I decided I'd collect all of my FB posts about the books I undertake into blog posts, for easy reference. If you've read Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth," you might have thoughts about my thoughts, or if you haven't, you might enjoy this overview with my commentary?
I just finished the first chapter of Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" -- "Work". Here are some of my starting thoughts.
In the first place, of course, the statistics and numbers are outdated (in the original version, which I'm reading), but actually, we all know that specifics aside, it's all still true -- women's work is still unpaid, underpaid, and radically undervalued, and our literal worth is tied directly to our appearance, many or even most professions can dictate repressive standards for which. As an academic, I've been lucky to avoid the most direct versions of the demands from a woman's appearance that many occupations make, but like all women I've spent my life having my labor go un/undercompensated and un/undervalued. And by labor, I don't just mean direct labor for my employers (although that too), but of course all of the housework and emotional work that is expected of women -- and that's before we even get to child- and eldercare, which I witnessed in intimate detail, growing up with my single mother and my elderly grandmother, although some of the folks in this group have experienced or are experiencing those things directly now.
One thing that strikes me is the importance of thinking in *economic* terms, which is another way of saying that it's impossible to think about the system of patriarchy without thinking about the system of capitalism. I think we primarily consider the beauty myth -- the unreasonable demands placed on women's appearances -- in terms of self-esteem alone: "Oh, I'm not thin enough/young-enough looking/pretty enough/gender conforming enough, and people aren't attracted to me or they treat me badly, and it makes me feel bad." And I'm not saying that those bad feelings are not a problem in and of themselves. I spent the first ~28 years of my life in a state of perpetual anxious body shame because of my weight, worried not so much about my appearance per se (I basically didn't have any of my own private opinions about what I wanted my body to look like) but about the fact that -- I had been led to believe -- no man would ever love me because I was fat. This made me feel worthless. Breaking that down is tragic -- the idea that I was worthless without the love of a man, the idea that only thin women are loveable, and just the *primacy* I placed upon being loved by someone else ... I still shudder to think about it. So my point is that those bad feelings in and of themselves are worthy of concern. (And I now realize that as a fat woman, I've got much bigger problems than men wanting to fuck me; fat discrimination is real, repeatedly documented, and literally kills people when it works in the health professions, although it also robs fat people of money and opportunity in measurable degrees -- but we can put a pin in that, I'm sure I'll find a book for it eventually.)
Anyway, those bad feelings are only the very beginning of things! "Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society. Women's poor physical self-image today is far less a result of sexual competition than it is of the needs of the marketplace." (49)
So let's break this down: by tying women's self-valuation to their appearance, and constantly critiquing that appearance as either substandard and thus a symptom of personal failure; or else superstandard and thus the only acknowledged reason for any success attained, women are set up to expect less and demand less economically. And so male-controlled economies prosper off of un/underpaid female labor. Killer Mike told us free labor was the cornerstone of U.S. economics, and he was right. Consider how much work women do in their occupations for cents on the dollar compared to men; now consider how much completely free labor they do in homes and communities that, if you paid someone fairly to do it, would cost a damn fortune. (24/7 childcare! Holy shit!) And we think, because of our general undervaluing by male economic structures (Cough! Capitalism! Cough!) that this, is if not appropriate, then inevitable. And that general undervaluing happens through a culture that insists our only value is as display objects and tools of male sexual gratification.
But there's more -- we also impose an enormous tax upon ourselves resultant all of this: the money we spend in the effort to conform to these beauty standards, which goes mostly into male pockets; and the *time* we spend on this "third-shift" of beauty maintenance activities, which we could either use literally productively, in the economic sense, or figuratively so, on ourselves, our own betterment, education, and especially on justice-oriented political projects. And it's not just money and time spent, but mental energy, which *is* a finite commodity; before giving up weight-loss dieting, I was, as Wolf describes near the end of the chapter, literally exhausted all the time from just ... THINKING about my body and my diet so much, just from FEELING ASHAMED itself.
