The economy also depends on a male work structure that denies the family. Men police one another’s sexuality, forbidding each other to put sexual love and family at the center of their lives; women define themselves as successful according to their ability to sustain sexually loving relationships. If too many men and women formed common cause, that definition of success would make its appeal to men, liberating them from the echoing wind-tunnel of competitive masculinity. Beauty pornography is useful in preventing that eventuality: When aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman—known, marked, lined, familiar—who hands him the paper every morning.
The myth freezes the sexual revolution to bring us full circle, evading sexual love with its expensive economic price tag. The nineteenth century constrained heterosexuality in arranged marriages; today’s urban overachievers sign over their sexual fate to dating services, and their libido to work: One survey found that many yuppie couples share mutual impotence. The last century kept men and women apart in rigid gender stereotypes, as they are now estranged through rigid physical stereotypes. In the Victorian marriage market, men judged and chose; in the stakes of the beauty market, men judge and choose. It is hard to love a jailer, women knew when they had no legal rights. But it is not much easier to love a judge. Beauty pornography is a war-keeping force to stabilize the institutions of a society under threat from an outbreak of heterosexual love.
Object Lessons
Glamorous rape scenes obviously eroticize the sex war. But what about nonviolent beauty pornography? The harm is apparent in the way such imagery represses female sexuality and lowers women’s sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which “beauty” is the only key. Since the myth began to use female sexuality to do its political work, by pairing it with “beauty” images in a siege of repetition, it has a stronger grip on women than ever before. With sex held hostage by “beauty,” the myth is no longer just skin deep, but goes to the core.
Western women’s sexuality may be as endangered by the myth as the sexuality of many Eastern women is endangered through cruder practices. Kinsey’s 1953 study showed that only between 70 and 77 percent of women had ever achieved orgasm, either by masturbation or intercourse. Women’s sexual satisfaction has not kept pace with the ostensible progress of the “sexual revolution”: Shere Hite’s 1976 figures showed that only 30 percent of women have orgasms regularly from intercourse without clitoral stimulation by hand, another 19 percent with clitoral stimulation; 29 percent don’t have orgasms during intercourse; 15 percent don’t masturbate at all; and 11.6 percent don’t have orgasms at all, ever. Helen Kaplan’s 1974 research showed that 8 to 10 percent of women never have orgasms, and up to 45 percent do so during intercourse only with additional clitoral stimulation. Only 30 percent of women in Seymour Fischer’s 1973 study had orgasms regularly during intercourse.
The 1980s showed surprisingly little change: By 1980, Wendy Faulkner found that only 40 percent of British women have masturbated by the age of forty, versus 90 percent of men. In a 1981 study, only 47 percent of Danish women were found ever to have masturbated to orgasm at all. In the United Kingdom, a 1989 study of 10,000 women discovered that 36 percent “rarely” or “never” experienced orgasm during intercourse and “most admitted faking it to please their husbands.” Western women’s sexuality may be so endangered by the myth that even Eastern circumcised women have more pleasure: Incredibly, in contrast, a major study of 4,024 circumcised Sudanese women (their clitorises removed by sunna circumcision) showed that 88 percent had experienced orgasm.
Though intercourse certainly need not be set up as the primary act around which women must adjust their pleasure, it is legitimate to ask why intercourse and masturbation, as just two sources of potential pleasure out of many, should be giving women so little satisfaction now. Western heterosexual women are not getting the pleasure from their own bodies or the bodies of men that they deserve or of which they are capable. Could there be something wrong with the way in which intercourse is culturally taught to men and women, and something wrong with the way women are asked to experience their own bodies? The beauty myth can explain much of that dissatisfaction.
The myth wants to discourage women from seeing themselves unequivocally as sexually beautiful. The damage beauty pornography does to women is less immediately obvious than the harm usually attributed to pornography: A woman who knows why she hates to see another woman hanging from a meat hook, and can state her objections, is baffled if she tries to articulate her discomfort with “soft” beauty pornography.
This fear of pornography that cannot speak its name is a quiet dismay that extends across the political spectrum. It can be found inside “free speech” feminists who oppose the antipornography movement, and inside women who don’t follow feminist debate, and inside women who don’t identify with the “bad” women in hard or soft pornography, inside religious women and secular, promiscuous women and virgins, gay women and straight. The women hurt by it do not have to be convinced of a link between “real” pornography and sexual violence; but they cannot discuss this harm without shame. For the woman who cannot locate in her worldview a reasonable objection to images of naked, “beautiful” women to whom nothing bad is visibly being done, what is it that can explain the damage she feels within?
