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The Ideology of Beauty

Chapter · January 1993

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4612-2746-5_29

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THE IDEOLOGY OF BEAUTY

Efrat Tseëlon

H. J. Stam et al. (eds.), Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology III ©

Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1993

SUMMARY: The paper takes the position that the rhetoric of beauty to
which Western woman is constantly subject is not "nature" but "ideology".
It identifies social psychological research as uncritically employing the
assumption that beauty is an asset and ugliness is a stigma. Instead it
argues-- using sociological and psychoanalytic concepts--that beauty is
a manufactured masquerade that hides the stigma of ugliness.

The social construction of gender

Appearance is one of the "technologies of gender".
The patriarchal regime of the woman defines and judges her through
a fantasy model of beauty. As a result, the physical self becomes the
core of her self-conception. While a positive relationship between physical
attractiveness and self-concept throughout the lifespan is reported
consistently (for a review see Adams, 1985; Freedman, 1986; Graham
& Kligman, 1985; Hatfield & Sperber, 1986; Patzer, 1985), beauty is a
gender related category. In a society where sexual difference forms part
of its dominant ideology, men and women are bound to occupy different
positions on the attractiveness dimension. Looks may be important for
the man, but they are consequential for the woman: both in terms of how
others value her, and how she values herself (Bar-Tal & Saxe, 1976a, b;
Unger, 1985).
To the extent that the beauty model defines and values the woman through
her appearance, it essentially regards her natural, bare, and uncontrolled
body as a stigma, as ugliness--something to disguise, to modify, to improve.
Thus, the woman is placed in a no-win situation. She is expected to embody
a "timeless" cultural fantasy that is removed from the diverse and changing
world of the living. But her special beauty is not really innate, and it takes
a lot of effort to maintain. The effort to control the body is evidenced by
the proliferation of a "weight control" culture, and cosmetic surgery.
In LA a plastic surgeon says that about 25% of his clients are teenage
nose-jobs, and adds that the idea of a "nose-job" as a birthday present,
or a Christmas present is not uncommon among Californian teenagers
(The Observer Magazine, Dec. 23, 1990).

The beauty ideology forces the woman into a paradoxical existence,

without making the paradoxes obvious. Thus, whether or not she
succeeds in subscribing to the beauty system, controlling her body, and
following the fantasy models of beauty it provides (be it the feminine fragile
one, or the healthy sporty one) she is in a double-bind. If she fails she is
powerless and condemned as ugliness. If she succeeds she is still powerless.
 2
Because locked into the "regime of the woman" which defines her value
and worth through her appearance, her success only underlies her inessential
nature.

p. 320
Stigma, beauty and social psychology
The social psychological notions of stigma refer to a phenomenon where
a person bears a mark or a sign of deviance (Physical, psychological or
social) by departing noticeably from norms of appearance or behaviour.
A stigmatizing label engenders attributions (both self and others') to
dispositions that discredit the bearer. In case of a minor stigma, the
stigmatizing attribute is not likely to become central in the makeup of the
person's identity. A major stigma, however, such as extremes of physical
appearance, is likely to take on a "master status" (Jones, Farina, Hastorf,
Markus, Miller & Scott, 1984).
Both physical attractiveness and stigma social psychologists are joined
together in the belief that stigma and beauty are essentialist (positive
and negative respectively) qualities, and that only extreme positions
on the scale from normality to deviance (that of the exceptionally
attractive or unattractive) are constitutive of the self-concept.
This approach is based on a structuralist binary paradigm (beauty/ugliness,
and stigmatized/normal). By omitting to examine the roots, conditions
of production, and implications of the categories themselves this approach
naturalizes their "self-evident" status, thus reproducing the power relations
that sustain them. Such an approach also fails to question the uni-
dimensionality of the stigma experience (Katz, 1981), or the uniformity
of the beauty experience (Foltyn, 1989). Finally, such an approach excludes
the possibility that, as I will argue later, women are stigmatized by the
expectation to be beautiful. My argument is that for women physical
attractiveness takes on a "master status" not because it is constantly
negatively reinforced. but because they constantly exist on display (Tseëlon,
1991). And that this predicament is a function of the power structure and
the ideology of gender construction which positions the woman as spectacle,
the man as spectator, and makes the process appear obvious and inevitable.
While some critical doubts challenged the exclusivity of the positive nature
of attractiveness and the negative nature of stigmatization (e.g. Jones, et al.,
1984), they were rather exceptional.
Unlike social psychological theories, my account of physical attractiveness
and beauty (Tseëlon, 1992) draws on Goffman's notion of stigma as a
perspective, and the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as masquerade.

