During the ’80s, mannequins set the beauty trends—and real women were expected to follow. The dummies were “coming to life,” while the ladies were breathing anesthesia and going under the knife. The beauty industry promoted a “return to femininity” as if it were a revival of natural womanhood—a flowering of all those innate female qualities supposedly suppressed in the feminist ’70s. Yet the “feminine” traits the industry celebrated most were grossly unnatural—and achieved with increasingly harsh, unhealthy, and punitive measures.—Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 8 — Beauty and the Backlash”
Adelle Waldman (author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.): Rereading Backlash has been a revelation for me. I read the book for the first time between my freshman and sophomore years of college, when I was living in a beach town in Delaware with my best friend from high school. I worked at a bookstore, and while my friend worked nights as a waitress, I didn’t have much to do. Night after night, I sat on the porch of her family’s house and read. For me, that was the summer of feminism — I read Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe.
I was galvanized by Backlash then, but nearly 20 years have passed. In that time, I’d forgotten much of its contents. Of course, I remembered the overall message (also, for some reason, the name of “trend spotter” Faith Popcorn), but I’d forgotten how convincing — and maddening — the book is. Can I just state the obvious and remark on what an incredible feat of reporting the book represents?
Reading it again, I couldn’t believe my own naïveté. I tend to assume that consumer capitalism reflects, for better or worse, the will of the consumer and that that most companies are passively in thrall to whatever will sell and indifferent to any other concern (which has its own problems, of course). What I find so convincing in Backlash is the way Faludi showed how the media, Hollywood, and the fashion and advertising industries seemed not to be mere profit-maximizers who sought to deduce — and capitalize on — what women wanted. Rather they seemed to hold fixed — and pernicious — ideas about women; these ideas then dictated the kinds of products they put out. The media, for example, seemed committed to the notion that there was “a man shortage” and an infertility crisis, never mind how little evidence they were based on or how much more reliable — and contradictory — evidence was ignored, probably because it wasn’t considered provocative (i.e., anxiety-provoking) enough. Another media-created fallacy was a supposed epidemic of burnout among career women, who belatedly decide that home is where they belong.
Faludi also convinced me that the entertainment industry was insanely hostile to positive portrayals of single women and working mothers and deeply committed to the notion that good wives stayed at home with their kids and didn’t work, that it was selfish for women to have professional interests or ambitions. Meanwhile, the fashion industry instituted an (ill-fated) campaign against business suits — which had come to symbolize women’s professional gains.
What I mean to say is that before I even got to the beauty chapter, I was enraged.
In a lot of ways, the beauty chapter read to me as more of the same. The anecdote that struck me the most was about a perfume called Charlie, which Revlon introduced in 1973, a decade in which the media tended to be glibly cheerful about women’s gains. Charlie, Faludi writes, was “represented in ads with a confident single working woman who signs her own checks, pops into nightclubs on her own, and even asks men to dance.” It sold out within weeks of its introduction to the market, and within a year, it had become the nation’s best-selling fragrance. Yet in the 1980s, the mood changed. Revlon replaced the happy single girls with “a woman who was seeking marriage and family.” Faludi quotes a Revlon executive: “We had gone a little too far with the whole women’s liberation thing.” Meanwhile, the new campaign — predicated on the idea that women no longer responded to positive portrayals of single women — was a bust, replaced again a few years later. Once again, a corporation’s wrongheadedness about women’s attitudes led it to shoot itself in the foot.
I think some of this was a function of groupthink. Journalists and trend spotters and advertising execs insisted there was some kind of change in the air, in terms of what women wanted; after a while, this became the dominant view — regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. That’s not to say it was an honest mistake — a screw-up, the equivalent of Coke’s New Coke debacle. This particular brand of groupthink was accepted so readily because certain people wanted very much to believe that women were rejecting feminism. It was not an error so much as wishful thinking.
I also found Faludi convincing on another score, about resistance to feminism on the part of men. These weren’t necessarily the “male chauvinist pigs” of old, the Archie Bunker types of the 1970s. The men in question were often well-educated, progressive-seeming, and supposedly sophisticated guys (Hollywood directors, newspaper editors) who nonetheless nursed a nostalgia for a time in which they wouldn’t have had to compete with — and at times lose to — women, whether in school or on the job. Some progressive-seeming men were perhaps nostalgic for a time when their wives’ ambitions might have been focused solely on supporting them. I think these traditionalist archetypes appealed to many men on a deep and pre-rational aesthetic level — which is why so much of the hostility toward feminism came down as insults about powerful women’s attractiveness or sexual desirability. (For what it’s worth, I do think male attitudes have changed, for the better. Very few men today would, I think, object to a wife who worked, let alone crave a wife who didn’t—for many men the prospect of being sole breadwinner is frightening, in part because of increased economic insecurity.)
