fem-lit

[fem-lit]

Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from category “woman” to category “ugly,” and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory, until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face. The free market will compete to cut up women’s bodies more cheaply, if more sloppily, with no-frills surgery in bargain basement clinics.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#beauty standards #anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

[…] the technology exists for wealthy white couples to rent the uteri of poor women of any race to gestate their white babies. Since childbirth “ruins” the figure, the scenario of rich women hiring poor ones to do their ungainly reproductive labor is imminent. And cosmetic surgery has given us little reason to doubt that when the technology exists for it, poor women will be pressed to sell actual body material—breasts or skin or hair or fat—to service the reconstruction of rich women, as people today sell their organs and blood.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti surrogacy #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe #she was so prescient and now she’s going on anti vaxx maga rants on twitter #proof that nobody is immune to propaganda

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, extremely graphic and explicit text descriptions of the reality and aftermath of undergoing face lifts, stomach stapling and liposuction.

​Seriously, don’t press read more if you don’t feel comfortable reading about violence being inflicted on women. I cannot stress how cruel and heartless these descriptions of surgical violence are.

Excerpts from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

Face Lifts:

Face-lifts cause nerve paralysis, infection, skin ulceration, “skin death,” scar overgrowth and postoperative depression. “What a shock! I looked like a truck had hit me! Swollen, bruised, pathetic … I looked freakish … about this time, I was told, many women begin to cry uncontrollably.” “It’s quite painful afterward, because your jaw feels dislocated. You can’t smile, your face aches … I had terrible yellow bruising and trauma.” “An angry infection … hematoma … a half-circle bruise and three distinct lumps, one the size of a giant jawbreaker…. Now I enjoy putting on makeup!” Those are quotes in women’s magazines from women who have had face-lifts.

Intestinal Bypass / Intestinal Stapling / Stomach Stapling:

In the 1970s, intestinal bypass surgery (in which the intestines are sealed off for weight loss) was invented and it multiplied until, by 1983, there were fifty thousand such operations performed a year. Jaw clamps (in which the jaw is wired together for weight loss) were also introduced in the feminist 1970s, and stomach stapling (in which the stomach is sutured together for weight loss) began in 1976. “As time went on,” reports Radiance, “the criteria for acceptance became looser and looser until now anyone who is even moderately plump can find a cooperative surgeon.” Women of 154 pounds have had their intestines stapled together. Though the doctor who developed it restricted the procedure to patients more than 100 pounds overweight, the FDA approved it for “virtually anyone who wants it.”

Intestinal stapling causes thirty-seven possible complications, including severe malnutrition, liver damage, liver failure, irregular heartbeat, brain and nerve damage, stomach cancer, immune deficiency, pernicious anemia, liver failure, and death. One patient in ten develops ulcers within six months. Her mortality rate is nine times above that of an identical person who forgoes surgery; 2 to 4 percent die within days, and the eventual death toll may be much higher. Surgeons “aggressively seek out” patients, and “have no trouble getting patients to sign informed consent forms acknowledging the possibility of severe complications and even death.”

One is not surprised by now to learn that 80 to 90 percent of stomach and intestinal stapling patients are female.

Liposuction:

Liposuction is the fastest-growing of cosmetic surgeries: 130,000 American women underwent the procedure [in 1989], and surgeons sucked 200,000 pounds of body tissue out of them. According to The New York Times, […], 11 women have died from the procedure. At least 3 more have died since that article was written.

What is liposuction (assuming you live through it)? If you are reading the Poutney Clinic’s brochure, it looks like this:

FIGURE IMPROVEMENT BY IMMEDIATE SPOT FAT REDUCTION…. One of the most successful techniques is that developed to refine and reshape the figure. With Lipolysis/Suction assisted Lipectomy a tiny incision is made in each area of excess fat. A very slender tube is then inserted and by gentle, skillful movements aided by a powerful and even suction this unwanted (and often unsightly) fat is removed—permanently.

