Have you read ‘The Beauty Myth’ by Naomi Wolf? In today’s post, I talk about the #KuToo Movement and how it reminds me of ‘The Beauty Myth’.

Gender Discrimination shows up in a million different ways in the lives of women. What a woman wears or rather what a woman must wear or look like often is one of the most common ways to perpetuate this discrimination. Or, shall we say the beauty myth is society’s most powerful weapons to rein woman in!

Sometimes it’s as subtle as telling a woman what is or isn’t appropriate to wear. At times it comes in the form of a suggestion to wear saree for a client visit because, well, tradition. The men meanwhile can keep wearing pants and shirts because obviously, only women need to uphold tradition even if it has nothing to do at the workplace. I remember when my sister had first started working, her organisation or rather that branch of the organisation had rules such as no sleeveless or no leggings. Also, leggings remind me of several women who have told me how their husbands don’t quite approve of them wearing those. Not a big deal, they say, because their husbands are all nice guys. Obviously, let’s try telling them what they can or can’t wear.

The uncomfortable fact is that there are different mechanisms in place to ‘control’ women. The sad part is we sometimes obliviously let them do that. 

A few days back there was news of the #KuToo movement from Japan. #KuToo is a quip on the Japanese words for a shoe (kutsu) and pain (kutsuu), with a yes to the #MeToo movement. If you didn’t know this already, women in Japan are required to wear heels to the workplace because apparently, that’s necessary and appropriate. Japanese actor and writer Yumi Ishikawa had submitted a petition to Japan’s Labour Ministry to stop employers from making the wearing of heels to the workplace mandatory. Heels hamper movement and can lead to physical pain. Even though the petition had garnered a lot of support worldwide, the Japanese Health and Labour Minister actually sided with the employers giving credence to this blatant case of gender discrimination and control. 

#KuToo is a quip on the Japanese words for a shoe (kutsu) and pain (kutsuu), with a yes to the #MeToo movement.

I understand the mandate of dressing well and neatly but making heels mandatory is just another way of keeping the women under control. Now, the argument could be that when men wear ties or blazers why can’t women wear heels? The latter, my friends, might lead to health issues unlike a necktie or a blazer and hence must be left at the discretion of the individual. However, that’s not to be because the powers that be in Japan’s corridors of decision making, mostly men, think they have the right to decide what kind of footwear adorn the feet of the nation’s females. That my friend is the beauty myth which has been perpetuated for ages.

The #KuToo Movement and some quotes from Naomi Wolf's 'The Beauty Myth' #Women Share on X

Today, a woman’s accepted ‘power dressing’ include the high heels which have several negative effects. And while many might say that women actually wear it happily, the real empowerment would be when it didn’t have to be a mandatory line-item for a woman’s acceptance and success at the workplace. But that isn’t to be, is it? Sadly, the few women in power also perpetuate this need for power dressing with heels.

This whole episode reminds me of Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’. It is again one of those feminist reads that will help you see through the charades that entire industries have been part of to control women and keep them at a disadvantage. Yes, because God forbid we realise our self-worth and have better self-esteem.

So, while you contemplate on the #KuToo Movement, Heels and the beauty myth that women have come to live with, I give you these poignant quotes from ‘The Beauty Myth’ to help you comprehend what I mean perhaps, more clearly.

“As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women’s advancement.”

“As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.”

“Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.”

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

“The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.”

“To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is, in fact, a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual–and hence social–confidence while undermining that of women.”

“Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.”

“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.”

“Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons’ language when they speak to women: “a nip,” a “tummy tuck.”…Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don’t start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.”

“Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”

“Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it.”

“The surgeons’ market is imaginary since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.”

“What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

Well, striking, right? It makes me wonder all the battles we need to fight to actually make something of our lives. Still can’t have it all and still start from a point of disadvantage, we women. But all is not lost as long as we stand up in our own small ways. We need to believe that, don’t we?

Before you go, tell me, which was your favourite quote from the lot and what do you think of the #KuToo Movement?

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