The Beauty Myth (17 page)

What is this scenario to which women are so painfully receptive? It is about the unspoken underside of the life of the successful, controlled working woman: about sexual violence and street harassment and a hostile workplace. Each word strikes a nerve of legitimate female fear that has nothing to do with aging or with the qualities of the product. Not only are women new to the public sphere; it
is
full of unseen dangers.

Women
are
under attack every day of our lives from “unseen aggressors”: Studies repeatedly show that at least one woman in six has been raped, and up to 44 percent have suffered attempted rape. We
do
have “pockets of vulnerability” subjected to assault—vaginas. The extent to which the AIDS virus has infected women is still unknown; we
do
need “protective barriers”—condoms and diaphragms. In the United States, 21 percent of married women report physical abuse by their mates. One and one-half million American women are assaulted by a partner every year; one British woman in seven is raped by her husband. Women respond to fantasies about protection from assault because we
are
being assaulted.

Almost all working women are clustered in twenty low-status job categories; we
do
have an “invisible enemy”—institutional discrimination. Verbal sexual abuse on city streets is a daily abrasive; women
are
exposed to “environmental stress.” Women score lower than men on tests to measure self-esteem; we
do
need to overcome “years of negative influence”—internalized female self-hatred. Almost two out of three marriages in the United States end in divorce, at which women’s standard of living declines by 73 percent while men’s rises by 42 percent; women
are
“unprotected.” More than 8 million American women raise at least one child alone, of whom only 5 million are awarded child support, of which 47 percent get the full amount, 37 percent less than half, and 28 percent nothing. Women
are
being “eroded” by “life-style variations.” American women’s 1983 median income
was $6,320, while men’s was over twice as much. Between two thirds and three quarters of women have been sexually harassed at work. We
do
face “environmental irritants.” Overwork and low pay
does
leave us “stressed” under “fluorescent lights” in “overheated offices.” Women make $.59–$.66 cents for every male dollar. We can buy a holy oil called Equalizer. Vaseline Intensive Care offers, “Finally . . . equal treatment . . . the treatment they deserve.” Just 5 percent of top managers are women. Johnson and Johnson makes Purpose. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass in the U.S. Congress; women
do
need a buffer. Women
do
need a better defense.

Holy oils promise the protection that women no longer get from men and do not yet get from the law. They do so at the level of a dream. They offer to be a chador or chastity belt or a husband or an antiradiation suit, depending on the fear evoked, to keep the woman safe in the abrasive male world that many have entered with such flying colors.

Some of the copy appeals to the ambivalence that women feel about their stressful new roles—or rather, about entering a discriminatory system in which feminism gets the blame for subjecting women to the high stress of a sexist outer world. Many have mixed feelings about the cost of male-defined “success” and time away from children. This is the “post-feminist” school of skin care:

The divorce rate in the United States nearly doubled between 1970 and 1981. Since 1960, the divorce rate has doubled in almost every country in Europe, tripled in the Netherlands, quintupled in the United Kingdom, and has risen tenfold in Barbados; in Bangladesh and Mexico, one woman in ten who has married has been divorced or separated, one in five in Colombia, one in three in Indonesia. Elizabeth Arden’s Eyezone repair gel gives us the last cycle of women’s history in a tube: “The vital supporting structures between the [cells] break down, leaving the skin weakened and vulnerable.” Her Immunage shields one from “rays that weaken skin’s support structure and devastate.” Untreated skin shows “a dramatic lack of cohesion.” Women’s traditional support systems—the family, male financial backing, even the women’s groups of feminism’s second wave—have broken down. Clinique “helps support needy skin. It’s a good cause.” In a rescue fantasy, single or struggling women read that Estée Lauder’s microsomes are “attracted like high-powered magnets [magnates?] to the surface cells that need help most, repairing, reinforcing and rebuilding.” These “support systems” can now be “repaired and rebuilt” by the “dynamic action” that women can get at the pharmacist’s when the nuclear family and the legislature have failed us.

