The Beauty Myth (24 page)

The numbers are staggering; so is the thought that the beauty myth is projecting sexually violent images of women, and images of perfection that demand that women do violence to themselves, in an environment that has already linked sex to violence in some way at some time in most women’s lives. Could harm done to women make them more willing to harm themselves? A
Radiance
magazine finding showed that 50 percent of anorexics in one clinic had been sexually abused. Plastic surgeon Elizabeth Morgan explored the relationship between incest and the desire for plastic surgery after many of her patients admitted they had been victims of child sexual abuse: “I came to understand that many of them wanted to erase the memory of the children they looked like when they were abused.” Clinical studies of incest survivors show that they have fears that “their sexual pleasure does not come from a good place . . . most believe that they are the ones who had done something wrong, that they should be punished, and that if no one will mete out justice, they will administer it to themselves.”

The most common reaction of rape survivors is a feeling of worthlessness, and then hatred of their bodies, often accompanied by eating disorders (usually compulsive eating or anorexia, to ensure that they will become “safely” very fat or thin) and sexual withdrawal. If actual sexual abuse does that to women’s physical self-love, could images of sexual abuse and images that invade female sexual privacy do similar harm?

A more pervasive effect of this atmosphere, the prevalence of sexual violence and the way it is linked to women’s beauty, is that women—especially, perhaps, young women who grew up with
such violent imagery—are made to fear and distrust their own beauty and feel ambivalent about physically expressing, in dress, movement, or adornment, their own sexuality. Today, perhaps more than ever before, when young women dress in a sexually provocative way they are made to feel that they are engaged in something dangerous.

It seems that exposure to chic violence and objectifying sexual imagery has already harmed the young. Theorists of eros have not come close to realizing the effect of beauty pornography on young people. Gloria Steinem and Susan Griffin separate pornography from eros—which makes sense if eros comes first in the psychosexual biography. Rape fantasies may be insignificant, as Barbara Ehrenreich believes, for those who grew up learning their sexuality from other human beings. But young people today did not ask for a sexuality of pleasure from distance, from danger: It was given to them. For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today’s children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from
Playboy
to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

Something ugly seems to be happening to young people’s sexuality as a result: The effort to retrain sex into violence may be nearly won. Hilde Bruch calls young women born after 1960 “the anorexic generations.” Since obscenity laws were relaxed in the the 1960s and children born after 1960 have grown up in an atmosphere of increasingly violent and degrading sexual imagery (from which young women are withdrawing through anorexia), we must
recognize young people born after 1960 as “the pornographic generations.”

Young women now are being bombarded with a kind of radiation sickness brought on by overexposure to images of beauty pornography, the only source offered them of ways to imagine female sexuality. They go out into the world sexually unprotected: stripped of the repressive assurance of their sexual value conferred by virginity or a diamond ring—one’s sexuality was worth something all too concrete in the days when a man contracted to work for a lifetime to maintain access to it—and not yet armed with a sense of innate sexual pride. Before 1960, “good” and “bad,” as applied to women, corresponded with “nonsexual” and “sexual.” After the rise of beauty pornography and the sexual half-revolution, “good” began to mean “beautiful-(thin)-hence-sexual” and “bad” meant “ugly-(fat)-hence-nonsexual.”

In the past, women felt vulnerable, in the prenuptial bed, to pregnancy, illegal abortion, and abandonment. Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.

The thirty-year education of the young in sex as stylish objectification or sadomasochism may have produced a generation that honestly believes that sex is violent and violence is sexual, so long as the violence is directed against women. If they believe that, it is not because they are psychopaths but because that representation in mainstream culture
is the norm
.

Twelve percent of British and American parents allow their children to watch violent and pornographic films. But you don’t have to watch either kind of film to tune in. Susan G. Cole notes that MTV, the rock video channel in the United States, “appears to be conforming to pornographic standards” (the Playboy channel simply broadcasts its selections on “Hot Rocks”). With the
evolution of rock videos, both sexes sit in a room together watching the culture’s official fantasy line about what they are supposed to do together—or, more often, what she is supposed to look like while he does what he does, watching her. This material, unlike the version of it in glossy magazines, moves, complicating young women’s sexual anxieties in relation to beauty in a new way, as it adds levels of instruction beyond the simple pose: Now they must take notes on how to move, strip, grimace, pout, breathe, and cry out during a “sexual” encounter. In the shift from print to videotape, their self-consciousness became three-dimensional.

So does their sense of being stylishly endangered. Sex killers are portrayed on MTV as male heroes: The Rolling Stones’ “Midnight Rambler” is a paean to the Boston Strangler (“I’ll stick my knife right down your throat”); Thin Lizzy sings “Killer in the House” about a rapist (“I’m looking for somebody . . . I might be looking for you”); Trevor Rubin sings “The Ripper.” Motley Crue’s videos have women as sexual slaves in cages. In Rick James’s video he rapes his girlfriend. In Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” a gang stalks a lone woman. Duran Duran shows female figures in chains, and their “Girls on Film,” observes Susan G. Cole, “look as if they’ve just stepped out of an X-rated film.” In Alice Cooper’s show, reports
The Guardian
, “a life-sized, woman-shaped doll lies on the floor in front of him, handcuffed, wearing ripped fishnets and a leotard. She appears to have been choked to death by a plastic hose.” “I used to love her,” sings Guns ’n’ Roses, “but I had to kill her.” Criticism of rock’s extremism exposes one to the charge of being reactionary. But by resorting to these images, it is rock music that is being reactionary. Images of strangled women, women in cages, do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliché of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh.

