.
Are we changed from listening to Naomi Wolf speak?
Wolf, author of seminal feminist text The Beauty Myth, received a warm welcome in at Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre this month, and she returned the favour by praising Australia’s “gutsy” and “down-to-earth” women. Her talk was in many ways an introduction to, or rehash of, her bestselling book from the ’90s, with some musings on how things have changed in the 19 years since the tome was published.
Her argument — that while women have made legal, educational and professional strides over the decades, they have been bombarded by cultural images to keep them insecure about and fixated on their attractiveness — in many ways changed feminist discourse. That women are key in this — internalising many of the shallow attitudes they oppose at an intellectual level — is worthy of greater thought. It’s no longer about blaming ‘the man’: women’s discussions about other women are frequently more cutting than those by men; critiques about female appearance more commonplace; expenditure on clothing, beauty products, surgery etc. disproportionate.
It’s a tricky situation acknowledged by Wolf; while arguing that the multi-billion-dollar cosmetics, dieting and plastic surgery industries want to “mess with your head”, she has no easy answer on how to affect self-confidence enough to ensure obsessive ruminations on appearance do not plague the lives of girls and women.
According to Wolf, the ubiquitous porn industry leaves women feeling they are second-rate and wanting to reproduce the new ideal: porn everywhere, showing all manner of women — though there is a porn ‘type’ — doing all manner of things (or, to use more masculine language, having things done to them). She argues that while people used to be turned on by people, by flesh and blood lying next to them in a bed for example, a women in her flesh cannot be assured that she will be accepted and desired nowadays because her partner has seen so many commodified and extreme images. This theory holds weight among some men, Wolf says, who are “dialling through a DVD of images” to become sufficiently aroused. As people relate to a bunch of strangers in their beds a kind of loneliness descends and relationships are drained of their vitality.
Still, this train of thought sits alongside an instinctive, though nuanced, anti-censorship stance. Having argued that the negative consequences of porn are preferable to all-ought censorship, Wold advocates that men in particular make a choice to abstain from excessive pornographic consumption in order to respect their sexual response, thereby enabling their “sexual energy” to be turned to their partners rather than into the abyss. Wolf encourages women — in a self-confessed ‘California’ frame of mind –to “see the goddess within”, which I presume is code for fortifying self-esteem.
Wolf notes now that as expectations of beauty and attractiveness have become more widespread — “taking pride” in your appearance, “making an effort” — it’s hard to ‘just be’ at times. And she harks back to a key argument in the The Beauty Myth that being an attractive woman, though it has its perks, is no utopia. Plenty of men objectify you; woman can be hostile. (When an audience member questioned whether the mantra that people should embrace the diversity of women’s looks could inadvertently lead to a hostility towards those who fit the modern-day ideal — the label ‘real woman’ seems to imply the existence of ‘unreal’ women – Wolf dryly noted that such negative stereotypes tend to subside as a woman ages.)