Her silence itself comes from the myth: If women feel ugly, it is our fault, and we have no inalienable right to feel sexually beautiful. A woman must not admit it if she objects to beauty pornography because it strikes to the root of her sexuality by making her feel sexually unlovely. Male or female, we all need to feel beautiful to be open to sexual communication: “beautiful” in the sense of welcome, desired, and treasured. Deprived of that, one objectifies oneself or the other for self-protection.
I once talked with other young women students about the soft-core pornography to which our college common room subscribed. I had it all wrong. I mentioned politics, symbolism, male cultural space, social exclusion, commodification. A thoughtful young woman listened intently for a while, but without a flicker of response in her eyes. “I’ll support you,” she said eventually, “though I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I know is that they make me feel incredibly bad about myself.”
The covers of soft-core magazines come close to a woman’s psyche by showing versions of the models familiar to her from her own fantasy life, which is composed of images from film, TV, and women’s magazines. Unlike the “alien” whores of hard-core pornography, whose “beauty” is less to the point than what they can be made to do, these models are a lesson to her: They are “her” models undressed. “Hefner’s a romantic, into the beauty of it all,” says Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw, “and his girls are the girls next door. My girls are the whores next door, with pimples and stretch marks and cheap black and white newsprint.” If those are the only two choices of sexual representation available to women, no wonder they seek beauty to the point of death.
The “romantic” models give the woman a hypnotic revelation of a perfected body to sketch in under the familiar protected face; the rosy labia and rouged nipples can be imagined under the lace of the Sunday supplement models, whose gleaming flanks and sinuous bellies can be imagined under the fashion layouts. To this consumer striptease she compares her own. She may feel wry humility, an antidote to desire, or she may feel a sense of narcissistic “measuring up,” pornographically charged but ultimately as antierotic, since the woman who “fits” does not win; she is simply allowed to fill the outline of the Iron Maiden. Indeed, it is possible that “beautiful” women are more vulnerable to pornographic intervention in their fantasy lives, since they can “see” themselves in pornography where other women do not.
A woman who dislikes Playboy may do so because the sexual core is not easily killed. Though she may have submitte
d her self-image to other humiliations, in its last site of resistance, this, the sexual essence, will fight hard and long. She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex—or, if “beautiful,” her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker’s essay “Coming Apart” investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover’s pornography, her heroine “foolishly” decides that she is not beautiful.
“I fantasize,” says “Betty” in Nancy Friday’s collection of female sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, that “I have changed into a very beautiful and glamorous woman (in real life I know I’m somewhat plain). . . . I close my eyes and seem to be watching this other beautiful woman who is me from some other place, outside myself. I can see her so vividly that I want to shout encouragement to her . . . ‘Enjoy it, you deserve it.’ The funny thing is that this other woman isn’t me.” Writes “Monica”: “I was suddenly not my own self. The body . . . was not this funny fat thing of mine, it wasn’t me. . . . It was my beautiful sister . . . all the time it wasn’t me, it was all happening to these two beautiful people in my mind.” Those voices—“it was not me”; “I was suddenly not my own self”; “it was this other beautiful woman”—are haunting. In only twenty years, the myth has slid a pane of imagery to separate women from their bodies during the act of love.
When they discuss this subject, women lean forward, their voices lower. They tell their terrible secret. It’s my breasts, they say. My hips. It’s my thighs. I hate my stomach. This is not aesthetic distaste, but deep sexual shame. The parts of the body vary. But what each woman who describes it shares is the conviction that that is what the pornography of beauty most fetishizes. Breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies; the most sexually central parts of women, whose “ugliness” therefore becomes an obsession. Those are the parts most often battered by abusive men. The parts that sex murderers most often mutilate. The parts most often defiled by violent pornography. The parts that beauty surgeons most often cut open. The parts that bear and nurse children and feel sexual. A misogynist culture has succeeded in making women hate what misogynists hate.
“Lady, love your cunt,” wrote Greer, and yet Hite’s figures showed that about one woman in seven thought her vagina was “ugly”; the same number thought its smell was “bad.” Lady, love your body is an even more urgent message a generation later: A third of women are “strongly dissatisfied” with their bodies, which leads them to experience “higher social anxiety, lower self-esteem, and sexual dysfunction” (italics added). Dr. Marcia Germaine Hutchinson estimates that 65 percent of women do not like their bodies, and that poor physical self-esteem leads women to shy away from physical intimacy. That low self-esteem and diminished sexuality are the psychic black hole that beauty pornography hollows in a woman’s physical integrity.
The black hole of self-hatred can migrate: An obsession with her breasts can fade away and revulsion at the sight of her thighs can take its place. Many women read the beauty index fearfully because it often introduces new and unexpected points of revulsion.
