beautiful girl.

THE FIRST TIME I saw my favorite (and only) niece, Josie, she was just 2 hours old. Wrapped in a politically correct, gender-nonspecific blankie of many colors, she nursed energetically at her mother's breast while her proud papa, my baby brother, beamed. "Beautiful," I gasped. I felt I'd never before truly understood the meaning of the word.

The first time I saw Josie on the cover of Glamour, she was 19 years old. I was on a story assignment, dashing past an airport newsstand, when the sight stopped me in my tracks: a whole wall of Josie's cleavage topped by the headline "Lust Lessons: Teach Them Tonight!" I wanted to buy every copy and pass them out to everyone I saw. And I wanted to buy every copy and burn them, so no one would see.

Five years and four Glamour covers later, not much has changed. Josie's still a supermodel, and I'm still alternately bragging and wincing about it. "That's my niece," I often feel compelled to point out to supermarket clerks, my dentist's receptionist, strangers in drugstores. "How do you feel about that?" my feminist friends ask sympathetically when Josie bares nearly all in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

"Mixed," I say. But "mixed-up" is more like it.

Being a journalist, I make it my business to research issues that perplex me. Being a feminist, I find one of them is the persistence of the beauty myth. The more barriers women shatter, the heavier the image of female beauty seems to weigh on them, as Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth in 1991. Women may be getting more powerful, but they're also getting more cosmetic surgery (there were 80 percent more facial procedures done in 2002 than in 1997, according to facial plastic surgeons). And for decades, eating disorders have steadily risen among young women.

As our family's designated gadfly, I inflict my values--and my confusion--on my relatives, including my beloved niece, who has become a wealthy young woman thanks to the beauty industry. "When I was your age," I find myself muttering at Josie--well, at Josie flickering on my TV screen--"I was doing useful things. Picketing the Miss America pageant. Writing diatribes against sexism. Growing my armpit hair. How could you have turned out this way?"

When I see Josie in the flesh, I strive for a more tactful approach. "I'm glad for your success," I told her recently over a platter of sushi. "But I'm worried about the impact of what you're doing--on you, and on girls and women."

"I'm good at what I do. That makes me happy," Josie countered. "You get to be creative with your writing, Mer. I get to be creative with my work."

"But doesn't it bother you," I pressed on, "to be reinforcing a standard of beauty that 99 percent of women can't fit?"

"I know modeling puts out this stereotype that the so-called beautiful woman is skinny and tall and looks like Barbie," Josie answered. "But I've never believed you had to look like that to be happy."

"Easy for you to say, Size Zero," I thought, trying and failing to resist comparing my 50-year-old body to hers. Sure, I believe that people should be judged by the quality of their character, not by the attractiveness of their skin, eyes, or highlights. And sure, I know that someday Josie's taut flesh will droop, her streaked hair will dull to gray, her rosebud lips will pale and pucker--and that I will still think she's beautiful.

But knowing that doesn't help when Josie and I are thigh-to-thigh. And it didn't help when I went to see my editor at Glamour a while ago and sat waiting beneath a larger-than-life-size poster of Josie. "Don't stand next to the pretty girl," the teen magazines of my girlhood warned. Forty years later, my editor glanced from me to Josie, then back at me. "I, um, see the family resemblance," she murmured, and mercifully led me to her office.

Watching Josie devour a California roll, struggling to separate my envy from my ethics, I swallowed an estimated 45-calorie bite of unagi and confessed, "I lost 15 pounds 5 years ago during the worst time of my fife, and I've never been as happy with my body as I was then. Now I'm having the happiest time of my life, and I've gained weight, and I beat myself up about it every day."

"You look great, Mer," Josie said.

"For a 50-year-old, you mean?" I sniveled.

Josie regarded me steadily. "You look great, period," she repeated. I squinted at her suspiciously, then had what Ms. magazine used to call a "click" moment of truth. "I'd rather be thin than happy. Some feminist role model, huh?" I said, and we both burst out laughing.

Later I thought about the serious side of my admission. I thought about the formative years that my friends and I had spent poring over those magazines, yearning for bodies like Josie's, and the years we've spent since, starving, exercising, and punishing ourselves in a million different ways to try and get one. Even as my friends and I have built our big fat "postfeminist" lives--with careers and passions our mothers weren't allowed to have and relationships they couldn't even imagine--we have kept running on a parallel track of self-loathing, the size of our thighs always counterbalancing the more important gains we were making. No matter how satisfying our successes, there is always this: We are never as beautiful as we could be, as beautiful as we want to be, as beautiful as Josie is.

"Isn't the goal of feminism to give women the same rights as men? The same luxuries?" Josie asked me recently.

"To give women the control over their lives that you have, yes," I agreed. "But don't you feel manipulated, diminished, by people relating only to how you look?"

"I don't feel manipulated. I feel lucky," Josie shot back. "I'm what America thinks is beautiful. I fit into society easier than a lot of people because of my looks."

What could I, loving aunt, self-appointed mentor, committed feminist, say to my niece in response? Yes, I'm critical of the beauty industry, pained by the damage it does to females, including me and possibly--now or later--Josie. But as her feminist aunt, I also ask myself what it means to support a young woman I love and respect, even if what she's doing doesn't follow my script for her life, even if what she's doing alternately awes and disturbs me. Josie is living her own dreams, not mine or anyone else's. What could be more feminist, or more beautiful, than that?

"You're right. You're lucky," I said. "My question is, what are you going to use that good luck for?"

"I'm sure my beautiful aunt will stay on my case till I get off my ass and do something good for the world," Josie answered, flashing that million-dollar smile.

"Flattery will get you everywhere," I told her, my arms wrapping around her twice, it seemed, as I hugged her.

I passed by another airport newsstand the other day and saw a wall of Josie on a new magazine cover. I plucked a copy for my collection, told the cashier reflexively, "This is my niece," resisting the urge to hold Josie's face next to mine to help her see the family resemblance.

"Beautiful girl," the cashier said, as people always do.

"She is a beautiful girl," I said, and I meant it.

IN THE GENES: Supermodel Josie with aunt Meredith

PHOTO (COLOR)

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By Meredith Maran

Meredith Maran is the author of the book Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic (HarperSanFrancisco).