The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  5

  The Dance of Adolescence: Boys

  The Look of Boys: Beloved Enemy

  One night on the cusp of adolescence we girls and boys who had grown up together played a game for the last time on the broad beach of Sullivan’s Island. It was called Red Rover, a game in which two teams faced one another, girls and boys holding on tightly to one another’s arms, creating a human chain that members of the opposite team attempted to race toward and break through. A person who broke the line got to take back to his or her team a member of the opposing line. We’d played the game for years, but that night there was a new excitement, something not altogether different from what we felt at our recent introduction to the dance at Madame Larka’s classes at the Hibernian Hall, where we also stood opposite one another, waiting to choose, if you were a boy, or be selected, if a girl.

  But tonight, true to the nonsexist rules of the game, having broken the line, I was entitled to take back whomever I chose. I looked at the boys. Without thinking, I said, “You’re all so beautiful, I don’t know who to choose.” These may not be the exact words, but they are close enough and were no sooner spoken than I was overwhelmed with shame. But they had come from the heart. I have always been a lover of men and of their beauty. From the awesome pleasure I take in their faces and forms, I imagine how much men have to gain in seeing themselves as I do.

  While I yearned for boys’ love in adolescence, I recognized, if only unconsciously, how much was being asked of them. So like a boy was I in my leadership, height, and courage that I remember wanting to help them, even as The Rules forbade it: “Here, let me assist you with this wooing business, for I am besotted with you and know exactly where the dance is heading, so desperate am I to be held.”

  The power of beauty isn’t new in adolescence, for we have all been here before. Though we have tried to turn our backs on early childhood, pushed the painful memory of mother’s preference for our lovely brother or sister into oblivion, now, in the supremacy of sexual beauty, it all comes swimming up again: the old jealousy, envy, the memory of loss. Does the boy dare try again to win the beauty, is he good enough, does he have the prerequisite looks, the power to match hers? Dare he risk defeat in front of his comrades?

  For five, six years now his need of women’s/mother’s love has been lessened by a growing solidarity in the camaraderie of other boys, the powerful identity it gives him as different from women. Abruptly, which is how it happens, the beauty of girls sweeps all before it, demanding ascendancy by its undeniable effect upon him, reducing the strong, developed, self-assured boy into a slavish, gawky suitor; yes, the attraction is exciting but fraught with fear. He may not consciously associate girls’ power over him with what he felt in opposition to his mother, but it is there, somewhere in his memory.

  In his awakening to the beauty of girls, is the boy really so different from Sleeping Beauty? Forget sexist roles for a moment. For some of us, there is no sight more heart-stopping than that of the youthful male body; the Greeks had their heads on straight. It is all a matter of training, of the eye becoming accustomed to faddish styles of dress, fat versus thin, and ideal beauty as male or female. In my mind’s eye, I see the adolescent boy extending his hand to the girl, he all perfection, not unlike Michelangelo’s male nude figure at the dawn of creation. No, more precisely, at the dawn of being created, for in that elegant male outstretched hand there is the expectation of mutuality, that the girl will meet him halfway. In his eyes, she has so much power and he, having been away from the female touch for several years, is in need, once again, of being seen, being visually regarded and found acceptable in his self.

  His memory of beauty is mother, who had all the power in the world; while he lived in her domain, his need of her eyes on him was total; he grew on her gaze, fed off it, took comfort and strength from it. In time he squirmed under her loving fingers, combing the hair away from his eyes so that she might look more deeply, see him. Now grown to puberty and cowed by the beauty of girls, he rubs the sleep from his eyes, abruptly remembering something of female power. While he can’t remove his gaze from the girl’s beauty, he is as much in need of being recognized as she is. How could he not be? Had it not been written that males must be the voyeurs and females the exhibitionists, this adolescent dance might be more cooperative. As it is, the boy rudely learns that no one sees him, no one really looks at him. And we wonder why men sometimes stare at us with anger in their eyes.

  Imagine being the invisible sex on whom no adoring eye, filled with desire, fastens. The Gaze, with its restorative powers, was life’s first feeding tube and never loses that power. But men are taught to turn away, it being unmanly to be seen basking in The Gaze. Instead, the boy sees the girl’s eyes go past him to his car, his prowess on the playing field, his status, her eyes totaling his worth like an adding machine and searching for envy in the eyes of the other girls.

  Yes, today she makes money of her own, but she wants her old options as well as the new. Should she reject him, he must appear to be impervious. Girls have a monopoly on showing pain, and he wouldn’t want his comrades to see him with a chink in his armor. It hasn’t turned out the way he’d dreamed before adolescence, when he had plans, wide horizons. Now he understands the power of the briefcase, that leather box that made his father seem old before his time.

