Page 63 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 57

rewriting of Friedan for a new generation, with, for example, a recapitulation of
the scenario of women being duped into the stupified condition of Stepford
Wives, automata who have been programmed to spend money no longer on their
homes but on their bodies. To paraphrase Friedan,’ writes Wolf, ‘why is it never
said that the really crucial function that women serve as aspiring beauties is to
buy more things for the body?’ (1991:66). At other times, however, Wolf is less
specific about her intellectual inheritances, with the result that The Beauty Myth
reads more as a palimpsest of the last thirty years of feminism, in which the faint
outlines of previous positions and figurations are still visible. The history of
feminism’s coming to terms remains sedimented within the body of Wolf’s text,
but keeps resurfacing at key moments.
The Beauty Myth is punctuated by moments of textual anxiety over what is to
be understood metaphorically, and what is to be taken literally. Wolf frequently
insists that many of the tropes she employs to describe women’s oppression by
the beauty myth are no such thing: she means them literally. ‘Electric shock
therapy is not just a metaphor’, she warns (1991:250). Wolf presumably means
that the manipulation of women’s minds is not just comparable to ECT, but is
sometimes actually instantiated by shock therapy. A similar hesitation between
the literal and the metaphorical occurs in a comparison between the physical
mutilation of slaves and the ‘employment demand for cosmetic surgery’ (1991:
55). The surgical economy is no slave economy, of course,’ explains Wolf, but
adds that, ‘in its demand for permanent, painful and risky alteration of the body,
it constitutes—as have tattooing, branding, and scarification in other times and
places—a category that falls somewhere between a slave economy and the free
market’. Wolf seems caught ‘somewhere between’ a desire to produce elaborate
comparisons and figures, and an awareness of feminism’s long history of making
itself a distinct project that cannot be collapsed into other terms.
As the book progresses, Wolf engages in an endless process of bolstering up
her rhetorical claims: when the comparisons seem to fall short and lose their
force, Wolf redoubles her insistence. Tellingly, the closer to her own personal
experience she comes, the more this strategy intensifies. In her heartfelt
discussion of eating disorders Wolf is less equivocal, more certain that women’s
oppression is not somewhere between the metaphorical and the literal, but
constitutes instead a literalization of the metaphorical:
Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social
order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are—
less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as
homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of
an inhumane social order. Anorexia is a prison camp. One fifth of well-
educated American young women are inmates. Susie Orbach compared
anorexia to the hunger strikes of political prisoners, particularly the
suffragists. But the time for metaphors is behind us. To be anorexic or
bulimic is to be a political prisoner.