Men, on the other hand, since they made gods in their own image, feel that their bodies are essentially all right. Studies show that while women unrealistically distort their bodies negatively, men unrealistically distort theirs positively. The Western legacy of a religion based on the concept of men resembling God means that feeling at fault in their bodies is an article of faith for women that need not reflect reality. While only one man in ten is “strongly dissatisfied” with his body, one third of women are “strongly dissatisfied” with theirs. Though the sexes are overweight in equal proportions—about a third—95 percent of enrollees in weight-loss programs are women. Women think they have a serious problem when they are fifteen pounds above the national average; men are not concerned until they are thirty-five pounds above. Those numbers do not prove that women are an evil-looking gender, compared with the godlike race of men; if anything, more women than men resemble a cultural ideal, because they try harder. All they reflect is the Judeo-Christian tradition: Women’s flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods. The actual demographics of obesity are irrelevant because this religion is not about whose body is fat, but whose body is wrong.
The Rites designate the surgeon as Artist-Priest, a more expert Creator than the maternal body or “Mother Nature,” from whom the woman had her first inadequate birth. From surgical literature, it appears that many doctors share this view of themselves: The logo for a rhinoplasty conference at the Waldorf Hotel is a female face sculpted from stone, cracked. Dr. Mohammed Fahdy, in a professional journal for plastic surgeons, describes female flesh as “clay or meat.” The New York Times reports a symposium on beauty sponsored jointly by the New York Academy of Art and the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery. In another New York Times article (aptly entitled “The Holy Grail of Good Looks”), Dr. Ronald A. Fragen admits that it is better to practice on clay faces first because “you can change your mistakes.” Dr. Thomas D. Rees, in More Than Just a Pretty Face: How Cosmetic Surgery Can Improve Your Looks and Your Life, writes: “Even the greatest artists of all time had, occasionally, to rework a section of a painting.” The cosmetic surgeon is the modern woman’s divine sex symbol, claiming for himself the worship that nineteenth-century women offered the man of God.
Original Sin
Q. I am only 21. Do I need Niôsome Système Anti-Age? . . .
A. Yes, definitely. The causes of aging have already begun, even though the signs may not yet be visible.
Q. I am over 45. Is it too late to start using Niôsome Système Anti-Age?
A. It’s never too late.
The Rites of Beauty redefine original sin as being born not mortal, but female. Before the backlash, girls and old women were exempt from participation in worship—and therefore outside the ranks of potential consumers. But the Rites recast original sin in such a way that no young girl can feel it is too early to worry about the stains of female ugliness—age or fat—invisible within her from birth, waiting to be revealed. Nor can an older woman put the Rites behind her. Skin creams and diet books use the language of the parable of the prodigal son to draw their moral: Despite the sinner’s wayward life, she is never forsaken and it is never too late to repent. If it’s never too early or too late to forget about the Rites, there is no point in a woman’s life at which she can live guilt free, to infect other women with her lapsed behavior.
An example of this theological trick is the “scientific” table of Clinique, which lists these categories under the heading “Facial Lines”: Very Many, Several, Few, and Very Few. The conceptual category for None does not exist. Being undamaged is inconceivable; to exist as a woman, even as an adolescent girl, is to be damaged.
The sales effect of this condition parallels that of Christian doctrine. A worshiper who does not feel guilty cannot be counted on to support the Church; a woman who does not feel damaged cannot be relied on to spend money for her “repair.” Original sin is the source of guilt. Guilt and its consequent sacrifice form the central movement of the newer religious economy as well. Ads aimed at men succeed by flattering their self-image, while ads for these ritual products work, as do ads aimed at women in general, by making women feel as guilty as possible: The sole moral responsibility for her aging or shape, she is told, rests in the woman’s hands. “Even the most innocent expressions—including squinting, blinking and smiling—take a toll” (Clarins). “Since 1956, there’s been no excuse for dry skin” (Revlon). “Do you laugh, cry, frown, worry, speak?” (Clarins). “Isn’t it obvious what you should do for your skin now?” (Terme di Saturnia). “Stop damaging your skin” (Elizabeth Arden). “A better bust is up to you” (Clarins). “Take control of your contours” (Clarins).
