(got this book for christmas and i still love it as much on the reread)
But we long to be loved the way we were, if we were lucky, as children: every toe touched, each limb exclaimed upon because it was ours alone, incomparable. ... [Yet,] Those elements that make each woman unique--the unrepeatable irregularity of her face, the scars of a childhood trauma, the lines and furrows from a life of thought and laughter, grief and rage--exclude her from the ranks of mythical beauties, and from the charmed playgrounds, we are told, of love.
...
Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and there is the "ideal." When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, become charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. ... The way in which women regard men's bodies is proof that one can look at a person sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.
...
"Beauty" is only visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions. ... So humans, in order to become dependable, sexually insecure consumers, had to be trained away from these other, more sensual senses. One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up.
The shape and weight and texture and feel of bodies is crucial to pleasure but the appealing body will not be identical. The Iron Maiden is mass-produced. The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one another as more masks are assumed. Cues are missed.
Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry, she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movements will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand the airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been blocked in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.
CHRISTIAN LACROIX GIVES WOMEN BACK THEIR FEMININITY, reads the fashion headline. "Femininity" is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If "femininity" means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. Wherever we feel pleasure, all women have "good" bodies. We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it.
Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking.
Many, many men see it this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light in her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe...
The fact is that the myth's version of sexuality is by definition just not true: Most men who are at this moment being aroused by women, flirting with them, having crushes on them, or making love to them, are doing so to women who look exactly like who they are.
-Naomi Wolf, "The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women" (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991), 172-178.
