VIII. Obsession

As I have described before, however, the choice to alter is the choice to conform and the choice to allow one’s body be a text on which the norms and rules of culture are inscribed (Bordo 165). The choice to alter one’s body surgically is not an empowering choice, although it may feel that way. Instead, it perpetuates the entrenchment of the beauty myth, thereby perpetuating social injustice toward women. Women who do not choose elective cosmetic surgery actually love themselves more and are more powerful than women who choose to do so; however, as Morgan illustrates, the stereotype of normalcy is rapidly being inverted. Why, then, do women not see this inversion of normalcy as problematic? Why do women continue to manifestly control themselves and adhere strictly to beauty standards, not recognizing their behavior as pathological? It is not because of a backlash against medicine’s repeated enforcement of the idea that all female self-esteem problems are “in a woman’s head.” Similarly, the obsessive need of women to conform is not solely the fault of male or female gaze.
Wolf’s thesis is deceptively simple: The status quo will not change unless heterosexual love is made possible in Western society (Wolf 142). Before the women’s movement, she argues, heterosexual love could not be equal because of the fact that women depended on men economically (Wolf 142). Feminism brough the idea of sharing, equal love between men and women into sharper focus; however, heterosexual love is “the enemy of some of the most powerful interests of this society” (Wolf 142).
In a hypothetical society where women and men bonded together in equality and nonviolence grounded in loving sexual relationships, “the power structure would face a massive shift of allegiances” (Wolf 143). If heterosexuals, the most socially powerful sexual majority, collectively deviated into relationships based on mutual respect, trust, and tenderness, a new commitment to transforming society “into one based publicly on what have traditionally been women’s values” would emerge (Wolf 143). The effects would be completely radical. “Male dominated institutions—particularly corporate interests—recognize the dangers posed to them” by a shift in the way women and men go about loving each other (Wolf 143).
Women who love themselves threaten current power structures, according to Wolf, but even more threatening are men who love women who love themselves (Wolf 143). If men and women together “moved into passionate, sexual love of real women, serious money and authority could defect to join forces with the opposition” (Wolf 143). So far, women who have subverted gender roles have proven socially manageable, mostly through the cultural adherence to the beauty myth (Wolf 143). If men and women were to commit to tender, sharing relationships of mutuality, “it would be the downfall of civilization as we know it—that is, of male dominance; and for htereosexual love, the beginning of the beginning (Wolf 143).
Current image-dominated mass culture is holding the force of a mass recommitment to heterosexual love in check: “Images that flatten sex into ‘beauty,’ and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism [and] their separate versions of lonlieness” (Wolf 143). Wolf’s thesis of the transformation of heterosexual love is evidence that the beauty myth is so firmly entrenched in Western culture that women will never recognize as pathological their desire to transform their own bodies into the feminine ideal. Women will never be able to love themselves, living in a world of male dominance. If women cannot love themselves, they cannot enter into relationships of mutuality with men, and cannot ever overthrow the dominant social order.