If you are reading an eyewitness account by journalist Jill Neimark, it looks like this:

[A] man force[s] a plastic tube down a naked woman’s throat. He connects the tube to a pump that, for the next two hours, will breathe for her. Her eyes are taped shut, her arms are stretched out horizontally and her head lolls a little to the side…. She’s in a chemically induced coma known as general anaesthesia … what comes next is almost unbelievably violent. Her surgeon, Dr. Leigh Lachman, begins to thrust the cannula in and out, as rapid as a piston, breaking through thick nets of fat, nerves and tissue in her leg. The doctor is ready to stitch her up. Nearly 2,000 millilitres of tissue and blood have been sucked out of her, any more would put her at risk for massive infection and fluid loss leading to shock and death…. He peels the tape back from her lids, and she stares at him, unseeing. “A lot of people have trouble coming back. Bringing someone out of anaesthesia is the most dangerous pan of an operation.” … [which] can lead to massive infection, excessive damage to capillaries and fluid depletion resulting in shock and coma.

#tw gore #tw violence #ANTI COSMETIC SURGERY #naomi wolf #the beauty myth

[fem-lit]

Men usually think of coercion as a threatened loss of autonomy. For women, coercion often takes a different form: the threat of losing the chance to form bonds with others, be loved, and stay wanted. Men think coercion happens mainly through physical violence, but women see physical suffering as bearable compared with the pain of losing love. The threat of the loss of love can put someone back in line faster than a raised fist. If we think of women as the ones who will jump through hoops of fire to keep love, it is only because the threat of lovelessness has been used so far against women rather than against men as a form of political crowd control.

Women’s desperation for beauty is derided as narcissism; but women are desperate to hold on to a sexual center that no one threatens to take away from men, who keep sexual identity in spite of physical imperfections and age. Men do not hear in the same way the message that time is running out, and that they will never again be stroked and admired and gratified. Let a man imagine himself living under that threat before he calls women narcissistic. Fighting for “beauty,” many of us understandably believe we are fighting for our lives, for life warmed by sexual love.

With the threat of lost love comes the threat of invisibility. Extreme age shows the essence of the myth’s inequality: The world is run by old men; but old women are erased from the culture. A banned or ostracized person becomes a nonperson. Ostracism and banning are effective, and leave no proof of coercion: no bars, no laws, no guns. Few can bear being treated as if they are invisible. Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#love #double standards #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

When women talk about surgery, they speak of “flaws” they “cannot live with,” and they are not being hysterical. Their magazines ask: “Is there life after 40? Is there life after size 16?” and those questions are no joke. Women choose surgery when we are convinced we cannot be who we really are without it. If all women could choose to live with themselves as themselves, most probably would. Women’s fears of loss of identity are legitimate. We “choose” a little death over what is portrayed as an unlivable life; we “choose” to die a bit in order to be born again.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #anti beauty culture #beauty standards #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

Are women less hungry, less bloody, if we act as our own torturers?

Most people will say yes, since women do it to themselves, and it is something that must be done. But it is illogical to conclude that there is a different quality to blood or hunger or second-degree burning because it was “chosen.” Nerve endings cannot tell who has paid for the slicing; a raw dermis is not comforted by the motive behind its burning. People respond illogically when confronted with beauty’s pain since they believe that masochists deserve the pain they get because they enjoy it.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#self harming #anti cosmetic surgery #tw violence #tw gore #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr

[fem-lit]

Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons’ language when they speak to women: “a nip,” a “tummy tuck.” Rees writes, describing a second-degree acid burn over the face: “Remember when you were in school and you skinned your knee and a scab formed?” This baby talk falsifies reality. Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

Surgery hurts, it hurts. They hold you underwater just long enough to stop you struggling. You breathe with newly cut gills. They haul you out again, logged and twisted, facedown on a bank with no footprints. Your spirit held in suspended animation, they drive a tank carefully over your ignorant body.

Waking up hurts, and coming back to life hurts horribly. A hospital, though it is called “luxurious” or “caring,” degrades: Like a prison or a mental institution, wherever the old identity meant trouble, they take away your clothes and give you a numbered bed.

For the time you were under, you lose your life, and you never regain those hours. Visitors come, but you see them through the waters that have closed over your head, another species: the well. Once you have been cut into, no amount of good living can ever erase what you know about how easy, how accommodating death is.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, very detailed, graphic text descriptions of a chemical face peel.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

A “scalpel slave” in She magazine describes a face peel:

