“Good Looks Supremacy”

Abstract

By the time the women who worked as copywriters at J. Walter Thompson (JWT) graduated from college, they had already been exposed to a relentless focus on the female body. In securing a place in academia, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were subject to extreme bodily surveillance by parents, college administrators and faculty, and physicians. This surveillance carried on the tradition of a monitored and regulated female body through a Victorian “cult of domesticity” and “true womanhood” that insisted on female demureness in the public sphere for middle-class women.

If people of color ruled the world, white people would curl their hair and darken their skin.

—Chandler Owen, editor of the Messenger¹

Among the Nigerian Wodaabes, the women hold economic power and the tribe is obsessed with male beauty; Wodaabe men spend hours together in elaborate makeup sessions, and compete—provocatively painted and dressed, with swaying hips and seductive expressions—in beauty contests judged by women.

—Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

Americans spend more each year on beauty than they do on education.

—“The Beauty Business: Pots of Promise,” The Economist, May 22, 2003