Elayne A. Saltzberg and Joan C. Chrisler
Beauty Is the Beast: Psychological Effects of the Pursuit of the Perfect Female Body
Women: A Feminist Perspective
edited by Jo Freeman. Fifth Edition.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 306-315.
Elayne Saltzberg (Daniels) was a postdoctoral clinical psychology fellow at Yale University
School of Medicine. Her major interests include body image and eating disorders. She is an
eating disorder specialist with a practice in Massachusetts.
Joan C. Chrisler is Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College. She is the author of
From
Menarche to Menopause: The Female Body in Feminist Therapy
(2004) and co-editor of
Arming
Athena: Career Strategies for Women in Academe
(1998) and
Charting a New Course for
Feminist Psychology
(2002).
Saltzberg and Chrisler discuss the ideal of the perfect female body, one that varies across
cultures; changes over time; and is impacted by racism, class prejudice, and ableism. Because it
is a fluctuating ideal that women strive for and few are able to attain, failure and disappointment
are inevitable. Striving to attain the ideal takes its toil on women in the form of physical pain,
health problems, medical procedures, costs of beauty products, time and effort, and damaging
psychological effects. They argue that there are detrimental consequences for women who fail to
reach the ideal: being punished for social transgressions, fired from jobs for being too old and
unattractive, and discrimination in hiring and promotion. Saltzberg and Chrisler advocate that
women become more aware of the effects on their bodies and their lives of pursuing ideals of the
perfect female body.
Ambrose Bierce (1958) once wrote, “To men a man is but a mind. Who cares what face
he carries or what he wears? But woman’s body is the woman.” Despite the societal changes
achieved since Bierce’s time, his statement remains true. Since the height of the feminist
movement in the early 1970s, women have spent more money than ever before on products and
treatments designed to make them beautiful. Cosmetic sales have increased annually to reach $18
billion in 1987 (“Ignoring the economy. . . ,” 1989), sales of women’s clothing averaged $103
billion per month in 1990 (personal communication, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 1992),
dieting has become a $30-billion-per-year industry (Stoffel, 1989), and women spent $1.2 billion
on cosmetic surgery in 1990 (personal communication, American Society of Plastic and
Reconstructive Surgeons, 1992). The importance of beauty has apparently increased even as
women are reaching for personal freedoms and economic rights undreamed of by our
grandmothers. The emphasis on beauty may be a way to hold onto a feminine image while
shedding feminine roles.
Attractiveness is prerequisite for femininity but not for masculinity (Freedman, 1986).
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