And I can't get over *how much money* you can make making women feel bad about themselves. The diet industry alone is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. And that's not mere exercise products (exercise per se being good for everyone) -- that's like, Weight Watchers and shit. So basically, male dominated economies take our money on both ends by insisting that we're primarily good for looking sexy (on a male scale), and we're almost all failing at it.
Women's misery is good for business under capitalism.
So, let me ask: what are your responses to this first chapter? Do you have personal experiences you'd like to share about this kind of economic discrimination? How can we resist, given the real consequences of being the woman who bucks this system, and understanding that lots of women literally can't afford to challenge it when they have mouths to feed and house? How do we think, in general, about resistance that involves two axes -- here, sexual and economic? And also, how do we disentangle from this mess our own personal desires about our own appearances? As I said above, I spent most of my life having no actual personal preferences about the way my body looked, or the way I dressed. It wasn't until I began to practice body acceptance that I also began to develop a sense of what I wanted from my body (mostly not in terms of appearance but in terms of functioning and ability), as well as a sense of personal style. And a big propeller down my own feminist path away from all of this was renouncing any fucks given about how men felt about me at all -- but then, easy for me to say, I've already nailed down an adorable hobbit. In other words, how do we navigate legitimate desires about our own appearance and our own ability to attract a mate (if we're heterosexual especially) and this mess? And speaking of ability -- boy howdy, is this shit wrapped up in ableism. My own tiny experience is that, because of my tiny leg be-cripplement, I can't wear heels, which is an automatic Femininity Points Deduction. But imagine that times a million, depending on one's disability.
Finished the second chapter of Wolf's "The Beauty Myth" -- although Ted just finished the first and commented on that post, so feel free to jump in wherever.
It discusses women's magazines at length, and I admit, I'm not sure how relevant women's magazines are in 2017 -- literally, I don't know. I read such magazines when I was much younger, and I certainly recognize the combination of degradation and exaltation Wolf describes and that makes reading them so complicated. On one hand, they're chief peddlers of the expensive, exhausting, unobtainable beauty standards that oppress women so completely economically and psychologically. But on the other hand, they're practically the only forum where a mostly female editorial and writing staff writes almost exclusively about women's issues. My sense is that the internet has opened up other, better venues than things like Cosmopolitan for women -- sites like Jezebel are problematic for a variety of reasons, but they're not pushing diets on you every other page. But I sincerely don't know what the penetration of either magazines or their online alternatives are in the general population -- I know that *I* as an old millennial self-select online feminist publications, and no longer engage traditional women's magazines, but that might put me far outside of the mainstream. I literally don't know what constitutes mainstream women's media anymore, and would be interested to hear others' opinions on what it might be.
But the overarching thing that stands out for me from the chapter is just the term, "women's culture" -- Wolf maintains, probably entirely accurately for the early 1990s -- that women's magazines constitute basically the only widespread, mainstream women's culture: cultural production made by and for women focusing on at least some version or subset of women's concerns. And now, twenty-five years later, I'm left wondering if even that still exists -- cultural production by and for women that focuses on at least a subset of women's concerns that is shared by a large and diverse cross-section of women (at least in the Western world). What, today, would constitute a broadly shared "women's culture"? And how -- HOW -- is it that in a seething ocean of 24/7, completely saturated media of every conceivable form, there's practically nothing identifiable as (widely available, broadly and diversely shared) "women's culture"??? What should "women's culture" be? How could we create it? It's literally impossible that there's no market for it, if we're constrained by capitalist considerations -- and yet, women, the majority of consumers, are left being considered a niche demographic, rarely exclusively catered to by media, and almost never catered to with media generated by women.
What the hell? Seriously.
Chapter Three: "Religion".
So, I'm a little dubious about part of Wolf's analysis in this chapter, for two reasons. The first is that her discussion seems to assume that American women are no longer directly under the influence and constraints of Judeo-Christian religion, which is an assumption that is probably true of Wolf's presumed audience, but which is, I think, emphatically not true for perhaps ... what, 25% of American women? Particularly in, but not limited to, rural areas, I think there is a goodly percentage of American women who are actively religious, or who are actively hampered by religion; the former being (more or less) voluntary practitioners, the latter being the children and trapped wives of practitioners. And so an analysis of the ways in which the rituals, rites, and scriptures of a consumerist American beauty cult parody and supplant traditional religious practice seems incomplete to me if it doesn't acknowledge that many American women are still directly involved with -- and to varying degrees, oppressed by -- traditional religious practice itself. That alone is a topic worth consideration.
