The Beauty Myth

If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics, or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.

The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable. The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they stand for experimental and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “unbeautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. Older women fear young ones, young ones fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female lifespan. Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our “beauty”, so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self esteem exposed to the air.

Since the family was a productive unit and women's work complemented men's, the value of women who were not aristocrats or prostitutes lay in their work skills, economic shrewdness, physical strength, and fertility. Physical attraction, obviously played its part; but beauty as we understand it, was not, for ordinary women, a serious issue in the marriage marketplace. The beauty myth, in its modern form gained ground after the upheavals of industrialization, as the work unit of the family was destroyed, and urbanization and the emerging factory system demanded what social engineers of the time termed the “separate sphere” of domesticity, which supported the new labor category of the “breadwinner” who left home for the workplace during the day. The middle class expanded, the standards of living and of literacy rose, the size of families shrank; a new class of literate idle women developed on whose submission to enforced domesticity the evolving system of industrial capitalism developed. Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about “beauty” date from no earlier than the 30's when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

For the first time, new technologies could reproduce- in fashion plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures-images of how women should look. In the 1840's the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful' women first appeared in mid-century. Copies of classical artworks, postcards of society beauties and royal mistresses, Currier and Ives prints, and porcelain figurines flooded the separate sphere to which middle class women were confined.

Since the industrial revolution, middle-class Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much by material constraints. This situation, unique to this group, means that analyses that trace “cultural conspiracies” are uniquely plausible in relation to ...