The Beauty Myth

...Miss Wolf will hear none of this...

...The situation is especially bad in America, because American men do not take their jobs easily, as British and Australian men do—they work hard, and keeping up with them clearly takes a grim toll on the energies of American women...

...In other words, male undergraduates are dangerous animals...

...The "beauty myth," she suggests, is perpetuated by women's magazines, the cinema, television, and advertising to such effect that women not only want to look the way men think they ought to look, but start to hate themselves if they don't...

...She would have us believe, for example, that up to 44 percent of women in San Francisco have "suffered rape or attempted rape," that "date rape" is "more common than left-handedness, alcoholism and heart attacks," and that "100 million young girls worldwide are being raped by adult men—usually their fathers—often day after day, week after week, year in, year out...

...I had known his brother, Harry Theodoracopulos, in the 1970s when he ran the American office of the family's vast shipping empire...

...Female obesity is obviously a national problem, which European doctors ascribe to the stress and bad eating habits that have resulted from the decline of traditional family life in America...

...I would guess that more than eighty percent of the inmates think they were framed by the police...

...Do all rich Greeks own ships, while their poorer countrymen only run restaurants...

...And ugliness need not be a handicap even in the higher walks of life...

...He managed to keep a journalstteng verboten—between the lines of his copy of Paul Johnson's Modern Times...

...Despite the whining of liberals that prisoners are for the most part pathetic victims who flunked toilet training or were denied bedtime stories, Taki discovered a mob of miscreants operating on a moral plane below that of normal society: What have I learned about my fellow inmates...

...The greatest achievers I can claim to have met among American women—Eleanor Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, and Hannah Arendt—were all rather ugly, although, of course, extremely charming as well...

...Vanity is imposed not by the male conspiratorswho rule the world, but by nature itself...

...On the other hand, it is absolutely natural for a woman to want not to be ugly...

...Although Miss Wolf's attack is on "the male gender" in general, she singles out cosmetic surgeons as being particularly sadistic and rapacious...

...Just containment...

...She simply instructs her female readers to let themselves go, to be "greedy," to "eat, to be sexual, to age," to allow their bodies to "wax and wane," to "cover up or go practically naked, to do whatever we choose in following—or ignoring—our own aesthetic...

...And, of course, I've also learned about the prisoner's bitterness toward society...

...But, once compelled by her liberators to put on unisex underwear, bike shorts, and other unflattering garments, a woman could only achieve the shape she wanted by getting a cosmetic surgeon to work on the body itself...

...But Taki's imprisonment for the same offense in the same year had slipped my mind, in the main because he was more famous in England and on the continent than in the USA, and because when it happened I had dismissed him as just another rich twit who had gotten what he deserved for dabbling with a dangerous and thoroughly anti-social chemical...

...She quotes a 1985 survey in which 90 percent of American women said they thought they weighed too much, but says this is evidence they had been brainwashed—not that they actually did weigh too much...

...Also, to expect their abrupt shows of personality, born of their longing to be somebody, which only leads them to try to assert their individuality by being aggressive to other cons...

...19.95 Brock Yates THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 37...

...Taki's jaundiced eye and acid prose are aimed at the bozos and status slaves who pollute the upper classes and degrade the "High Life:" While my own origins are unspeakably more plebeian than Taki's, his journalistic efforts have been of considerable interest to me owing to a shirt-tail ancestor of mine and friend to Dickens named Edmund Hodgson Yates...

...American women, she maintains, have absorbed and internalized these standards so completely that vast numbers of them have taken to starving themselves in order to be thin, submitting their breasts and hips to the knives of cosmetic surgeons, paying out fortunes for phony weight-loss formulae and sojourns at fat farms, and pumping iron daily, in obedience to such martinets as the exercise "guru" Jane Fonda, as Miss Wolf calls her—for even fellow female radicals get no mercy in these pages if they subscribe to the "beauty myth...

...No wonder so many all-American boys nowadays prefer to go out with Chinese, Korean, Filipina, and other foreign girls, who are still sweet and serene and not tensed up with fear of "date rape" from reading books like this one...

...She would make herself happier by doing so, and make herself a more attractive item in the furniture of the world...

...Female fat, she asserts categorically, is not unhealthy: "Where poor health is correlated to fatness in women, it is due to chronic dieting and the emotional stress of self-hatred...

...He chroniBrock Yates is the author of the new book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races (Doubleday...

...Ironically, it is the radical feminists who express such solicitude for them who are responsible for much of the trouble...

...Miss Wolf looks forward to what she calls a "pro-woman redefinition of beauty," but she does not tell us what that might be...

...Criminals commit crimes because they are misguided, disturbed or unhappy...

