is shockingly applicable to women today. There are a few passages that I marked that really struck home, so I'm going to type them out.
On women and weight loss:
Those ten to fifteen pounds, which have become a fulcrum... of most Western women's sense of self, are the medium of what I call the One Stone Solution. One stone, the British measurement of fourteen pounds, is roughly what stands between the 50 percent of women who are not overweight who believe they are and their ideal self. That one stone, once lost, puts these women well below the weight that is natural to them, and beautiful.... But the body quickly restores itself, and the cycle of gain and loss begins, with its train of torment and its risk of disease, becoming a fixation of the woman's consciousness. The inevitable cycles of failure ensured by the One Stone Solution create and continually reinforce in women our uniquely modern neurosis. This great weight-shift bestowed on women, just when we were free to begin to forget them, new versions of low self-esteem, loss of control, and sexual shame. It is a genuinely elegant fulfullment of a collective wish: By simply dropping the official weight one stone below most women's natural level, and redefining a woman's womanly shape as by definition "too fat," a wave of self-hatred swept over First World women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered the historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself.
This paragraph stuck out to me because it lines up really strongly with my own body issues. I have said numerous times that I'd feel a lot better about my body if I could just drop ten pounds. The usual reaction to this statement from whoever I'm talking to is "from where??" But ever since I grew out of the tall skinniness I had as a teenager and into my curves I've felt too big all over. This paragraph, I felt, directly addressed my exact weight issue: both why I feel that way, and why it's crazy and something I can hopefully learn to discard.
On aging:
You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that if a woman is healthy she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes after decades of laughter, closing together like fans as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of "serious lesions," or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion, and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life, and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.
I just found this to be such an expressive, beautifully written description of women aging. I wanted to type it out so I could always have it here to look back to.
I could type out more, but there's so much of this book that is wonderful and eye-opening and just excellent that I would just end up retyping the book. I strongly encourage you to go out and get this book if you haven't read it.
If you haven't read it or heard about it, The Beauty Myth is a book that explores how modern culture has adapted the myth/requirement of "beauty" to control women now that women have more power in society than they ever had before, and that ideals of beauty suddenly become more prevalent and demanding right after the feminist wave of the 1970s. In the past there were a variety of structures that controlled women's behavior, like the Victorian ideas of "hysteria" and women as pale sickly creatures to be taken care of, or the domesticity of the 1950s. Wolf makes the argument that women are now controlled by the ideals of beauty, that one must be beautiful to be successful or even loved, and that a lot of huge industries depend on women believing that they are not beautiful: that they need creams and powders and home gyms and weight loss pills and plastic surgery in order to become beautiful and so to "deserve" love and recognition and success. The book is 15 years old now, so a lot of the details she cites are out of date, but so very much of the text is shockingly applicable to women today. There are a few passages that I marked that really struck home, so I'm going to type them out.
On women and weight loss:
Those ten to fifteen pounds, which have become a fulcrum... of most Western women's sense of self, are the medium of what I call the One Stone Solution. One stone, the British measurement of fourteen pounds, is roughly what stands between the 50 percent of women who are not overweight who believe they are and their ideal self. That one stone, once lost, puts these women well below the weight that is natural to them, and beautiful.... But the body quickly restores itself, and the cycle of gain and loss begins, with its train of torment and its risk of disease, becoming a fixation of the woman's consciousness. The inevitable cycles of failure ensured by the One Stone Solution create and continually reinforce in women our uniquely modern neurosis. This great weight-shift bestowed on women, just when we were free to begin to forget them, new versions of low self-esteem, loss of control, and sexual shame. It is a genuinely elegant fulfullment of a collective wish: By simply dropping the official weight one stone below most women's natural level, and redefining a woman's womanly shape as by definition "too fat," a wave of self-hatred swept over First World women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered the historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself.
This paragraph stuck out to me because it lines up really strongly with my own body issues. I have said numerous times that I'd feel a lot better about my body if I could just drop ten pounds. The usual reaction to this statement from whoever I'm talking to is "from where??" But ever since I grew out of the tall skinniness I had as a teenager and into my curves I've felt too big all over. This paragraph, I felt, directly addressed my exact weight issue: both why I feel that way, and why it's crazy and something I can hopefully learn to discard.
On aging:
You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that if a woman is healthy she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes after decades of laughter, closing together like fans as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of "serious lesions," or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion, and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life, and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.
I just found this to be such an expressive, beautifully written description of women aging. I wanted to type it out so I could always have it here to look back to.
I could type out more, but there's so much of this book that is wonderful and eye-opening and just excellent that I would just end up retyping the book. I strongly encourage you to go out and get this book if you haven't read it.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 06:00 pm (UTC)From:May I borrow it?
no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 04:56 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 06:54 pm (UTC)From:We are beautiful!
Date: 2005-07-21 11:20 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 03:00 am (UTC)From:You know where I found some amazing stealth-feminist material is in the "I Hate to..." series published in the 1960's. Mixed in with the household hints are all kinds of defiant asides, including a some very sharp commentary on what "the magazines" expect women to look like. It's funny, but it has a bite, because what she's attacking is so very, very true and very, very sad.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 09:25 pm (UTC)From:I believe Americans are doomed to extinction. If we keep pushing a standard of beauty which consists of women looking like 11 year old boys with small ballons on their chest, we'll end up with a nation full of women with their endocrine systems so compromised that births are downright dangerous.
And then we spics, who don't care about such things, will take over.
Bwahahahaha