On the other hand, my sense is that women who are NOT directly involved with traditional religious practice are probably much less familiar with its traditions than Wolf seems to suggest: is any secular woman out there really thinking about her position as the derivative of Adam's rib, consciously or unconsciously? I don't deny that as a residual formation in the secular subcultural superstructure of modern America, religion might still provide touchstones and influences; but I seriously doubt that it's even a tertiary driving force in women's motivations for participating in consumerist patriarchal beauty rituals.
Those criticisms on the table, I DO appreciate the parallels Wolf draws between the language, ideology, and practice of beauty product consumption and the enactment of beauty routines and traditional religious beliefs and rites. The element of faith in both -- in religion that sacrifice and submission will lead to salvation, in beauty practice that it will lead to satisfaction and status -- is compelling, and her her points about skepticism are pretty on-the-nose: "The skepticism of the modern age evaporates where the subject is women's beauty. It is still -- indeed, more than ever -- described not as if it is determined by mortal beings, shaped by politics, history, and the marketplace, but as if there is a divine authority of makes deathless scripture about what it is that makes a woman good to look at." (87) And, of course, about what practices will give a woman those traits that make her good to look at.
Of course, it makes sense that, with God dying in the West (at least in the communities not still under the sway of traditional patriarchal religions), a patriarchal society would need a new way to oppress women, just as changes in society's production that pushed women out of home-making roles required reactions to oppress them in new economic ways. "Original sin left us sexual guilt. When the sexual revolution joined with consumerism to create the new supply of sexually available women, a physical relocation of female guilt was needed at once. The Rites of Beauty supplant virtually every Judeo-Christian prohibition against sexual appetite with a parallel taboo against oral appetite. The whole oral scenario of longing, temptation, capitulation, terror that 'it will show,' desperate efforts to purge the 'evidence' from the body, and ultimate self-loathing can be imagined almost unchanged ..." (97)
I notice that this religious sense of sin, guilt, sacrifice, and ritual sanctity seems to have expanded and mutated since Wolf was writing. While it's definitely still the case that women are indoctrinated into a cult that requires their constant self-monitoring and effort to be "good" -- thin and beautiful -- it seems to me that there is a new valence to what it is that generates sanctity; in response to feminist push-back on the rites of beauty Wolf describes, which seem to pretty directly reference male opinion on what women should look like, there's a new reactionary sanctification of the concept of "health" and the purity that attains to women who practice good "health" -- coincidentally, these things are touted as also keeping you thin and beautiful. I think you know what I'm talking about: the endless "lifestyle blogs" and everything else, including innumerable advertising campaigns, that encourage people, in particular women, to "take care of themselves" -- organic, supposedly detoxifying smoothies; endless yoga; raw food diets; meditation; "decluttering"; living your "best life" and etc. All of this is a purity test: can women deny themselves sufficiently, can they follow a thoroughly elaborate list of restrictions, can they flagellate themselves sufficiently, can they spend enough to achieve this new ideal, which is sold as not being anything so sexist and crass as mere sex appeal, heavens no!, but rather as being a kind of state of zen, in which women are thin, perpetually young, lithe, strong, "fit," but also, miraculously after following all of the rigorous rules of diet and exercise and presentation and consumption, relaxed and self-actualized. "Good" women are "healthy," bad women are too stupid or lazy to take care of themselves, and the emphasis on "health" masks the fact that everything Wolf describes in terms of the oppressively expensive, time-consuming, self-sacrificing, self-loathing, unobtainable demands of this new form of female sanctity are basically exactly the same as the old demands predicated on male sexual desire. Except this time it's supposedly about "you," woman, and not men. Or something. I guess. (NB: I'm not saying that in a vacuum, there's anything at all wrong with yoga, meditation, organic kale -- which I love! -- or any other individual element of "health" trends; rather I'm saying that in combination this "lifestyle" is just a new set of extremely expensive and challenging rituals and purchases to suck up women's time, money, energy, and confidence when they inevitably fail to attain perfect Gwyneth Paltrow cleansed and limber enlightenment.)
