Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone.
He is witnessing something he cannot possibly understand. The mysteriousness of her behavior keeps safe in his view of his lover a zone of incomprehension. It protects a no-man’s-land, an uninhabitable territory between the sexes, wherever a man and a woman might dare to call a ceasefire.
Maybe he throws up his hands. Maybe he grows irritable or condescending. Unless he enjoys the power over her this gives him, he probably gets very bored. So would the woman if the man she loved were trapped inside something so pointless, where nothing she might say could reach him.
Even where a woman and a man have managed to build and inhabit that sand castle—an equal relationship—this is the unlistening tide; it ensures that there will remain a tag on the woman that marks her as the same old something else, half child, half savage. He can take his pick—here at least the old insults still apply.
Hysterical. Superstitious. Primitive. Immanent. Other.
“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” she says. “She’s okay,” he says. “Do you think I’m that pretty?” she says. “You’re great,” he says. “Should I cut my hair like that?” she says. “I love you the way you are,” he says. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks in a rage. The culture has set it up so that men and women must continually hurt and offend one another over this issue. Neither can win as long as beauty’s power inequalities stay in place. In the dialogue, the man has said something that in a culture free of the beauty myth would be as loving as can be: He loves her, physically, because she is who she is. In our culture, though, the woman is forced to throw his gift back in his face: That is supposed to be less valuable than for him to rate her as a top-notch art object. If his loving her “the way she is” were considered more exciting than his assigning her a four-star rating, the woman could feel secure, desirable, irreplaceable—but then she wouldn’t need to buy so many products. She would like herself too much. She would like other women too much. She would raise her voice.
So the beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence “You’re beautiful,” which is next to “I love you” in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is destined to be unhappy. And the “luckiest” woman of all, told she is loved because she’s “beautiful,” is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.
This futile bickering goes far deeper than simply to show that women are insecure. It is not insecurity speaking the woman’s lines but—if she does have self-respect—hostility: Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man’s intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.
Just as “beauty” is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because “beauty” is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. “Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely, “Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines. The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her “for herself alone.” A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal “beauty” a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved “for herself alone,” for whom is she being loved? Auden knew that what is “bred in the bone” of both women and men is to crave “not universal love/but to be loved alone.” The “love” the beauty myth offers is universal: this year’s full-lipped blonde, this season’s disheveled tawny nymph.
But we long to be loved the way we were, if we were lucky, as children: every toe touched, each limb exclaimed upon with delight, because it was ours alone, incomparable. As adults, we seek that release from the scale of comparison in romantic love: In the eyes of one’s true love, even the most jaded wish to believe, each of us will be “the most beautiful woman,” because we will be truly seen and known for ourselves. The beauty myth, though, gives us the opposite prospect: If there is a set of features that is lovable, those features are replaceable. Those elements that make each woman unique—the unrepeatable irregularity of her face, the scars of a childhood trauma, the lines and furrows of a life of thought and laughter, grief and rage—exclude her from the ranks of mythical beauties, and from the charmed playgrounds, we are told, of love.
By having to “present” herself to her lover as “beautiful,” the woman remains not fully known. She leaves his bed at dawn to paint over her face. She leaves his arms to run around a barbed-wire reservoir. She needs to flirt with strangers because his desire for her cannot fill the black hole or compensate her for what she has sacrificed. They both stay counterpoised on the mistrustful axis: her face, her body. Mary Gordon in Final Payments describes the way the beauty myth makes women hide from men: “I knew I could not possibly see him as I was now, with my stomach hanging over the top of my underpants, with my thighs that chafed together. . . . I would have to do so much before I could see him. For I knew, and in knowing this, I hated him for a moment, that without my beauty he would not love me.” Insofar as he will never know her now, the man will never fully know her; and insofar as she cannot trust him now to love her with her “beauty” in eclipse, she can never fully trust him.
Beauty practices are being stressed so that the relationships between men and women will continue, in spite of a social movement toward equality, to feel dictatorial. Placing female pleasure, sex or food or self-esteem, into the hands of a personal judge turns the man into a legislator of the woman’s pleasure, rather than her companion in it. “Beauty” today is what the female orgasm used to be: something given to women by men, if they submitted to their feminine role and were lucky.
Men
For many men, the myth is a drug that insulates them from the dangers of self-knowledge. Contemplating an art object made out of a living woman is one way a man can fool himself that he is immortal. If the woman’s eyes are his mirror, and the mirror ages, the gazing man must see that he is aging as well. A new mirror, or a fantasy mirror made of “beauty” rather than degenerating flesh and blood, saves him from this self-awareness. Contact would ruin the ideal nature of the mirror. Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss./Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.” The sentence’s ambiguous grammar, which has given sleepless nights to generations of schoolgirls, reiterates the promise to women that they will get love
if only they escape from time. Forever wilt thou love because she will be forever fair? The dark side, the girl hears, is that if she is not fair forever, he will not love her forever.
Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
Simone de Beauvoir said that no man is truly free to love a fat woman. If that is true, how free are men? Women can imagine the emotional aridity of men’s experience of the myth if they look back on their lovers and try to imagine their women friends and colleagues criticizing them for any mate—no matter how witty, powerful, famous, sexy, rich, or kind—who did not resemble Praxiteles’ Charioteer.
Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight . . . but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot. The way in which women regard men’s bodies sexually is proof that one can look at a person sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.
What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
Some men do get a sexual charge from a woman’s objective “beauty,” just as some women feel sexual pleasure at the thought of a man’s money or power. But it is often a status high, a form of exhibitionism, that draws its power from the man imagining his buddies imagining him doing what he is doing while he does it. Some men feel a sexual thrill upon smelling the leather interior of a new Mercedes-Benz. It is not that that thrill is not real, but that it is based on the meaning assigned by other men to that leather. It is no deep psychosexual attachment to leather itself. There is certainly a reflexive—not instinctive—male response to the cold economy of the beauty myth; but that can be completely separated from sexual attraction, the warm dialogue of desire.
When men are more aroused by symbols of sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists. Fetishism treats a part as if it were the whole; men who choose a lover on the basis of her “beauty” alone are treating the woman as a fetish—that is, treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her sexual self. Freud suggests that the fetish is a talisman against the failure to perform.
The woman’s value as a fetish lies in the way her “beauty” gives him status in the eyes of other men. So when a man has sex with a woman whom he has chosen for her impersonal beauty alone, there are many people in the room with him, but she is not among them. These relationships disappoint both because both must live in public to get that constant, recharging affirmation of the woman’s high exchange value. But sexual relationships always go back to private space, where the beauty, as tediously human as any other woman, makes the stubborn mistake of asking to be known.
Some men by now cannot respond to anything but the Iron Maiden. A writing professor says that every year, when he assigns an essay on media imagery, young women write about their lovers’ having expressed disappointment that the women don’t look like those in pornography. If some men have come to “need” beauty pornography—Binet did simple experiments that proved that when sexual imagery was preceded by an image of a boot, he was able to create a sexual response to a boot—it is because the stimulus-response imprinting took place in the best of lab conditions: the ignorance that society tries to maintain in men about female sexuality.
So even those women who take men’s beauty pornography to heart and try, and even succeed, in looking like it, are doomed to disappointment. Men who read it don’t do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.
Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist: The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
The myth actually undermines sexual attraction. Attraction is a dialogue or dance or high-wire balancing act that depends on the unique qualities, memories, patterns of desire, of the two people involved; “beauty” is generic. Attraction is about a sexual fit: two people imagining how they will work together.
“Beauty” is only visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions. The visual is the sense monopolized by advertisers, who can manipulate it much better than can mere human beings. But with other senses, advertising is at a disadvantage: Humans can smell, taste, touch, and sound far better than the best advertisement. So humans, in order to become dependable, sexually insecure consumers, had to be trained away from these other, more sensual senses. One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up. “Beauty” leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit, in favor of a portrait on a pillow.
The shape and weight and texture and feel of bodies is crucial to pleasure but the appealing body will not be identical. The Iron Maiden is mass-produced. The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one another as more masks are assumed. Cues are missed.
Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is “done up” she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand the airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by “beauty”—a box continually shrinking—he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.
CHRISTIAN LACROIX GIVES WOMEN BACK THEIR FEMININITY, reads the fashion headline. “Femininity” is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If “femininity” means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. Wherever we feel pleasure, all women have “good” bodies. We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.
Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.
Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman’s face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes
of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light in her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.
The Big Lie is the notion that if a lie is big enough, people will believe it. The idea that adult women, with their fully developed array of sexual characteristics, are inadequate to stimulate and gratify heterosexual male desire, and that “beauty” is what will complete them, is the beauty myth’s Big Lie. All around us, men are contradicting it. The fact is that the myth’s version of sexuality is by definition just not true: Most men who are at this moment being aroused by women, flirting with them, in love with them, dreaming about them, having crushes on them, or making love to them, are doing so to women who look exactly like who they are.
The myth stereotyped sexuality into cartoons by representation: At one extreme, called “male,” and reinforced by classic pornography, is anonymity, repetition, and dehumanization. At the other extreme, the “female,” sexual desire is not something split off but suffusing all of life, not confined to the genitals, but flowing over the whole body; it is personal, tactile, and sensitizing.
These poles are not biological. Women raised free are doubtless more genital, healthily selfish, and aggressively curious about men’s bodies than the female extreme allows; men raised free are probably more emotionally involved, vulnerable, healthily giving, and sensual over their entire bodies than the male extreme allows. Sexual beauty is an equal portion that belongs to both men and women, and the capacity to be dazzled is gender-blind. When men and women look at one another beyond the beauty myth, it will bring greater eroticism between the sexes as well as greater honesty. We are not as sexually incomprehensible to one another as we are meant right now to believe.