The Official Body

The ideal female body has changed numerous times throughout the 20th century and now, in its current form, consists of a young, fresh face, free of wrinkles; hairless, smooth skin (tan year round in the West, porcelain white in the East), with rail-thin arms and legs, a narrow waist, tiny firm buttocks – topped off with big, gravity-defying breasts.

Advertising and mass media – television, film, newspapers, magazines, the web – propagate this very image of an “Official Body” that does not really exist in nature, but is achievable only through cosmetic surgery – or airbrushing.

Globalization

Since the spread of globalization, racial and ethnic traits have been depreciated, replaced by a Single, Universal Beauty standard – one that would streamline and homogenize marketing campaigns. The “Official Body” promoted by a plethora of industries is now virtually the same from Madrid to Shanghai – and women are resorting to skin whitening creams, nose jobs, and breast surgery in record numbers, diminishing or downright erasing ethnic traits, in order to resemble the “Official Body” brought forward by globalization.

Selling Hope

Charles Revson of Revlon Inc. once said, "In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope."

The very nature and sustenance of all women’s magazines, television shows, fashion, and all of advertising is predicated on an aspirational credo: making women feel inadequate about the way they look yet all the while giving them hope that by purchasing products like cosmetics, designer clothing, and luxury handbags, they could achieve a sense of completeness, emulating - and hopefully resembling a bit more - the models, actresses, and singers the media relentlessly showcases.

Indeed, what beauty companies actually sell is hope, the mere promise of erasing wrinkle lines or dimply thighs, since the efficacy of most cosmetic treatments is questionable at best. With no medical or scientific boards monitoring and regulating the advertising and sale of virtually all cosmetic products, the beauty industry can claim almost anything – to the tune of billions of dollars.

Indeed, in the 2005-2006 period the total revenue of skin care, cosmetics, hair care, perfume, cosmetic surgery and the weight loss industry surpassed
400 billion dollars worldwide.


Media Hearts Advertising

The beauty industry’s dizzying revenues are in part due to the invasive nature of advertising. From New York City to Melbourne, women are exposed to an average of 4,000 advertisements a day.

This does not include the portrayal of women on TV shows (mostly white, young, thin, wrinkle-free), who are walking advertisements for a plethora of products and treatments, and does not factor in film and television advertising tie-ins – for instance, the promotion of Manolo Blahnik shoes in Sex and the City (thanks to the show, the designer has gone from obscure to household name almost overnight).

The open secret about all media – print and broadcast – is that their survival is entirely dependent on advertising. This causes a clear conflict in between public welfare and corporate interest: if Restylane, Lancome, Dior, and La Praire have paid for ads for anti-wrinkle treatments (be it injections or creams), can a magazine feature unretouched photos of beautiful, confident women over the age of forty? The answer is no.

This is why, by picking up ANY magazine on newsstands, one could not find: women older than 40, with naturally creased faces; unretouched photos of celebrities; women bigger than a size 4; women without makeup; ads featuring ethnic minorities. And the list could go on and on.

Entire industries would crumble if television or the press showed women thoroughly confident about the way they naturally looked, regardless of their age, shape, or skin color.

Moreover, what is particularly troubling about the content of mass media and advertising is that there is a strong double standard concerning the topic of beauty. Case in point: aging. Images of older men are everywhere, in broadcast, print, and online media, whereas older women are hard to find. Photos of women are always retouched, making them look slimmer and erasing wrinkles and even skin pores; men, on the other hand, can be big bellied, ursine, with deep lines on their faces – and their photos are mildly, if ever, airbrushed.

Censorship

Through strong media censorship (selecting and rejecting content, altering images), women are kept ignorant about how other women’s breasts, tights, and stomachs really look like; as Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth, by looking at images of women in mass media, one does not know that bodies come in as many shapes and varieties as there are women.

Through this censorship, women are made to feel inadequate about the way they naturally look, and this can easily push them to purchase products or treatments that would make them look a little closer to the image of the Official (airbrushed, surgically enhanced) Body. Then, as more and more women artificially alter their appearance, the Official Body becomes the norm: as flat chests and wrinkled faces disappear, women who have those become the minority.

Different Social Expectation

Social observers lament this obsessive focus on female beauty. For Rita Freedman, “the idealization of female appearance camouflages an underlying belief in female inferiority.” And according to renowned writer Naomi Wolf, the beauty myth basically prescribes behavior, not appearance. For Wolf it is “the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”

If one examines the different social expectations for men and women, beauty is an ideal that is instilled in women since infancy. Indeed, little girls learn since a very early age the concept of “pretty” and “ugly”; as Simone de Beauvoir explained in The Second Sex, they are encouraged to play with dolls – objects that represent “the body in its totality” and that are essentially passive. While boys are taught to use their bodies to master the environment through physical activities and games, girls are taught to observe and judge their bodies from the outside, considering them as objects that need work before they can attract others.

The Fear of Female Power

As Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth, there are two aspirational ideologies promising a “total personal transformation in status” – the pursuit of beauty for women, and the pursuit of money for men.

But whereas beauty is ephemeral, coming with its own expiration date dictated by the passing of time, the power of money is durable – and can actually grow over time.

By examining closely the image of the ideal female body of today one could easily point out that it is extremely thin and childlike. Any ad, fashion spread, or photo accompanying articles in Vogue would point to that conclusion. The obsession over youth and thinness in women – and the exaltation of those qualities – ultimately reveal a deep rooted fear in the power of mature women. In 1981, New York Times contributor Kim Chernin wrote, “A woman who wishes to conform to her culture's ideal, in this age of feminist assertion, will not be large, mature, voluptuous, strong or powerful. She, who has the knowledge of life and birth, is to make herself look like an adolescent girl if she wishes to appease her culture's anxiety about female power.”

Documentary Overview

Through the relentless focus on the pursuit of beauty, the cultural institutions of our time are injecting women of all ages with a deep rooted sense of insecurity about the way they naturally look – which could lead to the virtual collapse of their self esteem. All in the name of capitalism.

The Illusionists will explore how and why big corporations, advertising, and the media create and perpetuate the beauty myth for women, how the myth is applied in areas like cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and dieting, and finally it will discuss how the pursuit of beauty is now starting to affect – with negative repercussions – younger and younger women and men (but who, unlike women, are not professionally threatened by this obsession over physical appearance.)

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