As one model told Muir-Sukenick, "That's just acting. It's not
real." She sharpens the point: "They're not making love to the camera.
Some feel the camera is making love to them. Which it would be--to a
narcissistic individual. The woman can feel less and less self-worth if
all her worth is dependent on how desirable she is in the eyes of a man.
She ends up feeling she's not getting anything in that transaction--but
the public thinks she has everything."
NARCISSISTIC INJURY TO THE VIEWER
Not only do we falsely impute what the model's experience must be,
we mistake her effect on the viewer, perhaps because their interaction is
subtle and complex. It is fashionable to talk of a body-image problem
among women, but that doesn't even begin to suggest the depths to which
images of models can penetrate a viewer's sense of self.
Images of models are photographs carefully prepared, carefully
selected, and perhaps even more carefully retouched. They're not the
truth. Yet we regard these photographs as representations of the
truth--after all, seeing is believing. And it is our nature to negotiate
the world both by identifying with and comparing ourselves to others.
Advertisers, photographers, and editors actually encourage viewers to
make an identification with models by casting them in real-life
settings.
Although the viewer is unknowingly seeing a false person (a person
who is the fabrication of the magazine, the stylist, or of the
photographer), she nevertheless makes a self-comparison. She winds up
feeling inadequate--in other words, narcissistically wounded. "The
inadequacy women feel in looking at unreal images feeds the desire to
constantly improve their looks," says Muir-Sukenick. "And women keep
looking at these images with the expectation that they will reveal how to
look better. They think there's an answer in the next image, or the one
after that, but with each look they're just repeating the narcissistic
injury.
THE BOX-TOP THERAPIST
"Listen," Diller says at one point in our conversations, "I'm a
little concerned about your doing an article that my patients might read
that identifies me as a model. I've had the experience where being known
as a model was associated with being shallow." And so we confront head on
the brains/beauty dichotomy and prejudices about models.
Because we traverse the social world always gauging similarity and
difference, on some still-unquantified course of identification,
comparison, and competition, the packaging of beauty and brains in one
person can strongly influence that person's relationship with another.
When that one person is a therapist, it can surreptitiously enter the
therapist-client relationship.
Diller tells the story of a patient who was herself in training to
become a therapist. She was gaining confidence and success. Then one day
she came in devaluing herself. "She thought she could never become a
successful therapist, she'd never make it in her career. I couldn't
figure out where this was coming from. Sometime later she casually
mentioned that she had seen a picture of me on a box top. Until then, she
had no idea I was a model.
"I felt that in seeing the box top she transformed me into some
idealized figure. Before, she used to think I was pretty, but we were
potentially similar in that she was going to be a therapist. Now I was in
another league entirely, that of a model/therapist."
MODELS AND OTHER WOMEN
"I grew up feeling almost as if I had to apologize that I was
pretty and that I modeled, because other girls wouldn't like me,"
Muir-Sukenick recalls. "I worked pretty hard at winning them over. I
wanted them to know 'I may be pretty, but I like to play games,
too.'"
Both therapists tell the story of an ex-model who has established a
film-production company. "When she goes to a meeting among men and wants
to be listened to, she wears high heels and short skirts." But to be paid
attention by women without envy interfering, she has to wear flats and
longer skirts."
She goes out of her way to level the psychological playing field.
That's because we need to perceive enough similarity on all sides of the
table to even engage in reasonable proceedings. Suddenly faced with a
steep grade between what we are and what we perceive another to be, we
can, like Diller's patient, trot out our inadequacies and devalue
ourselves. Or we can run out of the room: Or we can devalue the beautiful
model. And so we label her "dumb."
THE JOYS OF MODELING
How did they make it? Diller and Muir-Sukenick both think the big
difference between them and models who did not do well after modeling is
that the two came from families that nourished their sense of self. As a
result, they used modeling more than it used them. Modeling was a way
station in their lives.
Says Diller: "I went through a period of my life when I didn't know
what to do with myself. I had modeled as a child, so I thought, 'maybe
I'll model.' But I was always thinking I was going to use the money I
make to go to graduate school. For both of us, modeling was something we
did with our looks to benefit some other long-term goal."
Diller was modeling when she entered her Ph.D. program. "I remember
the odd feeling of walking into my classes with all this makeup on. It
was a nightmare--people looking at me and thinking, 'She can't be smart.'
I would try and hide my portfolio in a big bag."
Tags:
attitudes,
beauty,
confusion,
defiance,
depression,
fashion,
flesh and blood,
fluff,
kicker,
modeling,
narcissism,
psychotherapists,
real women,
successes,
women today,
young women