But I’m digressing. I guess this has been a long way of saying that my response to the book has been pretty much what it was when I was 19. I’m up in arms all over again. What about you guys? I’m especially interested in your thoughts on the beauty chapter since I was, apparently, so worked up by what came before that I was unable to focus on it, even though I think beauty is one of the most fraught, and thorny, issues in the arena of gender.
Jenna Sauers (writer and Iowa M.F.A. candidate): One area where we are in wholehearted agreement, Adelle, is on the general quality of Faludi’s reporting in Backlash: It’s detailed to the point of obsessive, and the rigor of her analysis very rarely lapses. I noticed this especially in Chapter 2 (which Roxane Gay, Donna Shalala, and Rebecca Traister already discussed for the Book Club here), which focuses on the media-created myths of the “infertility crisis,” the “man shortage,” and the supposedly dire impacts of no-fault divorce law reform on women and “the family.” Through dozens of interviews and what must have been months of research, Faludi reveals how a handful of flawed studies drew incorrect conclusions that were further misinterpreted by the popular press, and how those interpretations were endlessly reiterated until they became accepted as truth, even as further academic research produced more accurate results — results which were ignored by the media in favor of the established narrative of a silent epidemic of sad, dried-up career women whose wombs were as lonely as their hearts.
And it’s not like we’re above that kind of scaremongering now, almost 25 years later. The dynamic that Faludi identifies is sadly still prevalent. Reading that chapter made me think grimly of Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him, the Princeton Mom, the brouhaha about the “opt-out revolution,” and all the other scaremongering around female fertility, marriage, and work that is still propagated. (If you’re not married by 30 you’ll die alone! Don’t cohabitate either! If you’re a black woman you’ll never find a good man! Fertility declines after 27! Better freeze your eggs!) It made me angry. As a culture, we are still deeply unsettled by the idea of women delaying or avoiding marriage and prioritizing other areas of their lives, like education or work, which is really just another way of saying many people still fear women who dare to accrue power and resources of their own.
But I had a very different reaction to Chapter 8, “Beauty and the Backlash.”
Faludi takes on the cosmetics industry (or the “beauty industry” — in fashionspeak, “beauty” means “products”) first by considering its advertising. But the analysis here is a little off. Faludi decries the 1980s as characterized by an epidemic of young, even prepubescent girls in cosmetics ads targeting women, while asserting that the 1970s was a pre-backlash decade that pushed a healthier, grown-up image of womanhood. Sure, I thought, tell that to the creative team behind the Love’s Baby Soft fragrance ad from 1976 (tagline: “Because innocence is sexier than you think,” model: maybe 10 years old, tops). It’s not that I think Faludi is incorrect in diagnosing ours as a society that sexualizes young women in ways that are both harmful and disturbing. It’s that I don’t buy her argument that this is a phenomenon exclusive to the 1980s and other “backlash” periods. I think the dynamics that produce this way of looking at women and constructing femininity are more complicated and influenced by a wider variety of cultural and economic factors than Faludi acknowledges. Ever since modeling emerged as a permanent profession — so since roughly the end of WWII and the attendant rise of mass consumer culture and advertising — models have begun their careers in their very early teens. In 1947, aged just 15, Carmen Dell’Orefice was on the cover of Vogue — during another non-backlash decade in which, Faludi argues, the industry championed a more “invigorated” and empowered beauty ideal. It was only last year that New York State, where the biggest companies in the American beauty industry produce their advertising, finally passed a law that extended the same labor protections to underaged models that other child performers, like actors and musicians, have enjoyed for the better part of a century. Faludi ignores the structural problems created by the modeling, fashion, and beauty industries’ reliance on a vast pool of underaged (and, since the 1990s, often immigrant) female labor. She instead favors an analysis of the end products of that labor—only the images in the ads and the magazine editorials — that is a little superficial.
Some of Faludi’s arguments are simply dated. In the section dealing with the marketing of anti-aging products, she offers up a drive-by bashing of sunscreen — which is probably the single cosmetic ingredient that has most conclusively been proven effective in preventing sun damage and aging, not to mention, you know, several types of cancer. I agree with Faludi when she argues that beauty companies are evil for conniving to sell women products with dodgy ingredients based on misleading pseudoscientific babble, but sunscreen is hardly one of those. Cosmetic companies were not trying to pull the wool over women’s eyes and rob them of their hard-earned money by adding sunscreen to their products in the 1980s.
Another moment where my trust in Faludi’s account wavered was during the discussion of the fragrance industry. She writes that in the 1980s, “the perfume industry had resolved to sell weaker fragrances to weaker women,” characterizing perfume and perfume ads of the era as “demure” (she uses the word twice) and “weak and yielding.” I don’t know about you two, but when I think about 1980s perfumes, I don’t think “weak.” I think of Giorgio (launched in 1981), Obsession (1985), Poison (1985), and Opium (technically 1977 — but Faludi includes it in her analysis of the decade’s scents because it became so wildly popular). I think of big, melodramatic, sexually suggestive, powerful fragrances — not the meek, retiring scents that Faludi claims a backlash culture was foisting on women.
Faludi also concentrates her analysis on middle-class white women and their experiences of beauty culture. Some working-class women are mentioned, though mostly in the context of their not being able to afford certain high-priced cosmetics. And Faludi seems to have a blind spot that falls over the matter of race. Where is the attention to the experiences of women of color and the beauty industry? Faludi gives us a close reading of the beauty pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, but where are Ebony and Essence? How were beauty brands of the era targeting their minority customers? What images of womanhood were they pushing? How were consumers of color reacting? It’s as if race doesn’t figure at all in Faludi’s analysis of how beauty standards established by the dominant culture impacted women’s lives.
When race isn’t elided entirely, it’s discussed in problematic ways. The plastic surgery section of the chapter reflects this. Reporting on a conference presentation by a San Francisco plastic surgeon, Faludi notes disapprovingly that the doctor’s slides are “almost all photos of Asian women whose features he has Occidentalized.”
The line goes by quickly, but its assumptions deserve to be unwound. First, it assumes a monolithic understanding of the nature of race. Second, it assumes that the Asian women who pursue cosmetic surgery such as blepharoplasty are seeking to emulate white standards of beauty. And third, it assumes that the women of color who opt for such surgeries have no agency, that they are the hapless victims of a white-dominated beauty industry and the big, bad plastic surgeons who do that industry’s bidding. This point of view takes the supremacy of white, Western beauty ideals entirely for granted, and ignores the voices of the women of color actually undergoing the surgery that is held up for criticism and ridicule; in Faludi’s formulation, those women are to be pitied, at best. These assumptions about plastic surgery and race are not uncommon or unique to Backlash, but they indicate how, far too often, it’s the white experience that gets normalized in (even our feminist) media, and how the person of color’s experience that gets other-ized. As Maureen O’Connor noted in her recent (and excellent) New York magazine story on ethnic plastic surgery, the situation is far more complicated than Faludi lets on, and the implications of these kinds of assumptions are, to many people of color, deeply condescending. O’Connor writes:
Why do white people fixate on the “Westernizing” elements of ethnic plastic surgery? While working on this article, I found that people of all races had principled reservations about and passionate critiques of these practices. But the group that most consistently believed participants were deluding themselves about not trying to look white were, well, white people. Was that a symptom of in-group narcissism — white people assuming everyone wants to look like them? Or is it an issue of salience — white people only paying attention to aesthetics they already understand? Or is white horror at ethnic plastic surgery a cover for something uglier: a xenophobic fear of nonwhites “passing” as white, dressed up as free-to-be-you-and-me political correctness?
O’Connor also talks to a plastic surgeon who notes that surgery to narrow cheekbones — a procedure that has no Caucasian model — is one of the most-requested procedures among his Asian clients. However, notes O’Connor, “white people never seem as fascinated with this surgery as they are with double eyelids, he added.”
It’s not that I think this chapter is worthless; I just think it shows the techniques that are useful for analyzing developments in political policy and tracing the passage of a piece of misinformation from academia down to the press are not the same techniques that yield interesting observations when analyzing popular culture and consumer culture. For me, this chapter was a rare instance where Faludi didn’t engage very deeply with her source material. She seemed instead content to merely note trends in beauty advertising (at least, beauty advertising targeting a white audience), like a glut of imagery related to weddings or brides, and attribute that to the backlash.
