by Nancy Friday
The Power of Beauty
Our Looks, Our Lives
Nancy Friday
Copyright
The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives
Copyright © 1996, 2013 by Nancy Friday
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2013 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795335204
For Patricia Colbert Robinson
It is, in the final analysis, love which transforms even ugly things into something beautiful.
—BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment, 1976
Contents
Acknowledgments
I. The Gaze
My Mother’s Eyes
Imagining the Beautiful Baby
Pretty Babies Get Picked Up First
The Mutual Gaze and the Crying Storm
The Beauty of Separation: A Second Birth
Giving Up the Idealization of Mother/Women
Men in the Nursery
II. Envy
The Dark Side of Beauty
“Bring Me Her Heart!”
Sibling Rivalry: “What Is Beautiful Is Good”
Learning to Be Clean (and Beautiful)
Poor Vagina, a Rose by Any Other Name…
III. The Years of Invention
Freedom, Ah, the Feel of It, the Look of It!
Seeing Ourselves on the Silver Screen
Three Little Girls Can’t Play Together
The Search for an Ego Ideal
From Nancy Drew to Thelma and Louise
The Power of the Negative Role Model
The Tree House Versus the Sleep-Over
Girls in Each Other’s Arms
IV. The Dance of Adolescence: Girls
Pretty Babies Get Picked Up First, Again
Puberty: “A Farewell to Childhood”
Temple or Sewer? Today I Am a Woman, or Is It a Curse?
In Praise of Masturbation
Anger: “Not a Pretty Face”: Swallow It
The Ugly Denial of Mother-Daughter Competition
The Group—The No-Compete Clause
Looking for My Father’s Eyes
V. The Dance of Adolescence: Boys
The Look of Boys: Beloved Enemy
“Be a Man!”
How Girls Project on to Boys the Ugliness of Sex
A Farewell to Penis Envy
The Look of Anger
“I Am the Father That Your Boyhood Lacked”
VI. Feminism and Beauty
“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”
Jax Pants and the Twist
Wonderbras and Power Suits
Thank You, Dr. Guttmacher
The Looks of Revolution
The Sexual Revolution Versus The Women’s Movement
Feminism Versus Beauty and Men
Women’s Ink/Women’s Blood
Dressing for Success
The Denial of Competition
VII. Men in the Mirror
My Grandfather’s Closet
The Good Provider
“What Does She See in Him?”
Men’s Hungry Eyes
“The Copulatory Gaze”
The Fantasy Fuck
Beauty in the Workplace: Courtship or Sexual Harassment?
“Get Outa My Mirror!”
The Short, Bald Takeover Tycoons and Their Towering Trophy Wives
“The Future of Men’s Beauty Is Largely in Women’s Hands”
VIII. The Penis, the Shoe, and the Vagina
The Penis: Past, Present, and Future
Of Feet and Fetishes
The Codpiece
IX. Changing the Double Standard of Aging
Adultery: Scarlet Letter or Red Cross?
Becoming the Girl We Left Behind: To Hell with the Other Women’s Envy!
Conquering Fear of Sex
Good Witch/Bad Witch
What a Difference a Father Would Have Made in This Third Act Had He Been a Lead Character in the First
Wearing Our Power Beautifully
What Should the Good Witch Wear?
Solving the Riddle of Love and Money
The Prince, the Minstrel, the Tailor, the Wedding: A Musical! Produced by the Girl I Left Behind
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
A book is a journey, or as Bruno Bettelheim might put it, a quest filled with trials and tests. Five very special people helped me past the many obstacles along the way:
Dick Duane was the muse to whom I spoke each morning. His gift is knowing how to talk to writers. His words gave me courage when I needed it most.
Diane Reverand, my editor, always “saw” this book in that way I use this most significant verb, freeing me to find myself.
Julie Roth, my splendid researcher, was the finest gatherer of clues, solver of riddles, and best companion a writer could ask for.
Caroline Fireside was the Wise Woman who, if you are lucky, you meet on the road. She saw many of the dragons before I did and knew the paths around them.
1
The Gaze
My Mother’s Eyes
I am a woman who needs to be seen. I need it in a basic way, as in to breathe, to eat. Or not to be seen, that is the other increasingly attractive option, to give up the lifelong preoccupation of finding myself in others’ eyes, the need to be taken in so that my existence is noted.
Ambivalence explains so much of life. As in, I love you, I hate you. As in, how much to show, how much to let another see of one’s needs, one’s naked self. What bliss to show all and be adored; what agony to be judged, then abandoned after having revealed so much of one’s fragile self. Better to show nothing. But then, who would have seen us?
Do we begin life all open? Is ambivalence born of little rejected bits of the exposed self? Once, long ago, we were naked. We loved—no, love is learned—we needed the first eyes, the arms that took us in. Did they love what they saw? We can’t remember and so we stand at the mirror, unbuttoning the top button, inviting the eye, and then buttoning back up, playing it safe. But love is not safe; when we fall in love every button is undone, the risk of rejection taken. These eyes that look at us promise adoration. Of course we save our hottest rages for the people we love the most. How dare they take their eyes off us after all we’ve shown them? We love them, we hate them. High ambivalence. Aren’t the first suspects in a murder always those who are the nearest and dearest?