How did this disastrous definition of sexuality arise? “Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both “beautiful” and “sexual” constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention. When society needed chastity from women, virginity and fidelity endowed women with beauty (religious fundamentalist Phyllis Schlafly recently reasserted that sex outside marriage destroyed women’s beauty), and their sexuality did not exist: Peter Gay shows that Victorian women were assumed to be “sexually anaesthetic,” and Wendy Faulkner quotes the conviction of Victorian writers that middle-class women were “naturally frigid.” Only recently, now that society is best served by a population of women who are sexually available and sexually insecure, “beauty” has been redefined as sex. Why? Because, unlike female sexuality, innate to all women, “beauty” is hard work, few women are born with it, and it is not free.
The disparity between “beauty” and sex in the production of such images resonates in a memory of mine: A friend, a model, at fifteen, showed me the prints from her first lingerie shoot, for a big department store’s Sunday supplement ads. I could hardly recognize her: Sasha’s black hair, straight and puritanical, had been tousled and teased. Her high breasts were filmed over with a sheen of black-and-peach silk. The woman whom Sasha had pretended to become in the photo was seated on her haunches in a stylishly unmade bed, its sheets folded back like overblown cabbage roses. Her bed, on which we sat looking at the prints, was single, tucked-in, austere, covered in gray-cotton ticking. Above us were Shakespeare’s plays in dog-eared high school editions, her biology book, and a calculator; never those ropes of pearls, diamond cuff links, the lurid gladioli with stuck-out stamens. The thing made from Sasha arched its back, so the undersides of her breasts caught the glare. “Your poor back,” I said, thinking of its tense shoulder blades. Sasha had scoliosis. She had to wear a brace made of steel and rigid foam. The brace existed in a dimension outside the cropped window, the sophisticated orange twilight into which we both peered. Sasha’s glossed lips were parted over her teeth as if she had plunged a hand into scalding water. Her eyes were half closed, the Sasha in them painted out. Like me, Sasha was a virgin.
Looking back, I can imagine how the image would come out that weekend: exploding into a life of its own, between columns of text. A thousand grown women, who would know secrets that we two could not have begun to imagine, would stare at it. They would take off their clothes and brush their teeth. They would turn around before a mirror in the buzzing light, and the scoured illuminated shell of Sasha’s body would spin above their heads in the dark sky. They would flick off the light and go to their wide warm lively beds, to open arms, chastened, with a heavier tread.
The link between beauty pornography and sex is not natural. It is taken for granted that the desire to have visual access to an endless number of changing centerfolds is innately male, since that form of looking is taken to be a sublimation of men’s innate promiscuity. But since men are not naturally promiscuous and women are not naturally monogamous, it follows that the truism so often asserted about beauty pornography—that men need it because they are visually aroused while women aren’t—is not biologically inevitable. Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men’s power in the myth: They look at women’s bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no “rock called gender” responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality—an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire—brings heterosexual men and women together.
The asymmetry of the beauty myth tells men and women lies about each other’s bodies, to keep them sexually estranged. The myth’s series of physical lies negates what a heterosexual woman knows to be true about the bodies of men. Women are supposed to be the “soft-skinned” sex, but a woman knows that the aureole around a man’s nipple is supremely soft, and that there are places on his body where the outer skin is softer than anywhere on a woman’s: the glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the “sensitive” sex; yet there is no part of a woman’s body so vulnerable as the testes. Women must keep their shirts on in every weather ostensibly because their nipples are sexual. But men’s nipples are sexual too, and that doesn’t keep them covered when the mercury breaks eighty. Women are “ugly” where they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women’s breasts must be perfe
ctly symmetrical; men’s genitals sure aren’t. There is a whole literature of ancient revulsion against the tastes and sights of women’s bodies; men can taste unpleasant and look perfectly alarming. Women love them anyway.
The boom in images that turn women into sexual objects accompanied the sexual revolution not to cater to men’s fantasies but to defend them against their fears. When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll kill us.” When she asked men the same question about women, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll laugh at us.” When men control women’s sexuality, they are safe from sexual evaluation. A Japanese woman of the eighth century, for instance, reports Rosalind Miles, was taught “always to say of his membrum virile that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other. . . . And you will add, ‘Come fill me, O my wonder!’ and a few other compliments of the same kind.” A sixteenth-century literate woman was less complimentary: “The old man kissed her, and it was as though a slug had dragged itself across her charming face.” With women experimenting sexually, men risked hearing what women hear every day: that there are sexual standards against which they might be compared. Their fears are exaggerated: Even with sexual freedom, women maintain a strict code of etiquette. “Never,” enjoins a women’s magazine, “mention the size of his [penis] in public . . . and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right.” That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate.