Women and Femininity in U.S. Popular Culture

The body, writes the American feminist Susan Bordo, is a "culturally mediated form" (in Conboy, Medina, and Stanbury, p. 103), in that its appearance reflects the discourse of its society and the state of women's power or lack thereof in that society. Beyond aesthetics, the ideal appearance and female body exist in relation to the bondage of dependency, racism, and social roles. The body, in other words, is territory conquered by masculine spectatorship, the site of a struggle over ownership of resources.

Women's beauty rituals comprise part of this cultural mediation. Rituals are the repeated acts of grooming beyond basic hygiene that serve to embellish according to the tastes and standards she has internalized from her peer group, magazines, and other media. Rituals can be as innocent as preteen makeup parties, as painful as piercing or tattoos, and as life-threatening as eating disorders for weight control. Some girls choose rituals to feel good about what is asked of them; some to bind the anxiety they feel as they dodge threats to their still-formulating sense of self; and some to overcome perceived shortcomings of which they are constantly reminded by advertising.

Successful advertising seeks to address a consumer's pleasure-seeking tendencies before the reality principal dampens her impulse to buy. Along with products, companies sell fantasies of pleasure, excitement, or well-being that will arise from the act of buying and using advertised items. Scenes of arousal need not include a partner. Pampering oneself with soothing lotions satisfies the need for attention without the risks involved in a relationship. Contemporary television and print commercials feature women experiencing what looks like self-stimulation and sexual arousal from shampoo and soap use in the shower.

In addition to bath and skin treatments, creamy foods like yogurts are advertised as sensual indulgences enjoyed by oneself. But for women, eating is already overdetermined. Intentionally or not, advertising can contribute to "emotionally induced compensatory eating," says Suzanne Z. Grunert (quoted in Costa, p. 68), and thus heighten the dilemma between the immediate comfort of eating and the potential for weight gain. Perhaps in compensation, shades of lipstick, eye shadow, and nail polish often are named after food. Instead of ingesting chocolate or cinnamon, one can wear them.

Ads for beauty and grooming aids fuel self-consciousness and vulnerability by making women aware of flaws they did not know they had. They stimulate an often-panicky desire to improve and, not surprisingly, create markets for products that promise to remedy imperfections from acne to wrinkles. Magazine articles, infomercials, and niche-marketed television programs bombard young women with images and messages they ignore at their own peril. Well-socialized girls change their hairstyles and adopt fashion trends in part to conform to the standards of their peer groups—actions that indicate how well they understand and respond to peer influences as seen in their shopping patterns. Product boycotts or grassroots truth-in-advertising campaigns fight to expose the "marketization" of cultural expression, but cannot fully counteract the impact of advertising and mass marketing and their by-product, peer pressure.

Women at times can resist the expectation of prettiness by refusing to dress for the pleasure of the beholder. In renouncing what Bartky calls "institutionalized heterosexuality," lesbians, for example, can disengage from the "panoptical male connoisseur" who "resides within the consciousness of most women" (p. 72). Some remove themselves from the beauty game altogether and thus dislocate and interrupt the male gaze whether external or internalized. Comfort, serious athleticism, modesty, indifference to attention-seeking, and rejection of so-called female vanity lead others to free themselves from adornment. Young adolescents often respond to their own ambivalence about their developing bodies by dressing in shapeless t-shirts and baggy pants. This camouflage enables them to feel they can escape the judgmental stares of peers as well as surprised looks from family members unused to their daughters' emerging secondary sex characteristics.

Lesbian dressing evolved through the last decades of the twentieth century from a hard-core butch style to the appearance known as "lipstick lesbianism" and a greater repertory of looks, writes Barbara Creed in a 1999 essay titled "Lesbian Bodies." From the 1970s, when "the true lesbian" was expected to "reject all forms of clothing that might associate her image with that of the heterosexual woman and ultimately with patriarchal capitalism," to the "butch-femme renaissance of the 1980s," to the so-called heterosexual lesbians of 1990s queer culture, lesbians have renounced the "lesbian uniform" as well as "the patriarchal stereotypes of feminine dress and appearance" (pp. 122–123). In so doing they reveal the sacrifice required of women who conform to feminine attractiveness.

The cult of beauty in women represents an attempt to counteract an externally imposed sense of inadequacy. Feelings of failure arise from "a context where body image is subjective and socially determined.… A person's body image is not determined by the actual shape and size of that body, but by that person's subjective evaluation of what it means to have that kind of body within their particular culture," writes Grogan (p. 166). For women of any race, class, or gender identification, femininity becomes an investment of resources and discipline in order to gain fleeting attention "and some admiration but little real respect and rarely any social power" (Bartky, p. 73). Late-twentieth-century studies cited in Grogan (pp. 180–192) suggest that positive body image is linked to self-esteem and a sense of personal control over one's environment, both of which are problematic for women in a capitalist patriarchy. As long as societies teach women to evaluate themselves principally in terms of their femininity and attractiveness, self-assurance will belong more often to those who successfully conform to the cultural ideal. If instead girls and young women learn to appreciate their bodies as healthy, well-functioning instruments that enable them to lead productive lives, they will be closer to changing the conditions that relegate them to objectification.