Be a Doll Babe...
Author: Dr. Nili Raam

The Tyrannical Ideal of Feminine Pulchritude



Let her who is satisfied with her physical attributes raise her hand…



Most people, and especially most women, are dissatisfied with their appearance, their weight and/or the shape of certain parts of their body.
Women engage intensively in grooming and “shaping up”, and spend no small amount of time inspecting, examining and actually even falling into a depression on account of their breasts being too small, too large or too pendulous.
Fat legs, broad hips and other “defects” are a source of endless suffering. The unrelenting and, from her point of view, disadvantageous comparison with the ideal model can be highly frustrating to a woman unable to free herself from this dictate and make friends with her body.
Too many women feel – not without cause - as if they were under constant judgmental scrutiny. While men win the role of observers and evaluators, so to speak, women are the objects of such observations and evaluations. The balance of forces between them is such that men select and women are being selected. The woman being depicted as a sexual object, and the use that is made of her and her body, particularly in advertising, generate a process of woman’s dehumanization; woman is not a person, but rather something else – a symbol, an object, an exhibit, an ideal and so forth.




Women unconsciously internalize this message and invest a great deal of effort in meeting expectations and finding favor. Needless to say how this must negatively effect their degree of self esteem. The American women’s magazine Marie Claire recently published the findings of a survey. Of hundreds of men who were asked whether they felt embarrassed or bothered by what their spouses thought of their appearance, sixty-seven percent replied in the negative. But eighty percent of women answering the same question replied that they were embarrassed or ashamed of their bodies, or certain body parts, and that they were afraid their bodies were “not beautiful enough”.




Beauty, that was supposed to be an abstract notion like freedom, love or the soul, has long since become a product to the marketed, and a means of control and subjugation, directed mainly at women. Under the influence of social forces possessing vested interests, the ones that control magazines, the advertising trade, television and cinema, the components of womanly beauty are assigned their “standard” specifications, a “recipe”, as it were, based on clearly defined and absolute components.




The “beautiful” woman, so the contemporary social message informs us, is very slender, very young, rather tall, and fair complexioned. Such ideals of feminine pulchritude, held up to view for emulation and as standards for comparison, gaze upon us from every advertisement, practically shrieking, with every inch of their emaciated flesh “I am attractive”. We are all influenced by these messages. Women use them as a yardstick for measuring their own attractiveness, thus arriving at a warped perception of their own physical attributes as being hopelessly deficient or defective.




The female child imbibes, with her mother’s milk, the great significance that society – with its predominantly male-oriented perceptions - ascribes to her outward appearance. Little girls soon learn that they must try to find favor in the eye of their beholders, that their appearance is a matter of social value, and that beauty is a basic dimension in woman’s sexual roles. The child reaches puberty in full awareness of the significance of her looks, and usually suffers emotional problems related to that aspect of herself. Looks being linked to self-esteem, a body that fails to conform to the reigning ideal may well bring its owner to low self-esteem and a sense of shame and insecurity. Here, society makes no allowances. Constant anxious attention to her appearance becomes a major part of woman’s life, a source of frustration, unflagging investment and invidious comparison. She internalizes the message that her appearance will be her passport to success in life, and that her efforts to achieve physical perfection will be rewarded, in both her personal and her professional life. A body conforming to socially dictated criteria becomes women’s status symbol. None of which, of course, makes women any happier or healthier. On the contrary, such constraints foster self-hatred and a stinging sense of failure.







The Barbie doll: plaything or phenomenon?





One of the most outstanding examples of the tyranny of a periodic ideal of beauty is the far-famed Barbie doll, a phenomenon that packs an impact way beyond its original purpose of a girls’ plaything. Barbie has acceded to quasi-iconic status, as a symbol of the contemporary ideal of feminine beauty, something like the female statuettes found in excavations in Assyria, Asia Minor and ancient Canaan. As distinct from those images, however, Barbie’s proportions are evidently a figment of the fevered masculine imagination. Barbie is an unattainable dream figure: she is improbably tall and slender, sporting tiny hips and a full, erect bosom, pointy feet ever ready for high-heeled shoes, a small bottom and a flowing mane of hair. More than a hundred and forty countries idealize her image.





According to author M. G. Jones, who has commented extensively on the Barbie doll, her image is not one to which one can remain indifferent. She arouses envy, admiration and wonder. The average American girl in the 3 – 10 age group possesses more than eight Barbie dolls. Barbie fan clubs for the young and old have sprung up all over the world. Her style of dressing is imitated, her various editions are collected, clothes are sewn for her and girls and women undergo plastic surgery to resemble her.





Barbie’s vital statistics are becoming the average woman’s nightmare. Twenty-five years ago, the average model weighed eight percent less than the average American woman. Today, she weighs twenty-three percent less. What this means is that rising numbers of good-looking, healthy women, with perfectly normal bodily measurements, find themselves forced into a category of failing to measure up to idealized standards of beauty.






In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, beauty, that always excited admiration, has become a narrow, rigid and unrealistic notion, dictating an appearance with which few women are naturally endowed. This has given rise to that modern regime of oppression, namely the diet, itself no more than a latter-day reincarnation of the corset into which women once forced their protesting amplitude. The diet industry, of course, targets mainly women, who are sure to perceive themselves as relatively too well fleshed. In a society that sets up the Barbie doll as its ideal for universal emulation, no wonder women give themselves over to an obsessive “battle of the bulge”.





Perfectly fine-looking women find themselves aspiring by all possible means to achieve the ideal of feminine pulchritude touted by the media, admen, and the fashion industry. But, given the prevailing unattainable ideal of slenderness and perfect vital statistics, women are condemned to experience themselves as forever inadequate in terms of physical perfection. Almost everyone has some physical attribute that causes him or her dissatisfaction, even when viewed by others as the acme of perfection. Among women, however, such dissatisfaction is almost universal. Most women in western society are displeased with their appearance, or have a faulty body image – due to comparing themselves with some unrealistic ideal.





Slews of businesses do very well for themselves by exploiting this discrepancy between the common norm and the unattainable ideal. An entire industry is predicated on this sweeping feminine passion for slenderness. Profits are there for the harvesting for whoever niftily takes advantage of the fact that the average woman will continue to entertain a sense of physical inferiority, and will therefore channel funds to cosmetics companies, beauty parlors, slimming product manufacturers and so forth. There hardly exists a lower limit to the anorectic condition that women lust after. The mere fact that it could prove fatal does nothing to stop the trend whereby success is linked to thinness from flourishing so vigorously that persons of average weight are deemed to all intents and purposes abnormal.





The British media, for example, and especially fashion editors, are currently weathering a storm of protest in which they are blamed for the rising numbers of young women succumbing to various eating disorders. The British government, too, has joined the chorus of voices accusing the media of fostering the illusion that a slim figure is ideal, and that whoever fails to conform to that ideal doesn’t look good. In June 2000, in fact, the British government announced that a special follow-up team would determine whether the media had mended its ways and started using average or even full-figured females.







The feminine beauty ideal in a male-dominated culture


The female body and hence the feminine essence, have traditionally existed as putty in the hands of society’s male-dominated outlook. Throughout human history, that putty has been prodded, kneaded, refashioned, repressed and adapted to fit the shifting perceptions and requirements of masculine culture. Such cultural manipulation by the arbiters of public opinion has spared the male body, while extending long, prying fingers to reorganize and, mainly, to repress, the female body. Culture has always striven to prove that women’s brainpower is inferior to men’s, but that their bodies merit proactive attention.




And attention has, in fact, been lavished upon woman’s body, from every possible angle. Public opinion-shapers (principally the media) have expropriated the female body from its natural owners, transforming it into a symbol that society has shaped as it pleased.





