Noami Wolf is a preeminent figure in debunking society’s convenient truths. In The Beauty Myth she explores the relationship between the rise of beauty products and gains of the women’s movement in society. While street harassment has always been an issue, I think the way we perceive beauty has a powerful effect on the mindset behind it. This is a great resource for male allies who wish to understand the burden and pain placed on women by the corporate beauty industry.
Women put up with beauty critiques in the workplace and then walk home to cat calling at the end of the day. In the stores they are greeted with beauty pornography all around them. It transmits the following value: to be beautiful is to be liked.
Naomi Wolf summarizes this as “….’beauty’ is defined as that which never says no, and that which is not really human…’”
This encourages the behavior of men to treat women in public spaces as objects to be critiqued and scored. If women react to this kind of treatment in a negative way they are “bitches” or “difficult.” They failed the inhuman test.
Wolf goes on to say that “he gains something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.” Men will often sit on the sidelines or cheer their friends on when committing street harassment.
Beauty does not always translate into attraction. Wolf describes attraction as a deeper value that involves elements of people’s personality, desires, and interests. Beauty is purely visual. A main theme of the book is how advertisers manipulate women into being insecure consumers of beauty products, creating a visual distance between men and women. Men start to view women as “the other” and treat them as such. A cat call on the street sets up a boundary of the” looker” and the “looked.”
Wolf gives a charge to her readers: to grow up free of these boundaries and unite in sexual understanding. Male allies can work to “grow up free” by rejecting the stereotypes of their own gender and to stand up against dehumanizing acts that the beauty myth perpetuates.
This blog was originally posted on Stop Street Harassment Blog on June 8, 2011.
