Sexually Unlovely

I'm currently reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about cultural beauty ideals. The book was originally published in 1991, so parts of it are a little outdated for my project, but most of what I've been reading is still very relevant.

In the book Wolf spends some time discussing pornography, something she calls beauty pornography, and women's sexuality. According to Wolf, it's easy for women to identify why they dislike hardcore pornography; often times it is violent and objectifying. It's more difficult for those who dislike soft-core pornography to assess why. Wolf believes the reason some women feel adverse to soft-core pornography is that the women seen in the magazines and the movies are far more easy to identify with than the women of hardcore pornography. In hardcore porn, it's not necessarily about what the women look like, it's how they behave, but in soft-core porn the women are the same as the ones seen in everyday media and advertisements, only without clothes and in sexual poses. As Wolf puts it, "They are 'her' models undressed" (Wolf 148). As women compare themselves and their bodies more and more to the bodies they see in pornography, they do not just develop an aesthetic disliking of themselves, but sexual shame, which may lead to decreased pleasure in sex.  Male sexuality is defined mostly by a man's desire to have sex, while women's sexuality is still largely defined by a collection of body parts that are sexual:

"Breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies; the most sexually central parts of women, whose "ugliness" therefore becomes an obsession. Those are the parts most often battered by abusive men. The parts that sex murderers most often mutilate. The parts most often defiled by pornography. The parts beauty surgeons most often cut open. The parts that bear and nurse children and feel most sexual. A misogynist culture has succeeded in making women hate what misogynists hate."


If what our culture defines as female sexuality is also defined as "ugly" if it doesn't meet certain standards, it's no wonder women seek out surgical ways to fix the perceived problems. As Wolf puts it, "'Beauty' and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be 'beautiful' to be sexual" (Wolf 150).

Wolf also goes on to discuss that our culture perpetuates the idea that if a woman feels ugly, it must be her fault, and that we don't have the right to feel sexually beautiful. If we object to beauty pornography, we are objecting to our own sexuality and feel "sexually unlovely." Sex and female sexual pleasure has been held hostage by what the culture feels is beautiful, lowering female sexual self-esteem and repressing female sexuality.

Perhaps this is why women are risking sexual pleasure through breast augmentations and labiaplasty. If our culture teaches us that the parts of our body that make us sexual can have something wrong with them, we are also taught that something is wrong with out sexuality. That same culture that teaches us something is wrong then shows us the easiest fix is to go under the knife.