"THE FEMALE BODY in its natural state is shameful and ugly."

You'd probably be shocked to find this statement anywhere but in a Puritan manual of chastity or a 19th-century psychoanalyst's treatise on the hysterical opposite sex. Certainly no one today would say it openly.

Yet this is the unspoken principle behind much of our culture's images of female health, beauty and body care. Still, most people don't give this issue much consideration until they're confronted with a frightening consequence.

Silicon breast implants have been widely praised for restoring a normal figure to cancer patients who have undergone mastectomies. Indeed, in some cases implants have been necessary and beneficial.

Yet in fact 80 percent of the implant operations were performed on healthy women for purely cosmetic reasons. Now many of these women are suffering life-threatening illnesses because of the dangers of the implants. Furthermore, much of this could have been averted if the Dow Corporation had not covered up the problems with their supposedly safe product.

But what is frightening about this incident is not only the fact that a "safe" medical procedure has been proven largely unsafe, but that reconstructive surgery has become an accepted part of life for women who don't need to be reconstructed.

It's as if having a body that didn't look like a Barbie doll were a congenital defect. Now, a serious operation is as routine as a visit to the hairdresser.

AND IT'S NOT just breasts. Parts of one's face also need to be retouched. A plastic surgeon on the Oprah Winfrey show was extolling the virtues of his "quick 'n' easy" silicone-injected lips.

In less time than it takes to give someone a new make-up job, he demonstrated his technique on a model (who, by the way, was already better-looking than the rest of us ordinary mortals--as if to indicate that no woman is so perfect that she wouldn't be improved by going under the knife).

The flip side of this female ideal is that while lips and breasts should be full, the rest of the body is inevitably too fat. The nearanorexic demands made on models and actresses are well known. What is less discussed, and more relevant for most of us, is that similar standards prevail in the ordinary career world.

Consider the case of Tenita Deal, a flight attendant at American Airlines. A former dancer, she has a normal weight for her age and height according to accepted medical and nutritional standards. Yet in 1991, she was forced to file a suit against her employers because they gave her an ultimatum: lose weight or lose your job.

The weight they wanted was abnormally low for a woman of her age (50), and experts say that too low a body weight in middle age increases the risk of osteoporosis. More importantly, there was absolutely no relationship between weight and job qualifications. Still, the airline insisted on weighing and imposing diets on not only Deal but on all the flight attendants.

Such practices are not confined to one company. Women have been fired form their jobs for reasons ranging from weight gain to refusal to wear make-up. Is it any wonder that many women think something is so wrong with the female body that cosmetic surgery has become the norm?

THIS DESTRUCTIVE TREND has been documented in a variety of feminist books, from Kim Chernin's The Obsession: Overcoming the Tyranny of Slenderness in the 1970s to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth in 1991.

Yet such books have generally failed to change the cultural body image, probably because they go against common sense by claiming that all beauty is merely a social construct, invented to oppress women by exhausting them with an impossible quest to imitate an unnatural ideal.

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.