The Botox generation
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The Female Thing
Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability
Laura Kipnis
Pantheon: 174 pp., $23.95
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Beauty Junkies
Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery
Alex Kuczynski
Doubleday: 290 pp., $24.95
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SELF-LOATHING is a terrible, paralyzing thing. Magnified to encompass half the human population, it can be destructive and dangerous. Laura Kipnis’ “The Female Thing” and Alex Kuczynski’s “Beauty Junkies” both end, curiously, in the same place: We hate ourselves. As women, we find our bodies disgusting; as Americans, we have become shallow and empty. So much of what used to be considered normal in the aging process has come to be regarded as not merely horrifying but pathological, if curable -- from wrinkled skin to small breasts to decreased sexual desire.
Kipnis outlines the sources of female anxiety. A professor of media studies at Northwestern University, she has explored this subject in articles and essays, as well as in her 2003 book, “Against Love: A Polemic.” As she sees it, we are caught between “Feminism Plan A: Strive for empowerment, smash those glass ceilings” and “Plan B: Demand respect for women’s inherent differences from men, for our nurturing capacities, our innate moral compass, our emotional intuitiveness ... our female sensuality.” The problem, she suggests, is that femininity hinges on female inadequacy. Besides, when women gain something (job equality, financial independence), they must forgo something (motherhood in the traditional sense, even marriage).
The inner woman, Kipnis writes, is what’s holding women back. Women feel despair about ever changing anything, so they resort to endless and expensive fiddling with their bodies. At least, as any anorexic knows, you can change your body. This idea sets the stage for Kuczynski’s book, which reveals how self-loathing and despair play out nationally: A $15-billion industry, supported not only by the wealthy women who can afford, say, the $12,000 “surgery safari” in Africa (a nice way to avoid recovering at home), but also by those who earn less than $50,000 a year yet make up two-thirds of the cosmetic surgery culture’s consumers.
According to Kipnis, women have the sense of carrying an “inner stain,” which has to do with an enormous anger and self-righteousness that is itself generated by a kind of collective defensiveness at the belief that “[v]aginas are regarded by the world as dirty.” (Here, the author leans lightly on Freud.) This is why they “are so susceptible to housecleaning zealotry,” she continues -- “if women are situated in the world as contaminated, staking out a social role as a cleansing force makes a certain dismal, convoluted sense.” Because of this, she suggests, women feel in constant need of self-improvement. Their scorn for men, “that post-feminist badge of female independence,” is nothing but a “mask for disappointment,” “an index of dependency.” As she argues, their “self-loathing and neurosis are someone else’s target quarterly profits.”
Are they ever. Kuczynski’s “Beauty Junkies” is full of horrifying numbers: increases in every form of cosmetic surgery, from Botox injections (which, despite risk of sepsis and botulism, are considered relatively harmless and generated $840 million worth of business in 2005) to the increasingly popular labiaplasty, which reshapes a woman’s external genitals. Cosmetic surgery has become part of many women’s regular maintenance regimen, beginning as early as age 19. Despite horrifying anecdotes of quackery and fatalities, younger women are encouraged to start early to avoid the need for more drastic surgeries later on. (Paralyzing facial muscles sooner rather than later means less of a chance of developing unsightly wrinkles.)
A reporter for the Style section of the New York Times, Kuczynski reveals her horror at discovering that she has, in the course of covering the “Botox beat” for the paper, become obsessed with looking younger. At 5-foot-11 and 148 pounds, she would be considered downright fat, she half jokes, in Los Angeles, where 0 is the requisite size for beautiful, desirable women. (New Yorkers are a little less demanding when it comes to weight.) After some deliberation, Kuczynski has the saddlebags on her upper thighs removed. It is only when a Restylane injection in her upper lip goes wrong and she must miss a close friend’s memorial service that she realizes she has gone too far. Still, when at age 36 she is carded in a New Hampshire bar -- the state’s drinking age is 21 -- her pride practically leaps off the page.
“Beauty Junkies” is thoughtfully written and reported, and one admires the author for being professional and personal at once. Southern California, she notes, is ground zero for female self-loathing (as if we didn’t know that already). Kuczynski conducted her research primarily on the East and West coasts, but women in California seem more susceptible to the image industry. One quarter of all the breast augmentation procedures in the country are performed here, and many cosmetic surgery pioneers work in the region. Kuczynski reveals the terrible emptiness of several local women who feel they have nothing more to offer the world than their looks. Still, she writes, “I am a reporter, not an ideologue, and we live in a terrifying culture, a world in which images hold more power than words and language has been replaced with symbols and sound bites.”
As for Kipnis, although her book has the potential to say something profound and transformative, she is hampered by her sarcasm. She writes, not unlike Maureen Dowd or Caitlin Flanagan, with a constant sneer that makes it difficult to hold the thread of her argument. One senses that, unlike Kuczynski, she is an ideologue, disappointed by the direction that women’s lives have taken, terribly annoyed and angry. She is particularly biting on the subject of children. “[L]et’s face it,” she declares, “children’s intellectual capacities and conversational acumen are really not their best feature; thus boredom and intellectual atrophy are the normal conditions of daily life for the child-raising classes.”
This harder-than-thou tone has an arrogant, I’m-a-smart-girl-and-don’t-you-forget-it edge that never goes away. It also carries an air of defeat. (If one had to choose bad body image over this critical inner voice, one might well opt for the surgery safari). Yet defeat, or even subjugation, Kipnis suggests, can be erotic. We all secretly long for “encroachment” -- which in her view means everything from near-rape to economic dependence -- and the sooner we cop to that, the better off we’ll be. (An extremely long section on professor-student relationships has a similar, weirdly defensive attitude.) This type of self-acknowledgement, with its assumption that our weakness may in fact be our strength, seems increasingly irrelevant, especially when we all have different needs, childhood fears and goals.
If I had to choose, I’d say the problem is not so much inside us (Kipnis’ explanation) as it is outside -- a society that is ill and unnatural. Women, forever the canaries in the coal mine, bear the burdens of that sickness on and in our bodies. We pass PCBs on to our children in our breast milk; we scramble to stay attractive to men who have a harder and harder time making love. We have difficulty conceiving. We hate ourselves and what our culture is doing to us and our families. We become obsessed with appearance like hamsters on the wheel. The only wheel in the cage: Our bodies. Our selves. *