Sex into Food
Other writers have mentioned this parallel too: Kim Chernin in The Obsession asks: “Is it possible then that we today worry about eating and weight the way our foremothers and their doctors worried about women’s sexuality?” But what has been left untraced is the exalted source of these anxieties and their true function: Modern culture represses female oral appetite as Victorian culture, through doctors, repressed female sexual appetite: from the top of the power structure downward, for a political purpose. When female sexual activity lost its useful penalties, the Rites replaced the fear, guilt, and shame that women had been taught must always follow pleasure.
Original sin left us sexual guilt. When the sexual revolution joined with consumerism to create the new supply of sexually available women, a physical relocation of female guilt was needed at once. The Rites of Beauty supplant virtually every Judeo-Christian prohibition against sexual appetite with a parallel taboo against oral appetite. The whole oral scenario of longing, temptation, capitulation, terror that it “will show,” desperate efforts to purge the “evidence” from the body, and ultimate self-loathing can be imagined almost unchanged as the sexual reality of most unmarried young women until abortion and contraception were legal and premarital sex lost its stigma; that is, until a generation ago.
In the Church, though men were tempted by sexual lust, women were cast as its wicked embodiment. Similarly, though men have appetites and get fat, women’s oral appetites are the social embodiment of shame.
“Menstruation taboos,” writes Rosalind Miles, “. . . meant that for a quarter of their adult lives, one week in every four, women of earlier times were regularly stigmatized and set apart, disabled and debarred from the life of their society.” Their cycle defined women as unclean, sexually repugnant during their “bad days,” irrational, and unfit for public positions. Women feel similarly diminished and excluded by the “fat days” phase of their weight cycle, which serves the same purpose by characterizing women even to themselves as morally weak, tainted, and sexually unworthy. Where the menstrual taboo kept women out of public life, today women hide themselves away. In Orthodox Judaism, a woman in niddah, menstrual impurity, is forbidden to eat with her family; fat impurity does the same work.
Sexual impurity laws in general gave way to oral impurity taboos. Women were genitally chaste for God; now they are orally chaste for the God of Beauty. Sex within marriage, for procreation, was acceptable, while sex for pleasure was a sin; women make the same distinction today between eating to sustain life and eating for pleasure. The double standard that gave men and not women sexual license has become a double standard in which men have greater oral license. A sexually unchaste girl was “fallen”; women “fall off” their regimes. Women “cheated” on their husbands; now they “cheat” on their diets. A woman who eats something “forbidden” is “naughty”: “It’s just for tonight,” she’ll say. “I have lusted in my heart” becomes “All I have to do is look at one.” “I’m a girl who just can’t say no,” announces the model promoting Jell-O gelatin, which “kind of makes you feel good about saying yes.” With Wheat Thin crackers, “You don’t have to hate yourself in the morning.” The rosary has become a calorie counter; women say, “I have the stretch marks to show for my sins.” Where once she was
allowed to take communion if she made a full and sincere penance, now a woman is granted a given procedure “if she has sincerely tried diet and exercise.” The state of her fat, like the state of her hymen in the past, is a community concern: “Let us pray for our sister” has become “We’ll all encourage you to lose it.”
The Cycle of Purification
Beauty is heaven or a state of grace; the skin or fat cell count is the soul; ugliness is hell. “Heaven, I’m in heaven,” weight-loss spa Annandale Health Hydro advertises. It “is like nowhere else on earth . . . beauty treatments to make you feel like you have wings. . . . How do you get to heaven? Just be good—and clip the coupon.” Where a dessert is “temptation,” seventy-calorie Alba is “salvation”; an article in New Woman detailing the calories in ice cream is titled “Sundae Worship.”
The woman being addressed is in neither heaven nor hell—she is neither transcendent, because she is so beautiful, nor hopelessly fallen, because so ugly. She is never of the Elect, but can save herself through good works. The beauty product is her mediator: healer, angel, or spiritual guide.
