Whose power, Whose Pleasure?

Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West.

London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Reviewed by Kath Albury

As a girl growing up in a feminist household in the 1970s, I spent a fair amount of time leafing through my mother’s copies of Spare Rib. Many articles in this era argued against beauty practices and products (such as depilation and makeup), on the basis that they were time-consuming, expensive, and ultimately unnecessary. Similarly they argued against conventional ‘feminine’ fashion of the day, such as high heels and pantyhose, on the grounds that they restricted women’s freedom of movement. Both beauty practices and fashion were critiqued on the basis that they caused women to court what eventually became known as ‘the male gaze’.

Since the 1970s, there have been numerous feminist re-visitings of these arguments, the most recent being Sheila Jeffreys’ Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Jeffreys revisits the history of radical feminist theory, and attempts “to make sense of why beauty practices are not only just as pervasive 30 years after the feminist critique developed, but in many ways are more extreme’ (2). Her central thesis is that Western ‘practices of beauty’ are inherently harmful to women, and that these practices are largely compulsory, rather than chosen. Jeffreys offers extensive case studies of allegedly harmful practices in defense of this thesis, but her argument is paradoxically undermined by many of them.

For example, she argues that the increased popularity of body piercing should be primarily understood as a form of self-mutilation in the name of beauty. Body modification may involve an erotic desire for beautification – it may, in some instances, be also be a form of anti-beautification. While it is productive to explore the different meanings they might have for different sub-cultural groups, this is not Jeffreys intention. As in her other case studies, a variety of effects are ascribed to a single cause: male domination of women.

Where acknowledged masochistic elements exist (as they undoubtedly do in some of her examples) it is not sufficient triumphantly to dismiss a particular practice as ‘masochism’, while ignoring vast body of feminist (and other) literature which unpacks and complicates both the theory and practice of masochism. The intersection of sex and power cannot be denied. That doesn’t always mean though, that all intersections of sex and power are the result of ‘male domination of women’.

The implication underpinning Beauty and Misogyny is that all the trappings of beauty and fashion, from high heels, to lipstick to labiaplasty are not only inherently damaging to women, but that this damage is implicitly caused by a male or masculine desire to see women harmed, if not disabled. All male interactions with feminity, from gay men designing couture to married heterosexual crossdressers seem, in Jeffreys’ account, to have the same motive. This desire to do harm is never explored in and of itself, it is simply taken as given.

It’s clear that Jeffreys is not literally equating lipstick and high heels, with footbinding and genital mutilation. However, to cite the most grotesque and extreme practices of body modification (such as Belgian porn actress Lolo Ferrari’s multiple breast implant surgeries) as if they are in any way representative normative or everyday beauty practice is misleading at best. In Ferrari’s case, for example, the response by the general public to her exaggerated appearance was similar to that of another tabloid favourite, ‘The Bride of Wildenstein’: not so much an appreciation of ‘beauty’, but a cruel fascination with her side-show freakishness.

Jeffreys rests much of her argument on evidence drawn from media discussions of beauty practices. Her research is clearly extensive; her analysis, however, is problematic. Given the history of at least twenty years of feminist media and cultural studies, it is jarring to see articles in women’s magazines such as Vogue represented as simple prescriptions for behaviour. For one thing, these texts very rarely present seamless messages - they are often highly contradictory in their editorial content, especially around issues of diet and beauty. Many are self-reflexive in their discussions of the beauty and fashion industries. In the past ten to fifteen years, feminist approaches to these issues have been explored within fashion magazines themselves, with editors commissioning articles by leading feminist writers and activists (even while they continue to promote their advertisers’ products). Women who read magazines are not absorbing mere scripts for feminine conformity - they are consuming complex sets of messages, in the context of their own diverse environments, allegiances and beliefs.

While her case studies of print media texts are troubling, it is Jeffreys’ use of online media content that is most problematically de-contextualised. The websites she quotes are certainly valid forms of evidence – but only if the specificity of online publishing is clearly explained, and explored. This is not the case here. For example, Jeffreys’ use of online postings of foot fetishists who specifically eroticise the perceived pain and suffering of the wearer of high-heeled shoes seems to imply that men in general eroticise female pain and suffering. Similarly, she represents the erotic fantasies of particular married heterosexual crossdressers, and the advertising copy on a dominatrix’s website, as equivalent to, or representative of all the opinions and desires of all transgendered people.

Given that anyone, with whatever sexual taste or predeliction can launch a personal web page, this is a very long bow to draw. Unlike mainstream or broadcast media, which are required to appeal to a fairly large audience in order to survive, a webpage (and even a webring, or collection of web-pages) need only appeal to a small number of people. Private webpages, no matter how offensive, are forms of self-published niche media; not proof of widespread community attitudes.

While Jeffreys references Naomi Wolf’s popular feminist bestseller The Beauty Myth, she ignores the other feminist interrogations of both the Western ideal of gendered beauty, and the beauty industries themselves. Notable works in this field include Wendy Chapkis’ (1986) Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance, and Joanne Frueh’s (2000) Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Unlike Jeffreys, both Chapkis and Frueh acknowledge a problematised, but productive female (and feminised) erotics of beauty, existing among both lesbian and straight women. Neither author dismisses this erotics as a form of internalised misogyny, as Jeffreys appears to do, nor do they fall back on uncritical discourses of ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’ which Jeffreys rightly challenges. Instead they raise intriguing, and ultimately positive questions around the intersections of beauty, pleasure and power.

Jeffreys argues against the concept of gender as play or performance stating instead, that feminists must resist not just the contemporary notion of feminine beauty, but gender itself. Frustratingly, she doesn’t offer examples of how this is, or might be achieved, other than by abstaining from ‘feminine’ clothing and beauty products. This proposal, however, fails to acknowledge that in a culture that is relentlessly gendered, the alternative to ‘feminine’ appearance and attire is, more often than not, assumed to be ‘masculine’ rather than ‘neutral’. That is to say, it is not possible to do away with gender and sexual difference (eroticised or not), simply by avoiding lipstick and choosing trousers over skirts.

In a book that contains such exhaustive cataloguing and critiquing of the most extreme aspects of beauty industries, and indeed the concept of eroticised femininity in general, few alternatives are offered. It is only in the last page and a half of Beauty and Misogyny that Jeffreys invites her readers to imagine a world free of ‘oppressive’ beauty practices. In this world, makeup and hair removal are unnecessary, fewer women wear skirts or carry handbags, and all women wear comfortable shoes. Women are free to go about their everyday lives, unconcerned by men’s surveillance and sexual approval. Jeffreys concludes that “sexual difference/deference is the very basis of western culture and envisioning a world without it is challenging” (179). Given that men and women are both different and similar, is seems to me unlikely that ‘sexual difference’ is the only basis for inequality in western culture. There are many other differences and samenesses: of taste, class, religion, ethnicity, political conviction etc, that come into play when men and women interact with one another.

It is a shame, then, that Jeffreys herself doesn’t rise to her own challenge of envisioning another world. In Beauty and Misogyny she implicitly rejects the possibility of any non-oppressive erotics and aesthetics of sexual difference. Sadly, she does so without offering a fleshed-out erotics and aesthetics ‘minus gender’ that might serve as a replacement. A radical feminist model of erotic beauty that celebrates female pleasure and sexual power is overdue.

Kath Albury is an Honorary Research Associate in Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her second book, Bed Mates: Sex, Love and Friendship will be published by Melbourne University Press in 2006.