 How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women
1991
Still one of the most astute analyses elucidating the historical, political and financial roots of our conflicted attitudes about our bodies, which have only grown more profound since she wrote this book. She has written many more recent books, but this one remains a gem. To the degree we have not freed ourselves from the programming, our dilemma only worsens as we age. . .
Many of us may have had our ideas about our place in the world wrenched into a radically different shape in the 70's by Germaine Greer's searing insights in The Female Eunuch. But our memories grow dim, things are so much better now. Aren't they? Wolf can think, and she can write. In concise chapters titled Work, Culture, Religion, Sex, Hunger, and Violence, Wolf describes the reality that most of us are living, privately, usually unconsciously. Unconscious, we cannot see what we need to fight against in our own minds, we refuse to engage with in it our lives, we fail to armor our daughters and our sons against it.
If you have (as I have) caught an unexpected glimpse of yourself in a mirror, especially in public, looking much older or fatter than you are used to seeing yourself - and felt your self-confidence drain away - you need to read this book. This reaction of ours is no accident.
On the origin of the current Beauty Myth:
Since the Women's Movement had successfully taken apart most other necessary fictions of femininity, all the work of social control had to be reassigned to the only strand left intact, which action consequently strengthened it a hundredfold. This reimposed onto liberated women's faces and bodies all the limitations, taboos, and punishments of the repressive laws, religious injunctions and reproductive enslavements that no longer carried sufficient force.
Inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework. As the economy, law, religion, sexual mores, education and culture were forcibly opened up to include women more fairly, a private reality colonized female consciousness. By using ideas about "beauty," it reconstructed an alternative female world with its own laws, economy, religion, sexuality, and culture, each element as repressive as any that had gone before.
On Religion:
Original sin left us sexual guilt. When the sexual revolution joined with consumerism to create the new supply of sexually available women, a physical relocation of female guilt was needed at once. The Rites of Beauty supplant virtually every Judeo-Christian prohibition against sexual appetite with a parallel taboo against oral appetite. The whole oral scenario of longing, temptation, capitulation, terror that it "will show," desperate efforts to purge the "evidence" from the body, and ultimate self-loathing can be imagined almost unchanged as the sexual reality of most unmarried young women until abortion and contraception were legal and premarital sex lost its stigma; that is, until a generation ago.
On women and work:
United States law developed to protect the interests of the power structure by setting up a legal maze in which the power of the beauty myth blocks each path so that no woman can "look right" and win. St. Cross lost her job because she was "too old" and too "ugly"; Craft lost hers because she was too "old," too "ugly," "unfeminine," and didn't dress right. This means, a woman might think, that the law will treat her fairly in employment disputes if only she does her part, looks pretty and dresses femininely.
She would be dangerously wrong, though. Let's look at an American working woman standing in front of her wardrobe, and imagine the disembodied voice of legal counsel advising her on each choice as she takes it out on its hanger.
"Feminine, then," she asks, "in reaction to the Craft decision?"
"You"d be asking for it. In 1986, Mechelle Vinson filed a sex discrimination case in the District of Columbia against her employer, the Meritor Savings bank, on the grounds that her boss had sexually harassed her, subjecting her to fondling, exposure, and rape. Vinson was young and "beautiful," and carefully dressed. The district court ruled that her appearance counted against her. Testimony about her "provocative" dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was "welcome."
"Did she dress provocatively?"
"As her counsel put it in exasperation, "Mechelle Vinson wore clothes. Her beauty in her clothes was admitted as evidence to prove that she welcomed rape from her employer."
"Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then."
"Careful: In Hopkins v. Price Waterhouse, Ms Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to "walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely," and "wear makeup."
"Maybe she didn"t deserve a partnership."
"She brought in the most business of any employee."
"Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine."
"Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she "looked too much like a lady."
"All right, less feminine. I"ve wiped off my blusher."
"You can lose your job if you don"t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc."
"How about this, then, sort of"womanly?"
"Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andres V. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled "inappropriate for a supervisor" of women to dress like "a woman.""
"Well, what am I supposed to do? Wear a sack""
"Well, the women in Buren v City of East Chicago had to "dress to cover themselves from neck to toe" because the men at work were "kind of nasty."
"Won"t a dress code get me out of this?"
"Don"t bet on it. In Diaz v Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly harassed his female employees because they complied with it."
It would be funny if it weren"t true. And when we see that British law has evolved a legal no-win situation very close to this one, a pattern begins to emerge.
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Rewriting Cultural Rules 
