Free The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Page B

expensive concessions that many economists now believe are necessary if women are to have truly equal opportunity: day care, flextime, job security after childbirth, and parental leave. It might also change the focus of work and the very structure of organization. The unionization of women clerical and sales workers would force Western economies into a serious recognition of what the female work force contributes: 50 percent of working women in the United Kingdom are not unionized, according to the Equal Opportunities Commission. In the United States, 86 percent are not unionized. Many economists believe that the future for unions is female—and that they are the solution to “the feminization of poverty” of the past twenty years. “The fact that unionized women workers earn, on average, 30 percent more than nonunionized women workers speaks for itself,” writes one. “Collectively women workers do better.” Clerical workers, a third of female wage labor, and sales and service workers, over a quarter, have been some of the hardest groups to unionize. Solidarity is hardest to find when women learn to see each other as beauties first. The myth urges women to believe that it’s every woman for herself.
    It uses her body to convey her economic role.
When a woman says, “This will never be fair even if I play by their rules,” she gains insight into the real workings of the myth. No amount of labor will ever be adequately compensated; she will never, hard though she may try, really “make it”; her birth is not the birth of a beauty aristocrat, that mythic species. It
isn’t
fair. That’s why it exists.
    Women’s labor for beauty, and the evaluation of women as beauties rather than as workers, issue women each day with metaphors of the real economic injustices that apply to them in the workplace: selective benefits; favoritism in promotion; no job security; a pension plan that pays out a fraction of the capital the worker has put in; a shaky shares portfolio managed by unscrupulous advisers who stand to profit from the investor’s losses;false promises and worthless contracts from management; a policy of first hired, first fired; no union, rigorous union-busting, and plenty of scab labor ready to be called in.
    In a behavioral experiment Catharine MacKinnon cites, one group of chickens was fed every time they pecked; another, every second time; and the third, at random. When the food was cut off, the first group stopped trying at once, then the second group soon stopped. The third group, she writes, “
never stopped trying
.”
    Women, as beauty and work reward them and punish them, never come to expect consistency—but can be counted upon to keep on trying. Beauty work and the professional beauty qualification in the workplace act together to teach women that, as far as they are concerned, justice does not apply. That unfairness is presented to a woman as changeless, eternal, appropriate, and arising out of herself, as much a part of her as her height, her hair color, her gender, and the shape of her face.

Culture
    SINCE MIDDLE-CLASS women have been sequestered from the world, isolated from one another, and their heritage submerged with each generation, they are more dependent than men are on the cultural models on offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them. Marina Warner’s
Monuments and Maidens
explains how it comes about that individual men’s names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and “beautiful”) stone women. That situation is true of culture in general. Given few role models in the world, women seek them on the screen and the glossy page.
    This pattern, which leaves out women as individuals, extends from high culture to popular mythology: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.” Critic John Berger’s well-known quote has been true