The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Overworked as women may be, they will not easily relinquish the nursery role. And though many deny it vehemently, on some level they know that she who bears and raises the human race plays the most powerful role in all of human life. The prospect of giving men parity in the nursery, of seeing some men doing “women’s work” as well as they, is intolerable.

  Without thinking it through—and I do not believe there has been a conscious secret strategy—the oldest, most infallible tactic is employed to ensure women’s monopoly of what has always been ours: Idealize women. Keep woman on that pedestal with a baby in her arms, deny ill feeling and competition between women, and blame men for all that is awry in the world.

  The nursery may still stand as women’s turf, but I see hope for the fatherless child from an unlikely quarter: the emergence of the female fullback, a.k.a. the corporate killer. Take the story in this morning’s paper, the profile of an obnoxiously loud and aggressive, highly successful woman in publishing. If a woman can do the nasty business of the most cutthroat and mercenary men, surely we must accept the corollary that a father can be as good a caretaker as any woman. As more of this type of female hell-raiser gain political office, they throw their weight around, bully, destroy, even call armies to war. In sum, they act like men.

  I embraced Christina Hoff Sommers’s book, Who Stole Feminism?, for its rogues gallery of self-aggrandizing women nefariously hacking their way into profitable areas where they can control as omnipotently as any male dictator. This is life as it is today. “Covert operations,” “dirty tricks,” “plumbers,” and “misinformation,” all familiar terms from the world of Bad Men, today appropriately belong in modern feminism. It is a relief to have some female villains exposed by other women. Sommers’s book opened a window, clearing the air briefly with a gust of fine research on the holy sisterhood; in retaliation, they campaigned to cancel her scheduled appearances to promote her book on television talk shows.

  No less telling, a spate of “Mommy horror movies” has appeared, which I doubt would have found their audience ten years ago. In Serial Mom Kathleen Turner got big laughs for killing people who didn’t recycle their garbage, and Roseanne, who is quoted in the New Yorker saying, “I think women should be more violent, kill more of their husbands,” well, from the millions she earns it is clear that half of America sees themselves or their wives/mothers in an angry/loud, aggressive mom. Caught in the throes of her own dark scandal, Whitewater, Hillary Rodham Clinton might as well be starring in a made-for-television movie.

  What is fascinating is that all these seismic energies coexist today, and without much public comment. Few men criticize the wildly contradictory forces within feminism. Perhaps men think women will self-destruct. Perhaps they are afraid of these giantesses; I often am. But I grow impatient with men; their children are on the line. “Damn it,” I want to yell at them, “do something!”

  No role cries out for men’s involvement more than that of a father involved in his child’s life, from conception on. Unsure that they are qualified, reluctant to interfere without the heartfelt invitation from the “natural” caretaker, men hover at the door of the nursery.

  Life changes nowadays at the rate of geometric progression. Who, for instance, would have imagined twenty years ago that so many “deadbeat dads” would run out on their families, or that so many women would consciously decide, before conception, to leave men out of their child’s life? One does affect the other. My point is this: We must agree on what is best for the child, for we adults are in flux, seemingly out of control in our relationships with one another.

  Psychologist Penelope Leach—England’s answer to Spock and Berry Brazelton—lays it on the line: “Babies and young children have to be cared for by committed adults in suitable environments for twenty-four hours of every day. Society expects all able-bodied citizens of working age to earn the money they need and the satisfaction they crave at specialized all-day jobs in special, distant and unsuitable places. People cannot be in two places at once; ergo one person cannot be simultaneously a solvent, self-respecting citizen and an actively caring parent.”

  Nothing has changed my own life more than the absence of my father. I sometimes think of myself as the first “sperm bank” baby. It was the most constant deprivation I have known, a void that has alternately pushed me forward and held me back, always off balance. Because he was “the great secret,” I obediently did what children who want to please Mommy do: I protected my mother and her secret. It would be years, decades, before I dared to allow myself to think about him. Writing books allowed me to do it, to think about “the secret,” about how much I have missed him, about what it would have been like to have had a father. A child wants the feel of the man and the woman who make up his genetic bank, a mother and father to send him on his journey, no, not send, for the baby will go and go better and farther with the unconditional love of two parents. An ideal? Well, women in the workplace was an ideal. Things change. Evolution.

  Men in the Nursery

  The final decision on beauty, the judgment of Paris, belongs to women, not to men who cannot see us as critically as another woman. Her eyes will look for flaws we know are there, something we never have been able to get quite right. Men don’t know how to look, really look. Weren’t the judgments most critical to our lives the appraisals of another woman? Wasn’t it her eye that never said, “Go, my darling, you are perfect just as you are!”

  At the beginning of life, had there been a father whose eyes reflected us, we would believe men today. Had his arms held us, his eyes looking into ours as he fed us, his hands bathed us, his voice sung to us and scolded us too so that we saw him as both good and bad, men’s eyes would genuinely be the trusted mirrors.

  For whom do women dress? Did you ever doubt the answer?

