Very Long Post Written Mostly Not By Me
This is the continuation of my segmentation of "The Beauty Myth" that I wrote about before. This isn't really in response to the renewal of feminism from the film; I've been reading it again all week. I want to say that I've gathered lots of high minded thoughts, but really, all I've done is come to the conclusion that I am disgusted with the fact that I've ALLOWED myself to be forced into this lifestyle of hatred toward the female body.
So, I'm embarking on my own mini, personal crusade: I'm not allowed to hate myself anymore. I mean, seriously. I'm not allowed to think of myself as anything other than OK at the WORST. Most of the time, I should think of myself as a strong, sexy, wonderful woman. And I've recruited Brian to be my (extremely willing and eager) policeman: any comment I make that is inherently negative about myself must be addressed, and I must APOLOGIZE to myself. This includes everything from, "I hate how my thighs squish out whenever I sit down" to "How can you possibly find this attractive? I'm spilling chubby belly over" to "Goddamn, I wish I could just stop eating for a bit so I could fit into these damn pants properly." EVERYTHING that is essentially a miming of what I've been told to believe about my body (it will never be "sexy" until I'm "thin enough" and that anything that isn't smooth and scented like a flower or fruit is icky) is OFF LIMITS.
For how long?
FOREVER.
I'm done with it. I'm done with thinking of myself as the enemy constantly. Even my weightloss concerns must now be done SOLELY for the nutritional reasons, such as moving away from toxic food, and into more things with fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, less meat, and so on. Not to be thin, but to be closer to healthy. If that means I never drop below 125lbs, so be it. I won't just accept this--I'll embrace it. I'm going to value my body not because it's something I can find beautiful but because I LIVE IN IT. And I'm awesome. I'm amazing. So, by proxy, so is my body. Without it, I wouldn't be here. I can't be awesome and amazing and fun and sexy and interesting and happy and amusing and witty and lovely and intelligent and caring WITHOUT MY BODY. So, I'm damn well not going to buy into this body-hating anymore.
Let's talk about the media images we're so often presented, the ones that are frequently only addressed for the thinness of the models. Let's dig a little deeper into what Naomi Wolf calls "beauty pornography" as well as standard pornography:
"The usual discussions about pornography center on men and what it does to their sexual attitudes toward women. But the parallel effect of beauty pronography on women is at least as important: What does that imagery do to women's sexual attitudes toward themselves? If soft-core, nonviolent, mainstream pornography has been shown to make men less likely to belieave a rape victim; if its desensitizing influence lasts a long time; if sexually violent films make men progressively trivilaize the severity of the violence they see against women; and if at last only violence against women is perceived by them as erotic, is it not likely that parallel imagery aimed at women does the same to women in relation to themselves? The evidence shows that it does. Wendy Stock discovered that exposure to rape imagery increased women's sexual arousal to rape and increased their rape fantasies (though it did not convince them that women liked force in sex). Carol Krafka found that her female subjects 'grew less upset with the violence [against women] the more they saw, and that they rated the material less violent' the more it was shown to them.
"The debate continues about whether classic pornography makes men violent toward women. But beauty pornography is clearly making women violent towards ourselves. The evidence surrounds us. Here, a surgeon stretches the slit skin of the breast. There, a surgeon presses with all his weight on a woman's chest to break up lumps of silicone with his bare hands. There is the walking corpse. There is the woman vomiting blood.
"Why this flood of images now? They do not arise simply as a market respose to deep-seated, innate desires already in place. They arise also--and primarily--to set a sexual agenda and to create their versions of desire.
"If women and men in great numbers were to form bonds that were equal, nonviolent, and sexual, honoring the female principle no less or more than the male, the result would be more radical than the establishment's worst nightmares of homosexual 'conversions.' A mass heterosexual devioation into tenderness and mutual respect would mean real trouble for the status quo since heterosexuals are the most powerful sexual majority.
"Male-dominated institutions--particularly corporate interests--recognize the dangers posed to them by love's escape. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. Women who have broken out of gender roles have proved manageable: Those few with power are being retrained as men.
"Images that flatten sex into 'beauty,' and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring that men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism, their separate versions of loneliness
"The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
"But since sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our hearts' desire. The beauty myth keeps a gapy of fantasy between men and women.
"The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time.