The code words will change with women’s subconscious anxieties. But if women want out of an expensive belief system arranged to coerce us through these messages, we will read holy oil copy knowing that it is not about the product, but is an impressively accurate portrait of the hidden demons of our time.

The ads read women’s needs on a very personal level as well. Women, they know, sometimes feel a need to regress and be nurtured. With the Rites of Beauty, women are driven from the present with encouragement to recapture the past. Cults that idealize the past are called revitalization movements—Nazism being one example.

With both age and weight theology, women have memories of Eden—Timotei shampoo’s “secret garden”—and its loss: As children, all women had “flawless” skin and most were lovingly fed as much as they wanted to eat. The two words whose variants are repeated so often that few ads are free of them are “revitalize” and “nourish.” Almay “gives new life.” RoC “revitalizes”; Auraseva is “revitalizing,” lets one be “reborn.” Clarins uses
“revitalize” nine times in a one-fold leaflet. You can be “Reborn” with Elizabeth Arden. And Guerlain gives you Revitenol. Those two words are hypnotically repeated within single ads. “Renewal” recurs twenty-eight times over in a one-page leaflet for a holy oil called Millennium. The millennium heralded by the Second Coming is when the dead will live again; and women will return to their youth, the time when the Rites say they are most alive.

Women, advertisers know, are feeling undernourished, physically and emotionally. We repress our hunger—to acknowledge it would be a weakness. But our nutritional deficiency shows in holy oil copy that dwells on forbidden richness or sweetness, the honey of the Holy Land, the mother’s milk of Mary: Milk ’n Honee, Milk Plus 6, Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv, Wheat Germ n’ Honey, Max Factor 2000 Calorie Mascara, Skin Food, Creme, Mousse, Caviare. The woman feeds her skin the goodness she cannot take without guilt or conflict into either mouth. In a
New York Times
article entitled “Food for Thought,” Linda Wells writes that “the latest skin-care ingredients . . . could be mistaken for the menu at a glitzy restaurant”; she lists quail’s eggs, honey, bananas, olive oil, peanuts, caviar, sturgeon’s roe, and passion fruit. The hungry woman allows herself only on the outside what she truly desires for the inside.

In a 1990 survey of three thousand women, fully half felt that “men were only interested in their own sexual satisfaction.” The most “intensive nourishment” is promised by the creams for nighttime, “when your skin is able to absorb more nourishment. This is the time to nurture it . . . [with] special nourishments” (Almay Intensive Nourishing Complex). Nighttime is when such women will most deeply feel the lack of a nurturer. Skin “nourishment” is scientifically impossible, since nothing penetrates the stratum corneum. Women are feeding their skins as a way to feed themselves the love of which many are deprived.

Women are urged to project onto these products what they want from their relationships with men. The first
Hite Report
showed that women wanted more tenderness. There is a strain of Christian mysticism, sensual and intimate, in which Christ is a lover who offers the mystic a romantic, pure union. Jesus the bridegroom has been a fantasy mainstay of women. The cosmetic version of God the Son is tender. He knows exactly what the
supplicant needs. The oils “calm,” “soothe,” and “comfort”; they offer a “balm,” like Gilead’s, to a “sensitive” and “irritated” skin or self. Judging from the ads, women want more care and attention than they are getting from men (“They never give you any personal attention”—Clinique), as well as a slower hand, an easier touch. The oils “glide on smoothly, like silk.” The genie in the bottle does what real men evidently are not doing enough: He will touch her gently, commit himself forever, empathize and care for her, do for her what women do for men. He comes in a lipstick “you can have a lasting relationship with.” He offers “More Care. Pure Care,” “totally taking care creams,” “Special Care,” “Intensive Care” (Johnson & Johnson), “Loving Care” (Clairol), “Natural Care” (Clarins). He knows her sexual pace, taking “the softly, softly approach,” providing “the kind of loving” the woman has “been thirsting for.” He takes the guilt from sex: She “can be restored to feelings that are purely natural.” He suffereth long, and is Empathy shampoo and Kind cleanser and Caress soap and Plenitude conditioner. Magically, women’s sexual needs are a source of conflict no longer: “Your skin’s sensitive moments need be a problem no more. . . . You need sensitive care all over . . . it’s the body’s most complex organ.” Others offer to “lubricate luxuriously” and to “ensure maximum penetration” and to “respond directly to your needs . . . Special Care . . . when and where you need it.” (“Thou knowest,” the missal prays, “what good things I stand in need of.”) Female sexuality is like that, after all: “Sometimes you need a little Finesse, sometimes you need a lot.”

