The Bad Side of Looking Good

By EMILY MITCHELL.

Beauty is a conspiracy of pain forced upon women. Anorexia, induced by the pursuit of attractiveness, turns girls into something resembling skeletons. In the boardroom and in the bedroom, women are entrapped by a cult that is the equivalent of the iron maiden, a medieval torture instrument that impaled its captives on iron spikes.

These are only some of the assertions of The Beauty Myth (Morrow; $21.95), a provocative work by San Francisco-born Naomi Wolf, 28, that is being published in the U.S. this spring. Already, and as might be expected, reaction is divided. Fans of the work call it daring and disturbing, but when it appeared in Britain last fall, many critics dipped their pens in acid, variously describing it as lurid and dishonest, and slamming the author as a "clever child." Others have extolled it as a feminist handbook for the '90s.

Among other things, Wolf, a Yale graduate in literature, contends that today's women have been victimized in unprecedented ways by a "violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement." This victimization produces deep inside women "a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsession, terror of aging and dread of lost control."

The beauty myth of Wolf's title is reinforced, she argues, by a global industry worth billions that could be far better used for social purposes; for example, the money spent on cosmetics each year could finance 2,000 women's health clinics or pay for three times the amount of day care offered by the U.S. government. In addition, cosmetic surgery has boomed by playing on questionable ideas of health and sickness. Wolf chronicles the multiple ways that mass-culture images of women in advertising and pornography undermine female sexual self-worth. As a result of this bombardment, women learn, even as young girls, that sexual attraction is the "desire to be desired."

As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1986, Wolf had planned to write about the theme of beauty in literature. The Beauty Myth began taking shape when she heard someone remark that she had won the scholarship because of her looks. Says Wolf: "I had an image of the documents I had presented to the committee -- my essay, a book of poems I had written, letters of recommendation -- and the whole of it being swept away by that one sentence." Once she learned that other female Rhodes scholars had had similar tales told about them, she developed a new theme: that discussions of feminine beauty are actually about undermining women's achievements.

A number of other personal experiences went into the book. As a junior high school student, Wolf was anorexic, as were many of her peers. She has combined those painful memories with alarming statistics in a chapter about eating disorders titled "Hunger," which argues that those ailments can be traced to a "cult of thinness" inculcated into women at an early age. Girls will continue to starve, she warns, until they are made to feel valuable with or without the excuse of beauty.

Those personal touches have been the focus of much hostility. A reviewer for London's Independent on Sunday accused Wolf of steamrollering her experiences "into a theory which takes no account of what has been happening in the rest of the Western world." A.S. Byatt, author of the best-selling novel Possession and a former University of London lecturer, agrees that images of beauty oppress women, but she is dubious about Wolf's notion of a conscious conspiracy. Instead, she says, the beauty business is pandering to dreams.

Pioneer feminist Betty Friedan dismisses the book as an "obsolete rehash" and criticizes Wolf for dwelling on superficialities rather than coming to grips with the modern-day political challenges that confront females. While Friedan agrees that women often go to extremes in their pursuit of good looks, enduring repeated face-lifts and possibly risking their health by having silicone injected into their breasts, she thinks Wolf's book distorts the relationship between feminism and beauty. Women, she says, do not have to choose between the two, but can delight in a frivolous enjoyment of fashion without becoming a slave to it. In contrast, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, an associate professor of women's studies at Cornell University, who wrote a 1988 history of anorexia titled Fasting Girls, welcomes Wolf's book as another expose of the kind of self-inflicted damage that women undergo as a matter of course. "At this moment," she says, "looking good is the only coherent philosophy of the self that women are offered."

Instead of surrendering to the myth, Wolf is calling, if vaguely, for nothing less than its overthrow. The first step, she says, is to recognize the underlying issues of domination and female competition. Then she exhorts women to refuse to suffer any longer for the sake of an ideal beauty in which adornment and style are a source of pain rather than pleasure. That is both an old challenge and a tall order.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York