Something more insidious can kick in, too. Jean Kilbourne, one of the more thoughtful critics of the impact of advertising on women, writes quite eloquently about the way imagery—particularly sexual imagery, which is so coolly passionless and so unequivocally appearance-based—can tamper with a woman’s gut-level feelings about what it means to be sexual, numbing thinking about sex, skewing expectations about it, confusing real sexuality with narcissism, fostering a plastic and superficial view that’s all about arousing others, never about the emotions that might underlie arousal, like intimacy or connection or trust. “This not only makes real intimacy impossible,” she writes, “it erodes real desire. . . . We are offered a pseudosexuality, a sexual mystique that makes it far more difficult to discover our own unique and authentic sexuality. How sexy can a woman be who hates her body? How fully can she surrender to passion if she’s worried that her thighs are too heavy?”
And how can she learn to feel sexual—tuned into and comfortable with her own body—when she’s swamped by images that fuse sexuality with so many decidedly unsexy things, when so many of the external definitions of desirability around her have little, if anything, to do with her own bodily experience? The other day, I came across three ads: One, for Anna Molinari, showed a woman on her hands and knees, wearing a dog’s choker; another, for Versace, pictured a woman collapsed at the bottom of a flight of stairs, as though she’d been hurled down them; a third, for Moschino, showed a woman bound in ropes. These are typical images, standard fare—eroticized women in positions of total vulnerability, eroticized women pictured enjoying their vulnerability, turned on by it, or at least utterly blasé about it—and it’s taken me years to appreciate how truly alienating they are, how powerfully they can undermine not just confidence in the body but confidence in the truth. Total vulnerability is scary, not arousing, a fact that most women know in their bones. But when you’re bombarded by statements that suggest the opposite is true, it’s harder to understand that fear as natural and human, harder to embrace it, harder to talk about it. The contradiction makes it harder, too, to negotiate the already tangled lines between looking sexy and feeling sexual: To look sexy in the contemporary sense—exposed, submissive, vulnerable, even violated—is to feel powerless and afraid, which generally dampens appetite instead of whets it.
But these are the daily leakings of radon, slaps to the ego so consistent and routine it’s easy to miss the darker threads that bind them together: a steady lingering antipathy toward women; a core wariness about their bodies; a belief, which is ancient and durable, that there’s something dangerous, perhaps even poisonous, about the female form. Misogyny—hatred of women, manifest in particular in fear and mistrust of their bodies—is deeply embedded in the culture’s psyche and to one degree or another always has been; it cuts across all ages and almost all societies, Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary. Describing its historic ubiquity, anthropologist David D. Gilmore ticks off dozens of examples: From the ancient Greeks and Romans to contemporary tribal cultures in New Guinea and South America, men have a long history of perceiving women’s bodies as sources of evil, as perilous, disgusting, polluting; the Christian Bible, the Muslim Qur’an, the Hebrew Torah, and Buddhist and Hindu scriptures all condemn women, casting their bodies, particularly their vaginas, as gateways to sin and depravity; virtually all religions associate women’s menstrual discharges with un-cleanliness and ugliness; currents of dark suspicion about the female form run through mythology (think Pandora, or the classical world’s rank-smelling Harpies and Furies), literature and art (traceable from Attic poetry to Western folklore), and Western philosophy (Aristotle and Plato to Descartes); and dualist thought about men and women—the idea that men are defined by the lofty spheres of reason and intellect, while women, with their mysterious biological cycles, represent the base, dark, stormy, unpredictable realms of nature and emotion—has been a cornerstone of anti-woman sentiment for centuries.
It’s easy to write off such sentiments as broad, abstract generalizations about other peoples in less tolerant and liberated times, but I don’t think you have to search too far to see strains of it in contemporary culture, or to feel its presence at work in your own relationship to your body. Gilmore, among others, argues that men are and always have been profoundly ambivalent about women’s bodies, which can evoke powerful and deeply contradictory strains of feeling: A woman’s body sparks awe at her life-giving power and also terrible fear of that power; it calls up primal feelings of love and need (for a mother’s care, comfort, nurturance) and also infantile feelings of helplessness, dependency, and rage; it generates a longing for surrender, a wish to return to the safe harbor of a mother’s omnipotence, and also a deep terror of surrender, which so threatens male autonomy and control. “This multitiered ambivalence,” Gilmore writes, “creates an uncomfortable and endless tension at every psychic level, which leads to efforts to diminish the source of the turmoil by attacking its source: women.”
In its pop culture manifestation, this is where the goddess comes in. She turns male fear into female fear; she makes us wary of our own flesh; she cloaks old suspicions in new clothes, an ancient ambivalence merely veiled in Versace and scented with Chanel. Look closely. The goddess’s shape—not an ounce of fat on it, nothing bulging or protruding or exceeding its limits—presents an ideal based above all on the need for containment, as though something dangerous or repulsive might break through if the female body were not carefully managed and controlled; her beauty—highly stylized, detached, youthful often to the point of prepubescence—is constructed as something that’s attained only by eradicating much of what is natural—powerful, ample, generative—about the female form.
What’s breathtaking is the inescapability of this idea, the battering quality of the message, which is so easy to internalize and so difficult not to. I like to consider myself a fairly laid-back person on the beauty-and-fashion front, self-accepting enough to enjoy its aesthetic, preening pleasures without feeling oppressed by them, but when I think hard about my daily relationship to my own body—the exercises in maintenance I reflexively carry out every day, the way my eye flits across drugstore shelves and displays—I’m sometimes astonished at the sense of wary imperative at work, the quiet but grinding mandates, fix this and watch that. Beauty products, feminine-hygiene products, hair- and skin-care products, heaps of cosmetics—this relentless needling exists in my own bathroom, gallons of lotions, dozens of bottles and tubes and packages, all reflecting the understanding that a great deal of vigilance and work is required just to get the body out the door. Its flows must be managed, its odors fended off, its weird hormonal irregularities minimized. Its pores must be masked, its lines erased, its unsightly hairs tweezed and electrolysized and bleached. If the body has curves, they must be flattened; if it has bulges, they must be obliterated or concealed with special clothing; if anything jiggles or sags, it must be strapped down.
Much of this is intensified, in a similarly quiet but pressing way, by a lurking sense of unacceptability, a belief (which Elle Macpherson so radiantly underscores) that the body will be lacking, defective and unpresentable, unless modified, disguised, improved upon. I stand in front of the mirror and take stock. Deficiencies, flaws, each one so very evident. The eyes, too small, need defining. The lips, too bland, need coloring. The hair, limp and stringy (or pouffy and out of control), needs to be fussed over, bound and sprayed, yanked this way and that. And the skin—blemishes here, blotches there, wrinkles wrinkles everywhere, the skin is hopeless, the skin makes the heart sink, the skin is an area so troublesome in its natural state it requires its own vocabulary; it needs revitalizing, hydrating, smoothing, toning, balancing, contouring, firming, plumping, daily defending, shine-controlling, tiny-line-minimizing, anti-aging, antioxidizing, everything but a college degree.
The great irony, of course, is that no amount of effort, no amount of toning and improving and disguising and flaw-obliterating ever quite does the trick: The self-accepta
nce promised by all that work rarely materializes, never seems to open the door to freedom for more than a minute or two. I passed a news-stand just after Sports Illustrated’s 2001 swimsuit edition came out, the cover picturing model Elsa Benitez, a bikini-clad, dark-haired beauty with no body fat and enormous breasts. She was facing the camera, crouched on her hands and knees on a beach blanket, back arched, breasts pressed forward like two ample melons, and the cover line above her read, aptly enough, “Goddesses of the Mediterranean.” This is an invitation to negative self-perception, and I know this. I understand that such covers are designed to sell magazines and to titillate men, and I know that no one really looks like Elsa Benitez (including, not incidentally, Elsa Benitez herself, who’s a computer-enhanced and possibly breast-implanted, surgically altered version of her original self), and I can carp and kvetch and lob such images right into the great cultural recycling bin marked Unattainable Ideals and Warped Perspectives, where they belong. And yet I react. I looked at the magazine for a millisecond and then turned away, and in the split second before rational thought took hold, I had the fleeting sensation that a door somewhere had suddenly slammed shut, an immediate pang of dissociation—she is sexy in a way that I am not—and what troubled me about that response was its knee-jerk familiarity, the way I’ve become so inured to the phenomenon I barely notice it unless I’m paying the closest attention.
