by Nancy Friday
How ironic that our first reaction to the beauty was admiration, an emotion based on respect. In an envious society, admiration quickly sours and twists in on itself. We do not wish them well, those people in the photographs who live in such a magnificent house, drive such an elegant car, and go to parties with movie stars.
“Bring me her heart!” cried the envious, evil queen when the mirror informed her of the more beautiful Snow White, and she proceeded to devour the heart and liver of what she thought was her slaughtered rival. Now there’s envy!
When the subject of admiration is human beauty, perniciousness escalates, for envy of beauty goes back to the earliest years of life; it has been cooking for a long time. On some level, we all know that if we were beautiful, our lives would be different. It is ludicrous to deny that beauty is a resource that gets the best table, the best breast. Pretty babies do get picked up first. Other things happen to alter this auspicious beginning, and they will happen quickly. When we meet a beautiful person, how can we know that envious siblings, envious parents, envious friends have soured beauty’s life? We don’t care about their hard-luck stories, we wish we’d had a chance to have that face, that body. We are envious and they know it, especially today when polite disclaimers are out of fashion.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Envy is described as living in a cavern, wrapped in thick black fog, a creature that eats snakes’ flesh: “Envy’s face was sickly pale, her whole body lean and wasted, and she squinted horribly; her teeth were discoloured and decayed, her poisonous breast of a greenish hue, and her tongue dripped venom. Only the sight of suffering could bring a smile to her lips. She never knew the comfort of sleep, but was kept constantly awake by care and anxiety, looked with dismay on men’s good fortune, and grew thin at the sight. Gnawing at others, and being gnawed, she was herself her own torment.” Our refusal to understand the power of beauty is in part based on a reluctance to recognize our own moldy, poisonous envy.
I have come to feel that writing this book is my protection, my Wonder Woman’s “golden girdle.” As Graham Greene said, “Writing is a form of therapy,” a remark with which few writers would argue; sitting alone in a room for years isn’t always the choice of a happy, complacent mind. As personal as this odyssey may be, I am not alone in my preoccupation with beauty, which is hot and papered all over town; the covetous looks on the street are alive with hisses, “Why him, her, and not me?” Today is the stuff of Klein, Bettelheim, the Brothers Grimm, tales of people with envious stepsisters covered in warts. Listen to the old tales, the older the better, which means that they were handed down orally, so full of wisdom were they.
Writes A. S. Byatt in “The Sin of Families and Nations,” her essay on envy, “Allegory and fairy tales are solidified morals and psychology, and in the case of envy they work particularly well, because envy works by paralysis and self-consumption—the envious do indeed become Envy.”
Throughout the world, societies different in all other respects have evolved their unique defenses against envy’s desire to destroy. “Welcome to my humble abode,” intones the Chinese mandarin, bowing low at the door of his palace.
We thoroughly expect wealthy, powerful people to enjoy their privilege; even if a part of us wishes them ill for having so much more than we do, we grudgingly understand why they receive preferential treatment. Having made his obligatory bow to the gods so that we will not kill him for his “good luck,” the mandarin or the mogul now proceeds to accumulate even more power—as we would were we in his place.
We do not, however, surround physical beauty with such protective mantras, thus allowing the beauty to comfortably accumulate even greater power. Instead, we invoke the caveat “Beauty is only skin deep.” Such a prissy admonition wags its finger at those who would wield beauty’s power; better play it down, even be blind to it, or best of all, deny it: “Who, me, beautiful?” The worst thing the beauty can do is to try for more than is already possessed. Dumb blondes don’t just happen, they evolve.
In the late eighties, when I was producing a short documentary on the power of beauty, a print advertisement turned up for Pantene hair spray in which a gorgeous, drop-dead model intoned, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” She then goes on, in small print, to explain that she was really just as plain as you and I until she used this product. What a clever copywriter, I thought; this was the perfect ad for our envious era, which has gone berserk over physical beauty. Suddenly the ad disappeared and I was told, sotto voce, that Feminist Headquarters had objected to the inference that we Nice Girls felt envy.
Every society has its arrangement, a deal between the sexes regarding resources and roles. This is how beauty came to serve material wealth. In our society, economic power has traditionally belonged to men, the power of the caretaker to women, who for several hundred years have also enjoyed the monopoly on beauty. It is, however, a monopoly with strings attached. For Paternalistic Society to function, beauty’s ability to divert the eye from the wheel of progress had to be contained. The job was given to women. By relegating beauty to women, men freed themselves from their envy of beauty’s power and made women one another’s jailers.
A mother scanned her baby daughter’s face and saw her future. If she was pretty, mother rested assured that one day a prince would come and take care of her lovely child, buy her a house and give her a place in the community. This was the societal arrangement: To the most powerful man went the prettiest girl. Such a simple formula. So weighty in its implications. A boy, born poor, could go out and seek his fortune, but a girl was born with hers, apparent to all who looked at her.
