Free The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

who estimates that her maintenance expenses will be about $8,000 annually. Urban professional women are devoting up to a third of their income to “beauty maintenance,” and considering it a necessary investment. Their employment contracts are even earmarking a portion of their salary for high-fashion clothing and costly beauty treatments.
New York Woman
describes a typical ambitious career woman, a thirty-two-year-old whospends “nearly a quarter of her $60,000 income . . . on self-preservation.” Another “willingly spends more than $20,000 a year” on workouts with a “cult trainer.” The few women who are finally earning as much as men are forced, through the PBQ, to pay
themselves
significantly less than their male peers take home. It has engineered do-it-yourself income discrimination.
    When used against newly wealthy women, the PBQ helps to enforce and rationalize discrimination at the highest levels. A 1987 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report found that corporate women, vice presidents and above, earn 42 percent less than male peers. Men in the twenty highest-paid professions make significantly more than women peers, says Ruth Sidel. This discrepancy is protected by the way the PBQ leeches money and leisure
and confidence
from this rising class, thus allowing corporations to draw on women’s expertise at the higher-paid levels, while defending the structures of male-dominated organizations from a potential onslaught of women who have stopped thinking poor.
    It tires women out
. As the century draws to an end, working women are exhausted; bone-tired in a way their male colleagues may not be able to imagine. A recent series of surveys summarized in the women’s press “all point to one thing: modern women are worn out.” Seventy percent of senior women executives in the United States cite tiredness as their main problem; almost half of American eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds feel “tired most of the time”; 41 percent of the one thousand Danish women questioned responded that they “felt tired at present.” In Great Britain, 95 percent of working women put “feeling unusually tired” at the head of a list of their problems. It is this exhaustion that may call a halt to women’s future collective advancement, and that is the point of it. A weariness intensified by the rigors of the PBQ, sustained by its perpetual hunger, and renewed on its endless electronic treadmill, the PBQ may ultimately manage what direct discrimination cannot achieve. Professional, high-achieving women have, because of it, just enough energy, concentration, and time to do their work very well, but too little for the kind of social activism or freewheeling thought that would allow them to question and change the structure itself. If the rigors intensify to bring women to the physical breaking point, they may begin to long just to go back home.Already in the United States, there are murmurs among worn-out career women of nostalgia for life before the mechanized stairs that lead nowhere.
    All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.
    It inverts the male career span
. The PBQ teaches women visually that they must yield power at the same pace at which men gain it. Of women over sixty-five, the fastest-growing segment of the United States population, one in five lives in poverty. A third of people living alone in the United States are old women, of whom half have less than $1,000 in savings. If you are a woman, writes one economist, “you have a 60 percent shot at being poor in old age.” The average American old woman’s income was 58 percent of that of old men. In Great Britain, lone old women outnumber lone old men by four to one; and of those, over twice as many as old men need income support. The average West German retiring woman gets only half the full