  Without a father in the nursery, mothers’/women’s eyes are omnipotent. If she didn’t see in us something she loved, some feature, curl of hair, length of torso, we felt inadequate, worse, invisible in her world, which was the world. It was her total control of us in her nursery that was monitored by her omnipresent eye—not unlike the electronic, sensory eye that watches a house, seeing everything—her power to come and go at will, to feed us, warm us, or not. Eventually, in our symbiotic oneness with her we internalize her eye, meaning that we carry her judgments with us. Her sense of right and wrong becomes our conscience. When we eventually join the world of “other girls,” their eyes will own women’s decisions on beauty and all else too, for other women take mother’s place in the mirror. Their eyes follow, control, and judge us. When “the girls” leave us out, when they whisper and look at us critically, their looks cut: Something is terribly wrong, and it goes beyond how we look, to the very core of our being. We are terrified by exclusion from the Group Gaze, as disoriented as when mother didn’t see us.

  “It has often been said that woman dresses to inspire jealousy in other women,” remarked Simone de Beauvoir, “and such jealousy is in fact a clear sign of success.” In the absence of men’s eyes in the nursery, we learn our sureness of the tyranny of beauty from other women, a disadvantage we can no longer afford. Women’s move into the workplace is the greatest “image change” for women in history and, by extension, for men too. Obviously, our self-image, like our self-esteem, goes beyond surface appearance to what we do, how we act, think about, and see ourselves, consciously and unconsciously. Having moved outside the home into a more complex relationship with men, how much more in focus our picture of ourselves would be if a man had raised us, along with mother, from the beginning. Need I add how helpful it would also be for men to have another man around from the beginning, a man’s eyes as well as a woman’s mirroring them, loving them? The single-sex nursery was never perfect, but stood inviolate opposite the single-sex workplace.

  As if on cue, “The New Fatherhood”—as it was titled in a Time magazine cover story—has grown into a powerful voice. Unfortunately, this is not like feminism’s cross-cultural, cross-sexual re
volution. Who could argue that women had a right to an equal wage? This “fatherhood” army remains mostly on paper, a body of research by psychologists, psychiatrists, child care professionals, writers, fathers, and, yes, thank God, some women too. Rightness is on their side, but mass public opinion/sentiment is against them. Why doesn’t it feel as “right” having men in the nursery as it does having women in the workplace?

  There is an impressive library on what we know fathers bring to their children’s lives, and it grows steadily. Let us begin with Grandfather Spock, who abridged his original 1933 advice, “…fathers… get gooseflesh at the very idea of helping to take care of a baby,” to read in 1993, “The father—any father—should be sharing with the mother the day-to-day care of their child from birth onward…. This is the natural way for the father to start the relationship, just as it is for the mother.”

  We know from scientific studies that fathers, just like mothers, have prebirth fantasies of their children, that they get morning sickness, that today 90 percent of them are present in the delivery room when their children are born, that they are elated at the presentation of their newborns, that fathers are able to bottle-feed their babies as efficiently and effectively as mothers, regardless of how much experience the fathers have with infants; we also know that fathers find their babies more beautiful than any other, that they see them as perfect, feel drawn to “their” baby like a magnet, that men automatically speak to their infants in a falsetto voice without being told that babies respond more to higher voices than the lower-pitched.

  “Contrary to the notion of a maternal instinct,” says psychologist Michael Lamb, “parenting skills are usually acquired ‘on the job’ by both mothers and fathers.” As for the fathers, “They feel different, swept away, overwhelmed by their feelings, their self-esteem enormously increased,” says psychiatrist Martin Greenberg. Obviously, there are some fathers who cannot or will not form a tight relationship with their infants, but there have always been mothers unable or unwilling to do the same. We simply didn’t want to abandon our dream of a maternal instinct, one inherent in the idealized mother.

  Given what we now know fathers can bring to their children’s lives, why do we not turn the world upside down to make it a given that the father is expected to be as involved in his child’s life as the mother? Why doesn’t society rush to materialize what has been proven: that babies and fathers bring to each other a missing piece of the puzzle?

  I remember the first time I heard of women deciding to have children on their own, intentionally, without a man involved in the child’s life. It was early spring, close to fifteen years ago, and I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading the paper, when I saw a full-page article with the photos of women holding their babies. I thought it was a love story and dove in.

  I can’t remember if I was more shocked or confused. Why would a woman do this to a child and why would the New York Times print such an article as if it were just another family story? The impression that article left with me has never diminished. As early as it was that morning, I telephoned a woman friend, a therapist, so fair in her judgments that I was staggered by her easy reply: “Oh, sure, I’ve several women patients who have decided to do the same thing.” And then, when there was no response from me, “Nancy, women are entitled to have babies.”

  “But aren’t children entitled to have fathers?” I blurted out, something I would repeat again and again until I learned to hold my peace as some of my dearest women friends decided to make the same, increasingly popular choice.