Ambivalence certainly explains my frame of mind regarding the influence I am willing to give external mirrors. I take it very seriously indeed, what it would mean to shed the baggage that has weighed me down all my life, others’ opinions, the way they see me. And, quite literally, to travel with one small suitcase, my promise to my husband.
You are already thinking that this is not about you, who are not a clotheshorse or a starer into mirrors. Perhaps you have already begun to disdain my vanity. But your life has been as fashioned by mirrors as mine; none of us escapes the influence that our looks have had on our lives. Later we may choose to live without mirrors, but we begin life very much in need of reflection. Did you begin rich or poor, seen as the Christ Child or left, invisible, to make yourself up?
Perhaps you ducked out of the competition over looks so many years ago that you can’t remember. But once you did want to be
seen, taken in, and loved. If you don’t today, consider that it might be because you tried and lost. Lost to your brother or sister; maybe got lost in the abyss of invisibility, a parent demanding that all eyes be on her or him. Who wants to remember such pain? Perhaps, instead, you won and were hated for it. Envy can be a killer.
The universal power of looks is free-floating, an electrical charge between hungry eyes and the objects of their desire: “Let me feast my eyes on you. Let me take you in.” It is an open market, traded on more exhibitionistically today than at any time in my life. Near-naked bodies demand our attention on the streets, undressed fashions fill the restaurants, the television screens in our living rooms: “Look at me!”
Those of us who are old enough remember a world that prized invisible virtues such as kindness, generosity, empathy, which are out of fashion today. Now we wear our identities on our backs. Who cares about invisible values? “See me or I won’t even know I exist.” Ours is the age of The Empty Package. Vanity is all. You are part of this story, believe me.
In the beginning, loveliness is all. The more drawn a mother is to her child, the greater the likelihood that the child will survive. The more consistently the infant’s needs are met, the more beautiful and good the mother. To each, the other is perfect. When that face is present, life is sustained; absent, there is no warmth, no love. What does the infant know of standards of beauty, or the good mother care? The child may be too fat or too thin, the mother plain, but when I remember the early Renaissance artists’ golden beam painted between their eyes, joining their gazes, they were flawless. When you and I take in that ancient idealization, painted in countless variations by as many artists, we recognize what we once had and lost, or longed for all our lives.
We never outgrow our affinity for what is conveyed in the luscious paintings of mother and child, the most compelling of which I feel to be circular and cinematic in composition, belly round, affording a keyhole through which one spies and feeds on the intimacy of others. And there is that equally heartbreaking icon of the Pietà, Mary holding the dead Christ, her Child, in her arms, His head once again on her breast. There was a man who was jailed several years ago for desecrating that particular sculpture, hacking it with his rock hammer because, he is said to have told the authorities, “Mary isn’t looking at Him!” Indeed, Christ’s mother stares downward, her gaze not on His face.
Those Madonna and Child images were, in fact, my least favorite when I was a young art historian; I preferred the cool asymmetry of the post-Renaissance mannerists to Raphael’s passionate equilibrium. Not for me someone else’s blissful infancy; anyone who had what I had missed, even the divine Mother and Child, aroused envy. The irony is that the simple golden beam linking their gazes has stayed with me far longer than anything I can recall from the mannerists. Twenty years ago, when I was writing My Mother/My Self, it swam up from my unconscious as the perfect picture of earliest mother love, The Gaze captured in a beam of light remembered from a college art class when I was still too young and vulnerable even to let myself know how deeply moved by it I was. Here, within the context of looks and the need to be seen, it is even more apt.
The Gaze is where it all begins. “Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen,” writes art critic John Berger. “The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world.” You and I required that loving focus early on. Our infantile selves cried out for the nonjudgmental mirror of adoring eyes in which we saw ourselves reflected, warmed, taken in, and rolled lovingly around, then returned via The Golden Beam to be stored inside, the self at rest within the self. This is the beginning of self-esteem.
What is even more confusing, indeed is a tribute to the unconscious, is that I was certain that this golden beam motif was everywhere, in countless paintings before and during the early Renaissance; after all, it had meant so much to me. But I cannot find even one today, though I have called various art historians, curators at the Metropolitan Museum, art history teachers at universities. I know it is there, this painting I have magnified into an entire school. Consider memory holding on to an image, refusing to let it go, not because it was what I had actually seen, but was what I missed and grieved for. The Gaze.
Nowadays I say to my husband, “Let’s run away, buy a farm, be with animals, get one of those Vietnamese pigs.” I grow tired of caring about how I look. I want to be loved the way my dog Bongo loves me, uncritically, faithfully. The faithful bit is important in any discussion of the power of looks. The faithful don’t give a damn about how you look. They love you for the inner you, believe more in your worth than you do. Never mind that Bongo’s unconditional love is confused with dependency—without me he’ll die—at root I know that even if I didn’t fill his bowl, he’d adore me regardless of what I was wearing.
