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| Naomi Wolf |
I was doing some wandering in my old files and found these words of wisdom from
Naomi Wolf, from
The Beauty Myth.
***
Can there be a
pro-woman definition of beauty? Absolutely. What has been missing is play. The
beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends
on it. The pleasure of playfulness is that it doesn’t matter. Once you play for
stakes of any amount, the game has become a war game, or compulsive gambling.
In the myth, it has been a game for life, for questionable love, for desperate
and dishonest sexuality, and without the choice not to play by alien rules. No choice, no free will; no levity, no real
game.
But
we can imagine, to save ourselves, a life in the body that is not value-laden;
a masquerade, a voluntary theatricality that emerges from abundant self-love. A
pro-woman redefinition of beauty reflects our redefinitions of what power is.
Who says we need a hierarchy? Where I see beauty may not be where you do. Some
people look more desirable to me than they do to you. So what? My perception
has no authority over yours. Why should beauty be exclusive?
Admiration can
include so much. Why is rareness impressive? The high value of rareness is a
masculine concept, having more to do with capitalism than with lust. What is
the fun in wanting the most what cannot be found? Children, in contrast, are
common as dirt, but they are highly valued and regarded as beautiful.
How
might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax
and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when
something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves
with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less
pain women inflict on their bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to
us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find we
don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipations, and be
unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections, since there is nothing on
us that is not precious. Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore.
How
to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and
touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek
out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose
our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of
our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it
and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.
A
woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism
with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness
with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body,
rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various,
and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and
able at last to see it in ourselves.
