The Beauty Myth (7 page)

When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental one? Does her hand shape the lipstick into a cupid’s bow in a gesture of free will?

She doesn’t have to do it.

That is the response the beauty myth would like a woman to have, because then the Other Woman is the enemy. Does she in fact have to do it?

The aspiring woman does not have to do it if she has a choice. She will have a choice when a plethora of faculties in her field, headed by women and endowed by generations of female magnates and robber baronesses, open their gates to her; when multinational corporations led by women clamor for the skills of young female graduates; when there are
other
universities, with bronze busts of the heroines of half a millennium’s classical learning;
when there are
other
research-funding boards maintained by the deep coffers provided by the revenues of female inventors, where half the chairs are held by women scientists. She’ll have a choice when her application is evaluated blind.

Women will have the choice never to stoop, and will deserve the full censure for stooping, to consider what the demands on their “beauty” of a board of power might be, the minute they know they can count on their fair share: that 52 percent of the seats of the highest achievement are open to them. They will deserve the blame that they now get anyway only when they know that the best dream of their one life will not be forcibly compressed into an inverted pyramid, slammed up against a glass ceiling, shunted off into a stifling pink-collar ghetto, shoved back dead down a dead-end street.

The professional beauty qualification works smoothly to put back into employment relations the grounds for exploitation that recent equal opportunity laws have threatened. It gives employers what they need
economically
in a female work force by affecting women
psychologically
on several levels.

The PBQ reinforces the double standard
. Women have always been paid less than men for equal work, and the PBQ gives that double standard a new rationale where the old rationale is illegal.

Men’s and women’s bodies are compared in a way that symbolizes to both the comparison between men’s and women’s careers. Aren’t men, too, expected to maintain a professional appearance? Certainly: They must conform to a standard that is well groomed, often uniformly clothed, and appropriate to their context. But to pretend that since men have appearance standards it means that the genders are treated equally is to ignore the fact that in hiring and promotion, men’s and women’s appearances are judged differently; and that the beauty myth reaches far beyond dress codes into a different realm. Male anchors, according to TV employer guidelines cited by law theorist Suzanne Levitt, are supposed to remember their “professional image” while female
anchors are cautioned to remember “professional elegance.” The double standard for appearance is a constant reminder that men are worth more and need not try as hard.

“Wherever records have survived of the pay of working people,” writes Rosalind Miles, “women are shown either to receive less than men, or to get nothing at all.” That is still true: In 1984 in the United States, women working year-round at full-time jobs still earned an average of only $14,780—64 percent of the $23,220 that men working full-time earned. Estimates of what they now earn range from from 54 to 66 cents to the male dollar. Taking the highest figure, it is still a difference that has narrowed only 10 cents over the past twenty years. In the United Kingdom, women earn 65.7 percent of the gross weekly earnings of men. The pay difference in the United States is maintained within the same job throughout the social structure: On the average, male lawyers aged 25–34 earn $27,563, but female lawyers the same age, $20,573; retail salesmen earn $13,002 to retail saleswomen’s $7,479; male bus drivers make $15,611 and female bus drivers, $9,903; female hairdressers earn $7,603 less than male hairdressers. A barrage of imagery that makes women feel they are worth less than men, or worth only what they look like, helps keep this state of affairs going strong.

This proves again that the myth is political and not sexual: Money does the work of history more efficiently than sex. 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 of the needs of the marketplace.

Many economists agree that women do not expect promotion and higher wages because they have been conditioned by their work experience not to expect improvements in work status: Women, writes Sidel, “are often unsure of their intrinsic worth in the marketplace.” In the 1984–85 Yale University strike by the 85-percent-female clerical workers union, a basic issue, according to one organizer, was to get women to ask themselves, “What are we worth?” The biggest obstacle was “a basic lack of confidence.” The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.

Beauty ideology teaches women they have little control and
few options. Images of woman in the beauty myth are reductive and stereotyped. At any moment there are a limited number of recognizable “beautiful” faces. Through such limited perceptions of women, women come to see their options as limited: Women in the United States are clustered in 20 of 420 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Seventy-five percent of American women are still employed in traditional “women’s jobs,” most of which are ill paid. Arlie Hochschild found that women are concentrated “in jobs that stress their physical attractiveness.”

With few roles in which to see themselves and be seen, fully two thirds of American women work in service or retail jobs or in local bureaucracies, jobs with low wages and little opportunity for advancement. The few roles imagined for women are cheaply compensated: Secretaries, 99 percent of whom are female, earn an average salary of $13,000; preschool teachers, 97 percent female, $14,000; bank tellers, 94 percent female, $10,500; food service workers, 75 percent female, $8,200.

Women
do
earn more from selling their bodies than their skills. “In this context,” writes legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon, “it is instructive to ask: What is woman’s best economic option?” She cites evidence that, in contrast to the salaries of the “respectable” women described above, the average streetwalker in Manhattan nets between $500 and $1,000 a week. Another of her studies shows that the one difference between the prostitutes in the sample group and other women from similar backgrounds is that the former earn twice as much; A third shows that fashion modeling and prostitution are the only professions in which women consistently earn more than men. One woman in four earns less than $10,000 a year even though working full-time; in 1989, Miss America earned $150,000, a $42,000 scholarship, and a $30,000 car.