Rules therefore had to be set up to protect the beauty from other women’s envy, rules that also provided for the women who were less endowed. Most important, in a world where men had all the economic power, women couldn’t afford to let beauty’s advantage pit them against one another. In the women’s world of limited resources, beauty was so critical, it could not be honestly discussed; therefore, codes, screens, euphemisms, the language of the fan were practiced to protect the beauties as well as the have-nots.
Beauty was given her due but kept “in her place” too. Above all, open competition had to be avoided. It would not be tolerable for women to be seen competing over beauty. When competition did happen, it was denied: “Competing? Oh, no, we love one another!”
Today, nothing cuts the newly won economic ground out from under women like our inherited denial of competition, which began as a defense against the envy of beauty in a time of women’s limited resources. We compete nonetheless, calling it by other names rather than learn the rules that would allow for healthy competition.
I’ve never met a woman who actually remembers a cluster of girls sitting down and agreeing, “Now, here they are, The Nice Girl Rules, and anybody who doesn’t abide by them is out.” To be ostracized from women’s world when we were young was to be totally abandoned, for “little women’s world” replaced the attachment to Mommy. I remember a heart-wrenching Jules Feiffer cartoon, the theme of which was “Three Little Girls Can’t Play Together,” because two always leave one out, who runs crying to mother, “Mommy, Mommy, yesterday she was my best friend!” Well, it is a refrain in this book; big girls also leave one another out. I’ve seen it all my life, at work, socially, even (especially) among close friends, where little/big girls still can’t resist “punishing” one girl, thus drawing the others tighter. Until we give up the no-compete clause and allow ourselves to recognize that beauty is no longer our one resource, we will enviously continue to police one another.
Beautiful women tell tales of a childhood in which they learned to know their places. They didn’t try to shine too brightly (didn’t compete) in other areas, such as intellect, sports, leadership; their cup was perceived as already too full. “Who, me, pretty?” the lovely little girl said, denial being the first and most effective defense against envy. If mother didn’t communicate the lesson, a sibling did. Sooner rather than later, other girls let the beaut
y know the wisdom of being “beautiful but dumb.” It is one of those “implicit” early memories, an anxious feeling rather than an “explicit” memory of being told not to shine brightly in class or on the playing field. It is a memory kept alive whenever an opportunity is offered to excel at anything aside from beauty.
Twelve years of Women’s Rules have been learned by the time adolescence rolls around, and the beauty becomes the most powerful boy’s obvious partner. In time, when youth and beauty fade, or when the powerful man leaves her for a younger woman, the once beautiful woman has little to fall back on. The homily of her youth has come true: Beauty is only skin deep; there is nothing inside—no wit, no speed, no intellect.
Today a mother has no way of knowing whether her beautiful baby girl will grow up using her looks to win a wealthy man or to build her own empire and leave men out of her life. What hasn’t changed is beauty’s purchasing power: what it buys a woman, and increasingly today, what it buys a man. As beauty’s role evolve, by which I mean how we are going to use our looks to get what we want, you can be sure that ever present will be beauty’s evil companion, envy, that venomous emotion of which nothing good can be said. Now that men and women share the power of material wealth and beauty, we would be wise to study envy, become more conscious of its feel so that we recognize it before we injure people whom we admire and love, for this is precisely what envy seeks: to bite the hand that feeds us.
“How remarkable it is that one can admit to feelings of guilt, shame, pride, greed and even anger without loss of self-esteem,” says anthropologist George Foster, “but that it is almost impossible, at least in American society, to admit to feelings of envy…. In recognizing envy in himself, a person is acknowledging inferiority with respect to another; he measures himself against someone else and finds himself wanting. It is, I think, this implied admission of inferiority, rather than the admission of envy, that is so difficult for us to accept.”
Women’s entry into the workplace is an economic upheaval that alters the oldest societal contracts between the sexes. The rules surrounding the uses of beauty, by which we have lived for hundreds of years in Patriarchal Society, are fast becoming obsolete in this oncoming society, which, alas, I would call Pre-Matriarchal. The formidable defenses that once protected the sexes from envy of one another’s power aren’t holding up too well.
As for women’s own world, we no longer have to rely solely on our looks as our meal ticket. Women today have economic muscle. Having spent good money—not Daddy’s or our husband’s but our own—on clothes, makeup, the beauty parlor, we’re no longer so agreeable about playing down our looks. We want to take it in. “Who, me, pretty?” just doesn’t go down the way it used to.
Also, we’ve noticed that men in our office don’t devalue praise or hang their heads boyishly and turn away from a compliment for work well done. Now they too are getting into looking good, and when someone compliments them on the new Armani suit, they don’t say, “Oh, this old thing?” Men take the compliment and put it to work for themselves. It isn’t that men are less envious, it is simply that they envy assets other than beauty and usually react to the feeling of “Why him and not me?” more competitively than do women. Men have been raised to act, to perform, rather than to fade, demur. As men continue to move deeper and deeper into women’s oldest power base—and they will—women will be hard-pressed to employ the little girl denials of envy in opposition to beautiful men who step eagerly forward to snatch beauty’s rewards.