  He is only thirteen and is learning to pose, hoping to pass as something he isn’t. Girls have expectations and judge a boy differently than other guys do. Girls know what they want; while they are both formidable and mythic in their beauty, they want to be skillfully led. What does a thirteen-year-old know of escorting a goddess who has been practicing The Goddess Walk? What does he know of her fantasies of him, of the access to her self that she will give him—but only if he convinces her of his mastery? In his recent monastic life he had thought himself well off without women. Now, here they are, wise in the lore of girls’ magazines, practiced in the fine art of intimacy but nonetheless demanding his mastery. Lead?

  It wouldn’t occur to the girl that the boy hasn’t been anticipating her arrival, hasn’t rehearsed the requisite skills, hasn’t been conjuring up the vision of her that she is so desperate now to see in his eyes, the mirror that will show her to herself as unblemished. Never having been emotionally distanced from the first years of life, she has kept alive in memory the Golden Beam between hers and the caretaker’s eyes. Now, she reactivates that bliss of being adored and cared for, deftly substituting the boy for mother.

  How can the boy, having been on a totally different journey, comprehend that the girl wants to feel like his beloved baby whose thoughts he can read and over whom he has total mastery? Why, to him she has all the power! Hasn’t she controlled every move so far, allowing him access inch by inch? He reads her acquiescence in his arms as the meeting of peers, with her having the edge, meaning that only she can make sense of his sexuality, humanizing the brooding masturbatory dreams that until now had no heart.

  For her, the lowering of her drawbridge to him has said, I am yours, meaning that he will make her sexual and take responsibility for her. How can the adolescent boy comprehend the significance of her surrender and the expectations she now has of him? Yes, he is grateful, perhaps even loves her, but wasn’t it a joint venture? What does he know of how intimacy has totally changed her vision of herself and her new expectations of being transformed in his eyes? What does he know of mirrors? He has taught his eyes not to give him away, not to betray him. He sees her globally, while to herself she is an assemblage of parts, each imperfect until now, until him.

  Now that he has transformed her, she needs his eyes on her alone, recognizing when she is unhappy, when she has parted her hair on a different side, when she has a pimple or wears a new sweater. This is how mother/girls look at her. When he fails, she cries, You never loved me! Once again she learns that only women know how to appraise one another; only women, she deduces, know how to love.

  Men’s eyes are seldom as credible as other wome
n’s, except perhaps in literature, as in Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, where she describes the adolescent Alba, who has fallen in love with Miguel:

  For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser’s mistake than anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel’s eyes.

  What of the very handsome boy, seeing himself in mirrors, hearing people comment on his beauty? Under the Old Deal, men were forbidden to parlay their looks; yes, they saw their reflections, knew women were attracted to them. But like the adolescent girl who must walk more slowly and be less, the boy must give up knowing too consciously what his beauty buys him. How very twisted.

  I regret that I did not give the boys of my adolescence more awareness of the power of their beauty. It would be years before I admitted even to myself how their look intoxicated me, activating parts of my body in ways I probably attributed to indigestion, so stupid was I of how male beauty could make you crazy. No one had prepared me. No female spoke of the excitement of gorging one’s eyes on the spectacle of male beauty. So profound was the silence, I suppose I took it to mean that looking was verboten.

  The societal deal of female beauty in exchange for male protection had blinded us as surely as men were defended against their wanting to be seen. Of course men are angry, as angry as we women; deprived of the healthy narcissistic pleasure of being seen, adored, taken in by loving eyes, men act like the invisible creatures we have made them.

  My earliest awareness of the beauty of the male form, the arousing experience of looking at men’s bodies—seen but not seen, mind you, for visual lust was forbidden—was the spectacle on the parade ground at The Citadel. In a ritual that Charleston girls observed on Friday afternoons, we parked our cars along the perimeter of the field and perched ourselves prettily atop the front fenders as the cadets marched past to the strains of John Philip Sousa. We girls saw ourselves as the confections, the center of visual regard, waiting in our cashmere sweaters and pearls for the cadets to break ranks and come choose us. What a farce.

  Is there a more sexually exhibitionistic spectacle to watch than the collective beauty of a corps of cadets in their fitted uniforms, the skintight jackets with their seductive dark stripes down the back, the S curves that splayed the shoulders, hips, and asses of our sweethearts. How strange that none of us spoke of it, our hypnotic enslavement to that sight, its imprint on our fantasies. So rigid are the sexist roles of exhibitionist and voyeur in the South, that we girls twitched in self-conscious awareness of our own beauty, crossing our legs so as to be sure that we would draw the men to us.

  Last night we watched the 1949 film The Heiress, with Olivia de Havilland playing the plain daughter who is disdained by her cold father for her lack of looks and is rejected by the handsome fortune-hunter when he discovers that her father had threatened to disinherit her should she marry him. This morning my husband is bleary-eyed. “I was disturbed by that movie all night,” he says. “They were so cruel to her. What an awful father, and Montgomery Clift was no better. Why, she was the only person in the film you would want to spend time with. Just because she was plain…”

  “You identified with her,” I say.