Could I actually turn my back on external reflections and live on what is inside? Is there enough? This morning I spoke with Dick, my dear friend who phones each day before I sit down to write. He knows how to talk to writers, having once loved a man whose career as a writer he helped build. He told me that this man committed suicide last night. I remembered a remarkable photo of the two of them, both beautiful men, in which my friend’s eyes stare fixedly at his lover, who himself has turned full into the camera lens. Dick had given this man his own power, not just his worshipful gaze, but had abandoned his own career to focus on his lover’s work. The more successful the writer became, the more he hated his dependency on Dick. He loved Dick, he envied him. Eventually, he bit the hand that fed him. When they parted, the writer’s career spiraled down. Recently he’d had a masterful face-lift, but it hadn’t accomplished its goal. “He killed himself because he was no longer seen,” said my friend. There was nothing inside.
I think of the side of me that wants to abandon looks as the Good Nancy, the sweet child who for many years buried her rage at not catching her mother’s eye, in the way the Christ Child is adored by the Madonna, the gold beam of light like some adorable feeding tube between mother and babe. One day I saw an aerial photo of a big mother jet fueling a small plane in midair, nursing like some big mother cow, and this is what came to mind: a celestial feeding of mother/child regard, replenishment, refueling. Could Jesus have completed his selfless mission without that reflection in his mother’s eyes? I don’t think so.
“Someday,” I say to my husband, “I will recant all my books and ask God’s forgiveness for writing about sex, the ambivalence of mother love, jealousy, and envy.” My husband doesn’t think this is funny. He loves my books. He knows that who I call the Bad Nancy, who writes about forbidden subjects, is at war with the Good Nancy, who never missed a day of Sunday school, and that out of this constant war comes whatever creative fire I have. My husband sees me as Doris Lessing, in a passage from The Golden Notebook, described a man who loved her: “he saw me.” I knew the power of what she was saying years ago, long before I’d become a writer myself. Oh, yes, I certainly understand the magnetic power of a man who sees you.
I have sought out men’s eyes, required their gazes as far back as I can remember. There is nothing like the mystery of an absent father to addict you to the loving gaze of men. I have missed my father all my life, a void that would have remained behind the barriers of denial if I hadn’t become a writer. My mother wanted to protect me, and herself, and so told me nothing, showed me nothing. I wanted to be a good daughter, and so I asked nothing, needing her more than the information: Where was he, who was he? I grew up without his eyes reflecting me, giving back to me his impression of my form and face, my intellect, my sexuality, everything. Perhaps he was a cold man, the kind of person who didn’t like children, wouldn’t have liked what he saw in me. Ah, but you see, I’ll never know. Having nothing, knowing nothing, I have idealized him all my life. I would have been different if there had been a man present, this other half of me.
When exactly did he leave, on what day of what year? No one ever said, or spoke his
name, or cautioned, “Don’t ask about him.” As far back as memory goes, I knew that these were the words that could not be said: “Where is he?” Fact or fiction, what remains to this day is a love affair of what he and I might have had, a search for my self in the faces of all the members of my mother’s family, her beautiful mother who died of sleeping sickness before I was born and, of course, her father, her sisters, and brother, the gods and goddesses of the Pantheon of my childhood. They beamed on me from on high, imbued with all the power I so desperately wanted them to possess. To me they were as glamorous as the great stars of the movies of the forties and fifties to which I was addicted, people bigger than life.
Today my home is filled with photos of my mother’s family, my favorites dating from the years when I was very young, most vulnerable, and unformed. In all their beauty, they speak to me with the reassurance that I am part of them, that there is a physical link between us, and maybe a hint of character too, a touch of my own exhibitionism in the way my grandfather sits his horse, their group glamour at a table at El Morocco. I was never a beauty, but even in my pigtails and steel-rimmed glasses, I told myself I was one of them. Because they let me in, I believed it.
Neither my grandfather nor my uncle ever presented himself as a father substitute; it was I who chose each in that way that children of either sex go looking for the male and female parts of themselves, their genetic missing halves. They look unless, of course, they take in their mother’s anger at men, the fear of betraying her should they desire the enemy. One of the greatest gifts my mother gave me was an unconditional, unspoken permission to turn to others for love. It may sound like a nongift but I can assure you that doctors’ offices are crowded with people whose parent or parents didn’t love them but didn’t want them finding love, closeness, elsewhere.
My mother has always said that when she brought me home from the hospital, she put me in my nurse Anna’s arms. It is a black-and-white movie in my head, the car pulling up, Anna waiting at the curb, bending over to take this bundle, me, from my mother, who is tired, sad, probably relieved and grateful to have someone take responsibility for this second child. She is young, on her own, her husband, my father, dead, or so I will be told, though I’ve never been able to remember anyone actually saying it to me.