How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay. The pay-to-effort ratio at the top of the display professions, of which women are kept well-informed (“it’s really gruelling under those hot lights”), is a caricature of the real relation of women’s work to their pay. The gross high pay of
professional beauties is a false gloss over women’s actual economic situation. Hyping fantasies of discovery in the overpaid display professions, the dominant culture helps employers avoid organized resistance to the repetitiveness and low pay of real women’s real work. With the aspirational link of the women’s magazines in between, women learn unworthiness. The sense of professional
entitlement
a worker acquires from expecting a fair reward for a job well done thus remains conveniently distant from the expectations of working women.

Employers admit that “one way of weeding out women applicants for a job is to readvertise it at a higher salary.” “When it comes to defining our worth financially,” one study concludes, “we have severe doubts about ourselves.” In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.

The professional insecurity this situation generates cuts across the biological caste system that the PBQ sets up: It is found in “beautiful” women, since often no amount of professional success can convince them that they themselves, and not their “beauty,” have earned them their positions; and it’s found in “ugly” women, who learn to devalue themselves.

Pinups in the workplace are metaphors for the larger issue of how Iron Maiden imagery is used to keep women down on the job. At the Shoemaker Mine in the United States, when women coal miners joined the work force, graffiti appeared that targeted for ridicule individual women’s breasts and genitals; a woman with small breasts, for instance, was called “inverted nipples.” Faced with such scrutiny, reports legal scholar Rosemarie Tong, “the female miners found it increasingly difficult to maintain their self-respect, and their personal and professional lives began to deteriorate.” Nevertheless, a ruling by an American court,
Rabidue
v.
Osceola Refining Co
. (1986), upheld the right of male workers to display pornography in the workplace, no matter how offensive to women workers, on the grounds that the landscape is steeped in this sort of imagery anyway.

In Great Britain, the National Council for Civil Liberties recognizes that pinups constitute sexual harassment, as they “directly undermine an individual woman’s view of herself and her ability to do her job.” When unions formed discussion groups about the subject of pinups, forty-seven of the fifty-four groups ranked pinups as examples of sexual harassment that disturbed women. The Society of Civil and Public Servants ranks sexually evaluating looks, as well as pinups, as sexual harassment. Women interviewed said that when pinups are on the walls, they feel that “direct comparisons are being made.” Pinups are used directly to undermine women: In
Strathclyde Regional Council
v.
Porcelli
, Mrs. Porcelli testified that her harassers often “commented on my physical appearance in comparison with that of the nude female depicted.” But neither the American nor the British judicial system shows insight into the fact that this kind of harassment is intended to make women in the workplace feel physically worthless, especially in comparison with the men. It is
intended
to reinstate the inequalities that women’s entry into that workplace took away. In fostering in women the feeling of ugliness—or, if their “beauty” is the target, of exposure and foolishness—it should not have to
lead
to another injury, as the law now defines it, in order to be understood as discriminatory; it
is
already an injury.

The PBQ keeps women materially and psychologically poor
. It drains money from the very women who would pose the greatest threat were they to learn the sense of entitlement bestowed by economic security: Through the PBQ, even richer women are kept away from the masculine experience of wealth. Its double standard actually makes such women poorer than their male peers, by cutting a greater swathe in the income of a female executive than in that of a male, and that is part of its purpose. “Women are punished for their looks, whereas men can go far in just a grey flannel suit,” complains, ironically, a former beauty editor of
Vogue
, who estimates that her maintenance expenses will be about $8,000 annually. Urban professional women are devoting up to a third of their income to “beauty maintenance,” and considering it a necessary investment. Their employment contracts are even earmarking a portion of their salary for high-fashion clothing and costly beauty treatments.
New York Woman
describes a typical ambitious career woman, a thirty-two-year-old who
spends “nearly a quarter of her $60,000 income . . . on self-preservation.” Another “willingly spends more than $20,000 a year” on workouts with a “cult trainer.” The few women who are finally earning as much as men are forced, through the PBQ, to pay
themselves
significantly less than their male peers take home. It has engineered do-it-yourself income discrimination.

When used against newly wealthy women, the PBQ helps to enforce and rationalize discrimination at the highest levels. A 1987 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report found that corporate women, vice presidents and above, earn 42 percent less than male peers. Men in the twenty highest-paid professions make significantly more than women peers, says Ruth Sidel. This discrepancy is protected by the way the PBQ leeches money and leisure
and confidence
from this rising class, thus allowing corporations to draw on women’s expertise at the higher-paid levels, while defending the structures of male-dominated organizations from a potential onslaught of women who have stopped thinking poor.

It tires women out
. As the century draws to an end, working women are exhausted; bone-tired in a way their male colleagues may not be able to imagine. A recent series of surveys summarized in the women’s press “all point to one thing: modern women are worn out.” Seventy percent of senior women executives in the United States cite tiredness as their main problem; almost half of American eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds feel “tired most of the time”; 41 percent of the one thousand Danish women questioned responded that they “felt tired at present.” In Great Britain, 95 percent of working women put “feeling unusually tired” at the head of a list of their problems. It is this exhaustion that may call a halt to women’s future collective advancement, and that is the point of it. A weariness intensified by the rigors of the PBQ, sustained by its perpetual hunger, and renewed on its endless electronic treadmill, the PBQ may ultimately manage what direct discrimination cannot achieve. Professional, high-achieving women have, because of it, just enough energy, concentration, and time to do their work very well, but too little for the kind of social activism or freewheeling thought that would allow them to question and change the structure itself. If the rigors intensify to bring women to the physical breaking point, they may begin to long just to go back home.
Already in the United States, there are murmurs among worn-out career women of nostalgia for life before the mechanized stairs that lead nowhere.