So anyway, those are my initial thoughts on women's capitalist beauty rites -- both the practices themselves and the beliefs that support them, as well as the required consumption -- insofar as they recapitulate religious demands and oppressions, as Wolf claims they do. Something that remains to be asked, I think, is if there is something about this kind of ritualism and faith that women -- or people in general -- *like* and find satisfying, such that when ritualism and faith are removed from the spiritual realm, there's a tendency to recreate them in another realm. It's not that I don't see how such demands are instrumental for patriarchy in enacting women's oppression, and for capitalism in exploiting women as consumers; but I also wonder if there's a need that's being fulfilled by these bad actors which could be fulfilled in positive ways, but in any case needs fulfilled in the absence of literal spiritual practice.
Chapter Four: "Sex"
I had this immediate, visceral recognition of the points made in this chapter ... and then felt guilty for agreeing with her. So let's parse those two reactions, which is what I then set about doing.
In the first place, her description of the depiction of women in media as brutalized objects just felt so spot-on to me. Even in ads that target *women,* women are depicted as they are in pornography: beauty objects -- where the "beauty" is according to the standard used by conventional patriarchy -- whose sexuality has been rendered as both extremely rarefied and as being almost completely passive to a man, or the product that stands in for the man. Moreover, the pornographic representation isn't even that of a soft-core, soft-focus romance -- it's a capitalist parody of sadomasochism, where women, sometimes rendered literally as objects -- robots, mannequins, unmoving (dead?) bodies -- are subjected to male dominance and abuse, to the point where any other kind of sexualized depiction is marginalized as timid, boring, and not worth the name "sex." "The woman learns from these images that no matter how assertive she may be in the world, her private submission to control is what makes her desirable." (133) And I think Wolf's interpretation of the role of the rapid ascendancy in visual culture of this particular depiction of women's sexuality -- passive, impossibly "beautiful" according to very narrow standards, and violently subjugated -- as being one of oppression is a good one: "The feminine sexual style of the 1960s was abandoned in popular culture, because for women to be sexual in that way -- cheerfully, sensually, playfully, without violence or shame, without dread of consequences -- would break down completely institutions that were tottering crazily enough since women had changed merely their *public* roles." (134) In a sense, this recapitulates the political motivations behind previous chapters' subjects as well: since women had achieved a radical new freedom in terms of politics and economics, there was an immediate reaction in cultural spheres to intensity the oppression women experienced there to make up for the new freedom elsewhere. The pressure on women got released, to an extent, in some areas, and so new pressures got applied in others to compensate and maintain the patriarchal status quo. And here the new pressure is the depiction of women's sexuality as limited to only a very small group of women who meet certain appearance standards, and even then that sexuality can only be channeled into violent, submissive forms.
