"Femininity" Susan Brownmiller - 1984

Brownmiller has her own painstaking way of dismissing and embracing some aspects of femininity and not others. She carefully works out her anxieties in the text of her book and has a simplistic tone.

Prologue
"Femininity, in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed limitations...To be insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identity." (p. 2-3) It also is bred of competition with others and with self. Brownmiller is attempting to link femininity to female biology, sometimes she finds connections and sometimes she doesn't. Often times the origins of femininity lie in the "historic subjugation of women through sexual violence, religion and law, where certain myths about women where put forth as biological fact. (p.5) goal of the book is to raise awareness of femininity so "one day the feminine ideal will no longer be used to perpetuate inequality between the sexes..." (p.6)

Body
Current erotic standards change over time and across cultures, but their is usually one model to which all must strive for. Women should be shorter than men, but in the majority of species, females happen to be the larger species. Chinese foot binding and the "exquisite feminine beauty contained within the deforming violence..." (p.17) "The truth is, men have barely tampered with their bodies at all, historically, to make themselves more appealing to women." (p.19) The corset fits the beauty is pain mantra and signifies the "submissive, self-conscious values of the feminine sphere." (p.21) She talks endlessly about breasts and how their containment throughout history has been viewed. She ends talking about dieting and how it is a competition between women that takes the form of denial of food.

Clothes
She is very bitter about skirts and talks about throughout history how women have been bound and restricted by skirts. She talks very personally about her refusal to wear skirts now that she can get away with wearing pants. She talks about historical women like Joan of Ark and Marlene Dietrich that have dressed in men's clothes and the historical implications of such. "Erotic attire has often served as a smoke screen to deflect the female consciousness from a lasting understanding of the nature of oppression." (p.69) Dolls train women to be fashion consumers.

Skin
Skin condition is related to cleanliness, hygiene and age. Youthful, smooth and pale is the usual type societies aspire to. 'Sunburnt' and 'red-neck' are a symbol of the working class, performing manual labor under the sun. In the 60s the California tan came in, but went out when skin studies said nothing ages Caucasian skin more than sun. She talks about biological differences between the sexes don't affect skin color or distribution of hair. Gendered biology does affect amount and degree of hair between men and women though and women should want to remove or contain their hair as much as possible. Again her personal stories make her biased against shaving, using perfume and even make-up. " This is the central contradiction of make-up, and the one I find most appalling. Cosmetics have been seen historically as proof of feminine vanity, yet they are proof, if anything, of feminine insecurity..." (p.123) The artifice of cosmetics has been historically seen as luxury and to "tell people not to do something that makes them feel better is always suspect, and to suggest that women throw away their mascara and file down their nails in the name of liberation cast the femininst movement in a repressive light." (p.124)