Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West Sözleri ve Alıntıları
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Graham offers an explanation for why many women believe that their "femininity" is biological and inherent and why, "we believe that we would choose to wear makeup, curl our hair, and wear high heels even if men didn't find women who dressed this way more attractive" (1994, p. 197). Women believe this, she says, because "to believe differently" would require the acknowledgement that our behaviour is controlled by "external variables"; that is, men's use of force and its threat. Recognizing this would mean that women would have to "acknowledge our terror" (p. 197). She says that "It is scary for women to contemplate no longer being feminine" (p. 199) and concludes that examining what it is that is scary about giving up femininity may lead to the decision to give it up altogether.
One of the great powers of feminism is that it goes so far in making the experiences and lives of women intelligible. Trying to make sense of one's own feelings, motivations, desires, ambitions, actions and reactions without taking into account the forces which maintain the subordination of women to men is like trying to explain why a marble stops rolling without taking friction into account. What feminist theory is about, to a great extent, is just identifying those forces . . . and displaying the mechanics of their applications to women as a group (or caste) and to individual women. The measure of the success of the theory is just how much sense it makes of what did not make sense before.
Wolf's analysis does not suggest that there is a problem with the fact that women, and not men, have to do beauty practices at all, only that they are not free to choose to do so. It is this failure to ask the fundamental questions of why beauty practices are connected with women and why any women would want to continue with them after the revolution, that makes The Beauty Myth a liberal feminist book rather than a radical feminist one.
Beauty practices can reasonably be understood to be for the benefit of men. Though women in the west sometimes say that they choose to engage in beauty practices for their own sake, or for other women and not for men, men benefit in several ways. They gain the advantage of having their superior sex class status marked out, and the satisfaction of being reminded of their superior status every time they look at a woman. They also gain the advantage of being sexually stimulated by "beautiful" women. These advantages can be summed up in the understanding that women are expected to both "complement" and "compliment" men. Women complement men by being the "opposite" and subordinate sex. Women compliment men by being prepared to make an effort to adorn themselves for men's sexual excitement. Thus men can feel both defined in manhood and flattered by women's exertions and, if the women are wearing high heels for instance, pain endured for their delight. Those women who refuse beauty practices are offering neither complement nor compliment and their resistance can be deeply resented by members of the dominant sex class.
Radical feminist critics argued that, on the contrary, the "personal"; that is, the behaviours of this "private" world, were indeed "political". Recognizing the "personal as political" allowed women to identify, through consciousness raising groups and the exchange of experiences, that what they took to be their own personal failings, such as hating their plump stomachs or feigning a headache when they wanted to avoid sexual intercourse without their male partner getting angry, were not just individual experiences. They were the common experiences of women, constructed out of the unequal power relations of the so-called "private" world, and very political indeed. The "private" world was recognized as the basis of the power men wielded in the "public" world of work and government. Men's public power and achievement, their citizenship status (Lister, 1997), depended on the servicing they received from women in the home. Not only did women provide this vital backdrop to men's dominance but they lacked a class of persons who would do the same for them, thus they were doubly disadvantaged in the public world in comparison with men. The concept that the personal is political enabled feminists to understand the ways in which the workings of male dominance penetrated into their relationships with men. They could recognize how the power dynamics of male dominance made heterosexuality into a political institution (Rich, 1993), constructed male and female sexuality (Jeffreys, 1990; Holland et al., 1998), and the ways in which women felt about their bodies and themselves (Bordo, 1993).
In our culture, not one part of a woman's body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement. Hair is dyed, lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed, shadowed; lashes are curled, or false - from head to toe, every feature of a woman's face, every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration. (Dworkin, 1974, p. 112)