A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes—all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as subjects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male “ideal” from a lineup; and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.
Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, “need” beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist—then a real young man would probably approach the young woman’s bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
But again, so what? Having been trained does not mean one cannot reject one’s training. Men’s dread of being objectified in the way they have objectified women is probably unfounded: If both genders were given the choice of seeing the other as a combination of sexual object and human being, both would recognize that fulfillment lies in excluding neither term. But it is the unfounded fears between the sexes that work best to the beauty myth’s advantage.
Imagery that is focused exclusively on the female body was encouraged in an environment in which men could no longer control sex but had for the first time to win it. Women who were preoccupied with their own desirability were less likely to express and seek out what they themselves desired.
How to Suppress Female Sexuality
Germaine Greer wrote that women will be free when they have a positive definition of female sexuality. Such a definition might well render beauty pornography completely neutral to women. A generation later, women still lack it. Female sexuality is not only negatively defined, it is negatively constructed. Women are vulnerable to absorbing the beauty myth’s intervention in our sexuality because our sexual education is set up to ensure that vulnerability. Female sexuality is turned inside out from birth, so “beauty” can take its place, keeping women’s eyes lowered to their own bodies, glancing up only to check their reflections in the eyes of men.
This outside-in eroticism is cultivated in women by three very unnatural pressures on female sexuality. The first is that little girls are not usually intimately cared for by fathers. The second is the strong cultural influence that positions women outside their bodies to look at women alone as sexual objects. The third is the prevalence of sexual violence that prohibits female sexuality from developing organically, and makes men’s bodies appear dangerous.
1. The naked Iron Maiden affects women powerfully because most are tended in infancy by women. The female body and the female breast begin as the focus of desire for the infant girl, with the male breast and body absent. As girls grow, the myth keeps the sexual focus on the female body, but, unlike the attraction to it felt by straight men and lesbians, heterosexual women’s ungratified admiration often becomes contaminated with envy, regret for lost bliss, and hostility. This situation creates in women an addiction to men’s eyes, enforcing what the poet Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality,” which forbids women from seeing other women as sources of sexual pleasure at all. Under the myth, the beauty of other women’s bodies gives women pain, leading to what Kim Chernin calls our “cruel obsession with the female body.” This balked relationship—which gives straight women confused, anxious pleasure when looking at another female body—leaves women in a lifelong anguish of competition that is in fact only the poisonous residue of original love.
2. The cultural inversion of female sexuality starts early, beginning with the masturbation taboo. Sexual integrity grows out of the sublime selfishness of childhood, from which sexual giving emerges as generosity rather than submissiveness. But female masturbation is also culturally censored. Early solitary desire is one of the rare memories that can remind women that we are fully sexual before “beauty” comes into the picture, and can be so after and beyond the beauty myth; and that sexual feeling does not have to depend on being looked at.
Men take this core for granted in themselves: We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women. It does not lie dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman’s will. Solitary male desire is represented from high culture to low, from Philip Roth, André Gide, Karl Shapiro, and James Joyce to dirty jokes told to mixed audiences. We all know about the sexual desire of adolescent boys. But scenes of young women’s sexual awakening in themselves do not exist except in a mock-up for the male voyeur. It is hard to imagine, in a cultural vacuum, what solitary female desire looks like. Women’s bodies are portrayed as attractive packaging around an empty box; our genitals are not eroticized for women. Men’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Other women’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Female masturbation is not eroticized for women. Each woman has to learn for herself, from nowhere, how to feel sexual (though she learns constantly how to look sexual). She is given no counterculture of female lust looking outward, no descriptions of the intricate, curious presence of her genital sensations or the way they continually enrich her body’s knowledge. Left to herself in the dark, she has very little choice: She must absorb the dominant culture’s fantasies as her own.
Ten-year-olds in the 1970s, eager for talk about sex written in a woman’s voice, took turns at camp reading aloud pirated copies of The Story of O or The Happy Hooker; one is an indoctrination in masochism, the other is about soulless commercial sexual barter. Little girls for lack of anything better learn from what comes to hand. They do not lack facts; they lack a positive sexual culture: novels and poetry, film and jokes and rock and roll, written not to sell but to explore and communicate and celebrate, as the best male erotic culture is written. For girls’ education, there is nothing but a woman bound to a wall, her mouth an O; or a woman with an apt business sense and a flat prose style counting her money.
