The Beauty Myth (11 page)

Because people trust their clubs and because this voice is so attractive, it is difficult to read the magazine with a sharp eye as to how thoroughly ad revenue influences the copy. It is easy to misread the whole thing—advertisements, beauty copy, images of models—as if it were a coherent message from the editors telling women, “You should be like this.” Some of the harm done by the
magazines to women comes out of that misunderstanding. If we could read them in a more informed way, we could take the pleasure and leave the pain, and the magazines, with different advertisers, could do themselves the justice that they deserve in providing women with the only serious mass-market women’s journalism available.

Women also respond to the beauty myth aspect of the magazines because adornment is an enormous—and often pleasing—part of female culture. And there is almost nowhere else where they can participate in women’s culture in so broad a way. The myth does not only isolate women generationally, but because it encourages women’s wariness of one another on the basis of their appearance, it tries to isolate them from all women they do not know and like personally. Though women have networks of intimate friends, the myth, and women’s conditions until recently, have kept women from learning how to do something that makes all male social change possible: How to identify with unknown other women in a way that is not personal.

The unknown woman, the myth would like women to believe, is unapproachable; under suspicion before she opens her mouth because she’s Another Woman, and beauty thinking urges women to approach one another as possible adversaries until they know they are friends. The look with which strange women sometimes appraise one another says it all: A quick up-and-down, curt and wary, it takes in the picture but leaves out the person; the shoes, the muscle tone, the makeup, are noted accurately, but the eyes glance off one another. Women can tend to resent each other if they look too “good” and dismiss one another if they look too “bad.” So women too rarely benefit from the experience that makes men’s clubs and organizations hold together: The solidarity of belonging to a group whose members might not be personal friends outside, but who are united in an interest, agenda, or worldview.

Ironically, the myth that drives women apart also binds them together. Commiserating about the myth is as good as a baby to bring strange women into pleasant contact, and break down the line of Other Woman wariness. A wry smile about calories, a complaint about one’s hair, can evaporate the sullen examination of a rival in the fluorescent light of a ladies’ room. On one hand,
women are trained to be competitors against all others for “beauty”; on the other, when one woman—a bride, a shopper in a boutique—needs to be adorned for a big occasion, other women swoop and bustle around her in generous concentration in a team formation as effortlessly choreographed as a football play. These sweet and satisfying rituals of being all on the same side, these all-too-infrequent celebrations of shared femaleness, are some of the few shared female rituals left; hence their loveliness and power. But, sadly, these delightful bonds too often dissolve when the women reenter public space and resume their isolated, unequal, mutually threatening, jealously guarded “beauty” status.

Women’s magazines cater to that delicious sense of impersonal female solidarity, now, compared with the high-water mark of the second wave, so rare. They bring out of the closet women’s lust for chat across the barriers of potential jealousy and prejudgment. What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men? The magazines offer the electrifying feeling that women are too seldom granted, though men in their groups feel it continually, of being plugged in without hostility to a million like-minded people of the same sex. Though the magazines’ version is sadly watered down, women are so deprived of it that it is powerful even in a dilute concentration. Each reader, Mormon housewife in Phoenix, schoolteacher in Lancashire, conceptual artist in Sydney, welfare mother in Detroit, physics professor in Manhattan, prostitute in Brussels, au pair in Lyons, is dipping into the same bath of images. All can participate in this one way in a worldwide women’s culture, which, though inadequate and ultimately harmful, is still one of the few celebrations of female sexuality in solidarity that women are allowed.

One sees the “perfect” face differently with this in mind. Its power is not far-reaching because of anything innately special about the face: Why that one? Its only power is that it has been designated as “the face”—and that hence millions and millions of women are looking at it together, and know it. A Christian Dior cosmetic vision stares from a bus at a grandmother drinking a
café con leche
on a balcony in Madrid. A cardboard blowup of the same image gazes at the teenage Youth Training Scheme worker setting
it up in the local pharmacy in a village in Dorset. It glows over a bazaar in Alexandria.
Cosmopolitan
appears in seventeen countries; buying Clarins, women “join millions of women worldwide”; Weight Watchers products offer “Friends. More friends. Still more friends.”

