Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West Gönderileri
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The powerful take up more space. Not only do employers have larger offices but men will have more space in their homes and the world which is theirs alone. They take up more space with their bodies. Thus men may stretch out on a bus seat or on the sofa. Women are expected to keep their legs and arms tucked into their bodies and fit into the space
The "difference" between men and women is created in and by culture but is regarded as natural and biological. The huge difficulty that so many women and men have in seeing femininity and masculinity as socially constructed rather than natural, attests to the strength and force of culture. The French feminist theorist Colette Guillaumin explains the difficulty with this cultural idea that women are "different" (Guillaumin, 1996). If women are "different" then there must be something they are different from. That something turns out to be "men" who are not themselves "different" from anything, they just are. It is only women who are understood to be different, "Men do not differ from anything . . . We are different - it is a fundamental characteristic . . . We succeed in the grammatical and logical feat of being different all by ourselves. Our nature is difference" (Guillaumin, 1996, p. 95). Women are, of course, understood to be "different" from men in many ways, "delicate, pretty, intuitive, unreasonable, maternal, non-muscular, lacking an organizing character", as Guillaumin puts it (1996, p. 95). But most importantly women are understood to be different from men in being both potentially "beautiful" and in being interested in beauty and enthusiastic to put in huge amounts of time, money, pain and emotional distress to be "beautiful". This is assumed in western culture to be "natural" to women and a most persuasive sign of women's difference from men.
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).
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.
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)
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.