Kate Harding (author of the forthcoming Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do about It): I should begin by confessing that I didn’t read Backlash for the first time until a few years ago. I was 16 in 1991, and the book was definitely on my radar by the time I hit college, but until fairly recently, it remained one of those books that I was always meaning to read and somehow never did.
My overall experience of reading it was similar to yours, Adelle. It fired me up, and I was shocked by how little has changed in some ways—although I agree with Jenna the beauty chapter reads as surprisingly dated now.
I think the chapter deserves a bit more credit than you’re giving it, though, Jenna. As you’ve both noted, Faludi is an outstanding reporter and thinker, and this chapter connects some dots that will remain sadly relevant for the forseeable future: the link between women’s advancement and sexist, retrograde marketing; the class implications of a beauty standard that demands expensive products and excessive time commitments; the pressure on women to suffer, physically and emotionally, for the sake of being regarded as pretty and non-threatening. I love that she spells out how the cosmetics industry represents “women’s problems as purely personal ills, unrelated to social pressures and curable only to the degree that the individual woman succeeded in fitting the universal standard—by physically changing herself.” (Feel bad about your appearance? Try this new cellulite cream, and pay no attention to the patriarchy behind the curtain!)
The specifics, though, seem very much of their era. Her concern about the proliferation of plastic surgery, for one, seems almost quaint in 2014, when numerous celebrities openly discuss having work done, self-identified feminists indulge in Botox and fillers, and weight-loss surgery—not just the liposuction Faludi concerns herself with—is marketed as an alternative to dieting.
That said, I don’t necessarily blame her for failing to predict how much our overall cultural tolerance for body modification would increase in the space of two decades. In the suburbs when I was growing up, ankle tattoos and multiple ear piercings were still considered mildly scandalous. My mother, who turned 50 in the mid-1980s, was always suspicious of women who dyed their hair! Joan Rivers and Dolly Parton are the only celebrities I can recall ever talking about the cosmetic procedures they underwent, whereas today, every female celebrity over 35 is asked about it in interviews. Back then, plastic surgery still had a real shock factor, and Faludi was clearly hoping her bracing statistics would inspire women to say, “Enough is enough!”
She writes that between 1983, when the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons launched a major publicity campaign, and 1988, “the cosmetic surgeons’ caseload had more than doubled, to 750,000 annually. And that was counting only the doctors certified in plastic surgery; the total annual figure was estimated in excess of 1.5 million.” In 2012, the same organization reported performing 14.6 million cosmetic procedures. As bad as Faludi said it was then, I don’t think anyone imagined the industry would continue to grow at that pace.
Having said that, she correctly identifies a major factor that allowed that to happen: “Beauty became medicalized.” I take your point about sunscreen, Jenna, but again, she was writing this in the U.S. in the late ’80s. Sunscreen had only recently come on the scene in a big way—I was born in 1975 and didn’t even consider using anything but suntan lotion until I was a teenager—and a lot of people were still skeptical. In retrospect, we can see she chose the wrong product to focus a large part of her argument on, but everything she says about the medicalization of the cosmetics industry and the cynical marketing of beauty as “health and wellness” is right on.
I was thinking about that recently, when I stayed in a hotel where the complimentary shampoo, conditioner, and lotion were all branded “Dr. Somebody’s” whatever whatever. Like, first, my shampoo needs to be “physician-approved” now? Come on. And second, remember when high-end bath and beauty items signified indulgence, rather than medicine? Now, the more pseudo-pharmaceutical the product, the more luxurious—and meanwhile, nonsurgical cosmetic procedures are performed at “med-spas,” where you can see an M.D. and a make-up artist in the same building.
As far as the fragrance coverage you both mention, my first thought is that I was surprised she focused so long on that branch of the industry, to the exclusion of, for example, commercial diet programs. (Since I’m currently in the home stretch of writing a book of cultural criticism, I’ll chalk that up to “You can’t cover every single thing,” which has been my mantra of late.) My guess is, she was working with the contacts and existing research she had, so fragrances take on outsize importance in the chapter. Still, “We had gone a little too far with the whole women’s liberation thing” is gold, no?