Stigma and the Goffmanesque position

In contrast to the static social psychological models of stigma, Goffman
(1963) provides a dialectical conception. The difference between Goffman's
account of stigma and the social psychological accounts lies in the distinction
between the normal and the stigmatized. While psychological accounts draw
a clear distinction, Goffman observes that
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the normal and the stigmatized are not persons but rather
perspectives... particular stigmatizing attributes do not determine
the nature of the normal/stigmatized roles: only the frequency of
playing a particular one of them (1963, p. 138).

p. 321
Goffman's position enables us to treat physical attractiveness for women
as stigma because it accommodates for the dual role women play: praised
for their natural beauty which is nothing but a mask for a condemnable
inherent ugliness. Thus, what appears to be an asset, hides a stigma.
Women, in turn, display quite a number of characteristics of a "stigma
culture" (experiencing existential insecurity and shame regarding their
bodies, constructing a stigma theory, and producing specialized publications
where the ideology is celebrated).
The natural, unadorned and uncontrolled female body is unacceptable.
Like a stigma it is an attribute to disguise, improve, cover and control;
otherwise, the woman runs the risk of exposing her grotesque body,
described by Bakhtin (1965/1968) as the exaggerated, disproportional,
boundless, and uncontained. The devalued position of the female body is
illustrated by the contrast between the Christmas pantomime dames and
the transvestite. The Christmas pantomime is a peculiarly British theatrical
tradition which involves a comic staging of a children's story in which the
principal boy is played by a woman, and the leading dame by a man. The
dame pretends to be a man pretending to be a woman. The transvestite, on
the other hand, genuinely dresses to pass as a woman. The dame is funny
because his disguise is obvious, but the transvestite is threatening because
by crossing over to the devalued realm of femininity, he is challenging the
privileged position of the male and the whole system of sexual difference as
constituted by appearance (Woodhouse, 1989).
As a result of the devalued status of her body, when Western woman looks in
the mirror and sees the ugliness that her society has placed upon her gender
category, she picks up "pencil and paint...to draw a human face on this
nothingness, a beautiful face" (MacCannell & MacCannell, 1987, p. 214).

Beauty and the psychoanalytic position

Femininity as masquerade is a well noted psychoanalytic category.
Riviere first introduced it in 1929 in her analysis of the behaviour of
some professional women who flaunt their femininity to deflect their
desire of the phallus, of power. The display of femininity is, for Riviere,
a disarming disguise: having castrated her man, the woman then seeks
protection from his expected anger, offering herself now as the castrated
woman through a fetish, a mask of womanliness. Thus, femininity is a
reaction formation which hides an unconscious masculinity.
The masquerading woman becomes the father through her masculine
success, having exhibited herself in possession of the phallus. For Lacan
(1966/1982) femininity does not cover dissimulated masculinity. Rather,
it is masking a lack, a non-identity.
 4
Authentic femininity is thus a myth. And the search for it reveals the
structure of "bad faith" which, according to Sartre (1943/1966) implies
that the attempt to be authentically female indicates that originally one
is something else (masculinity according to Riviere, nothingness according
to Lacan).
From the perspective of the masquerade there is no feminine essence.
The woman, thus, can assume either of two positions: she can either appear
feminine

p. 322
(castrated), or masculine (castrating). The Victorian woman chose the
former, while the career woman chose the latter, but both were locked into
the paradigm: beauty determines worth (Chapkis, 1986). Social change, it
seems, does not reside in either fighting the beauty myth or in subscribing to
it. Rather, it lies in deconstructing it, like Madonna who cynically plays with
feminine and feminist images from a position of power and choice (Kaplan,
1988).

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Bar-Tal, D. & Saxe, L. (1976a). Perceptions of similarly and dissimilarly

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