Now, at the turn of the century, men’s and women’s roles are up for redefinition and, appropriately, our looks are changing inside and out. Thinking of ourselves differently, women look into mirrors and expect to see some new reflection of what we are becoming. We can’t afford the skewed vision our mothers saw staring back at them, wherein all the joy was sucked out of beauty power for fear of arousing envy. Certain feminists chant that competition is the evil legacy of Big Bad Patriarchal Society, men the brutes; they would like to extend the “no compete” rule of women’s world into the workplace, meaning that they would control the marketplace with the same denials that for centuries regulated beauty’s power. Oh, they would compete and heads would roll, but on their faces would be those painted smiles that contradict ill feeling, hostility, and murder; Nicole Kidman had it down pat in the film To Die For, where she maims and destroys, deflecting suspicion with her Nice Girl smile.
But what of men’s feelings regarding the Women’s Movement having brought beauty’s power to the workplace? So long as they had all the economic power, the diffidence men felt toward women’s beauty was lessened. The sting was removed. The arrangement was codified: To the conqueror went the spoils. No matter how old and ugly the man, the deal was never questioned. It still isn’t. Seeing the exquisite freshness of the young woman opposite the swollen, blotched face of the old patriarch, we shrug. After all, exchanges as deeply entrenched as those surrounding beauty and wealth don’t go away quickly, and twenty-five years is a speck in time.
The irony is that women feel easier about entering the workplace, providing for ourselves, challenging and acting like men than we do in confronting one another over the uses of beauty. We still practice the denial of beauty’s power out of fear of reprisals from other women. At times it is as if men don’t even exist.
For instance, when a woman walks into the office in her expensive Chanel suit or high heels and miniskirt, whose eyes is she testing as she walks between her colleagues’ desks? The other women are evaluating what she spent on that suit, deciding whether or not her legs are good enough for a mini; other women’s eyes are stripping her naked and imagining themselves in such an outfit; comparing, evaluating, judging. It is fine to wear the Chanel suit; after all, this is what we work for, to spend our money as we wish. What is irresponsible is not to appreciate what beauty sets in motion, how quickly admiration becomes envy. If we can’t live with or diffuse the whispers, the barely veiled resentment in the critical eyes, we have invested our money unwisely.
Envy isn’t going away any more than women are going to leave the workplace and return to total economic dependence on men. What is required is that women see themselves as men always have: as powerfully beautiful as the first woman who held them. Born of woman, raised by woman, a man has the truest understanding of the uses of female beauty. Before women can enjoy the rewards that come with the beauty we now work so hard to purchase, we must learn to see our beauty as power.
Some feminists argue that an army of powerful women is one that absolutely denies nursery angers, meaning anger at other women. The enemy is “out there,” this line of reasoning goes, not here in us Nice Women. “Take Back the Night” marches feel good, but only lead to more rage because the target is often inappropriate. Yes, some evil men hurt women, but men are not the original origin of our deepest rages. Not even men want to admit to the real source because it is so belittling for men to prod an old wound inflicted by the first most important woman in all of our lives.
The unexamined life is one of denial. Denial eats up energy, and, as we know, an army marches on its stomach. The furnace requires constant stoking to turn out sufficient smoke screens to obscure what we don’t want to see. Maybe twenty-five years ago when the army was assembling, we women needed to spend our energy hoisting ourselves out of the iron tenets of women’s traditional world. Not surprisingly, the first thing to go was the wardrobe, the pretty costumes slipped over our heads as children to show off our worth. We marched in jeans.
But neither nursery anger nor the importance of beauty has gone away. We have new options, thank God, but they are less available and enjoyable than they should be; buried battles won and lost with parents and siblings over issues of beauty hold us back. Women’s new alternatives aren’t going to make the power of beauty go away. We may find more lasting identities in the work of our choice, but whether we decide to eschew appearance or pursue its prizes is going to be influenced by what happened in the first years of life.
Our blind eye to beauty omnipotence has been passed down through generations. Given that Patriarchal Society was based on material wealth as the ultimate goal, beauty’s potency had to be denigrated in every way possible. Of course we have no mantra to ward off the envy of beauty.
We need to lighten the load of polite denials. I wrote My Mother/My Self out of a fear that I would never feel whole and independent if I had to live with the homilies of denial that kept that Nice Girl smile on my face. Actually, I began that book in a state of innocence; the anger would only surface as I got further into the writing, which pulled it out of me, terrifying me and sapping my vitality, making me sick. For way back in the first years of life I’d built emotional conduits to channel rage away from Mommy and on to safer targets. All the while, other energy had to constantly rebuild and prettify my relationship with mother/women: “Angry at my dear old mom? You must be joking! Don’t we have great times together? Why, I have a better relationship with my mother than anyone I know.”