Boys, though, have a sexual culture ready-made for them. They sing, playing air guitar against their groins: “Brown sugar, mm! How come you taste so good? Ahhh . . . Just like a young girl should.” (“We should?” wondered the little girls. “Like brown sugar?”) But of the girls’ own experience, what their own senses are telling them—the prickling smell of male salt in a school corridor, the intrigue of newly darkening down on a forearm, the pitch of a voice shifting into low gear, the slouch that stretches denim over a thigh, the taste of Southern Comfort on a half-educated tongue, of filterless Lucky Strikes filched from a dresser, the corrosion of stubble, windburn—they notice it all, they see it; but they are powerless to tell it. The fact that such images elicit awkwardness in both the teller and the listener attests to how unused we are to encounter young girls in our culture as sexually awakening subjects. The alien beauty of the bodies of men, though girls stumble upon it in a Phaedrus or a Dorian Gray, is nowhere to be found in culture meant for them; the glamour and allure of men’s bodies is not described for them in a woman’s voice; and their attraction to their girlfriends is described nowhere at all.
Their sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hun
gry gaze returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why? . . . Why not? What can I do about it?
The books and films they see survey from the young boy’s point of view his first touch of a girl’s thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls’ minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful than those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film.
This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually (“Clairol . . . it’s the look you want”); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt (“Gillette razors . . . the way a woman wants to feel”); many confuse desiring with being desirable. “My first sexual memory,” a woman tells me, “was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else’s hand.” Women say that when they lose weight they “feel sexier”; but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don’t multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they’re jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body; that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire.
Could it be then that women’s famous slowness of arousal relative to men’s, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the cultural prohibition against seeing men’s bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it relate to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?
The inversion of female sexuality keeps women from being in control of their own sexual experience. One trouble with soft-core sexual imagery aimed at young men is that the women photographed are not actually responding sexually to anything; young men grow up trained to eroticize images that teach them nothing about female desire. Nor are young women taught to eroticize female desire. Both men and women, then, tend to eroticize only the woman’s body and the man’s desire. That means that women are exaggeratedly sensitive to male desire for their own arousal, and men are exaggeratedly insensitive to female desire for theirs. The chain reaction that has women’s sexual feeling depend on men’s is responsible for the phenomenon described by Carol Cassell in Swept Away: Why Women Confuse Love and Sex. Because many women need to feel “swept away” before they can experience desire, only 48 percent of them use contraception regularly. In the United States, 48.7 percent of abortions follow from unprotected intercourse. If women’s sexuality were so highly valued and attentively fostered that they could protect themselves without fear of lessened sexual feeling, half of the abortion tragedy would be a thing of the past. With the AIDS epidemic, women submitting to the “swept away” phenomenon are risking not just pregnancy but death.
3. A final explanation for women’s deflected sexuality and ambivalence about intercourse relates to their lived experience of sexual force. The suggestive power of the abused Iron Maiden must be understood in a context of actual sexual violence against women.
According to the 1983 random survey conducted by Diana Russell of 930 San Francisco women, 44 percent had survived rape or attempted rape as defined by the FBI, 88 percent of those knew their attacker, and 1 woman in 7 had been raped by her husband or ex-husband. In a Dutch study of 1,054 middle-class, educated women between the ages of twenty and forty, 15.6 percent had been sexually abused by relatives, 24.4 percent had been sexually abused as children by nonrelatives, and 32.2 percent had forced sexual experiences before age sixteen. In another study of 4,700 Dutch families, 20.8 percent had experienced violence from a husband or lover, half experienced repeated acts of violence, and 1 in 25 experienced very severe violence that resulted in permanent damage. The Netherlands saw an increase of over a third in rapes reported between 1980 and 1988. In Sweden there was an increase of 70 percent of reports of violence against women between 1981 and 1988, and an increase of 50 percent of reported rapes. In Canada, 1 woman in 4 will have her first sexual experience under conditions of force, at the hands of a family member or someone close to the family. In Great Britain, 1 wife in 7 is raped by her husband. A 1981 study of 1,236 London women found that 1 in 6 had been raped and 1 in 5 had fought off attempted rape; other studies in 1985 and again in 1989 found the same proportions.