She follows a calendar of excess and penance, a Mardi Gras and Lent of the body, atoning for midwinter sprees with New Year’s resolutions. At “the critical stage,” as Terme di Saturnia puts it, the worshiper is evaluated by a righteous God from whom nothing can be hidden. Using the language of Yom Kippur, in which true repentance is possible for ten days, after which the Book of Life is sealed for the rest of the year, one cosmetician’s ad tells New York that “what you do in the next ten days will determine what your skin looks like for the rest of the year.” The “moment of truth,” like the Last Judgment, weighs the penitent on a scale. “The scale,” the new gospel teaches, “does not lie.” “Every mouthful will show on your hips,” the woman is told; “Your skin reveals what you put inside you.” With those warnings she learns to “fear the Almighty from whom nothing is hidden.”
What does this sense of constant surveillance do to women? In The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, Elaine Showalter describes how surveillance is used in modern mental hospitals to keep women patients tractable. “In the asylums . . . woman are encouraged, persuaded, and taught to become surveyors, ‘to watch themselves being looked at,’ and to make themselves attractive objects by being surveyed.” Makeup, Showalter writes, is kept in the ward box with its “stump of lipstick” and “box of blossom-pink powder.” “It is not surprising,” she concludes, “that in the female narrative [of schizophrenics] the hectoring spirit . . . who jeers, judges, commands and controls . . . is almost invariably male. He delivers the running critique of appearance and performance that the woman has grown up with as part of her stream of consciousness.” Continual surveillance is used against political prisoners for similar reasons: An enforced lack of privacy strips dignity and breaks resistance.
This ritual use of constant surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth: Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.
This god is Big Brother. “Discipline is Liberation,” writes exercise guru Jane Fonda, deaf to its echo: War is peace, work is freedom. And many women internalize Big Brother’s eye: Weight Watchers lets women pay for mutual surveillance; their magazines tell them to “Always wear your makeup, even if you’re just walking the dog. You never know whom you might meet.” Jesus said, “Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning.” “Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and look at yourself from the front, back and sides. Take the shades from your eyes and face the truth of the situation,” charges Positively Beautiful. “Does your flesh wobble and seem dimpled? Can you see the bulges? Are your thighs very thick? Does your stomach stick out?” This is self-scrutiny that used to be reserved for the soul.
Female nineteenth-century diarists of the soul noted every moral fluctuation, aware, in the words of one, that “the salvation of our precious souls is not to be effected independent of our exertions.” The behavior modification techniques invented by psychologist Richard Stuart in 1967—the out-of-control year of the Summer of Love—had subjects record “when, where, what, and under what circumstances” they ate, thus burdening women with minute self-monitoring—just in time—for the salvation of their bodies.
The purification cycle often follows the seasons: Women who feel they have “something to hide” dread summer’s approach, anxious that hot weather and full exposure will not overtake them before they have fasted and flagellated themselves into blameless readiness. Medieval Christians feared that death would overtake them while their souls were still black with sin. The magazines use the Church fathers’ formula for the hidden female body, a whited sepulcher, a fair surface hiding loathsomeness: “It’s easy to hide a multitude of sins under winter fashions.” Only with penance can the worshiper “dare to bare all” and be like the angels of Bain de Soleil, who “have no fear of exposure.” The weight-loss cycle mimics the Easter cycle: Self-scrutiny leads into self-mortification, which leads to rejoicing.
In its death-and-rebirth centerpiece, the women enter what anthropologists call the “liminal phase,” a “betwixt and between” state during which, according to cult expert Willa Appel, “the novice must become nothing before [s]he can become a new something.” The old identity is suspended until the new one can be assumed. A magical transition, it is surrounded with special effects that actually, not metaphorically, induce a susceptible, altered state: darkness, low music, blindfolding; the subject is often touched, bathed, and immersed in sensory stimuli such as fragrances or changes in temperature. In spas and beauty parlors, women shed their street clothes and put on identical white or colored robes. Their status is suspended when they unclasp their jewelry. They give themselves over to the touch of the masseuse or beautician. Pads are put on their eyes, scented liquids cover their faces. The waters of the Golden Door have the effect of the waters of Lourdes. The liminal moment in a make-over comes after the old makeup is removed, but before the new is applied; in surgery, when the patient, in her hospital gown, is prepared and put under. In a Lancôme ad, a woman lies on her back in a sepulchral light, seemingly dead, while a mysterious hand descends with Jesus’ gesture to touch her face.
