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Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

Insight on the News, Feb 28, 2000 by Suzanne Fields

The photograph was startling: 11 women seated on simple chairs wearing nothing -- absolutely nothing -- but a strand of pearls around their necks, beneath wide-brimmed hats. They looked as though they were at a sedate meeting before afternoon tea.

The photo would have brought a blush to the cheeks of my grandmother in private, but here it was on the front page of the New York Times. Adding absurdity to voyeurism, the women came in assorted sizes and shapes and were between the not-so-nubile ages of 45 and 66.

Furthermore, they did not live in some perverse aging playboy mansion, but in the heart of Rylstone, a small English village noted for its picturesque landscape of green grasses, yellow buttercups, duck ponds and hiking paths. Were they nudists or exhibitionists?

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Neither. The ladies of Rylstone are do-gooders who raise money for charity. One of their members had lost a husband to leukemia and they felt an urgency to raise money to fight that disease. They knew they wouldn't raise much with the usual washed-out pastoral watercolors on their annual calendar, so they determined to do something original. Each woman chose a month to display herself in the buff for what they called their Calendar Girl(ie) Campaign.

The ladies of Rylstone would have been happy to have raised $2,000, but they wound up with $550,000 as word of the benevolent eccentrics' calendar spread through England. They were even invited to Buckingham Palace to deliver calendars for the Queen and the Queen Mother.

The story is quaint in its earnestness. We live in a time when sexual images of disrobed young women are common, and the culture is awash in pursuit and worship of the perfect body. These women were able to make fun of themselves. Those who saw their calendar laughed with them. "How wonderful to see real women instead of stick insects with pouty lips and pipe cleaners for legs," said one Englishman.

Young American women (as young English women) are dying (literally) to be thin and sometimes become anorexic; older women seeking earthly immortality are visiting cosmetic surgeons in record numbers for tummy tucks, breast enlargements or reductions, chin firmers, eyelid tighteners and face-lifts.

David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard, suggests that this latest stage of feminism for young American women is a cult of the body, reflecting health, vigor and athleticism. The pinup for this group of women is Brandi Chastain, a member of the World Cup-champion U.S. soccer team who ripped off her shirt in celebration on the field, displaying her athletic bra. Middle-aged women have to work harder for their athletic look. But they're jogging to work and taking their lunch hours at gyms riding stationary bicycles, Stairmasters and treadmills. "I'm on two life treadmills," says one middle-aged lawyer, who works out at a gym daily.

Feminists in the early stages of the revolution never went to the beauty shop and thought not shaving their legs or under their arms gave them badges of distinction, if not honor. But feminists today are making early-morning appointments for coiffures, waxing and manicures. Some exclusive salons in New York City open as early as 6 a.m. to accommodate them. "The old-fashioned desire to look pretty for the menfolk has been transmuted into a newer desire to look fit and taut as a symbol of strength, power and mastery," writes Brooks.

This has an exhausting downside, as well as a trim backside. As divorce rates remain high, women compete for men at all stages of life. They also compete with women (and men) for jobs. Vanity must not be in vain lest a woman find herself without a job and without a man. Sad but true.

Emblematic of this new woman is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Gossips continue to ask whether she has had or is going to have cosmetic surgery, and her friends report she threw herself vigorously onto the exercise machines during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The humiliation she bore is, no doubt, one of the reasons she decided to run for the U.S. Senate from New York.

But her makeover coincided with other changes, distressing her supporters. They didn't mind her tacky pantsuits when she stood up for something they believed in. Alice Montgomery, in Salon, showed how the new perception of Hillary was met by a fitting (if nauseating) question during her first Internet interview: "Stereotypes were that if you were brainy you couldn't be beautiful and if you were beautiful, you couldn't have a brain," intoned Nancy Evans. "You've always had brains, and now you're beautiful. When did you say to yourself, `Okay, I'm gonna look good'?"

Polls and interviews show that women who are like Hillary do not like Hillary. New York feminists have problems when she now waxes lyrically about her future life in Chappaqua, where hubby and doggie make three. Richard Cohen, the male feminist columnist, liked the first lady better as a brawler and compares the new and improved Hillary to a Stepford candidate, the robot suburban women Betty Friedan set out to liberate in her novel.

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

Insight on the News, Feb 28, 2000 by Suzanne Fields

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