Free The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Page A

pension. Of retiring American women, only 20 percent have private pensions. Worldwide, just 6 percent of wage-earning women will receive a pension by the year 2000. If it is scary to be an old woman in our culture, it is not just because you lose your complexion. Women cling to the PBQ because what it threatens is true: A young woman may indeed do better economically by investing her sexuality while it is at an optimum exchange rate than she does by working hard for a lifetime.
    “Beauties” reach the peak of the possibilities open to them in early youth; so do women in the economy. The PBQ reproduces within the economy the inverted life-span of the “beauty”: Despite twenty years of the second wave of the women’s movement, women’s careers still are not peaking in middle and later life alongside those of men. Though business began recruiting women in the early 1970s, long enough ago to give them time for significant career advancement, only 1 to 2 percent of American upper management is female. Though half the law school graduates are women, and 30 percent of associates in private firms are female, only 5 percent of partners are women. At the top universities in the United States and Canada, the number of women fullprofessors is also about 5 percent. The glass ceiling works to the advantage of the traditional elite, and its good working order is reinforced by the beauty myth.
    One reaction to this is that older American women who have made advances within every profession are being forced to see the signs of age (the adjunct of male advancement) as a “need” for plastic surgery. They recognize this “need” as a professional, rather than a personal, obligation. While male peers have evidence of a generation above theirs of old, successful men who look their age, contemporary women have few such role models.
    This employment demand for cosmetic surgery brings women into an alternative work reality based on ideas about the uses of human beings as workers, ideas that have not applied to men since the abolition of slavery, before which a slave owner had the right to inflict physical mutilation on his workforce. The surgical economy is no slave economy, of course; but in its increasing demand for permanent, painful, and risky alteration of the body, it constitutes—as have tattooing, branding, and scarification in other times and places—a category that falls somewhere between a slave economy and a free market. The slave owner could cut off the foot of the slave who resisted control; the employer, with this development, can, in effect, cut off parts of a woman’s face. In a free market, the worker’s
labor
is sold to the employer; her
body
is her own.
    Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women’s hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete. We can better understand how insidious this development is if we try to imagine a racial discrimination suit brought in the face of a powerful technology that processes, with much pain, nonwhite people to look more white. A black employee can now charge, sympathetically, that he doesn’t
want
to look more white, and should not have to look more white in order to keep his job. We have not yet begun the push toward civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say that she’d rather look like herself than some “beautiful” young stranger. Though the PBQ ranks women in a similar biological caste system, female identity is not yet recognized to be remotely as legitimate as racial identity (faintly though that is recognized). It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep asany ethnic or racial pride, a woman’s determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.
    It keeps women isolated
. Collective female solidarity in the workplace would force the power structure to tackle the