...What is wrong in America, Miss Wolf protests, is not that so many women are fat, but that so many are on diets-25 percent are on one and 50 percent are either finishing, breaking, or starting one...

...His Spectator columns elevate social commentary (and we mean social in the most elegant and exclusive context) to a level infinitely more cerebral than the sycophantic gossip-mongering that litters the pages of many popular journals...

...Taki's adventures with the late Sean Flynn, Errol's bairn, who was murdered at a remote outpost in Cambodia (while tripping on LSD, according to Taki), and the actress Linda Christian (for whom he hocked the family silverware and was exiled to one of his Papa's factories in darkest Sudan for two years) are the height of sophisticated nonsense...

...First, that prisoners are exceedingly quick to take offence...

...In the 1850s, Yates wrote a column for the London Illustrated Times called "The Lounger at the Clubs," and it was Yates who first reported such heady matters in the first person singular, which Taki today employs with notable elan and candor...

...Once he became inured to the omnipresent reek of human excreta and the suffocating confines of his seven-by-thirteen cell, Taki's vivid powers of observation took root...

...Unfortunately for Miss Wolf, the modern American woman does not have that old-fashioned German aptitude for metaphysics...

...For those in authority, and inmates as well, can never admit that a crime is ever committed because someone is bad, greedy or malicious...

...Miss Wolf goes on to argue that, since their superhuman efforts to attain the standard of beauty imposed by the male conspirators are seldom successful, American women today are depressed and displeased with themselves, and so bend humbly to the "anti-feminist backlash of the 1990s...

...Most of the time they do not...

...he yelled over the assorted groans and whines issuing from the old crock...

...Recently this pleasing scene has been marred by a sizable minority with weight problems—not Miss Wolf'sanorexic and bulimic women, but fat ones...

...surely he couldn't be all bad...

...Most of my friendships in this place are with people who wanted to be somebodies but are too weak to really try...

...Miss Wolf cites surveys of undergraduate males in which 61.7 percent say it would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman, 91.3 say they like to dominate a woman, and 30 percent say they would commit rape if they could get away -with it...

...Second, that their chief characteristic is their irresponsibility and their propensity for violence...

...She fails, however, to acknowledge that it is feminist reforms that have provided the opportunity and the market for plastic surgeons...

...Her alternative proposal will seem to them as alien as that of the late-nineteenth-century Naturphilosophen, who unlacedtheir flabby torsos to cavort on the shores of the Baltic, secure in the syllogism that, since they were part of nature and all nature was beautiful, they too must be beautiful—despite the n a crisp spring morning several ki years ago, a friend was driving me through South London aboard an ancient Aston Martin Ulster when he yanked his hand away from the juddering steering wheel and pointed at an ominous brick fortress on the right...

...Montesquieu married a very plain wife and urged others to do the same on the grounds that a beautiful wife is more likely to be unfaithful and is almost cerMaurice Cranston, professor of political science at the London School of Economics, is the author, most recently, of The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762...

...A woman looking into her mirror every day must see an image that pleases her before she can think of pleasing others...

...Only a woman who is herself very pretty—as Miss Wolf, on the evidence of her publicity photographs, clearly is —could write a book like this one, expressing scorn for the efforts of plain women to improve their looks...

...Of course...

...Beyond the zaniness and glitter of the High Life, Taki reveals himself as yet another perfectly ordinary man seeking credibility and approval...

...Looking at photographs of upper-class weddings down through the years, one notices that, however pretty the bridesmaids, the bride is seldom a beauty...

...Harry, then an amateur sports car racer and the owner of Connecticut's Lime Rock Park race course, was clearly the more placid of the two, and has been written off as a bit of a stiff by his more pyrotechnic sibling...

...She wants them to stop it...

...21.95 Maurice Cranston 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 working week to the inescapable duties of a wife and mother...

...Interwoven with Taki's account of his nightmarish life inside Pentonville is the informal autobiography of a rich Greek who was fitfully educated in American prep schools, dabbled in internationaltournament tennis, then gained a legitimate reputation as a war correspondent and columnist...

...tain to have been spoiled by a doting father...

...This is what you hear on the rare occasions when prisoners admit that a crime took place...

...All very well for the svelte and sensuous Miss Wolfs of the world, most women will reply...

...The combination of urban decay, squalor, boredom and grinding poverty makes for crime...

...Taki, the famed patrician diarist for the London Spectator...

...N o one can deny that American women today have a hard time of it, one way or another...

...ut to judge from Nothing to Declare, his unblinkingly candid recollection of his three months inside the medieval precincts of Pentonville, Taki is far from your standard-issue jet-setter...