What makes this particular form of pressure more intense than, say, the demands of the market for beauty products and services, is that Wolf makes the assertion -- which I think is convincing -- that the saturation of these depictions of women's sexuality is actually *conditioning* men AND women to normalize violent, nonconsensual sex. "But what is happening now is that men and women whose private psychosexual history would not lead them to eroticize sexual violence are *learning* from such scenes to be interested in it. In other words, our culture is depicting sex as rape *so that* men and women will become interested in it." (138) The statistics she quotes on rape and sexual assault are horrifying, and we know they're no better now than they were when Wolf was first published. We now call what she's describing Rape Culture -- a culture that normalizes sexual violence against women in media and real-life gender relations, and excuses and ignores it in judicial institutions. Part of that normalization is the RELENTLESS depiction of women's sexuality in media -- entertainment and advertisements -- as objectifying, subjugating, and sadomasochistic. And this pressure works to maintain patriarchy in a two-fold way: one, it literally terrorizes women with the threat of or actual sexual violence, which limits us or leads us to self-limit out of fear. Two, it suppresses a healthier, more liberatory sexuality that supports and even constitutes political radicalization: "... 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 ... Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. 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 women for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out of the sexual marketplace are good for business in the sexual economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror's mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women ... (But) an erotic life based on nonviolent mutuality rather than domination and pain teaches firsthand its appeal beyond the bedroom. A consequence of female self-love is that a woman grows convinced of social worth ... If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights ... if we believed we could get away with it, we *would* ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care." (144-5)
So why did I react so guiltily to agreeing with this? I think it's because, upon a shallow reading, it appears to condemn alternative sexualities per se: its use of the term "sadomasochism" can read as nonliteral, but rather referring to the actual practice of kink. In general, feminism teaches us that sexual freedom is paramount: people should be free to fuck how they want, and suggesting that some sexual expressions are categorically unhealthy or "off-limits" or "anti-feminist" is contrary to the sexual freedom feminism should encourage. But I think this concern is easily resolved. REAL kink -- the actual practice of S & M by actual people, in a deliberate, intentional way -- is, ideally and even usually, and as articulated by the main kink community, deeply mutually respectful and preoccupied with total consent between partners. "Sadomasochism" as a lived and deliberate practice is understood, by all respectable practitioners, as a mutually concerned and satisfying sexual practice between men and women (when it's between men and women). What Wolf describes is merely the appropriation of S & M by patriarchy and capitalism to do the work of oppression; that's a sick parody of real sexual expression, put to bad ends by bad people, and shouldn't reflect on good people expressing their marginal sexuality in mutually respectful ways. Furthermore, feminism that just shallowly declares "I choose my choice!" without investigating whether a given depiction of women and women's sexuality is overall harmful or not is actually a tool of patriarchy: patriarchy *encourages* this thoughtless "everything done by or to women is ok as long as you can find at least one woman to defend it, even the things that are obviously not ok" style of "feminism," since it's a tool to silence real feminist discourse. So Wolf isn't actually attacking REAL sexual freedom or any authentic marginalized sexual practice; she's attacking their weaponized parodies, which are much more prevalent in culture at large, and used to oppress women in general and silence the healthy things they've misappropriated for ill use.
So! Any thoughts on women's sex and its depictions in America?
(Also: this chapter is sort of relentlessly concerned with heterosexuality, BUT I think this is just because one, mass culture is grossly heteronormative, and two, it kind of goes without saying that lesbian sexuality is free of many of the oppressions of heterosexuality as wielded by patriarchy and capitalism.)
Chapter Five: "Hunger"
So, in a way, this is the chapter about which I should have, naturally, the most to say. As a fat woman, I've lived my life directly chained and bludgeoned by this particular subsection of patriarchy: fat hate. Diet culture. Literally starting when I was a tiny child, I was daily bullied by peers, caretakers, other adults, and the culture at large. It was conveyed to me directly and explicitly that my body was ugly, wrong, bad, an inconvenience and an imposition, unloveable and disgusting. The background chorus to these direct statements of my body's worthlessness was a million daily implicit messages about how irresponsible, lazy, slovenly, and stupid I must be to have "let" my body be the way it is: fat. I don't think I should have to explain in detail what this does to a person -- how painful it is, how it destroys your sense of self-worth, how it perverts your relationship to yourself and others, to food, to exercise, to other women, to men (particularly if you're straight or bi), to wearing clothes, to being in public at all.
So, let's just get get the facts on the table. All of this is easily verifiable by casual google searches; since it's the day of the women's strike, I'm not going to do free research. I'm going to say, "Trust women," and to take my word for it.
1) There is no scientifically demonstrated method to reliably keep a fat adult thin. In approximately 90% of cases of adult weight loss of more than 10% of body weight, the weight returns by the end of five years. So to begin with: the vast majority of fat people cannot currently, through *any* method, become and remain thin.
2) Fat *does* correlate to some health conditions. It is unclear in which direction the correlations run, and it is unclear how many of them are confused or even generated by stress -- the stress of living in a stigmatized, abused, discriminated-against body every day. Further, there is a great deal of well-documented discrimination against fat people within healthcare itself, which damages fat peoples' health and even kills them through neglect. Knowing this first-hand, many fat people delay or avoid seeking healthcare entirely. All of this makes it extremely difficult to determine how much of their unhealth might actually be the result of fat alone.
