“The Beauty Myth” Revisited 

About thirty years after Betty Friedan published her bestselling feminist manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, Naomi Wolf charged fashion magazines, or “beauty pornography” as she called them, with perpetuating “The Beauty Myth.” This myth, according to Wolf, sold women the lie that to be valuable to society was to be beautiful, and that unattainable standards of beauty are precisely what we see – dewy lipped and eyes half closed – on the pages of a magazine. For Wolf, this myth has lead to a variety of societal ills from hunger (anorexia and bulimia) to sustained violence against women on all fronts.

So where do we stand now – almost twenty years after Wolf called our attention to the so-called beauty industry, whose main goal, she claimed, was to make women feel bad about themselves? There’s been much talk this fall over a variety of studies revealing that women’s happiness is in decline. Is it? Why? And does the Beauty Myth have anything to do with it? Without diving too deeply into statistical evidence, I think it is important to pause and reconsider the role that the fashion industry has played, and is still playing, in the continued survival of this Beauty Myth.

At the risk of revealing my own Freudian bent, it seems the whole problem comes down to one of sexuality. It’s not so much “beauty” but sex that sits at the heart of these issues. It’s true that in the current social milieu, there are many more ethnic and physically unique women who are recognized as beautiful. And, as more and more subcultures proliferate the cultural horizon, each has begun to champion their own differing standards of beauty.

But back to the birds and the bees. I think it’s important to clarify that for Wolf’s argument “beauty” equals “sexually desirable.” The damaging message she’s getting at is not that women are told to be perfectly beautiful, but rather that they should be always attentive and ready to fulfill all male sexual fantasies.  Now, the complex of sex, desire, and how women want or don’t want to be perceived is incredibly difficult to examine. The levels and layers of human sexuality are infinitely mysterious. But what is simple and fundamental to say is that both men and women want to feel desired. But for what? As what ?

What the proliferation of sexualized, “beautiful” images of women indicate most basically is a separation of sex and love. It’s not so much that these women are impossibly beautiful (although most of them are) as much as that they are served up on a silver platter as a sexual product, devoid of their essential humanity. In order to somehow reinstate a connection between human sexuality and common love and empathy, it seems imperative for magazines to feature images of women engaged in real activities, with real expressions, and real personalities.

It’s become commonplace to say that a woman who is beautiful has nothing to say. Why? Because it’s physically impossible to be both attractive and intelligent? Absolutely not. It’s because we’d rather a beautiful individual just serve her “purpose” as an object fulfilling a disconnected sexual appetite. The minute her personality or thoughts appear, it just gets in the way.

This is a call to arms, then. A re-appropriation of the beautiful people – to give them a platform from which to reveal the stickiness and messiness of who they are as individuals.

Because magazines are a strictly visual medium, they are especially susceptible to a form of objectification. Wolf puts if well: “In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all sense but the visual, and impairing even that.” But it’s precisely in this medium that the myth can be dismantled. One must actually enter the lair to get to the dragon.

We can never get past the body, it’s true. We subconsciously make snap decisions based on appearance. But instead of dismissing people for being unattractive, or even too beautiful, perhaps the reinterpretation of the Beauty Myth calls us to see others for who they are as people. The real myth is that we can ever get past appearance in any context – whether on the pages of a magazine, on the sidewalk, or in the grocery store.  But we can begin to see each of those people as human beings – with their own hopes, desires, dreams, and opinions.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant warned against using human beings instrumentally. He claimed that treating another human a simple means to an end is the first step towards all manner of unethical behavior. It seems to me that the view of women as beautiful sexual instruments is exactly what led to this mess. As Wolf describes the Beauty Myth, it tells us that “if there is a set of features that is lovable, those features are replaceable.”  And yet, no human being is a replaceable. No one is the same as the next person.

In order to overturn the lingering consequences of the Beauty Myth, Beauty must have a voice.

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Lucy F. Collins, PhD is the author of the forthcoming publication, “Fashion in Bad Faith: Framing the Clothed Self in a Sartrean Lens,” a phenomenological exploration of fashion. She recently presented at the School of Visusal Art’s D-Crit (design criticism) series, giving a lecture entitled “From the Ivory Tower to the Tents: Thinking Critically about Fashion.”   Her own academic curriculum ranges from criticism and theory to philosophy and ethics. One of her hopes is to “infuse fashion criticism with more theory,” making it more relevant to the industry.  One of her favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau, “Beware all enterprises that require new clothes and not, rather, a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the clothes be made to fit?”