...Taki was in there...

...If she observes a nose like Jimmy Durante's, she is bound to wish it looked instead like that of Mme...

...Better yet, Yates was in the vanguard of literary prisoners, having spent seven weeks of 1885 in the Holloway Gaol for libeling Lord Lonsdale...

...But the heart and soul of Taki'sI D memoir is Pentonville, a world of obscene filth and cynicism, a dingy Hell populated by evil, self-serving, unrepentant inmates and case-hardened prison guards vilified as "screws...

...One of the pleasures for the foreign visitor to the United States has long been the company of well-groomed, well-dressed, attractive women, many of them looking ten years younger than their age...

...We live, unfortunately, in the era of the excuse...

...Like Cecil Rhodes, however, Miss Wolf is rather a bully, and the people she is out to bully are the millions of American women who try to make themselves look pretty...

...de Pompadour, and if she hears of a cosmetic surgeon who could bring about that transformation for her, it is only natural that she should seek his services...

...evidence of the photographs...

...Bro...

...Plainly because feminist propaganda has propelled women out of the home to add a man's THE BEAUTY MYTH: HOW IMAGES OF BEAUTY ARE USED AGAINST WOMEN Naomi Wolf/William Morrow/348 pp...

...Mutual friends had described Taki as a witty wastrel with an Olympian tolerance for wine and women...

...For it was feminists, as Miss Wolf notes with satisfaction, who liberated the bodies of American women by persuading them to stop wearing girdles...

...They are already following their own aesthetic, which is precisely that of the "beauty myth" Miss Wolf derides...

...His childhood under the Nazi heel in Athens is hardly as amusing, nor is the story of his fumbling attempts to get closer to his imperious father...

...Miss Wolfs argument is that the male tyrants who rule America are conspiring to frustrate the liberation of women by imposing standards of beauty as conditions of equal acceptance in professional and social life...

...A cultural fixation with female thinness is not an obsession with female beauty but an obsession with female obedience...

...Described on occasion as a "terrorist among the rich," he has gained a reputation for riddling poseurs with high-velocity verbal ordinances (while of course taking a few incoming rounds of his own...

...The argument is outrageous, and it is written in a wild and witty way by a glamorous American graduate student, aged 28, who is at Oxford on a "Rhodes scholarship"—that is, with a fellowship endowed by the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes, although her own views are those of the most radical-feminist left...

...One is not easily persuaded, however, that our Rhodes scholar is wholly reliable on scientific matters, and her statistics are sometimes bizarre...

...And Yates was a troublemaker...

...It is hard to imagine how such figures could have been gathered, especially as Miss Wolf tells us that "women who are raped by men they know don't even identify their experience as rape...

...Why is this so...

...There is always somebody in authority ready to rush in and explain why a crime was perpetrated...

...I can offer no magic solutions for this sorry state of affairs and how to improve it, not even after one month of first-hand experience, but what does seem clear to me is that we need to search for both the culprits and the motives...

...NOTHING TO DECLARE: A MEMOIR Taki/Atlantic Monthly Press/216 pp...

...Yet it was the wearing of just such corsetry which for generations had enabled a woman to mold her silhouette to the shape she chose, to present herself to the world in whatever slender or curvaceous form her fancy took...

...And it is true that women are among the victims of the violence that is so lamentably rampant in modern civilization, but Miss Wolf simply adds to the climate of fear...

...I was familiar with the incarceration of Yank actor Stacy Keach, who in 1984 had been tossed in Reading Gaol for nine months after attempting to ease through Heathrow customs with a stash of cocaine hidden in a shaving cream tube...

...Pentonville Prison...

...In 1858 he was expelled from the Garrick Club for insulting fellow member William Makepeace Thackeray, much as Tald was heaved from Gstaad's Eagle Club for assaulting the preposterous Aga Khan with a custard pie...

...She raises "rape-awareness" to such a fevered pitch that young female readers will close the book terrified of dating their classmates...

...His Spectator column was an odyssey of ramblings between Athens and Gstaad, London and New York, punctuated by drunken flings with brittle, over-sexed women and allnighters with idle aristocrats and titans of industry and literature...

...In a sense, Miss Wolf is entirely jus- tified in saying that beauty is overrated...

...For example, Miss Wolf points out that women "work harder than men," and for once gives sound statistical evidence to show that the working week of American women is twenty-one hours longer than that of men...

...No rehabilitation happens in jail...

...cled the flashy legions of mountebanks, philistines, and barbarians who, he charged, were giving civilized debauchery a bad name...

...The male tyranny wants to keep women hungry, since "hunger makes women feel poor and think poor," and so remain docile...