"But even more powerful interests than the consumer index depend on heterosexual estrangement and are threatened by heterosexual accord. The military is supported by nearly one third of the United States government's budget; militarism depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children. Men who loved women would shift loyalties back to the family and community from which becoming a man is no longer exile. Serious lovers and fathers would be unwilling to believe the standard propaganda of militarism: that their wives and children would benefit from their heroic death."
"The women hurt by pornography 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 nakes, '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.
"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 less to her.
"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. 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.
"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 centra parts of women, whose 'ugliness' therefore becomes an obession. 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 misoghynist culture has suceeded in making women hat what misogynists hate.
"The black hole of self-hatred can migrage: 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.
"The link between beauty pornography and sex is not natural. It is taken for granted that the desie 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 pomiscuous 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 ealy 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.
"They 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: tha glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the 'sensitive' sex; yet there is no part of the 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 with the mercury breaks eighty. Women are 'ugly' when they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women's breasts must be perfectly 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.
"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 pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and every 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 man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
"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 like dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman's will. Solitary male desire is represented from high culture to low. We all know about the sexual desire of adolescent boys. But scenes of young women's sexual awakening in themselves do not exists 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. Each woman as 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 presense 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."
"The architechts of the Feminine Mystique didn't really believe that a floor in which you could see yourself indicated a cardinal virtue in women; in my own lifetime, when the idea of menstrual psychic irregularity was being clumsily resurrected as a last-ditch way to hold off the claims of the women's movement, no one was really vested in the conviction of menstrual incapacity in itself. By the same toekn, the beauty myth could not care less how much women weight; it doesn't give a damn about the texture of women's hair or the smoothness of our skin. We intuit that, if we were all to go home tomorrow and say we never meant it really--we'll do without the jobs, the autonomy, the orgasms, the money--the beauty myth would slacken at wonce and grow more comfortable.
"This realization makes the real issues behind the symptoms easier to see and analyze: Just as the beauty myth did not really care what women looked like as long as women felt ugly, we must see that it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful.
"The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don't, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and our faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.
"The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don't. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming to order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so tha she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes 'beauty' hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not adornment, or expressed sexuality or time spent grooming, or the desire to attract a lover. The actual struggle is between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion.
"The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious?"
I hope this has inspired some thoughts. Again, the book is "The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolf.
So, I'm embarking on my own mini, personal crusade: I'm not allowed to hate myself anymore. I mean, seriously. I'm not allowed to think of myself as anything other than OK at the WORST. Most of the time, I should think of myself as a strong, sexy, wonderful woman. And I've recruited Brian to be my (extremely willing and eager) policeman: any comment I make that is inherently negative about myself must be addressed, and I must APOLOGIZE to myself. This includes everything from, "I hate how my thighs squish out whenever I sit down" to "How can you possibly find this attractive? I'm spilling chubby belly over" to "Goddamn, I wish I could just stop eating for a bit so I could fit into these damn pants properly." EVERYTHING that is essentially a miming of what I've been told to believe about my body (it will never be "sexy" until I'm "thin enough" and that anything that isn't smooth and scented like a flower or fruit is icky) is OFF LIMITS.
For how long?
FOREVER.
I'm done with it. I'm done with thinking of myself as the enemy constantly. Even my weightloss concerns must now be done SOLELY for the nutritional reasons, such as moving away from toxic food, and into more things with fresh, organic fruit and vegetables, less meat, and so on. Not to be thin, but to be closer to healthy. If that means I never drop below 125lbs, so be it. I won't just accept this--I'll embrace it. I'm going to value my body not because it's something I can find beautiful but because I LIVE IN IT. And I'm awesome. I'm amazing. So, by proxy, so is my body. Without it, I wouldn't be here. I can't be awesome and amazing and fun and sexy and interesting and happy and amusing and witty and lovely and intelligent and caring WITHOUT MY BODY. So, I'm damn well not going to buy into this body-hating anymore.
