Rather, I would argue that today's beauty culture is so unhealthy because it is not about beauty at all. It is about ugliness.

Is the distinction merely semantic? Then so is the distinction between "innocent until proven guilty" and "guilty until proven innocent."

A preoccupation with beauty, while maybe shallow, would not be deadly if a woman's starting assumption were "My body is a great thing and I want to take care of it." Instead, the view presupposed and induced by our culture is "My body is flawed and subnormal, and I'd better fix it before anyone finds out."

The hidden emotion is fear, fear of something that the body is or does or is always perilously on the brink of doing. What the body does is die.

This is why so many of the signs of "ugliness" that make-up, diets and surgery "fix" are signs of maturity: wrinkles, for example, or a heavier and more matronly figures (and since when did "matronly" become an insult?).

A possible explanation for the cult of youth and the heightened fear of death is the secularization of society. A collective emotional belief in immortality is no longer a part of mainstream culture as it was for earlier generations.

Moreover, skepticism, relativism and plain confusion, rather than an inspiring non-religious vision, have rushed in to fill the gap. It is no wonder that the fact of being in the world, and in the body, fills people with panic and uncertainty.

Whatever the reason, the important thing to understand is that the seeming hedonism of the beauty culture is really the product of an underlying asceticism. Women are being made to feel that they must disguise, starve or cut their way out of the messy and unreliable thing that is the human body.

Just as in the Middle Ages, the larger society's misgivings about the flesh are specifically projected onto women. By making one group the symbol for the flesh, people can conduct a war against it as if it were an external enemy, not an inseparable part of themselves.

If our society does not come to terms with its conflicted feelings about the body, age and death, women's psychological and physical health will continue to be the greatest casualties of this self-defeating conflict.

Jendi B. Reiter '93, a Crimson editor, writes weekly for the Opinion page.