  Even when fathers are a part of the family, something more granite than our resistance to women entering the workplace keeps us from wanting men in the nursery: It is much more revolutionary to couple a man with his baby. In a world that loses constancy daily, we can accept a woman at the head of a conference table in an office with far more comfort than we can imagine her husband at home, holding the baby in his arms, their eyes locked in Mutual Gaze. Why, we can look at a transvestite with more equilibrium than we can at a man changing diapers in the men’s room, or leaving his job for a year to be with his infant son. Men know this.

  “Society sends men two messages,” says psychologist Jerrold Lee Shapiro, father of two and author of three books on fatherhood. “The first is, We want you to be involved, but you’ll be an inadequate mother. The second is, You’re invited into the birthing room and into the nurturing process—but we don’t want all of you. We only want your support. We’re not really ready as a culture to accept men’s fears, their anger or their sadness. This is the stuff that makes men crazy. We want men to be the protectors and providers, but we are scared they won’t be if they become soft.”

  Even if the mother isn’t there half the time, or doesn’t enjoy mothering as much as work outside the home, and/or she isn’t good at it, the nursery remains women’s inviolate territory. If the baby responds to the father as lovingly and automatically as to her, then who is she, given the definition of womanliness in almost all cultures as “caretaker”?

  Change on the deepest, unconscious level involving feelings that we got from our parents, which they got from theirs, these gut feelings change over generations, if they change at all. First, attitude and behavior have to change, words spoken, acts repeated again and again before the unconscious shifts. Can you think of anything more deeply ingrained than the nursery belonging to women who have the womb, breasts, all the equipment? Even if the image of men raising children doesn’t feel right intellectually, doesn’t look right in the balloon over our heads, we have to stick with it; eventually a new image will evolve, an image in which he looks as appropriate and comfortable feeding and holding a baby as a woman does in an office.

  Close to fifteen years ago in an interview with Berry Brazelton, I remember asking, “How are we going to get more men into the nursery given women’s reluctance to make them anything more than lieutenants rather than equal caretakers?”

  “You must say it again and again in a strong voice,” he replied.

  Very well, we must hammer away at it until that deep, not-so-unconscious image of man is altered to include empathic caretaker. If it still sticks in our craw, consider that studies indicate that men involved in the early care of their children are far less likely to become abusive.

  As it is, 27 percent of all children now live without a father—up from 12 percent in 1970. “In the most perfect of single-parent households,” says American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (ASECT) president Judith Seifer, “there is no way that a child will be as well-equipped to go out into the world and function as an adult, as he is in a two-parent household. It is an extraordinarily selfish decision on the part of the person—male or female—who chooses to be a single parent.”

  In a report released in 1994, it was noted that “nearly one-fourth of all American infants and toddlers live in poverty… [that] children in single-parent households… are more likely to experience behavioral and emotional problems”; even though mounting scientific evidence indicates that children’s environments, from birth to age three, help determine their brain structure and ability to learn.

  The most powerful force working against men getting equal emotional responsibility in the nursery is the invisible but impenetrable refusal we all feel in giving up our image of father/man as unyielding. No one says to a woman, “Prove you’re a woman.” Born female, we are complete in our gender. But for men, proving their manliness is a lifetime job, meaning that it can be forfeited if the beach isn’t taken, if they don’t bite the bullet or bring home the bacon. Men are fully aware of how society sees the man who takes advantage of his company’s parental leave program. His fellow workers may slap him on the back and tell him he’s doing a fine thing, but there is the unspoken belief that a man who leaves his post, even for his child, is less of a man. His associates will not be thrilled that they must now shoulder the responsibility for his work, and his vacated desk will be fought over by everyone beneath him on
the corporate ladder.

  Because it wasn’t how you and I were raised, the image of a man feeding an infant from a bottle the same distance from dad’s eyes as the breast would be (if the breast were there instead of mother sitting in an office, bringing home the bacon), well, we can accept the woman in the office much, much more readily than we can live with this soft-focus man. We must acknowledge how loath we are to relinquish our image of “man the conqueror” before anything of any consequence changes in the understaffed nursery. The not-so-unconscious pressures to keep men distanced from “women’s work” are winning a contest that disenfranchises children and, by extension, society.

  The competitive corporate world, as it exists, has no tolerance for parental leave programs, especially for men. “What [fathers] are hearing, from their bosses, from institutions, from the culture around them, even from their own wives,” says the Time article on fatherhood, “very often comes down to a devastating message: We don’t really trust men to be parents, and we don’t really need them to be.”

  Does it come as any great surprise that the corporate culture clashes with the notion of family leave, especially for men? In 1992, Child magazine tracked father-friendly companies, but so few qualified, or even cared, that the magazine dropped the survey the next year. And when Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett addresses women’s groups and fundamentalist Christian groups, he is roundly criticized for attempting to usurp the “natural” place of women in the nursery.

  Most women want what is best for their children. They do not belong to the political women’s world, but they are nonetheless reluctant to see men taking from them a role that they and their mothers shared. They would never cheat their own child, but in the same study that showed a majority of men wanting to be more involved in child-rearing, between 60 and 80 percent of the women surveyed said they did not want their husbands more involved in child-rearing than they already were.