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Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful
to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress
alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty
myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral.
Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like
Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep
of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps
those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared
into the uniform shades of mud.
At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick
Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale
secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female
Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them
this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went
to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to
check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography
black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no
buyers.
Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may
have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his
buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they
are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they
are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when
they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless:
exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not
make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us.
Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable,
even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and
valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984
that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health,
energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all
had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies.
They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely
overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in
their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they
looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning
the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their
own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect
sense.
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