Women’s experience of violence from their lovers is epidemic. In 1980, a study of 2,000 married couples in the United States found that there had been assault in 28 percent of them, with 16 percent reporting violence in the past year. One third of the violence was serious: punching, kicking, hitting with an object, assault with a knife or gun. In a 1985 follow-up survey, the percentages were the same. A Harris Poll showed violence in 21 percent of relationships, which squared with Diana Russell’s 1982 random sample also showing 21 percent. In an assault, it is the woman who gets hurt in 94 to 95 percent of the cases. At least one and a half million American women are assaulted by their partners each year. One quarter of the violent crime in the United States is wife assault. Researchers in Pittsburgh tried to find a control group of nonbattered women—but 34 percent of the control group reported an attack from their partner. One Canadian married woman in ten is beaten by her spouse, and one in eight will be assaulted by the man she lives with. Battering accounts for one out of every four suicide attempts by women treated in the emergency rooms of metropolitan hospitals in the United States. In a National Institute of Mental Health study, 21 percent of women having emergency surgery were battered, half of all injured women using emergency services were battered, and half of all rapes of women over thirty were part of the battering syndrome. The Worldwatch Institute asserted in 1989 that violence against women was the most common crime worldwide.
Child sexual abuse, of course, links sex to force very early in a quarter to a third of the female population. Kinsey found in 1953 that nearly a quarter of the 4,000 women he surveyed had survived rape or attempted rape by adult men when they were children. Diana Russell’s survey found in 1987 that 38 percent of women had been sexually abused by an adult relative, acquaintance, or stranger before age eighteen; 28 percent had been seriously abused before age fourteen, 12 percent by someone in their family. Bud Lewis, director of a Los Angeles Times poll conducted in 1985, found in his random survey of 2,627 men and women from all the states that 22 percent of those questioned had been sexually abused as children; of the women, 27 percent. He then asked 1,260 males if they had ever sexually abused a child; 1 man in 10 acknowledged that he had. Worldwide, research culled from countries as diverse as Australia, the United States, Egypt, Israel, and India suggests that one in four families is incestuous; in 80 to 90 percent of those cases, girls are sexually abused by a male relative, usually fathers. In Cairo, between 33 and 45 percent of families had daughters who had been sexually abused by a male relative or family friends; Kinsey found incest in 24 percent of American families, a figure that is consistent with the numbers in Australia and the United Kingdom. Two thirds of Israeli victims were younger than ten and a quarter of the victims in the United States
were younger than five. Debbie Taylor, by extending the data to the rest of the world, suggests that as many as 100 million young girls “may be being raped by adult men—usually their fathers—often day after day, week after week, year in, year out.”
The numbers are staggering; so is the thought that the beauty myth is projecting sexually violent images of women, and images of perfection that demand that women do violence to themselves, in an environment that has already linked sex to violence in some way at some time in most women’s lives. Could harm done to women make them more willing to harm themselves? A Radiance magazine finding showed that 50 percent of anorexics in one clinic had been sexually abused. Plastic surgeon Elizabeth Morgan explored the relationship between incest and the desire for plastic surgery after many of her patients admitted they had been victims of child sexual abuse: “I came to understand that many of them wanted to erase the memory of the children they looked like when they were abused.” Clinical studies of incest survivors show that they have fears that “their sexual pleasure does not come from a good place . . . most believe that they are the ones who had done something wrong, that they should be punished, and that if no one will mete out justice, they will administer it to themselves.”
The most common reaction of rape survivors is a feeling of worthlessness, and then hatred of their bodies, often accompanied by eating disorders (usually compulsive eating or anorexia, to ensure that they will become “safely” very fat or thin) and sexual withdrawal. If actual sexual abuse does that to women’s physical self-love, could images of sexual abuse and images that invade female sexual privacy do similar harm?