Appearances can lie. Peacocks are nasty, roses -have thorns, and Cindy Crawford could be rotten to the core. I’m not saying she is, mind you; just that it’s possible.
There are perfectly understandable standable reasons for wanting to believe Brownmiller et al. For one, beautiful people form a natural elite, elites are undemocratic, and we live a democracy–at least on paper. For another, ranking people on the basis of their looks makes for hurt feelings, as anyone who’s been to high school knows. But the evidence of our eyes remains: some people are drop-dead gorgeous and some people aren’t. Two new books on the subject, Ellen Lambert’s The Face of Love: Feminism and the Beauty Question and Ken Siman’s The Beauty Trip, suggest that instead of denying that difference we should try to figure out what beauty is, why it exerts such fascination, and how to celebrate it.
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Lambert confesses up front that she has a secret vice–paging through the J. Crew catalog–and that at 52 she still cares deeply about her looks, a preoccupation that sometimes made her feel as conspicuous as Dolly Parton a Wittgenstein symposium. In her professional environment, she tells us, the beauty question “hovered like a guilty secret” over many conversations; somehow “Who cuts your hair?” seemed less acceptable question than “Who are you sleeping with?” Once she started noticing the guilt that educated women feel when then they think about their looks, says Lambert, she discovered it everywhere. A self-confessed compulsive reader of fiction, she began to see a similar unease about the beauty question in the work of serious modern writers, too; Doris Lessing’s and Cynthia Ozick’s protagonists hardly ever talk about how they look, much less confess to caring about it.
Lambert attributes contemporary unease about the beauty question to a misunderstanding about what feminist scholars often call the “male gaze.” The current wisdom, most recently aired in Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (which Lambert finds “wildly exaggerated” and “self-serving”), is that there is essentially only one sort of male gaze, one that seeks to control. Lambert disagrees: she believes that there are two–the controlling gaze and the purely admiring one–and that failing to distinguish between them gets women into big trouble, introducing hostility where it’s not warranted. When the young women Lambert teaches find themselves not just admired but enjoying it, they feel as if they’re traitors to their sex, or at least to their educations.
Not that Ford denies the existence of inner beauty: it’s just that, because it can’t be photographed, she has no time for it. Siman says of her admiringly, “To pay an average-looking model would be, in her eyes, rewarding mediocrity.” There’s something bracing about the depth of her commitment to surfaces: Ford “doesn’t fantasize about turning ugly ducklings into swans,” Siman tells us. “Her job is to turn swans into paid swans.”
The Face of Love: Feminism the Beauty Question by Ellen Lambert, Farrar Straus Giroux, $24.