But that slamming-door sensation is key; the door, I think, is the gateway to appetite and to the feeling that appetite may be indulged, freely and without regard to consequences. I look at Elle or Elsa and I think, That is the kind of woman men want. I flip through Shape and think, Bikini abs, perfect thighs, that is the route to desirability, oh shit, I ate too much lunch. At least fleetingly, I think in the black-and-white terms of culture, in wholesale trade-offs, A versus B. If I do not have this—the abs, the breasts, the hair—I cannot have that—the allure, the sexuality, the right to desire itself. I may understand the fallacy of that thinking, but these reactions operate at a very deep level; they touch off feelings I first experienced not as a grown woman with an ability to understand the roots of misogyny or to analyze the links between culture and self but by someone much younger and far less fully formed.
Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life’s little horrors begin. A very pretty and popular girl named Jill, a leader of the in-crowd, organized the event during recess, gathering seven or eight of us around her on the steps by the school’s entrance and beginning the scrutiny. My friend Jen always got best skin, rosy and smooth. My friend Nina got best hair, thick and blond. Jill gave herself best eyes, I think, but I may just be guessing (she did have beautiful eyes, large and dark and framed with the most naturally thick lashes). Me, I got prettiest hands, which felt bitterly disappointing at the time. Hands? Hands didn’t matter. Who cared about hands?
If you could change any one thing about your looks, what would it be? We played this, too, frequently: Oh, I’d have Jen’s skin, we’d say. I’d have Nina’s hair, I’d get rid of these freckles. Once, I mentioned something about wanting curly hair instead of straight hair, and a girl looked at me and said, “If I were you, I’d get rid of those little nostril veins.” I didn’t even know I had little nostril veins, but as soon as I got home from school that day, I looked in the mirror and sure enough, there they were: several tiny distinct red squiggles, horrifyingly visible, creeping down the skin from inside my nose to the base of each nostril.
These were early exercises in gaze-training, a way of coaxing the eye outward instead of inward, of learning to experience the body as a thing outside the self, something a woman has rather than something she is. From seventh grade on, we would hone this skill, breaking the body down into increasingly scrutinized parts, learning to see legs and arms, belly and breasts, hips and hair as separate entities, most of which generated some degree of distress, all of which were cast in hierarchical and comparative terms, viewed in relation to others: my hair versus Nina’s hair, my eyes versus Jill’s eyes; this needs fixing, that needs hiding. Pore by pore, we learned to take ourselves apart.
There’s no question that this way of thinking is reinforced in the world beyond seventh-grade school yards, that the art of self-dissection receives constant visual support, that it’s part of consumer culture’s lifeblood. Thick auburn tresses cascade across a magazine page, shiny and rich with Pantene shampoo. An enormous Maybellined eye stares out from a TV screen, each lash glossy and distinct. A calf stretches across a billboard, lean and taut in an $800 Jimmy Choo pump. American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women’s bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious. Models would become more thoroughly eroticized, presented in more states of obvious arousal, with more full-out nudity and more undertones of violence; the ideals they presented would become more specific and out of reach, with more and more body parts exposed and subject to critique (butt, arms, hips, and abs as well as the traditional breasts and legs) and ever more Byzantine configurations of beauty presented (bodies with no fat but huge breasts; delicate bodies with muscular limbs; fifty-year-old bodies that still look twenty-five).
