By Emily Rawle (she/her)
Warnings: Light spoilers for The Substance (2024)
Dismantling the cultural pressure for women to adhere to patriarchally sanctioned beauty standards in order to maintain sexual desirability to men has been a goal of feminism for decades. It is a battle that tackles everything from portrayal of women in media to the power of corporations that make money from selling beauty ‘enhancements.’
We understand that these forces are formidable and continue to drive millions of women to partake in daily expensive rituals and procedures that often ultimately cause more harm than good to their wallets, esteems, and even physical health.
The fight against toxic beauty standards for women is consistently studied and portrayed in all types of media. 2024’s The Substance tackles the topic in a fresh way. Director Coralie Fargeat turns the struggle to achieve desirability to the male-gaze into a shocking body horror, where that socially imbued feminine self-hatred leads to complete destruction-- and a lot of gore.
Leading actress, Demi Moore is gorgeous (as she is), but her character, Elizabeth Sparkle, struggles to cope with an entertainment industry where men can replace her with a sexier and younger model on her fiftieth birthday.
While watching this movie, I could not help but reminisce on the 1990 book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf, which explores the punishing cultural practices that oppressed the women who were (at the time) newly liberated by second-wave feminism.
Comparing the two, many of the struggles outlined in The Beauty Myth are still present during our era. We watch The Substance and empathise with the characters who redo their makeup repeatedly, experiment with different anti-aging products, and over analyse their naked bodies in the mirror. Audiences may be able to relate to the feeling of looking in the mirror, and trying to be like the younger influencer, who has a curated 10-step anti-ageing routine. People know that the influencer exists to make women compare themselves to an unrealistic standard and spend their money trying to obtain it, but being intertwined and believing in the Beauty Myth, women continue to push for the fit.
Medical staff holding a silicone breast implant. Image via Unsplash
In The Beauty Myth, Wolf explores the contrasting aesthetic expectations of men and women when it comes to ageing, dieting, power, religion, portrayal in pop culture, reactions to violent imagery, and pressure to have cosmetic surgery.
A frequent reference in The Beauty Myth is ‘The Iron Maiden’, a metaphor to the actual medieval torture device, which is used in the book to represent the unattainable standard that demands women to conform and punishes them for failure, through things like isolation, being overlooked and in worst cases, bullying, all of which we see Elizabeth encounter as a result of her natural aging. The message is that women are pressured to fit into an iron maiden which is determined by beauty standards regarding both visual appearance (body shape, facial lines), and behaviour (acceptance of violence and oppression against their gender).
In The Substance, the Iron Maiden is the necessary willingness to be objectified and sexualised to maintain desirability. Elizabeth Sparkle, upon being fired for ageing past sexual desire (according to the executive she overhears), stares at herself naked in the mirror, she contemplates injecting herself with a fluorescent-yellow coloured substance. She had been told: ‘One single injection unlocks your DNA. And will release another version of yourself. This is… The Substance.’
This movie shows the height of desperation for ‘beauty’ -- or the definition of beauty through a hyper perverted-capitalist male gaze. It takes the mainstream concept of learning to love the body you’re in and combines it with the themes of the Iron Maiden described in The Beauty Myth, and glorious body-horror.
Cosmetic surgery and body image have dedicated chapters in The Beauty Myth, where Wolf makes the important point, ‘Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women…’ (The Beauty Myth, Page 220).
The supporting character, Sue, who is the result of Elizabeth taking ‘the substance’, is an amalgamation of the qualities Elizabeth (influenced by the male gaze) yearns for. She’s young, skinny, soft skinned, doe-eyed, thick lipped, and the owner of a lovely pair of breasts. Margaret Qualley does a great job of bringing Sue to life and shows that she uses her sexual desirability to literally replace Elizabeth within the company that abandoned her, with the false hope that they wouldn’t do the exact same thing to her when she inevitably ages.
Sue represents the new, augmented standard of beauty, she fits perfectly into the iron maiden and will fight to remain that way, even if it destroys Elizabeth; the woman who literally brought her to life.
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf writes, ‘Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span. Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.’ (The Beauty Myth, Page 14).
Audiences observe the back and forth between the two women in The Substance, their competition and contempt for each other fuels the destruction of Elizabeth and the crumbling of Sue’s rising stardom. Ultimately creating a horrific monstrosity of flesh, blood, and protruding extra limbs. There are constant reminders that this is a world where women are pitted against each other, and the one with the most money always wins.