The beauty myth, paradoxically, offers the promise of a solidarity movement, an Internationale. Where else do women get to feel positively or even negatively connected with millions of women worldwide? The images in women’s magazines constitute the only cultural female experience that can begin to gesture at the breadth of solidarity possible among women, a solidarity as wide as half the human race. It is a meager Esperanto, but in the absence of a better language of their own they must make do with one that is man-made and market driven, and which hurts them.

Our magazines simply reflect our own dilemma: Since much of their message is about women’s advancement, much of the beauty myth must accompany it and temper its impact. Because the magazines are so serious, they must also be so frivolous. Because they offer women power, they must also promote masochism. Because feminist poet Marge Piercy attacks the dieting cult in
New Woman
, therefore the facing page must give a scare sheet about obesity. While the editors take a step forward for themselves and their readers, they must also take a step back into the beauty myth for the sake of their advertisers.

Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors. They blur the line between editorial freedom and the demands of the marketplace. The magazine may project the intimate atmosphere of clubs, guilds, or extended families, but they have to act like businesses. Because of who their advertisers are, a tacit screening takes place. It isn’t conscious policy, it doesn’t circulate in memos, it doesn’t need to be thought about or spoken. It is understood that some kinds of thinking about “beauty” would alienate advertisers, while others promote their products. With the implicit need to maintain advertising revenue in order to keep publishing, editors are not yet
able
to assign features and test products as if the myth did not pay the bills. A women’s magazine’s profit does not come from its cover price, so its contents cannot roam too far from the advertisers’ wares. In a
Columbia Journalism Review
story captioned “Magazine Crisis: Selling Out
for Ads,” Michael Hoyt reports that women’s magazines have always been under particular pressure from their advertisers; what’s new is the intensity of the demands.

Women’s magazines are not alone in this editorial obligation to the bottom line. It is on the increase outside them, too, making all media increasingly dependent on the myth. The 1980s saw a proliferation of magazines, each competing wildly for its piece of the advertising pie. The pressure is now on newspapers and news magazines: “Editors are facing a harder time maintaining their virginity,” says the editor of the
Christian Science Monitor
. Lewis Lapham, editor of
Harper’s
, says that New York editors speak of “the fragility of the word” and “advise discretion when approaching topics likely to alarm the buyers of large advertising space.” “The American press is, and always has been, a booster press, its editorial pages characteristically advancing the same arguments as the paid advertising copy,” he writes. According to
Time
, modern media management now “sees readers as a market.” So publishers must seek upscale advertisers and apply pressure for upscale stories. “Today, if you had Watergate, you would have to check with the marketing department,” says editor Thomas Winship. The
Columbia Journalism Review
quotes the former editor of
The Boston Globe:
“‘Magazines are commodities, commodities are there to sell goods, and the competition these days is ferocious.’ He admits that now he too is heavily dependent on fashion ads. ‘We used to have a silken curtain between advertising and editorial, but no more.’ For years now, some publishers have gone out of their way to attract advertisers by creating what advertisers regard as a favorable editorial atmosphere.” John R. MacArthur, editor of
Harper’s
, believes, writes Hoyt, that “editing for advertisers” will destroy what makes magazines valuable: “an environment of quality and trust.” Soon, if this trend continues unchecked, there will be few media left that will be free to investigate or question the beauty myth, or even offer alternatives, without worrying about the advertising repercussions.

The atmosphere is thronged with more versions of the Iron Maiden now than ever before also because of recent changes in media organization that have intensified visual competition. In 1988, the average person in the United States saw 14 percent
more TV advertising than two years before, or 650 TV messages a week as part of the total of 1,000 ad messages each day. The industry calls this situation “viewer confusion”: Just 1.2 of the 650 messages are remembered, down from 1.7 in 1983; the advertising business is in a growing panic.

