The Beauty Myth (33 page)

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women. It took over the regions of the female mind left unpoliced when female sexuality stopped hurting, and exploited our willingness to heed an authoritarian voice that announces—as we uneasily try out the alien state of the pain-free women—Not so fast.

The cosmetic surgery industry is expanding by manipulating ideas of health and sickness. There is a clear historical precedent for what the surgeons are doing. “Healthy” and “diseased,” as Susan Sontag points out in
Illness as Metaphor
, are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control. What the modern Surgical Age is doing to women is an overt reenactment of what nineteenth-century medicine did to make well women sick and active women passive. The surgical industry has taken over for its own profit motives the ancient medical attitude, which harks back to classical Greece but reached its high point in the Victorian female cult of invalidism, which defines normal, healthy female physiology, drives, and desires as pathological. “In the traditions of Western thought,” write Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich in
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
, “man represents wholeness, strength
and health. Woman is a ‘misbegotten man,’ weak and incomplete.” Historian Jules Michelet refers to women as “the walking wounded.”

The relation of doctors to women has been less than straightforward for most of their history. Healing and tending the sick were primarily female skills until the Enlightenment; women’s medical effectiveness was one catalyst for the witch burnings that swept Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. But the ascent of science and the exclusion of women healers from the childbed are connected, and the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century deliberately barred women from their traditional healing role.

The Surgical Age took over from the institutionalization of female “mental illness,” which had in turn overtaken the institutionalization of nineteenth-century hysteria, each phase of medical coercion consistently finding new ways to determine that what is female is sick. As English and Ehrenreich put it: “Medicine’s prime contribution to sexist ideology has been to describe women as sick, and as potentially sickening to men.” The “vital lie” that equates femaleness with disease has benefited doctors in each of these three phases of medical history, guaranteeing them “sick” and profitable patients wherever middle-class women can be found. The old edifice of medical coercion of women, temporarily weakened when women entered medical schools in significant numbers, has gained reinforcements from the beauty doctors of the Surgical Age.

The parallels between the two systems are remarkable. Both arose to answer the need for an ideology that could debilitate and discredit middle-class women whose education, leisure, and freedom from material constraints might lead them too far into a dangerous emancipation and participation in public life. From 1848 until the enfranchisement of Western women in the first decades of the twentieth century was a time of feminist agitation of unsurpassed intensity, and the “Woman Question” was a continuing social crisis: in backlash, a new ideal of the “separate sphere” of total domesticity arose. That ideal came, like the beauty myth in a parallel backlash against women’s advancement, with its socially useful price: the cult of female invalidism, initiated by “a constriction in the field of vision which led doctors to focus, with
obsessive concern, on women as organs of reproduction . . . a distortion of perception which, by placing primary emphasis on the sexual organs, enabled men to view women as a creature apart.” Showalter also notes that

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.” Her reproductive value, as the “aesthetic” value of her face and body today, “came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.”

Where Victorian doctors helped support a culture that needed to view women through ovarian determinism, modern cosmetic surgeons do the same for society by creating a system of beauty determinism. In the last century, notes Showalter, “women were the primary patients in surgical clinics, water-cure establishments, and rest-cure homes; they flocked to the new specialists in the ‘female illnesses’ of hysteria and neurasthenia, as well as marginal therapies, i.e., ‘mesmeric healing,’” just as women are the primary patients of “beauty therapies” in the current backlash. These attitudes, in both ideologies, allow doctors to act as a vanguard in imposing upon women what society needs from them.

Both the Victorian and the modern medical systems reclassify aspects of healthy femaleness into grotesque abnormality. Victorian medicine “treated pregnancy and menopause as diseases, menstruation as a chronic disorder, childbirth as a surgical event.” A
menstruating woman was treated with purgatives, forced medicines, hip baths, and leeches. The regulation of menstruation was pursued obsessively, just as the regulation of women’s fat is today: “The proper establishment of the menstrual function was viewed as essential to female mental health, not only for the adolescent years but for the woman’s entire life-span. Menarche was”—as the weight gain of puberty is now considered to be—“the first stage of mortal danger.” Maintaining reproduction, like the maintenance of “beauty,” was seen as the all-important female function threatened by the woman’s moral laxness and mental chaos: Just as they do today, doctors then helped the Victorian woman maintain her “stability in the face of almost overwhelming physical odds,” and enforced in her “those qualities of self-government and industriousness that would help a woman resist the stresses of her body and the weakness of her female nature.”

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 that 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 at 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. It too was a double symbol, like “beauty”: Subjectively, women invalids exerted through it the little power they had, escaped onerous sexual demands and dangerous childbirth, and received attention from responsive doctors. But for the establishment, it was a political solution as useful as the Iron Maiden. As French writer Catherine Clément puts it: “Hysteria [was] tolerated because in fact it has no power to effect cultural change; it is much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage and allow discontented women to express their wrongs through psychosomatic illness than to have them agitating for economic and legal rights.” Social pressure demanded that leisured, educated, middle-class women preempt trouble by being sick, and the enforced hypochondria felt to the sufferer like real illness. For similar reasons today, social pressure requires that women preempt the implications of our recent claim to our bodies by feeling ugly, and that forcibly lowered self-esteem looks to the sufferer like real “ugliness.”