“Essentially, it is no different from a second-degree burn…. [It] makes you go brown and crispy, then a scab forms and drops off … [it] takes several hours because it is so poisonous and you can’t risk getting it into the bloodstream.” Dr. Thomas Rees minces no words: “Abrasion and peeling traumatizes [sic] the skin … with either procedure, the skin can be removed too deeply and result in an open wound …. deaths [from cardiac arrest] have followed a chemical peel … the skin is frozen [for dermabrasion] until it assumes a boardlike quality that facilitates the abrasion from a rotating wire brush impregnated with diamond particles.” (“Skin planing,” he informs the reader, “originated in World War II, done with sandpaper to remove shrapnel embedded in the skin.” Plastic surgery developed after World War I in reaction to wartime mutilations never witnessed before.) A woman who has witnessed skin planing said to an interviewer, “If we found that they were doing that to people in prison, there would be an international outcry and [the country] would be reported to Amnesty International for torture of the most horrific kind.” Chemical peeling, that “torture of the most horrific kind,” is up, according to Rees, 34 percent.

It is not easy to describe physical pain, and the words we agree on to convey it are rarely adequate. Society has to agree that a certain kind of pain exists in order to ease it. What women experience in the operating theater, under the mask of acid, laid out open to the mouth of the suction machine, passed out cold in wait for the bridge of the nose to be broken, is still private and unsayable.

#anti cosmetic surgery #tw violence #tw gore #naomi wolf #the beauty myth

[fem-lit]

Pain is real when you can get other people to believe in it. If no one believes it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures—doctors, priests, psychiatrists—tell us that what we feel is not pain.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#hysteria #pain #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

If anything on a woman’s body can be changed, something revolutionary—or demonic—has come about in the alternate world of the beauty myth. Does it mean the cruel old economy is blasted apart? That science has indeed opened up a horizon of beauty for all women who can afford it? Does it mean the bitterly rankling caste system, in which some are born “better” than others, is dead, and women are free?

That has been the popular interpretation: The Surgical Age is an unqualified good. It is the American dream come true: One can re-create oneself “better” in a brave new world. It has even, understandably, been interpreted as a feminist liberation: Ms. magazine hailed it as “self-transformation”; in Lear’s, a woman surgeon urges, “Voilà! You are led to freedom.” This hopeful female yearning for a magic technology that destroys the beauty myth and its injustice—with a “beauty” that is almost fair because you can earn it with pain and buy it with money—is a poignant, but shortsighted, response.

Whether or not a woman ever undergoes cosmetic surgery, her mind is now being shaped by its existence. The expectation of surgery will continue to rise. Since the beauty myth works in a mappable balance system, as soon as enough women are altered and critical mass is reached so that too many women look like the “ideal,” the “ideal” will always shift. Ever-different cutting and stitching will be required of women if we are to keep our sexuality and our livelihood.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#reading this book was like having 50 new epiphanies after each paragraph #forever upset that naomi wolf has become a conspiracy theorist #anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

WARNING! This post contains potentially upsetting, extremely detailed, graphic text descriptions about the effects of cosmetic surgery.

Excerpt from The Beauty Myth (1990) by Naomi Wolf:

That apathy is the real issue: The global numbing effect is under way. With every article on surgery that details the horrors of it, as many do, women, ironically, lose a bit more of our ability to feel for our own bodies and identify with our own pain—a survival skill, since with each article, social pressure to undergo those very horrors will have mounted. Women know about the atrocities; but we cannot feel them anymore.

As the index rises and surgical technologies become more sophisticated, this numbing process will accelerate. Procedures that still sound barbaric to our ears will soon be absorbed into the encroaching numbness.

The point is that our numbness is catching up to what the beauty index is asking of us. The reader finishes the article and looks at the pictures: The woman’s face looks as if she has been beaten across the zygomatic ridge with an iron pipe. Her eyes are blackened. The skin of the woman’s hips is a blanket of bruises. The woman’s breasts are swollen out and yellow like hyperthyroid jaundiced eyes. The woman’s breasts don’t move. The blood crusts under the sutures. The reader, two or three years ago, thought these images were alarmist. It dawns on her now, they’re promotional. She is no longer expected to react with the revulsion that she felt at first. Women’s magazines set the beauty index. They’ve given enormous coverage to surgery, partly because very little happens in the world of “beauty” that is at all new. These features have readers believe that we should balk now at nothing, since it seems that other readers, the competition, are braving it. The typical article, which details weeks of grisly pain but ends in happy beauty, provokes in women something like panic buying.