The American writer Bram Dicastra, author of The Idols of Distortion, says we are mistaken if we think that toward the end of the second millennium we have liberated the female body from its shackles. The female body, says Dicastra, is just as oppressed and shackled as it was in the nineteenth century, with just one difference: the shackles, no longer external to the woman, are now within her. In the nineteenth century, the female body was suffocatingly trapped inside a tight (man-designed) corset. Constricted and hobbled by their corset strings, and thus unable to move freely, women became disabled and passive. And the more passive they became, the greater the purity ascribed to them by men’s warped perception. To be active means to become a part of what is basically a man’s world. The corset, therefore, was a means of sending women a stop signal – “so far and no further!” – you are incapacitated and passive, and therefore not free to play any role in the world of action “like us men”.





The Victorian era even went so far as to instruct young girls in the fine art of fainting. The weaker and the more passive they became and the more skillfully they cultivated the appearance of indisposition, the more exalted and pure women were considered. The cult of female infirmity conferred on upper-class women the license to “fall off their feet” (as the saying went), spending the remainder of their days in the half-life of the mistress of a Victorian drawing room, truly a miserable fate. No wonder so many of them fell insane; female lunacy as an operatic theme was quite á-la-mode at that time; and whether the woman jumped to her death off a building, or simply poisoned herself – the cause (madness) and the result (death) were invariably identical. Contemporary notions of beauty also lauded the sick look in a woman: the desired white complexion and red lips were actually signs of tuberculosis – a disease to which operatic heroines frequently succumbed.





The medical literature of the Victorian era determined that such female characteristics as menses, birth and even menopause at a later age, were also critical phases that could and would undermine women’s health. Women engaging in sport were warned that they were endangering the future of mankind, no less, since their uterus was liable to be ejected…





The medical profession prospered by aspiring to control female reproductive capacity. Physicians (of the masculine sex, naturally) replaced the traditional midwives, ensuring that birth would take place under medical supervision. The masculine establishment ousted women from the midwifery role, claiming that their knowledge was inadequate, and that they had no understanding of the birthing process or of their own bodies that would qualify them to make important decisions. In masculine eyes, the female body appeared to harbor innumerable hazards.





Having adopted that stance, it was a short step to deeming all aspects of female sexuality to be menacing or negative, to the point where any woman capable of arousing masculine concupiscence was held to be a temptress, in league with Satan. Women’s sexuality was a force that somehow threatened the male, undermining his confidence, and hence the masculine need to gain control of femininity, and suppress female sexuality by means of social norms. A man of strong passions was seen as healthy and positive, while a female with a healthy sexual appetite was a scarlet woman, an abandoned slut, from whom delicately nurtured youths must be protected. In order to bolster these warped perceptions and beliefs, the masculine establishment surrounded woman’s image with darks myths, whose hold still persists even as the third millennium begins. There was, for example, the myth of femininity as an avid engulfing force, a consuming voraciousness. This myth owed its genesis to the fact that masculinity felt itself threatened by female power, by femininity as represented by the ancient fertility goddess, the goddess of life and renewal, she who is found in almost all archeological excavations in most ancient civilizations.





Just slightly farther along the same road lay fertile ground for giving growth to repressive standards of womanly beauty: a thin, half-starved body, a flat abdomen, narrow hips. Appetite for food, symbolizing the appetite for sex, became a negative concept, and the full, rounded female form was deemed unattractive, since it attested to woman’s inability to control her passions. The “good” woman (she who could be relied on to do the right thing) controlled her appetite, her lean body proving that she was also capable of controlling her sex drive.





Underlying this “thin is beautiful” motif there evidently lurks a masculine fear of sensuous, passionate, exuberant femininity, the kind that Runs With Wolves (book by Clarissa Pincola Estes). This femininity, with its natural vitality and healthy (sexual) appetite, causes masculinity to feel threatened. If this appetite of woman’s can be suppressed, man need no longer fear his inability to satisfy her, and will feel less threatened by her possible infidelity. Hence the message to women: control your passions and your appetite (and remain thin, as a result) and society will reward you appropriately. So powerful is this message that it does, indeed, manage to curb not only women’s appetite for food, but also, to a certain extent, their sexual appetite. The fear of growing fat, and the sense of inferiority regarding their physical proportions that most women entertain, inhibit many of them in bed, since they are uncomfortable with their bodies. They shift position in bed to prevent their partner from touching their thighs, which they consider too heavy; or they refuse to lie on top of him, for fear their breasts won’t look good hanging down. They are more preoccupied with their appearance than with their sensations (during the sex act) or their enjoyment. Some women may therefore be sexually non-responsive, since they are paying much more attention to what their partner supposedly thinks of them than to their own physical pleasure.





Any attempt to discover how all this came about, and what place women occupied throughout the history of human civilization, will soon run into difficulties. Inasmuch as men were the authors of all history books, practically nothing can be learned about women other than through the masculine prism. Most nineteenth-century male historians presented women’s history as though women had only just begun to evolve and make themselves felt, as they though they had no previous history. This is an ancient theme, rife with distortions, battles and the silencing of protesting voices.





Western woman today enjoys an astounding improvement in both health and life expectancy. Women occupy positions in the entire educational system, in athletics and in the military. While impressive progress seems indicated, these improvements are still not so much essential as cosmetic. Society is still masculine by definition, is still controlled by men and still serves masculine needs and perceptions.







The masculine perception of woman


Pertinent studies expose conflicting emotions, am ambivalent attitude and a great deal of confusion. Most men, holding a dichotomous perception of women, are at a loss to merge the two contrasting images into a single feminine essence. Asked which feminine type they find preferable, men tend to perceive two diametrically opposed female entities: the one is to be preferred for sex or for non-committal relations, while the other is preferred as a spouse. One is described as immoral, passionate and lustful, and the other as pure, motherly and moral. For casual encounters, the man prefers one or another version of the sex kitten or porno star; as his wife, he prefers the girl next door. The one – the type he wants under or over him – is the figment of his wildest imaginings, she who stars in his sexual fantasies. The other – whom he would like to have at his side – fulfils his representational and social vision, she is the woman who will raise his children, will represent him and form part of his life. The one is for satisfying his secret sexual appetites, while the other is meant to fulfill his representational, social and emotional needs.




What we have outlined is the eternal dichotomy between the whore and the saintly woman, the witch and the innocent virgin, the “bad” and the “good” woman. This duality in the masculine perception of women bears powerful witness to the confusion and the sense of menace that men feel when confronted with genuine whole womanhood, which is both sensuous and lusty, and at the same time motherly and possessed of a strong backbone.





Both of these images, obviously tainted as they are by radically stereotypical over-simplification, expose the complexity of man’s attitude to the feminine figures in his life, and possibly also the source of that complexity: the fact that men perceive femininity as threatening to them. The greater the hypocrisy with which a man’s lifestyle is suffused, the more profound and the sharper will be the distinction he draws between the two types of women. The wider the gulf between the social image he projects (the successful man, with a “proper” wife clinging to his arm) and the passions that pulsate beneath this mask (depraved notions, in which he fantasizes about the next female he can bed), the more polarized will be his two images of the cheap, bold, provocative, sexual woman and the exalted, elegant, educated and sophisticated wife.





Somewhere in the midst of the vast abyss that divides, in men’s eyes, between the dual images of red-hot prostitute and cold-hearted Madonna, there plunges into oblivion the true, humanly possible female essence, doomed to a kind of unreality – she is there, she exists, but nobody acknowledges her existence.










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Dr. Nili Raam is a renown expert in her field in comunication and body language in Israel. She heads the Body Language Center and is authour of a few steady-sellers. The above article is quoted from her new book: Men And Women Beyond Words, 2000, Israel Head of Body Language Center, raamg@barak-online.net www.angelfire.com/co/bodylanguage

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