Public Eye

By MARGARET CARLSON

Women want to be attractive to men; men want to be attractive to women. This will ever be so. But why must women, after three decades of working toward equality, still spend countless hours and endure pain to that end while men get off pretty well with a shave and a shine?

The latest instruments of female torture are contraptions with names like Wonderbra and Super-Uplift that force a woman's breasts, however small, into a harness, creating cleavage of the sort enjoyed by Dolly Parton. The maker of Super-Uplift describes its product as a feat of engineering (constructed with 46 separate components and underwires, a "gate back" for anchoring, and ridged shoulder straps to prevent the "embarrassing jellies-on-a-plate look"), but it is actually a feat of marketing. Reconvincing women that the absence of breasts holds them back is as easy as forcing hemlines up or down: it is only a few fashion shows, press releases and glossy- magazine features away. When Super-Uplift went on sale at Manhattan's Saks Fifth Avenue two weeks ago, 489 were bought the first day.

Why are liberated women willing to buy the successor to the corset? It does not hurt, but neither is it comfortable. Like shoes that never stop rubbing the back of your heel, it is always there, doing what nature did not intend, with wires sufficient to hold up a suspension bridge and pads that would protect Jim Kelly. And for what? To be more appealing? A few minutes ago, the Kate Moss waif effect was all the rage, together with its requisite minimizer bra -- a contraption that could raise your voice an octave.

There is a postfeminist argument for the Wonderbra: liberation means that women can dress any way they want. No more the little bow tie and the boxy gray suit or the Sears orthopedically correct underwear beneath it. Women should feel free to be sexy in the boardroom as well as the bedroom. But then the message becomes: Notice my breasts before you notice my recommendation to go long on pork-belly futures.

Replacing dressing-for-success with dressing-for-sex is no leap forward. Men don't wear tight pants to get a promotion or a new client. By contrast, women lighten, heighten, straighten, curl, iron and bleach their hair. Unwanted hair is ripped out by its roots with hot wax, shaved, electrolyted and depilated. Bound feet may never have caught on here, but high heels that force the entire body weight to rest on the tip of the big toe are a cause of daily anguish.

Women have endangered themselves with many kinds of surgery. It is some comfort that three companies -- Dow Corning, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Baxter Healthcare -- agreed last week to pay $3.7 billion over 30 years to women claiming they were injured by silicone breast implants. But that settlement, the largest ever for a class-action suit, does nothing to alter the mentality that led as many as 2 million women over the past quarter-century to seek the operation in the first place. Only a male model or a body builder would think of surgically enhancing a bicep, and only in a few cases of dealing with male- pattern baldness has a Senator or actor succumbed to scalp-piercing follicle transplants. Otherwise, machismo allows for vanity, if at all, in terms of toupees and dentures. As long as women think they need a lace-trimmed demicup underwire to be valued, parity will remain a distant goal. The Wonderbra is not what most women were thinking about when they talked about getting control of their lives. |