Unfortunately, musical originality is not the only thing at stake: MTV sets the beauty index for young women today. If the women depicted in mass culture are “beautiful” and abused, abuse is a mark of desirability. For young men, “beauty” is defined as that which never says no, and that which is not really human: The date-rape figures show what lessons that teaches.

In 1986, UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth reported that 30 percent of college men said they would commit rape if they could be sure of getting away with it. When the survey changed the word “rape” into the phrase “force a woman into having sex,” 58 percent said that they would do so.
Ms
. magazine commissioned a study funded by the National Institute for Mental Health of 6,100 undergraduates, male and female, on thirty-two college campuses across the United States. In the year prior to the
Ms
. survey, 2,971 college men had committed 187 rapes, 157 attempted rapes, 327 acts of sexual coercion, and 854 attempts at unwanted sexual contact. The
Ms
. study concluded that “scenes in movies and TV that reflect violence and force in sexual relationships relate directly to acquaintance rape.”

In another survey of 114 undergraduate men, these replies emerged:

In the
Ms
. survey, one college man in twelve, or 8 percent of the respondents, had raped or tried to rape a woman since age fourteen (the only consistent difference between this group and those who had not assaulted women was that the former said they read pornography “very frequently”). Researchers at Emory and Auburn universities in the United States found that 30 percent of male college students rated faces of women displaying emotional distress—pain, fear—to be more sexually attractive than the faces showing pleasure; of those respondents, 60 percent had committed acts of sexual aggression.

Women are faring badly. In the
Ms
. study, one in four women respondents had had an experience that met the American legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Among the 3,187 women surveyed, in the preceding year, there had been 328 rapes and 534 attempted rapes; 837 women were subjected to sexual coercion, and
2,024 experienced episodes of unwanted sexual contact. Date rape shows, more than rape by a stranger, the confusion that has been generated in the young between sex and violence. Of the women raped, 84 percent knew the attacker, and 57 percent were raped on dates. Date rape, thus, is more common than left-handedness, alcoholism, and heart attacks. In 1982, an Auburn University study found that 25 percent of undergraduate women had had at least one experience of rape; 93 percent of those were by acquaintances. Of Auburn men, 61 percent had forced sexual contact on a woman against her will. A St. Cloud State University study in 1982 showed that 29 percent of the women students had been raped. Twenty percent of women students at the University of South Dakota had been date-raped; at Brown University, 16 percent had been date-raped. Eleven percent of Brown men said they had forced sex on a woman. The same year at Auburn University, 15 percent of male undergraduates said they had raped a woman on a date.

Women are four times more likely to be raped by an acquaintance than a stranger. Sexual violence is seen as normal by young women as well as young men: “Study after study has shown that women who are raped by men they know don’t even identify their experiences as rape”; only 27 percent in the
Ms
. study did so. Does their inability to call what happened to them “rape” mean that they escape the aftereffects of rape? Thirty percent of raped young women, whether or not they called their experience rape, considered suicide afterward. Thirty-one percent sought psychotherapy, and 82 percent said the experience had permanently changed them. Forty-one percent of the raped women said they expected to be raped again. Posttraumatic stress syndrome was identified as a psychological disorder in 1980, and is now recognized as common among rape survivors. The women who don’t call their rape by its name still suffer the same depression, self-hatred, and suicidal impulses as women who do. Their experiences are likely to imprint young women sexually: In the
Ms
. study, 41 percent of the raped young women were virgins; 38 percent were between fourteen and seventeen at the time of the attack. For both the rapists and the victims in the study, the average age at the time of the rape was eighteen and a half years old. College women are having relationships that include physical
violence: Between 21 and 30 percent of young people report violence from their dating partner.

Among younger adolescents, the trend is even worse. In a UCLA study of fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, the researchers wrote that “we appear to have uncovered some rather distressing indications that a new generation is entering into the adult world of relationships carrying along shockingly outmoded baggage.” More than 50 percent of the boys and nearly half the girls thought it was okay for a man to rape a woman if he was sexually aroused by her. A recent survey in Toronto reports that children are learning dominance and submission patterns at an earlier age: One in seven boys in grade 13 reported having refused to take no for an answer, and one in four girls of the same age reported having been sexually forced. Eighty percent of the teenage girls reported that they’d already been involved in violent relationships. According to Susan G. Cole, “In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex is. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.”

Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped
as a normal course of events
. The boys may even be unaware that what they are doing is wrong; violent sexual imagery may well have raised a generation of young men who can rape women without even knowing it. In 1987 a young New York woman, Jennifer Levin, was murdered in Central Park after sadomasochistic sex; a classmate remarked dryly to a friend that that was the only kind of sex that anyone he knew was having. In 1989, five New York teenagers raped and savagely battered a young woman jogger. The papers were full of stunned questions: Was it race? Was it class? No one noticed that in the fantasy subculture fed to the young,
it was normal
.