Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks-heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go heaving clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. no wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.
Susan Sontag, "The Double Standard of Aging", Saturday Review, September 24, 1972.
1 comment:
Except for the fact that some women have to unwillingly go through the two stages of masculinity AS WELL.
Nice invisibilising there, Susan Sontag.
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