Let's talk about the media images we're so often presented, the ones that are frequently only addressed for the thinness of the models. Let's dig a little deeper into what Naomi Wolf calls "beauty pornography" as well as standard pornography:
"The usual discussions about pornography center on men and what it does to their sexual attitudes toward women. But the parallel effect of beauty pronography on women is at least as important: What does that imagery do to women's sexual attitudes toward themselves? If soft-core, nonviolent, mainstream pornography has been shown to make men less likely to belieave a rape victim; if its desensitizing influence lasts a long time; if sexually violent films make men progressively trivilaize the severity of the violence they see against women; and if at last only violence against women is perceived by them as erotic, is it not likely that parallel imagery aimed at women does the same to women in relation to themselves? The evidence shows that it does. Wendy Stock discovered that exposure to rape imagery increased women's sexual arousal to rape and increased their rape fantasies (though it did not convince them that women liked force in sex). Carol Krafka found that her female subjects 'grew less upset with the violence [against women] the more they saw, and that they rated the material less violent' the more it was shown to them.
"The debate continues about whether classic pornography makes men violent toward women. But beauty pornography is clearly making women violent towards ourselves. The evidence surrounds us. Here, a surgeon stretches the slit skin of the breast. There, a surgeon presses with all his weight on a woman's chest to break up lumps of silicone with his bare hands. There is the walking corpse. There is the woman vomiting blood.
"Why this flood of images now? They do not arise simply as a market respose to deep-seated, innate desires already in place. They arise also--and primarily--to set a sexual agenda and to create their versions of desire.
"If women and men in great numbers were to form bonds that were equal, nonviolent, and sexual, honoring the female principle no less or more than the male, the result would be more radical than the establishment's worst nightmares of homosexual 'conversions.' A mass heterosexual devioation into tenderness and mutual respect would mean real trouble for the status quo since heterosexuals are the most powerful sexual majority.
"Male-dominated institutions--particularly corporate interests--recognize the dangers posed to them by love's escape. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. Women who have broken out of gender roles have proved manageable: Those few with power are being retrained as men.
"Images that flatten sex into 'beauty,' and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring that men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism, their separate versions of loneliness
"The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
"But since sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our hearts' desire. The beauty myth keeps a gapy of fantasy between men and women.
"The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time.
"But even more powerful interests than the consumer index depend on heterosexual estrangement and are threatened by heterosexual accord. The military is supported by nearly one third of the United States government's budget; militarism depends on men choosing the bond with one another over the bond with women and children. Men who loved women would shift loyalties back to the family and community from which becoming a man is no longer exile. Serious lovers and fathers would be unwilling to believe the standard propaganda of militarism: that their wives and children would benefit from their heroic death."
"The women hurt by pornography 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 nakes, '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.
"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 less to her.
"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. 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.
"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 centra parts of women, whose 'ugliness' therefore becomes an obession. 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 misoghynist culture has suceeded in making women hat what misogynists hate.
"The black hole of self-hatred can migrage: 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.
"The link between beauty pornography and sex is not natural. It is taken for granted that the desie 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 pomiscuous 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 ealy 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.
"They 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: tha glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the 'sensitive' sex; yet there is no part of the 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 with the mercury breaks eighty. Women are 'ugly' when they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women's breasts must be perfectly 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.
"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 pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and every 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 man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
"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 like dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman's will. Solitary male desire is represented from high culture to low. We all know about the sexual desire of adolescent boys. But scenes of young women's sexual awakening in themselves do not exists 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. Each woman as 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 presense 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."
"The architechts of the Feminine Mystique didn't really believe that a floor in which you could see yourself indicated a cardinal virtue in women; in my own lifetime, when the idea of menstrual psychic irregularity was being clumsily resurrected as a last-ditch way to hold off the claims of the women's movement, no one was really vested in the conviction of menstrual incapacity in itself. By the same toekn, the beauty myth could not care less how much women weight; it doesn't give a damn about the texture of women's hair or the smoothness of our skin. We intuit that, if we were all to go home tomorrow and say we never meant it really--we'll do without the jobs, the autonomy, the orgasms, the money--the beauty myth would slacken at wonce and grow more comfortable.
"This realization makes the real issues behind the symptoms easier to see and analyze: Just as the beauty myth did not really care what women looked like as long as women felt ugly, we must see that it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful.
"The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don't, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and our faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.
"The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don't. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming to order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so tha she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes 'beauty' hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not adornment, or expressed sexuality or time spent grooming, or the desire to attract a lover. The actual struggle is between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion.
"The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious?"
I hope this has inspired some thoughts. Again, the book is "The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolf.