an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible
expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and
values organically rooted in all cultures, then and
now. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, his
sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her,
his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation:
physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is
the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based
on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well
as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her
deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her
as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her
feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge
as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos
is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.
Women should be beautiful. All repositories of
cultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefner
agree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverence
for female beauty which informs the romantic ethos,
gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformed into that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous and abstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman is
Beauty.
Notions o f beauty always incorporate the whole of a
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given societal structure, are crystallizations o f its values.
A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocratic standards o f beauty. In Western “democracy”
notions o f beauty are “democratic” : even if a woman is
not born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.
T h e argument is not simply that some women are
not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to ju d ge women on
the basis o f physical beauty; or that men are not judged
on that basis, therefore women also should not be
judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards o f beauty are too parochial in and o f themselves; or even that judgin g
women according to their conformity to a standard o f
beauty serves to make them into products, chattels,
differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms o f
literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial.
Standards o f beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body.
They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture,
gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define
precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, o f
course, the relationship between physical freedom and
psychological development, intellectual possibility, and
creative potential is an umbilical one.
In our culture, not one part o f a woman’s body is
left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is
spared the art, or pain, o f improvement. Hair is dyed,
lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are
plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed,
shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head to
toe, every feature o f a woman's face, every section o f
her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This al
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Woman Hating
teration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to
the economy, the major substance of male-female role
differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part
of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,
painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and
wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of
makeup and costuming caricature the women they
would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic
ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the
core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.
The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her
arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high-
heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly
her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother
teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which
defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in
order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What
we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly
in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th-
century China.
This cultural transfer o f technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic o f that relationship.
What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward
the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do
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painful things to her own body? T h e mother takes on
the role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all
manner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform to
the demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother-daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. T h e daughter
who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother
is forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognition o f the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society
so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.
T h e daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.
Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,
and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,
shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to
walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,
straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.
The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: no
price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation
too painful for the woman who would be beautiful.
The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives o f childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent
experience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts the
feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces
the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases