BEAUTY AND MISOGYNY Should western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations' understanding of harmful traditional/ cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should. In the 1970s feminists criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but in the last two decades the brutality of western beauty practices has become much more severe. Today's practices can require the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Some ``new'' feminists argue that beauty practices are no longer oppressive now that women can ``choose'' them. This book seeks to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as persistent 30 years after the feminist critique developed, but in many ways more extreme. By examining the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high- heeled shoes, and by looking at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing and surgical alteration of the labia, Beauty and Misogyny seeks to explain why harmful beauty practices persist in the west and have become so extreme. It looks at the cosmetic surgery and body piercing/cutting industries as being forms of self-mutilation by proxy, in which the surgeons and piercers serve as proxies to harm women's bodies. It concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. This essential work will appeal to students and teachers of feminist psy- chology, gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist sociology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health. Sheila Jeffreys is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Melbourne where she teaches sexual politics, inter- national feminist politics and lesbian and gay politics. She is the author of ®ve books on the history and politics of sexuality, and has been active in feminist and lesbian feminist politics since 1973. WOMEN AND PSYCHOLOGY Series Editor: Jane Ussher School of Psychology University of Western Sydney This series brings together current theory and research on women and psychology. Drawing on scholarship from a number of different areas of psychology, it bridges the gap between abstract research and the reality of women's lives by integrating theory and practice, research and policy. Each book addresses a ``cutting edge'' issue of research, covering such topics as post-natal depression, eating disorders, theories and methodologies. The series provides accessible and concise accounts of key issues in the study of women and psychology, and clearly demonstrates the centrality of psychology to debates within women's studies or feminism. The Series Editor would be pleased to discuss proposals for new books in the series. Other titles in this series: THIN WOMEN Helen Malson THE MENSTRUAL CYCLE Anne E. Walker POST-NATAL DEPRESSION Paula Nicolson RE-THINKING ABORTION Mary Boyle WOMEN AND AGING Linda R. Gannon BEING MARRIED DOING GENDER Caroline Dryden UNDERSTANDING DEPRESSION Janet M. Stoppard FEMININITY AND THE PHYSICALLY ACTIVE WOMAN Precilla Y. L. Choi GENDER, LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE Ann Weatherall THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF GIRLS AND WOMEN Sheila Greene THE SCIENCE/FICTION OF SEX Annie Potts JUST SEX? Nicola Gavey WOMAN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HERSELF Helen O'Grady BODY WORK Sylvia K. Blood BEAUTY AND MISOGYNY Harmful cultural practices in the west Sheila Jeffreys First published 2005 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN32FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright Ø 2005 Psychology Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. This publication has been produced with paper manufactured to strict environmental standards and with pulp derived from sustainable forests. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jeffreys, Sheila. Beauty and misogyny : harmful cultural practices in the West / Sheila Jeffreys. p. cm. ± (Women and psychology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-35182-0 ± ISBN 0-415-35183-9 1. Feminine beauty (Aesthetics). 2. Body, Human±Social aspects. 3. Women±Social life and customs. 4. Women±Health and hygiene. 5. Women in popular culture. 6. Misogyny. I. Title. II. Series. HQ1219.J44 2005 306.4©613±dc22 2005004366 ISBN 0-203-69856-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-35183-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-35182-0 (pbk) Beauty and Misogyny is dedicated to my partner, Ann Rowett, with my love, and with respect for her lifelong, determined resistance to beauty practices. CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 The ``grip of culture on the body'': beauty practices as women's agency or women's subordination 5 2 Harmful cultural practices and western culture 28 3 Transfemininity: ``dressed'' men reveal the naked reality of male power 46 4 Pornochic: prostitution constructs beauty 67 5 Fashion and misogyny 87 6 Making up is hard to do 107 7 Men's foot and shoe fetishism and the disabling of women 128 8 Cutting up women: beauty practices as self-mutilation by proxy 149 Conclusion: a culture of resistance 171 References 180 Index 195 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for the large grant that enabled me to do the research for this book. I was able to employ two wonderful research assistants, Carole Moschetti and Jennifer Oriel, who not only collected and annotated materials but discussed them with me and made suggestions. I appreciated their enthusiasm for this project and their support in looking at the sometimes dif®cult materials that had to be analysed. I would like to thank those friends who read and commented helpfully on the manuscript, Ann Rowett, Heather Benbow, Iva Deutchman. My students in Sexual Politics over the last few years have contributed very useful insights about the impact of beauty practices such as high-heeled shoes on their lives and I have enjoyed my discussions with them very much. I would like to acknowledge my debt for the ideas in this book to the work of the radical feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin. Her untimely death in April 2005 was a terrible loss to feminist activism and scholarship. I am very sad that she will not be able to read this book and know how her ideas on beauty practices continue to inspire those who survive her. viii INTRODUCTION In the 1970s a feminist critique of makeup and other beauty practices emerged from consciousness-raising groups. The American radical femin- ist theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon called consciousness-raising the ``methodology'' of feminism (MacKinnon, 1989). In these groups women discussed how they felt about themselves and their bodies. They identi®ed the pressures within male dominance that caused them to feel they should diet, depilate and makeup. Feminist writers rejected a masculine aesthetics that caused women to feel their bodies were inadequate and to engage in expensive, time-consuming practices that left them feeling that they were inauthentic and unacceptable when barefaced (Dworkin, 1974). ``Beauty'' was identi®ed as oppressive to women. In the last two decades the brutality of the beauty practices that women carry out on their bodies has become much more severe. Today's practices require the breaking of skin, spilling of blood and rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Foreign bodies, in the form of breast implants, are placed under the ¯esh and next to the heart, women's labia are cut to shape, fat is liposuctioned out of the thighs and buttocks and sometimes injected into other sites such as cheeks and chins. The new cutting and piercing industry will now split women's tongues in two as well as creating holes in nipples, clitoris hood or bellybuttons, for the placement of ``body art'' jewellery (Jeffreys, 2000). These developments are much more dan- gerous prescriptions for women's health than the practices common in the 1960s and 1970s when the feminist critique was formed. It might be expected, then, that there would have been a sharpening of this critique and a renewed awareness of its relevance in response to this more concerted attack on the integrity of women's bodies. But this is not what happened. Instead, the feminist perspective, which caused many thousands of women to eschew beauty culture and products, came under challenge in the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge came from two directions. Liberal feminists, such as Natasha Walter (UK) and Karen Lehrman (USA), argued that there was nothing wrong with lipstick or women making themselves look good, with 1 INTRODUCTION all the products and practices of beauty culture (Walter, 1999; Lehrman, 1997). Feminism itself had created choice for women, they said, and enabled women now to ``choose'' lipstick where once it might have been thrust upon them. Meanwhile the in¯uence of postmodern ideas in the academy led to some rather similar rhetoric about ``choice'', usually in the form of ``agency'', emanating from some feminist theorists and researchers (Davis, 1995).