In other moods, some women may be torn by a longing to submit again to vanished authority, to God the Father. Another sales pitch lets them kiss the rod. The woman needs “Tame,” an exacting guide who will train her to contain the chaos of her natural impulses; she is offered a masculine hand to subdue her, just but merciful, gentle but firm. She needs “extra control for problem skin,” as if she were a problem child: “The last thing older skin needs is to be babied.” Spare the rod, she is told, spoil the complexion: “Exfoliate. Inundate. Do it as aggressively as possible” (Clinique). She can buy “corrective and preventive” action (Estée Lauder), the idiom of juvenile detention: “Slackening
skin? Be firm with your face” (Clarins).

Sacrificing ourselves for others, women respond to substances that acquire their aura from sacrifice. A substance into which death has entered must work miracles. At a Swiss spa, freshly aborted sheep embryos are “sacrificed” each week for their “fresh and living cells.” (A client speaks of it as “a spiritual experience.”) Placenta is a common ingredient in face creams, as are the stomach enzymes of pigs. Mammal fetal cells have been processed into them; Orchidea offers “mammary extract.” In Great Britain, France, and Canada, according to Gerald McKnight, human fetal tissue cells are sold to manufacturers of skin creams. He cites recorded cases of pregnant women in poor countries persuaded to abort their children as late as seven months, for about two hundred dollars, to a lucrative undercover trade in cosmetic fetal tissue. In seventeenth-century Romania, a countess slaughtered peasant virgins so that she could bathe in their blood and stay youthful. The vampire never ages.

Magic potency comes from financial sacrifice as well. “The actual ingredients cost 10 percent or less of what [women] pay for them,” a source who has worked for Helena Rubinstein and
Vogue
told McKnight. The “hideously huge markup,” she says, is to cover the cost of advertising and “research.” It is understood that the unreal cost is actually part of the holy oil’s attraction for women: In another Linda Wells piece in
The New York Times
, “Prices: Out of Sight,” she notes that Estée Lauder raised its prices for the “prestige.” “The whole industry is overpriced,” says a chairman of Revlon. “The price is soaring. . . . Some companies believe that the trend is peaking out. Others, meanwhile, are pushing their prices farther into the stratosphere.” High prices
make
women buy holy oils. McKnight asks: “If the cost was sharply reduced . . . would they feel as satisfied in buying the stuff? It is this aspect of the business that confuses sociologists and psychologists alike.” He provides a chart that proves that the breakdown of a $7.50 product yields $0.75 worth of ingredients. Selling nothing at an extortionate price makes for low overhead.

The “confusing” appeal of high cost to women should not be so baffling. The ingredients are beside the point; even their effectiveness is beside the point. The actual sheep-grease or petroleum derivative in the pot is as irrelevant as who painted the
Shroud of Turin. Unlike the high cost of face colors, which at least do what they are meant to, all that the high cost of holy oil delivers is the assuaging of guilt, of the compulsion to sacrifice. In this way, the great medieval industry of pardons and indulgences reappears as the holy oil industry of today.

The value of indulgences
is
their expense to the penitent. Their primary psychological meaning lies in how much the penitent is willing to sacrifice for the sake of forgiveness. The salesmen, too, threaten to damn the woman if she does not pay. It is not even a hell of ugliness that she fears—but a limbo of guilt. If she ages without the cream, she will be told that she has brought it on herself, from her unwillingness to make the proper financial sacrifice. If she does buy the cream—and ages, which she is bound to anyway—at least she will know how much she has paid to ward off the guilt. A hundred-dollar charge is black-and-white proof that she tried. She really tried. Fear of guilt, not fear of age, is the motivating force.