THE CHURCH OF BEAUTY
Magazines transmit the beauty of women as the gospel of the new religion. Reading them women participate in re-creating a belief system as powerful as that of any of the churches who's hold on them has so rapidly loosened. This "truth" is seen in the way that God used to be-- at the top of a chain of command, its authority linking down to his representatives on earth: beauty pageant officals, photographers, and finally, the man in the street.Even he, the last link, has some of this divine authority over women, as Milton's Adam had over Eve: "He for God, and she for God in him." A man's right to confer judgement on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny becuase it is thought of as God given. That right has become so urgently important for male culture to exercise becuase it is the last unexamined right remaining in tact from the old list of masculine privilege: though that it was universally believed that God or nature or another absolute authority bestowed upon all men to exert over all women.
As such, it is daily exercised more harshly in compensation for the other rights over women, and the other ways to control them, now lost for ever.
The Judeo-Christian Creation story is the heart of the evolving religion.Because of the three verses, (Genesis 2:21-23), beginning "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs...," it is women who are the population of believers the Rites of Beauty manipulate. western women adsorb from those verses the sense that their bodies are second-rate an after thought.
Though God made Adam from clay, in his own image, Eve is an expendable rib. God breathed life directly into Adam's nostrils, inspiring his body with divinity; but Eves Body is twice removed from the maker's hand, imperfect matter born of matter.
Genesis explains why it is women who often need to offer their bodies to any male gaze that will legitimize them. "Beauty" now gives the female body the legitimacy that God with held. Many women don't beleive that they are beautiful until they win the offical seal of approval that men's bodies possess in our culture simply becuase the Bible says they look like their Father.
That seal must be bought or won from a male authority, a God the Father stand-in: surgeon, photographer, or judge. Women tend to worry about physical perfection in a way men seldom do becuase Genesis says that all men are created perfect, whereas woman began as an inanimate piece of meat; maileable, unsculpted, unauthorized, raw--imperfect.
Men, on the other hand, since they made gods in their own image, feel that their bodies are essentially all right. Studies show that while women unrealistically distort their bodies negatively, men unrealisitically distort theirs positively. The Western legacy of a religion based on the concept of men resembling God means that feeling at fault in their bodies is an article of faith for women that need not reflect reality.
While only one man in ten is "strongly dissatisfied" with his body, one third of women are "strongly dissatisfied" with theirs. Though the sexes are over-weight in equal proportions--about a third --95 percent of enrollees in weight-loss programs are women.
Women think they have a serious problem when they are fifteen pounds above the national average; men are not concerned until they are thirty-five pounds above. Those numbers do-not prove that women are an evil-looking gender, compared with the god like race of men; if anything,
More women than men resemble a cultural ideal, becuase they are harder. Look at it this way, Beauty is heaven or a State of grace; the skin or fat cell count is the soul; ugliness is hell "Heaven, I'm in heaven," weight-loss spa Annandale Health Hydro advertises, it is like nowhere else on earth....beauty treatments to make you feel like you have wings... How do you get to heaven? Just be good-- and clip the coupon." Where a dessert is "temptation," seventy-calorie Alba is "salvation," and an article in New Woman detailing the calories in ice cream is titled "Sundae Worship."
Don't be fooled...Original sin left us sexual guilt. When the sexual revolution joined with consumerism to create the new supply of sexually available women, a physical relocation of female guilt was needed at once. The Rites of Beauty supplant virtually every Judeo-Christian prohibition against sexual appetite with a parallel taboo against oral appetite. The whole oral scenario of longing, temptation, capitulation, terror that it "will show," desperate efforts to purge the "evidence" from the body, and ultimate self-loathing can be imagined almost unchanged as the sexual reality of most unmarried young women until abortion and contraception were legal and premarital sex lost its stigma; that is, until a generation ago.
In the Church, though men were tempted by sexual lust, women were cast as its wicked embodiment. Similarly though men have appetites and get fat, woman's oral appetites are the social embodiment of shame. Now at the end comes victory and new life: The death in the dessert of the old, tainted generation is redeemed with the birth of a new one who may enter the Promised Land. The baptized person assumes another name as new status in the community.
The newly made up or coiffed or thin woman, the woman with the surgically "new face," celebrates her fresh identity and returns to take up what she hopes will be improved status. She is told, to prepare for reentry, to buy clothes, get a haircut, take on the accessories of an altered personality. Presented as incentive for weight loss, or camouflage for surgery , that advice is elementary magic. But in other moods, some women may be torn by a longing to submit again to vanished authority, to God the Father Another Sales pitch lets them kiss the rod.
The woman needs "Tame," an exacting guide who will train her to contain the Chaos of her natural impulses; she is offered a masculine hand to subdue her, just but merciful, gentle but firm. She needs " extra control for problem skin," as if she were a problem child: "The last thing older skin needs is to be babied."
Spare the rod, she is told, spoil the complexion: "Exfoliate. Inundate. Do it as aggressively as possible" (Clinique). She can buy "corrective and preventive" action (Estee Lauder), the idiom of juvenile detenion: "Slackening skin? Be firm with your face" (Clarins). Sounds confusing but its really simple. Women know about sacrifice!
Sacrificing ourselves for others, women respond to substances that acquire their aura from sacrifice thereby creating in us the ability and desire for Sex, Sacrifice, and Submission.
Embrace and Enjoy!
Ciao
Rone de Beauvoir