2a) When people talk about fat shaming as being about health, they are universally lying, possibly to themselves as well. If health were a concern in our culture we would:
- Make whole, nutritious food universally accessible for free or cheap, subsidizing it at both the consumer and producer levels, as opposed to what we do now, which is the literal opposite, giving out corporate welfare to industrial producers of heavily processed, unhealthy food and providing practically no assistance to hungry families.
-Make leisure time a priority for all people with caps on hours worked per week, paid vacation time, and prohibitions on employers contacting employees after work hours so that people have adequate time to both rest and exercise within their ability, as well as to relax to combat the scientifically confirmed negative health impacts of stress.
-Make pleasurable, healthful movement universally accessible, both by subsidizing access to gym facilities and prioritizing the safety and infrastructural soundness of public spaces for the use of people to recreate and exercise in.
-Provide whole, nutritious foods in schools, for free.
-Provide universal, high-quality healthcare to all people within our borders, for free.
We do none of these things. This is not a culture concerned with health. When it claims to be concerned with fat people's health as an excuse for shame and discrimination, it is lying. Period. Full stop.
3) Fat people are discriminated against in many ways: in hiring and salary, admission to academic programs, and in doctors' offices. Fat women are discriminated against to a greater degree than fat men. All of this has been repeatedly proven in studies.
4) Fat bodies are stigmatized by capitalism to drive consumption of weight-loss products. The American diet industry is a multi-billion-dollar-per-year industry. It is not just fat people who are coerced by the stigmatization of fat bodies into buying these products (which do not work). Rather, by making the fat body a bogey man that might strike anyone at any time, and by making the beauty standard constantly thinner and thinner, until almost no one naturally conforms to its weight requirement, ALL consumers are drawn into the diet industry.
Besides this last point -- the profit motive of capitalism -- fat stigma also serves the goals of patriarchy. Wolf notes that thinness became a preoccupation of American culture in the 1920s -- at precisely the emergence of the significant success of first-wave feminism, and not, contrary to a different mythological narrative, as a new marker of prosperity: the subsequent Depression and world war eras were not times in which skinny bodies would have naturally been seen as symbols of prosperity. No, the requirement of unnatural (for most women) thinness was imposed at the moment of first-wave feminism's big gains, as a new way to sap women's energy and time. "This great weight-shift bestowed on women, just as we were free to begin to forget them, new versions of low self-esteem, loss of control, and sexual shame. It is a genuinely elegant fulfillment of a collective wish: by simply dropping the official weight one stone [~14 lbs] below most women's natural level, and redefining a woman's womanly shape as by definition 'too fat,' a wave of self-hatred swept over first world women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered a historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself." (186)
What are the consequences of the perpetual quest to be thinner than your body is physically capable of being? "A cultural fixation on female thinness is not a fixation about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience ... Researchers ... confirmed what most women know too well -- that that concern with weight leads to 'a virtual collapse in self-esteem and sense of effectiveness.' Researchers ... found that 'prolonged and periodic caloric restriction' resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are 'passivity, anxiety, and emotionality.' *It is those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation.*" (187-8)
Let me quote at length, to describe the effects of prolonged semi-starvation as described by Wolf, bearing in mind that the human body *cannot tell the difference between a diet and a death camp* -- less food than it needs is taken by the body as starvation, period.
"The range of repulsive and pathetic behaviors exhibited by women touched by food diseases is portrayed as quintessentially feminine, proof positive of women's irrationality (replacing the conviction of menstrual irrationality that had to be abandoned when women were needed for the full-time work force). In a classic study done at the University of Minnesota, thirty-six volunteers were placed on an extended low-calorie diet and 'the psychological, behavioral and physical effects were carefully documented.' The subjects were young and healthy, showing 'high levels of ego strength, emotional stability, and good intellectual ability.' They 'began a six-month period ... in which their food intake was reduced by half -- a typical weigh reduction technique for women.