Even more dramatic would be a shift in the pitch of imagery, the level and nature of the bombardment. Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture’s primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They’re immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious. When televisions first appeared in the 1950s, the image on the screen used to change every twelve to fifteen seconds. By the eighties, the speed of change had increased to about seven seconds. Today, the image on the average TV commercial can change as quickly as once every 1.5 seconds, an assaulting speed, one that’s impossible to thoroughly process or integrate. When images strike you at that rate, there’s no time to register the split-second reactions they generate, no time to analyze them or put them in their proper place; they get wedged inside, insidious little kernels that come to feel like truth.
This is the subliminal ooze of culture and misogyny, the source of its grip. It’s hard to talk about the power of imagery and cultural mandate without falling into clichés and generalizations: Images of beauty and directives about the body make women feel inadequate, they set up unrealistic expectations, they tell us that well-being has less to do with what’s going on inside, in our lives and relationships and work, than with what’s happening outside, how the body looks, what it’s wearing, whether it conforms to rigid cultural standards. All of those ideas are valid, but I think the truly corrosive effects of imagery occur on less conscious levels, on the more private terrain where culture interacts with lived experience. Visuals operate like heat-seeking missiles to the ego, each one homing in on a prior pang of insecurity or judgment, a lesson learned, a school-yard game: Jen’s skin, Nina’s hair. Who has what; what bestows value and status, what takes it away. These memories endure, they’re merely reawakened by the Maybellined eye, poked and prodded by the Pantened hair. Images echo what we already know, what we’ve already come to fear.
By seventh grade, even in that less visual, less eroticized time, we understood the world as a place of physical haves and have-nots: Beauty, and by extension sexuality, were rooms that only a small, perfectly formed portion of the population could enter freely; the rest of us had to buy our way in, tickets available through better hair and clearer skin. And by high school, we’d begin to develop the internal correlary of this, a world of cans and cannots, where hungers are split off from one another and wrapped in threat and consequence, appetite an either-or proposition. Eating versus thighs. Chocolate versus zits. Indulgence
versus beauty.
I spent seventh and eighth grades in a small, all-girl’s school, an environment that probably insulated my classmates and me from some degree of preoccupation with appearance. We played those who’s-got-the-best-what games, we worried about our skin and hair and clothes, but the freedom from boys also permitted us, at least on occasion, a kind of unselfconscious androgyny. We were a tough lot, or at least we thought we were. We wore tight Levi’s corduroy pants and heavy workboots and thick mascara; we snuck off at lunchtime to a nearby pizza shop where we’d sit at linoleum tables like odd clusters of teen-girl-construction workers, wolfing slices and laughing and smoking masculine cigarettes, Marlboros and Winstons and Old Golds. We managed to hold onto a shred of pre-pubescent oblivion about the body during those years, and if our externalizing gazes were in training, they weren’t as intently focused as they’d become. But in ninth grade, our school merged with a nearby boy’s school. We were taken there by bus every day at lunchtime, after morning classes, and if I had to pinpoint what Carol Gilligan calls the female adolescent “moment of revision,” when confidence and voice plummet and concern with appearances and conformity soars, it would be during those early afternoons, when our small pack of fourteen-year-old girls trooped off the school bus and straggled past the cafeteria toward the front door. We were completely on display, stared at, sometimes hooted at, parading past the large plate-glass windows and into the lunch line, and if you’d video-taped us, you’d have seen a distinct shift in demeanor and expression. Eyes downcast now, bodies held stiffly, hands fluttering to hair to smooth it down or fluff it up. At lunch, we’d sit in self-conscious clumps, hunched over our trays. Between classes, we’d stream into the girls’ bathroom and stand there fussing over our hair and our makeup, obsessing about how the pants fit, whether the butt looked too big, how the body parts were, or were not, measuring up.
Appetites Page 11
