Milenn’s Reviews > The Beauty Myth > Status Update

There is a whole literature of ancient revulsion
against the tastes and sights of women’s bodies; men can taste unpleasant and look perfectly alarming.

Skin “nourishment” is scientifically im-
possible, since nothing penetrates the stratum corneum. Women are
feeding their skins as a way to feed themselves the love of which many
are deprived.

The same holds for the antiage industry, which a truly effective product
(or universal female self-esteem) would destroy. Fortunately for the
industry, even surgery patients continue to age at the rate of 100 percent.
The “new me” is washed off with the evening’s bath.

The “supportive” rhetoric of the diet industry masks the obvi-
ous: The last thing it wants is for women to get thin once and for all.
Ninety-eight percent of dieters regain the weight. “The diet industry is
an entrepreneur’s delight,” writes Brumberg, “because the market is
self-generating and intrinsically expansive. Predicated on failure…the
interest in diet strategies, techniques and products seems unlimited.”

Airbrushing age off women’s faces has the same political echo that
would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened.
That would be making the same value judgment about blackness that
this tampering makes about the value of the female life: that less is
more. To airbrush age off a woman’s face is to erase women’s identity,
power, and history.

Жорстоко
ʼ Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured
out that they [women] will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating,
ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring
“beauties.” ʼ