The surgeons are taking the feminist redefinition of health as beauty and perverting it into a notion of “beauty” as health; and, thus, of whatever they are selling as health: hunger as health, pain and bloodshed as health. Anguish and illness have been “beauty” before: In the nineteenth century, the tubercular woman—with her glittering eyes, pearly skin, and fevered lips—was the ideal.
Gender and Stress
describes the media’s idealization of anorexics; the iconography of the Victorians idealized “beautiful” hysterics fainting in front of male doctors, asylum doctors dwelt lasciviously on the wasted bodies of anorexics in their care, and later psychiatric handbooks ask doctors to admire the “calm and beautiful face” of the anesthetized woman who has undergone electroshock therapy. Like current coverage by women’s journalism of the surgical ideal, Victorian journalism aimed at
women waxed lyrical on the sentimental attractiveness of feminine debility, invalidism, and death.

A century ago, normal female activity, especially the kind that would lead women into power, was classified as ugly and sick. If a woman read too much, her uterus would “atrophy.” If she kept on reading, her reproductive system would collapse and, according to the medical commentary of the day, “we should have before us a repulsive and useless hybrid.” Menopause was depicted as a terminal blow, “the death of the woman in the woman”: “The end of a woman’s reproductive life was as profound a mental upheaval as the beginning,” producing, like the modern waning of “beauty,” “a distinct shock to the brain.” Then as now, though with a different rationalization, menopause was represented as causing the feeling that “the world . . . is turned upside down, that everything is changed, or that some very dreadful but undefined calamity has happened or is about to happen.”

Participation in modernity, education, and employment was portrayed as making Victorian women ill: “warm apartments, coal-fires, gas-lights, late hours, rich food,” turned them into invalids, as today, as the skin cream copy puts it, “central heating, air pollution, fluorescent lights, etc.” make us “ugly.” Victorians protested women’s higher education by fervidly imagining the damage it would do to their reproductive organs; Friedrich Engels claimed that “protracted work frequently causes deformities of the pelvis,” and it was taken for granted that “the education of women would sterilize them” and make them sexually unattractive: “When a woman displays scientific interest, then there is something out of order in her sexuality.” The Victorians insisted that freedom from the “separate sphere” impaired womanhood, just as we are asked to believe that freedom from the beauty myth impairs beauty.

Vital lies are resilient. Contraception, for example, is defined by the medical profession, depending on the social mood, as making women ill or “beautiful”: Victorian doctors claimed that any contraception caused “galloping cancer, sterility and nymphomania in women; . . . the practise was likely to produce mania leading to suicide.” Until the 1920s, it was considered “distinctly dangerous to health,” sterility and “mental
degeneration in subsequent offspring” being among its supposed effects. But when society needed sexually available women, although questions about safety and side effects arose at once, women’s magazines nonetheless ran enthusiastic stories suggesting that the Pill would keep women young, and make them more “sexy.”

In the same way, surgeons—and women’s magazines, increasingly dependent on the editorial copy and ad revenue the surgeons provide—are recasting freedom from the beauty myth as disease. Advertisements for holy oils initiated this new definition by imitating medical journalism’s photographs of “disease” and “cure.” They drew on the worst medical fears of the age, postnuclear cancers and AIDS. “Crow’s feet” sounds insignificant compared with the suggestions the ads made of radiation sickness and carcinogenic lesions, cellular chaos and lowered immune systems. Elizabeth Arden’s is “the most advanced treatment system of the century,” as if aging required chemotherapy. Estée Lauder’s “science-proven” Night Repair is applied with a medical syringe and rubber balloon, like a blood transfusion or a liquid drug. Vichy lets your skin “recuperate.” Clarins talks of “relapse.” Elancyl speaks of fat as a “condition” that “disfigures.” Doctors give prescriptions, Clarins a “Beauty Prescription,” and Clinique, “Prescriptives.” Cancer specialists speak of the “regression” of the illness; so does Clinique: “Stay with your treatment—the temporary ‘regression’ will stop.” Ultima II makes Megadose.

In 1985, Eugenia Chandris in
The Venus Syndrome
called big hips and thighs “a medical problem”; looking at the Paleolithic fertility figures, she committed the solecism of saying that “the problem has troubled women ever since.” “The problem,” of course, has only troubled women since it has been called a problem—that is, within living memory. Female fat is characterized as if it were not only dead, but carcinogenic: “proliferating cells,” breeding more death. The Victorians defined all reproductive activity as illness; today’s beauty surgeons define as illness all evidence on the body of its reproductive activity—stretch marks, sagging breasts, breasts that have nursed, and the postpartum weight that accumulates, in every culture, at about ten pounds per pregnancy. Education, of course, never affected a woman’s ovaries, just as maternal breasts lose no feeling; nursing
is
erotic.
Nor are they dysfunctional; to the contrary, they have fulfilled a primary function of the breast, lactation. But cosmetic surgeons describe postpartum breasts, as the Victorians described educated ovaries, as “atrophied,” a term that healing doctors use to describe the wasted, dysfunctional muscles of paralysis. They reclassify healthy adult female flesh as “cellulite,” an invented “condition” that was imported into the United States by
Vogue
only in 1973; they refer to this texture as “disfiguring,” “unsightly,” “polluted with toxins.” Before 1973, it was normal female flesh.