Beauty and Misogyny Quotes

“Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But in both cases there is considerable evidence of the pressures arising from male dominance that cause the behaviours. For instance, the historian of commerce Kathy Peiss suggests that the beauty products industry took off in the USA in the 1920s/1930s because this was a time when women were entering the public world of offices and other workplaces (Peiss, 1998). She sees women as having made themselves up as a sign of their new freedom. But there is another explanation. Feminist commentators on the readoption of the veil by women in Muslim countries in the late twentieth century have suggested that women feel safer and freer to engage in occupations and movement in the public world through covering up (Abu-Odeh, 1995). It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil may both reveal women’s lack of entitlement.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.

She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28).

Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“The huge difficulty that so many women and men have in seeing femininity and masculinity as socially constructed rather than natural, attests to the strength and force of culture. Women are, of course, understood to be ``different'' from men in many ways, ``delicate, pretty, intuitive, unreasonable, maternal, non-muscular, lacking an organizing character''. Feminist theorists have shown that what is understood as ``feminine'' behaviour is not simply socially constructed, but politically constructed, as the behaviour of a subordinate social group. Feminist social constructionists understand the task of feminism to be the destruction and elimination of what have been called ``sex roles'' and are now more usually called ``gender''.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39).

The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“...women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology.

For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen as both disgusting in their natural state and inferior to men's'' (2001, p. 141).”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“their bodies seemed to be a battlefield" between the values of the west, the "'capitalist' construction in which female bodies are 'sexualized, objectified, thingified' and the traditional in which women's bodies were 'chattelized,' 'propertized,' and terrorized as trustees of family (sexual) honor." (P. 524) Lama Abu-Odeh”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West