So images of women and “beauty” become more extreme. As advertising executives told
The Boston Globe
, “You have to push a little harder . . . to jolt, shock, break through. Now that the competition is fiercer, a whole lot rougher trade takes place. [Rough trade is gay male slang for a sadistic heterosexual partner.] Today, business wants even more desperately to seduce. . . . It wants to demolish resistance.” Rape is the current advertising metaphor.

In addition, film, TV, and magazines are under pressure to compete with pornography, which is now the biggest media category. Worldwide, pornography generates an estimated 7
billion
dollars a year, more, incredibly, than the legitimate film and music industries combined. Pornographic films outnumber other films by three to one, grossing 365 million dollars a year in the United States alone, or a million dollars a day. British pornographic magazines sell twenty million copies a year at 2 to 3 pounds (about $3.20 to $4.80) a copy, grossing 500 million pounds a year. Swedish pornography earns 300–400 million kronor a year; a sex shop there offers some 500 titles, and a corner tobacconist, 20 to 30 titles. In 1981, 500,000 Swedish men bought pornographic magazines each week; by 1983, every fourth video rented in Sweden was pornographic; and by 1985, 13.6 million pornographic magazines were sold by the largest distributors in corner kiosks. Eighteen million men a month in the United States buy a total of 165 different pornographic magazines generating about half a billion dollars a year; one American man in ten reads
Playboy, Penthouse
, or
Hustler
each month;
Playboy
and
Penthouse
are the most widely read magazines in Canada. Italian men spend 600 billion lire on pornography a year, with pornographic videos representing 30–50 percent of all Italian video sales. Pornography worldwide, according to researchers, is becoming increasingly violent. (As slasher filmmaker Herschel Gordon Lewis said, “I mutilated women in our pictures because I felt it was better box office.”)

To raise the level of pressure once again, this image
competition is taking place during worldwide deregulation of the airwaves. In its wake, the beauty myth is exported from West to East, and from rich to poor. United States programming is flooding Europe and First World programs flood the Third World: In Belgium, Holland, and France, 30 percent of TV is American-made, and about 71 percent of TV programs in developing countries are imports from the rich world. In India, TV ownership doubled in five years and advertisers have sponsored shows since 1984. Until a decade ago, most European TV was state-run; but privatization, cable, and satellite changed all that, so that by 1995 there could be 120 channels, all but a few financed by advertising, with revenues expected to rise from $9 billion to $25 billion by the year 2000.

America is no exception. “The networks are running scared,” reports
The Guardian
[London]. In ten years (1979–89), they lost 16 percent of the market to cable, independents, and video: “The result is a glitz blitz.”

With
glasnost
, the beauty myth is being imported behind the Iron Curtain, as much to constrain a possible revival of feminism as to simulate consumer plenty where little exists. “
Glasnost
and
perestroika
,” says Natalia Zacharova, a Soviet social critic, “. . . seem likely to bring Soviet women contradictory freedoms. Glamour will be one of them.” Her remark was prescient:
Reform
, Hungary’s revealingly named first tabloid, read by one in ten Hungarians, has a topless or bottomless model on each page.
Playboy
hailed Soviet Natalya Negoda as “The Soviets’ first sex star.” Nationalist China entered the Miss Universe contest in 1988, the year the first Miss Moscow competition was held, following Cuba and Bulgaria. In 1990, outdated copies of
Playboy
and women’s glamour magazines began to be shipped to the Soviet bloc; we will be able to watch the beauty myth unfold there in utero. Tatiana Mamanova, a Soviet feminist, responding to a question about the difference between the West and Russia, replied, “The pornography . . . it’s everywhere, even on billboards . . . [it] is a different kind of assault. And it doesn’t feel like freedom to me.”