Popular Culture Review 30.2
in postmodern Western society is a simulated caricature that exists outside of nature . In an effort to belong to a given social group and to find love , Baudrillard asserts that consumer citizens pledge their allegiance to a preexisting model of romance linked to all of the products that are supposed to bring these utopian images to life . Baudrillard shares Morin ’ s conviction that it is because of the power of mimesis that there is such little resistance to romantic simulacra that do not hold up to critical scrutiny .
In comparison to Morin , Baudrillard more explicitly outlines the very real dangers of simulated femininity . Creating a rending portrait of the dark side of the cult of feminine beauty that has crossed over into the hyperreal because of technological advances , the philosopher notes that the feminine ideal “ can only be slim and slender , according to its current definition as a combinatorial logic of signs , governed by the same algebraic economy as the functionality of objects or the elegance of a diagram . It even tends , somewhat , towards the scrawny and emaciated , on the lines of the models and mannequins that are simultaneously the negation of the flesh and the exaltation of fashion ” ( The Consumer Society 142 ). Baudrillard grumbles in disgust about “ the skinny , emaciated models of Vogue ” that have become the desired feminine body in Western civilization ( The Consumer Society 142 ). It is in this sense in which Baudrillard ’ s earlier comments in The Consumer Society regarding the “ perils of the social liberation of women ” should be understood ( 97 ). After enduring centuries of systematic patriarchal oppression , Baudrillard explains that many women in Western society would soon become pawns of late capitalism to the point of allowing virtual simulations to define their corporal essence .
In their Baudrillardian interpretations of the crisis of simulated femininity and its real-life victims , Kathleen Dixon , Dan-
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