At the depth of the disorientation, the initiate into a cult often undergoes an incision or an endurance test: There is pain, hunger, or blood, real or symbolic. At that point, women are pricked with needles that emit electric shocks, or they are cut open, or burned with acid, or their hairs are plucked out by the root, or their bellies are emptied. The liminal period ends with another submersion in liquid that evokes the waters of rebirth: It is often blood, as in the Christian “blood of the lamb,” or the bull’s blood of the Osiris cult. This is the stage of the crucified Jesus in the tomb, the Christian under baptismal water, the patient bleeding under anesthesia, the spa devotee under wraps or steam or herbal baths.
At the end comes victory and new life: The death in the desert of the old, tainted generation is redeemed with the birth of a new one, who may enter the Promised Land. The baptized person assumes another name, a new status in the community. The newly made up or coiffed or thin woman, the woman with the surgically “new face,” celebrates her fresh identity and returns to take up what she hopes will be an improved status. She is told, to prepare for reentry, to buy clothes, get a haircut, take on the accessories of an altered personality. Presented as incentive for weight loss, or camouflage for surgery, that advice is elementary magic.
The new religion improves on the others, because redemption does not last. The “supportive” rhetoric of the diet industry masks th
e obvious: The last thing it wants is for women to get thin once and for all. Ninety-eight percent of dieters regain the weight. “The diet industry is an entrepreneur’s delight,” writes Brumberg, “because the market is self-generating and intrinsically expansive. Predicated on failure . . . the interest in diet strategies, techniques and products seems unlimited.” The same holds for the antiage industry, which a truly effective product (or universal female self-esteem) would destroy. Fortunately for the industry, even surgery patients continue to age at the rate of 100 percent. The “new me” is washed off with the evening’s bath. The cycle must begin again from the start, since living in time and having to eat to live are both sins against the God of Beauty—and both, of course, inevitable.
When women adapt too well to the strictures of the industries, the weight or age that defines grace merely adjusts by plummeting: The models descend another ten pounds, the surgeons lower the “preventive” age for a first face-lift by another decade. From the industries’ point of view, the one scenario worse than women winning at this rigged game would be for them to lose interest in playing it at all. The repeating loop of the purification cycle prevents that. A woman is scarcely given the chance to think before she must take up her burden again, the journey growing more arduous each time.
Memento Mori
The Rites of Beauty are intended to make women archaically morbid. Five hundred years ago, men thought about their lives in relation to death as women today are asked to imagine the life span of beauty: Surrounded by sudden inexplicable deaths, medieval Christianity made the worshiper’s constant awareness of mortality a lifetime obsession. The dangers of childbirth intensified the consciousness of death for women, as was exemplified by the use of Psalm 116 by women in labor: “The snares of death compassed me round, and the pains of hell gat hold on me . . . O Lord I beseech thee, deliver my soul.” This once-general morbidity became primarily feminine in the nineteenth century. Scientific advances tempered men’s sense of fatality, but well into the industrial age, the specter of death in the childbed forced women often to dwell upon the condition of their souls. After antisepsis lowered the maternal death rate and once women became valued as beauties rather than mothers, this preoccupation with loss was channeled into fears about the death of “beauty.” So many women still feel they are surrounded by ill-understood forces that can strike at any time, destroying what has been represented to them as life itself. When a woman with her back to the TV camera describes a botched surgical job, saying, “He took away my beauty. In one blow. It’s all gone,” she is expressing a sense of helpless resignation that harks back to the way preindustrial societies responded to natural disaster.