There is nothing natural or inevitable about women wanting to cut up their faces or inject them with silicon. Until around the 1920s, the feminine ideal was decidedly matronly. Victorian models of femininity were based on moral virtue or character, which meant that there was nothing wrong with ageing. In fact, beauty was equated with a maternal ideal.
Maturity was scorned at the precise historical moment that Western women gained the vote, started to work, began to live independently of men and entered the public sphere. I don’t put this down to mere coincidence. Nor is it a strange quirk of history that an infantile model of femininity emerged at the same time as a mass market. Victorian women were deeply suspicious of make-up, or ‘paint’ as they liked to call it. To make money, the beauty industry (today worth $170 billion a year globally) had to convince women that beauty could only be bought, and this meant creating anxieties through promoting an unattainable ideal of sexualised adolescence. The companies who created the fears were also the ones who offered the remedies at a very high price.
At the very moment that women were promised freedom, they became subject to a crushing regime of external regulation and bodily “improvement”. At the very moment when maturity should have given women political power and social authority, they were mocked or made invisible because of their deviation from a childish ideal. At the very moment when they should have turned their minds to matters of state, they internalised these new prescriptions and turned their minds to matters of moisturising. The psychological effect upon women of youthful femininity was, and is, catastrophic.
Great story. I had not made the connection between Victorian and current day perspective. I saw the film ‘Goddess’ last night and apart from becoming a cult movie with mothers I think it also represents an emerging view of femininity which is a little more empowering. I think the current crucifixtion of the feminine is a backlash by the old philosophy which is on its way out. Just hope we don’t have to dwell here for long.