At the risk of sounding like someone from a generation that knows what a broken record sounds like, I also want to contextualize—but by no means excuse—Faludi’s near-exclusive focus on white women. (I was also going to bring up Maureen O’Connor’s article, so thanks for covering that, Jenna.) While I absolutely agree that she could have, and should have, considered beauty publications and products aimed at women of color, the vast majority of mainstream advertising and media neglected women of color just as blatantly. (I mean, they still do! But it was even worse in the ’80s.) Those were the days when mass-market foundation came in a handful of shades, only one of which, at best, was darker than a medium beige. If there was a model of color in a women’s magazine not specializing in a particular ethnic market, she was almost certainly the only one. The cosmetics manufacturers, the magazine publishers, and the advertisers openly did not give a shit about anything other than the white women’s market.
Since those racist institutions were the primary subjects of her criticism, that’s one explanation for the absence of any discussion of race—albeit still no excuse. I wish Faludi had at least acknowledged that women of color don’t even rate the kind of ultimately destructive attention the beauty industry pays to white women, instead of committing the very same erasure. The chapter would be a lot more interesting, let alone more representative of American women’s challenges, if she’d also considered the backlash(es) that inevitably come with people of color’s advancement in society, and how that manifests as a double whammy for women who aren’t white.
So I agree that this isn’t her strongest chapter, but I still think she beautifully articulates a lot of points that are still relevant today: the danger of conflating beauty and health, the way marketing departments dictate trends, the co-optation of feminist rhetoric to undermine women’s self-confidence and loosen their wallets. It might be a little premature to consider this a historical work (or perhaps I just think so because I don’t want to deal with how old that makes me), but I think it’s worth considering it as if it were one. Faludi got some things wrong, neglected the reality of millions of people, and failed to anticipate certain developments, but she still said a lot of things before and better than anybody else.
Adelle: I am enjoying this discussion so much! In spite of my enthusiasm for the book, I am sympathetic to many of your criticisms of the beauty chapter, Jenna. At the risk of seeming mealy-mouthed, I think you’re absolutely right to point out that many of the trends Faludi points to, such as the sexualization of young women, are not unique to “backlash” periods or the 1980s. And I am glad you pointed out counter-examples that call into question her narrative of the 1970s as a time that was generally more positive for women.
Oddly enough, as much as I admire and appreciate the book, for me, one of the weakest parts of Backlash is the idea of backlash. I am interested more in her larger argument about the way forces in the culture are apt to latch onto certain narratives about women than I am in setting the 1980s against the 1970s. This is not because I necessarily think Faludi is wrong in her diagnosis of either decade but because I don’t know enough about the cultural products of the 1970s to have an informed opinion and because I am less interested in labeling or characterizing this or that decade than I am in her scrutiny of the way certain narratives about women are propagated, which I think is, unfortunately, timeless.
I agree with you both that this isn’t Faludi’s strongest chapter. Beauty is a complicated subject that doesn’t receive an especially deep treatment here — it is touched upon merely to serve to Faludi’s larger argument about the culture. For the purposes of this book, I think that’s mostly okay, but it’s also certainly true that, as you say, Jenna, “the dynamics that produce this way of looking at women and constructing femininity are more complicated.”
For me, nothing better encapsulates what a problematic issue beauty is than this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her.” This is spoken by Amory Blaine, the hero of This Side of Paradise (1920). To my mind, this offhand remark, a bit of casual repartee in an argument about capitalism versus socialism, highlights something so very entrenched, even among sensitive, liberal men, like Blaine/Fitzgerald. Even for such men, a beautiful “girl” is not a person, but a prize, like a reward or a trophy, a sort of currency; meanwhile a girl who isn’t beautiful has no value whatsoever. To my mind, the tendency to view women this way, i.e., to value them in accordance with their beauty, transcends not only the 1980s but the beauty industry — which merely exploits it.
This is to say that I agree there is a glibness in Faludi’s treatment of the subject. Nonetheless, I also agree with you, Kate, that in spite of its limitations, many aspects of the chapter are still relevant. I was especially interested in what you pointed out about the medicalization of beauty.
I hope I don’t sound too contradictory here, since I do both appreciate the book very much and also see the validity of the criticisms you both raised.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Lena Dunham, Anna Holmes, Aminatou Sow, Roxane Gay, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