#anti cosmetic surgery #burnout #tw violence #tw gore #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

Enough pain makes people numb. Look at a “done-up” woman walking down a wintry street, branches rattling above her. She is wearing a costume, part flamenco dancer, part Carmen, a self-creation that is fragile and arresting. She painted her face for an hour, blending and shading, and now she holds her head as if it were a work of art. Her legs in black silk are numb from the windchill. The deep parting of her dress is open to a blast of wind, which raises tiny hairs on her skin. Her Achilles tendons are ground by the upward pressure of her black-red spike heels, and are relentlessly throbbing. But heads turn, and keep turning: Who’s that? Each glance is like a shot from a hypodermic. As long as the heads keep turning, she truly is not cold.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#self objectification #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

Medical ethics treats interference in male sexuality as an atrocity. Depo-Provera, a drug that lowers the libido of male criminals, is controversial because it is barbaric to intervene in male sexuality. But female sexuality is still treated by institutions as if it were hypothetical. Not only do factory-produced breasts endanger women’s sensual response; many other procedures harm it too. (The Pill, for example, which was supposed to make women “sexier,” actually lowers their libido, a side effect of which they are rarely informed.) A risk of eyelid surgery is blindness; a nose job risks damage to the sense of smell; numbness accompanies face-lifts. If the surgical ideal is sensual, there must be other senses than the usual five.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#double standards #naomi wolf #the beauty myth

[fem-lit]

Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong […]

Women are not cutting their breasts open for individual men, by and large, but so that they can experience their own sexuality. In a diseased environment, they are doing this “for themselves.”

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

What is it about the Official Breast that makes it cancel out all other breasts? Of all shapes and sizes, it best guarantees adolescence. Very young girls, of course, have small breasts, but so do many mature women. Many mature women have large breasts that are not “firm” and “pert.” The breast that is high but also large and firm is most likely to belong to a teenager. In a culture which fears the price of women’s sexual self-confidence, that breast is the reassuring guarantee of extreme youth—sexual ignorance and infertility.

Many women’s sexuality is becoming so externalized by beauty pornography that they may truly be more excited by sexual organs that, though dead or immobile, visually fit into it.

So breast implants, even if they feel bizarre to her lover and cut off sensation in herself, may in fact “free” a woman sexually. They look official. They photograph well. They have become artifact—not-woman—and will never change, the beauty myth’s ultimate goal.

Surgeons are not expected to elicit what will make the woman beautiful in her own eyes, but to guarantee her that they will impose on her body the culture’s official fantasy.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #breast implants #naomi wolf #the beauty myth #representation #radblr #radfem #radical feminism #radfem safe #radical feminist safe

[fem-lit]

The removal of the ovaries was developed in 1872. The next year, it was recommended for “non-ovarian conditions,” especially masturbation, so that by 1906 about 150,000 American women were without ovaries. “Non-ovarian conditions” was a social judgment aimed to prevent the “unfit” from breeding and polluting the body politic. “The ‘unfit’ included … any women who had been corrupted by masturbation, contraception and abortion … from the 1890s until the Second World War, mentally ill women were ‘castrated.’”

The “Orificial Surgery Society” in 1925 offered surgical training in clitoridectomy and infibulation “because of the vast amount of sickness and suffering which could be saved the gentler sex.” Ten years ago, an Ohio gynecologist offered a $1,500 “Mark Z” operation to reconstruct the vagina “to make the clitoris more accessible to direct penile stimulation.” A common boast of modern cosmetic surgeons is that their work saves women from lives of suffering and misery.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth

[fem-lit]

Dr. Symington-Brown began clitoridectomies in 1859. By the 1860s he was removing labia as well. He became more confident, operating on girls as young as ten, on idiots, epileptics, paralytics, and women with eye problems. As a surgery addict says in She magazine, “Once you start, it has a knock-on effect.” He operated five times on women who wanted divorces—each time returning wife to husband. “The surgery … was a ceremony of stigmatization that frightened most of them into submission….The mutilation, sedation and psychological intimidation … seems to have been an efficient, if brutal, form of reprogramming.” “Clitoridectomy,” writes Showalter, “is the surgical enforcement of an ideology that restricts female sexuality to reproduction,” just as breast surgery is of an ideology that restricts female sexuality to “beauty.”

Victorian women complained of being “tricked and coerced” into treatment, as did the American women who in 1989 described to talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey the genital mutilations inflicted on them without their consent by a surgeon convinced he could improve their orgasms by surgical reconstruction.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

#anti cosmetic surgery #naomi wolf #the beauty myth