"'After losing approximately 25% of their original body weight, pervasive effects of semistarvation were seen.' The subjects 'became increasingly preoccupied with food and eating, to the extent that they ruminated obsessively about meals and food, collected recipes and cookbooks, and showed abnormal food rituals, such as excessively slow eating and hoarding of food related objects.' Then, the majority 'suffered some form of emotional disturbance as a result of semistarvation, including depression, hypochondriasis, hysteria, angry outbursts, and, in some cases, psychotic levels of disorganization.' Then, they 'lost their ability to function in work and social contexts, due to apathy, reduced energy and alertness, social isolation, and decreased sexual interest.' Finally, 'within weeks of reducing their food intake,' they 'reported relentless hunger, as well as powerful urges to break dietary rules. Some succumbed to eating binges, followed by vomiting and feelings of self-reproach. Ravenous hunger persisted, even following large meals during refeeding.' Some of the subjects 'found themselves eating continuously, while others engaged in uncontrollable cycles of gorging and vomiting.' The volunteers 'became terrified of going outside the experiment environment where they would be tempted by the foods they had agreed not to eat .. when they did succumb, they made hysterical, half-crazed confessions.' They became irritable, tense, fatigued, and full of vague complaints. 'Like fugitives, [they] could not shed the feeling they were being shadowed by a sinister force.' For some, doctors eventually had to prescribed tranquilizers.
"The subjects were a group of completely normal healthy college men." (193-4)
Here's the point: patriarchy doesn't want women to be healthy. It doesn't even want them to be thin. It wants them to be hungry. It wants them to be starving. Because a starving person is distracted, exhausted, incapable of focus, incapable of striving and ambition, incapable of normal self-esteem, desperate, irrational, half-hysterical, and sick. And anyone in that state is compliant. She is no threat. She does not think she deserves fair treatment, she does not organize, she does not resist, she does not challenge those in power. She counts calories and runs in circles to nowhere and hates herself, no matter what she weighs.
Hating fat people, stigmatizing them as ugly and disgusting, as lazy and stupid, as slovenly and unhealthy (which we erroneously tie to moral failure), is how patriarchy convinces every woman she must be thinner than she naturally is -- thinner than she can ever be. It is how patriarchy convinces her to starve herself into weakness and compliance. It is how it neutralizes the threat of women's resistance.
Don't fall for it. Fuck diets.
Chapter Six: "Violence"
First off: Wolf does not, although she should, make mention of the fact that for some women, particularly many trans women, cosmetic surgery is life-saving, in a physical and emotional sense. I think it is not her intention to bring the weight of judgment down on women who require surgery to bring their bodies into alignment with their gender, or to rebuke women who require corrective surgeries to feel whole again after disfiguring accidents or medical treatments. Nevertheless, let me make explicit what she does not: the analysis of the patriarchal oppression of women through the pathologization of womanhood and its processes and appearances, and the medical intervention upon these processes and appearances, is directed at whole, healthy women being acted upon as though they were diseased, not women who require surgery to be whole and healthy.
My first impression of this chapter, discussing the rise of plastic surgery among women, was that this was a pretty rarefied subject to treat. Not that Wolf's points about the violence of plastic surgery and the absurdity of its use to pursue a patriarchal beauty standard aren't well-taken; just that, how many women can even afford plastic surgery, let alone pursue it?
