Constant
scrutiny of women has led to a boom in the beauty industry, ‘As the unconscious
hallucination grows ever more influential and persuasive because of what is now
conscious market manipulation; powerful industries – the $33-billion-a-year
diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic
surgery industry and the $7-billion pornography industry – have arisen from the
capital made out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their
influence on mass culture, to use, stimulate and reinforce the hallucination in
a rising economic spiral,’ (N, Wolfe, 1991, p.17). Female vanity could be
suggested for these big business industries, Freud suggested that women are
‘more narcissistic’ with self-obsessed qualities. However R, Coward contradicts
this with ‘Advertisements, health and beauty advice, fashion tips are effective
precisely because somewhere, perhaps even subconsciously, an anxiety, rather
than a pleasurable identification, is awakened. We take an interest, yes. But
these images do not give back a glow of self-love... The faces that look back
imply a criticism.’ (Coward in Thomas, 2000, p.37). This implies a pressure
upon women to be perfect, they are not innately vein but are pushed into being
so. These advertisements play on contemporary anxieties such as diets, bulimia,
hair colour, flawless skin etc. The suggest to women that in order to have a
happy life they must stick to a beauty regime that could dictate their time,
they must by these products in order to have a happy life.
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