  “I guess I did identify,” he says. “There she was, perfectly happy in her simple life until her looks suddenly became important.” My husband has never forgotten the disruptions and rejections of adolescence; no amount of success washes it away. He never believes in his later-found looks. None of us does.

  Raised on two different planets, boys and girls meet in adolescence, the one without knowledge of the other. While he may initially feel ineffectual, her dreamy vision of him as the in-charge initiator is a role he would very much like to fill; it is grand to be seen as larger than life when you are all thumbs. He woos her. Only afterward does he realize the full scope of her expectations. He feels bad. She feels betrayed.

  Young women sacrifice so much at the advent of adolescence and then hate men for not rewarding us adequately for everything we gave up for them. But boys did not ask it of us. We did it, drank the Kool-Aid and then hated boys for not raising us from the dead with a power they never possessed in the first place.

  Girls never consider what the adolescent boy has left behind in his yearning to be loved by us. In the years just prior, he had come to believe through the fellowship of other boys that males had a strength equal to mothers; not all boys like one another, but a sense of ease had come to be expected when good fellows got together. “Men Only” wasn’t initially directed against women but was for themselves, a need born in the female-dominated first years of life. Now, in adolescence, here come the girls! As thrilling as girls are, boys learn quickly what they must bring to the bargaining table if they are to win a beauty.

  It is scarier than ever to be an adolescent boy these days, to have to deal with the very knowing, demanding young women raised on a Matriarchal Feminist agenda that sees the boy as Public Enemy Number One. The word feminist need not even be applied; the girls growing up in Fort Worth with a mother who repudiates the women’s movement are still part of a culture shaped by its antimaleness. But fathers still refuse to address the plight of their sons, their adolescent predicament at finding themselves totally unschooled in behavior opposite The New Girl of postfeminism. I have to assume that the neglect is one of choice.

  Behaviorists tell us that parents see themselves in their adolescent children, that this age in particular reawakens their own experiences. If a father went through hell in adolescence, does he want to make his son’s life any easier? Maybe he thought the hard knocks he took are what made a man of him; maybe he’s envious of his son’s having all the things he never enjoyed, which only his hard work has won. Yes, this is the reason he worked so hard, but now that the boy is on the brink of life, at a time when father suddenly feels his age, the older man also feels envy, resentment.

  Patriarchal Society taught father that men are expected to be powerful and in charge, devoid of “weak” feelings; let the son suffer in these years, which are a kind of boot camp for life, father decides. It probably isn’t conscious, but it assuages the envy of youth. However, today’s adolescent girls aren’t what they were in father’s day; they aspire to become economically powerful too. The boy’s future isn’t at all certain; the definition of a Real Man isn’t what it was in father’s day.

  Without parents, teachers, popular literature of his own that informs him of what lies ahead and how very complex and contradictory The New Girl is, the boy is worse off than his father was at his age. At least father had a societal deal in which women saw him as necessary to their economic survival. It wasn’t a great deal, and we’re well rid of it, but that still leaves today’s adolescent male doomed to stumble with girls who are as emotionally needy and demanding as ever but who can, ultimately, survive without him.

  What can the young man today ante up to match the girls’ power? He aspires to the traditional male power of wealth, but he works on his looks too, consults his mirror, buys more clothes and beauty products than any generation before him. The power of women’s beauty, now buttressed by their recent acquisition of what used to be male power, forces adolescent boys to reevaluate the influence of looks for themselves. It is a wise boy indeed who understands the currency of beauty.

  If young men are getting into l
ooks more readily today—like my friend Joni’s eleven-year-old son who religiously mousses his hair every morning and checks himself repeatedly in the mirror—it is because the danger of male vanity has been removed: A male is no less male for being handsome, wearing great clothes. Feminism has done this for men, has steadily, slowly opened the closet door to reveal a wardrobe increasingly varied as any female’s.

  As the period of adolescence grows ever longer, giving our child/men more and more time to grow out of childhood and to imagine a future superior to that of their parents’, we the older generation should better understand the potential of these years; they might, with our help, move beyond our loveless world and create a new moral order. Instead, our eyes reflect envy of our children’s youth; we no longer act like adults, tutors, respected disciplinarians.

  Having created our children as spenders, we make more money than ever from them, not just addicting them to spending but then turning around and stealing whatever it is they have created in their effort to be unique. Adolescents are going to require more than their age-specific moral and genital passions to step over us and change the world they have inherited.

  Today, boys’/men’s rage spills over in all directions, sometimes upon women: More than one million incidents of domestic violence occur in America annually. There is no question that one reason men strike out has to do with how women see them. As much as women’s lives have changed, we still want men to bite the bullet and take care of us too. It is nowhere more obvious than in the adolescent.