To link this to our own experiences, women can also capitalise on the insecurities of others, and overall harm progress to dismantling the beauty myth to make money. The Kardashian family are an example of wealthy influential women who use their image and augmented bodies and faces to sell products that perpetuate an unrealistic dream to the everyday woman that ‘this’ is what beauty looks like. It is almost insidious how they suggest through their marketing and reality TV show that their looks were achieved through hard work and genetics, rather than cosmetic surgery funded by immense wealth forged by selling products (Time, 2023).
In the world on-screen, and similarly to what Namoi Wolf explores, men control the way women are perceived, and thus treated, whether it’s a superstar in the making, whose body is sexualised and exposed for entertainment, or a young female assistant whose name is changed on a whim because her boss couldn’t be bothered to remember it.
In The Beauty Myth, Wolf talks about how women are not allowed to age gracefully, it is anticipated as a disappointment or a loss, but for men, ageing is ‘refined’ and is associated with wisdom. The men in The Substance are neither, every camera angle is unflattering and displays their perverted and selfish nature, they’re filmed up close enough to be for the viewer to feel the discomfort of the woman they’re facing. The men are characters used to portray the cruelty of this world and represent how our real-life media and advertising industries objectify young women and push unrealistic beauty standards for monetary gain.
Modern patriarchy and modern capitalism have a symbiotic relationship; this social partnership creates this double standard of aesthetics between men and women. To maintain this norm, women are pressured through advertising to ‘put in more effort’, and thus; more money, into maintaining this standard, and therefore, maintain patriarchy.
Even though the goal of capitalism is profit, it aids patriarchy through the harm it does to women’s self-esteem, with messages designed to keep people consuming, even if the promised rewards are unrealistic.
In The Substance, the audience hears how all (but one) male characters talk about women, how they feel about her appearance, her face, her body, how sexually appealing he finds her, how ‘pretty girls should always smile.’ Everything the men in power have to say is loud and hurtful, but hauntingly familiar, and the women listening (and in the audience) are not able to talk back.
In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf also comments on the premise; ‘When men control women’s sexuality, they are safe from sexual evaluation … A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming or taste in clothes -- all of which we do ... given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.’ (The Beauty Myth, Page 153).
The Beauty Myth has a feeling of foreboding doom if women do not learn to appreciate and accept ourselves and each other as we are, ‘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 ...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.’ (Beauty Myth, Page 257).
The Substance, being set in a modern Los Angeles, shows how there is still power in the beauty myth that Naomi Wolf exposed in the 1990’s. Both pieces frame how capitalist and cultural attitudes towards ageing pressures women to remain eternally young and sexually appealing and punishes women who do not conform. In spaces dominated by men, where women are the product, violence is physical, sexual, and visual.
Despite being more than a generation apart in creation, The Beauty Myth and The Substance inspire comparison, in artistic value, feminist inspiration and hopefully; cultural impact. Overall, both pieces of feminist media are wonderfully constructed, and provide endless talking points on culture, societal values, and self-reflection.
Both pieces are amazing and worth of praise individually, however, their shared themes uplift the message of the other. Consuming both one after the other is a profound experience and leaves you with a feeling of awareness of how entertainment and advertising uses our own bodies against us, and what horrors self-hatred can create.
Defeating the Iron Maiden, as Wolf describes, refusing to be objectified and marginalised is a way that women can fight back against the beauty myth, by reclaiming their bodies and embracing individuality. The Iron Maiden is only powerful when the entire group accepts to feel the pressure and accepts societies punishment for not fitting in or perpetuates the culture of shame onto others. But with more women refusing to promote the toxicity of the beauty myth, nor spending money on procedures and products to morph themselves to fit said standard, the Iron Maiden and thus the capitalist machines that profit from it, lose their power.
The Substance has a similar message, in that things would have been better for Elizabeth if she did not give into the pressure ‘to be a better version’ of herself, and to belong in an industry that profited off her objectification and threw her out when they were done.
These individual pieces of creative work showed us that the desire to fit into the Beauty Myth is still an issue that modern women face, and The Substance portrays the disastrous consequences of conformity to patriarchy, and the importance of accepting one’s own body.
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References:
Wolf, N. (1990). The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. London: Vintage Classic. ISBN: 9780099595748
The Substance (2024), Coralie Fargeat, Motion Picture, Adastra Cinema.
Lang, C. (2023). Even the Kardashians Can’t Keep Up with Their Beauty Ideals. [online] Time. https://time.com/6298911/kardashians-kylie-jenner-boob-job-beauty-standards/