However, I think there are two larger points in the chapter that apply to all women, whether they ever could or ever would seek plastic surgery for the purposes of attempting to achieve patriarchy-defined "Beauty." The first is the history of the pathologization of womanhood: turning the natural state of being a woman into a medical condition. The West has, for many centuries, defined women's reproductive processes less as neutral biological systems and more as a source of disease, both physical and mental. "Hysteria" doesn't come from the word for "womb" by mistake. Beginning with the advent of relative modernity in medicine -- roughly the 1700s, and intensifying significantly in the 1800s -- woman's reproductive systems were seen as practically terminal conditions. (Elaine Showalter's work on this subject, particularly the book The Female Malady, which I assign portions of in my Madness course, describes the Victorian tendency to pathologize women's sexual function very well.) At every stage of a woman's life, but particularly puberty, pregnancy and immediately after childbirth, and menopause, her reproductive organs were thought to be the cause of actual physical invalidity and severe mental and emotional dysfunction. To counter these supposed negative health conditions, which were considered to be universal and essentially unavoidable as an essential element of possessing a middle- or upper-class woman's body, women were confined -- oftentimes literally -- and strictly policed in their behaviors, including being forbidden to acquire an education, work outside the home, or even undertake any strenuous activities within the home. They were subjected to bizarre "medical" procedures, including forced bedrest for months and extreme forced feeding, or being locked in dark rooms for months at a time, or even genital mutilation in the form of clitoridectomies.
Of course, the *result* was all middle- and upper-class women relegated to, essentially, physical and emotional invalidism. They were hopelessly restricted in every sphere of life, relegated to social if not legal prisons (although women were also often committed to mental wards, where they were subjected to a variety of tortures, including lobotomies, because women were literally thought not to need their minds, since they didn't use them anyway). The justification for this was that the essential biological processes of womanhood were actually a disease that required strict medical intervention.
After women's middle-class labor was needed outside the home, the medical myth that their reproductive systems caused them physical and mental disease that required almost complete physical and mental inactivity was suddenly erased. But women's bodies remained pathologized. As Wolf demonstrates, it is now a woman's *appearance* and her natural aging process that are described in the medicalized terms of disease and disfigurement, and are said to require extensive (expensive) violent intervention by doctors and other experts in this supposed pathology that arises from the essential physical nature of womahood itself. FUN.
"WIth the advent of the Victorian women's doctor, the earlier religious rationale for calling women *morally* sick was changed into a biomedical one. That in turn has changed into an aesthetic one, bringing us full circle. Our rationale is even more subjective than the 'vital lie' of the Victorians. While their medical terminology had at least to gesture at 'objectivity,' today's aesthetic judgments about who is sick and who is well are as impossible to prove, as easy to manipulate, as a belief about the stain on a woman's soul. And the modern reclassification makes more money: A woman who thought she was sick with femaleness couldn't buy an ultimate cure for her gender. But a woman who thinks she is sick with female ugliness is now being persuaded she can.
"The nineteenth-century version of medical coercion looks quaint to us: How could women have been made to believe that menstruation, masturbation, pregnancy, and menopause were diseases? But as modern women are being asked to believe that parts of our normal, healthy bodies are diseased, we have entered a new phase of medical coercion that is so horrific that no one wants to look at it all.
"The reclassification of well and beautiful women as sick and ugly women is taking place without hindrance. Since the nineteenth-century, society has tacitly supported efforts of the medical profession to confine women's lives through versions of this reclassification. Since it is socially necessary work, now as in the last century, fewer reality checks apply to this than are applied to medical practices in general; the media is tolerant or supportive; and the main functionaries, whose work benefits the social order, are unusually highly compensated.
"The purpose of the Victorian cult of female invalidism was social control." (223-4)
So too social control is the purpose of the newly medicalized beauty standard.
The second point made by Wolf that is relevant to all women is that all of this affects, by proxy, even women who cannot or (think they) would not have plastic surgery. As Wolf says, "We have entered a terrifying new age with cosmetic surgery. All limits have broken down. No amount of suffering or threat of disfigurement can serve as a deterrent ... We are affected by the Bomb whether or not it goes undetonated. Whether or not a woman ever undergoes cosmetic surgery, her mind is now being shaped by its existence. The *expectation* of surgery will continue to rise. SInce the beauty myth works in a mapable balance system, as soon as enough women are altered and critical mass is reached so that too many women look like the "ideal," the "ideal" will always shift. Ever-different cutting and stitching will be required of women if we are to keep our sexuality and our livelihood." (252-3)
It is a bleak world indeed for women when absolutely no amount of pain or risk of injury and death is considered too much to justify forgoing the pursuit of an unnatural beauty standard that we did not set, but we will be punished in every sphere of life for not conforming to.
