The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  There was a period of years, beginning in the late 1960s with the flowering of feminism, when marriages and motherhood were dead subjects. You could walk for miles and not see a pregnant woman. Men themselves were suspect, and a tight relationship with a man jeopardized membership in a consciousness-raising group, where women caught up in the frenzy of sisterhood often divulged the most intimate secrets of their marriages. The New Woman was identified by her job and her success at it. My friend Jane remembers being pregnant in New York in 1971, walking to her job and feeling as if her tummy bore the scarlet letter.

  Now babies are back, and pregnancy is absolutely in vogue. Pregnant models proudly walk the runways, expectant movie stars pose, nearly naked, on the covers of international magazines, and when a woman breast-feeds in public, you can hear the envious sighs of other women. Some older feminists now write bitterly of The Sisterhood not encouraging motherhood from the beginning, for now they have waited too long and are unable to conceive.

  Even before the child is born there are expectations, fantasies that parents have for nine months, no, longer, for some people dream of a child, a specific kind of child, for years. There is a shape, a size, a certain sex, a color of hair created from the parents’ own lives, what they had, or wish they’d had. “All parents, when they’re pregnant, have some picture of their baby, conscious or not,” says Dr. Nancy Poland, who works with expectant parents at the Brazelton Institute. “We think there are three babies that they think about during the last trimester of pregnancy. One is the perfect baby, the Gerber baby, the baby of their dreams. The other is the damaged baby, an image that might be the result of an emotional crisis they have had, or a congenital problem in the family, or even a fight they had. And then there is the baby that is inside them, the real baby. We try through talk, delicate questioning, to close the gap between the baby that exists and either the damaged or the perfect baby.”

  “And if the child is born who doesn’t look or act in a manner that the parents have expected, dreamed about?” I ask.

  “Then the parents must begin to adjust, genuinely come to say, ‘This is my baby.’ Only then can there be a relationship embedded in trust and safety. If this acceptance doesn’t happen, then the baby feels unimportant, unnoticed, invisible, and grows into a child who doesn’t feel accepted for who he or she is.”

  The truth is that parents feel different emotions for each of their children, and looks have something to do with it. How could it be otherwise? Each arrived at a different point in the parents’ lives when, separately and together, they were different people. There is no God-given maternal/paternal instinct that magically wipes clean parents’ visions of how they view themselves and others. Major battles have been won and lost, hostages taken, concessions made over the influence of looks.

  Was beauty important in the parent’s own family, or were kindness, an open heart, achievements stressed? The list is endless, but looks are always on it, somewhere, top or bottom. So how did they fare, these grown people who are now going to beam down upon this infant with eyes that are at best loving, but also skewed, programmed to see what they want to see and to be blind to what they do not want to see?

  There will be a day when couples will be able to choose not just the sex of their unborn child, but also its attributes, according to Sherman Elias, director of reproductive genetics at the University of Tennessee at Memphis. “Today it’s the preference for gender,” he says. “Tomorrow we’re making designer kids.” Will the Power Couple sit at a machine similar to that on which a person designs his new face prior to surgery and “design” the look of their Power Baby? When the beautiful baby can be ordered on demand, adequate finances notwithstanding, will we then be willing to discuss the power of beauty as we discuss the power of money?

  To this day, the birth preference is that the first child be a boy, the second a girl. How many of us have tripped up our parents expectations, not just in our looks but in our sex too? A couple we are close to had hoped for a daughter after their firstborn son. The whole family is gorgeous, and the mother still jokes about how her secondborn issued forth not only another male, but “tinted slightly green….”

  “And I looked like a frog when I was born, all pop-eyed,” he contributes, smiling, for they have told this story many times.

  “And look at him now!” his smiling mother says, for he is the handsomest of the family.

  Almost ten years ago, when I was beginning this research, he took a day off from college to drive four hours for a videotaped interview. I had the feeling then that he had nowhere to put this seemingly irrelevant business of being born not just the wrong sex, but unattractive too. The pop eyes and the odd hue of skin were gone by the middle of his second year, but the nickname, Frog, still occasionally comes up. He never criticizes his family; they are tight, loving. I tell him of my own family, the old rages that sometimes have me grinding my teeth at night while I sleep.

  “In my dreams, all my teeth have fallen out. They’re loose in my mouth,” he says. “I’ve always had that dream.”

  Ah, the old universal rage dream wherein we destroy the teeth that would bite the “bad mother”; to protect her we turn the instruments of destruction against ourselves, gouging out our own teeth. We don’t want to think of her as bad; we love her. Ambivalence. Half the world is grinding its teeth at night, many of us because we were the wrong sex, the wrong look, wrong. Dentists fit their patients with plastic mouth guards as routinely as they clean their teeth.

  He likes the rage dream, something being given a name, an explanation. He is a grown man and can deal with anger, which fits in with his adult picture of himself as a rebel on his college campus, where he has no patience with “political correctness.” Women as victims? Oh, no, that isn’t how he views women’s power. Today he is in no hurry to marry; he reminds me of myself at his age, restless and less interested in making money than in finding out, What does it all mean? In a few days he will leave for Croatia to work with the refugees. I send him a note in which I include one of my favorite movie lines, which John Garfield delivers to a woman he’s just met: “You’re beautiful, you’re level, and you’re different.” The beautiful part he won’t believe, but he certainly knows he’s different.

  A generation apart, he and I take comfort in talking about the “unspeakable,” the anger with people we love, an ancient rage we seem destined always to carry around.

  Referring to the disappointment parents feel when babies don’t turn out to be what was hoped for, dreamed of, psychologist Aviva Weisbord says, “Although it may be unconscious, there is a discontent that remains that the child will pick up as nonacceptance.”

  As for women pregnant with an unwanted infant, a study at the University of South Carolina indicated that they “had a greater than twofold increased risk of delivering a child who died within the first 28 days of life.” The study was not comprehensive, but one of the epidemiologists concluded, “Being unwanted puts children at increased risk of a range of adverse health outcomes, including child abuse and delayed cognitive and social-emotional development.”

  What a responsibility these Power Babies carry: how to live up to the expectations of a Power Couple, especially today when looks, at the expense of less visible attributes, are so loaded with significance. We seem to be at a crossroads where the current overexposure of fashion and beauty maintenance has collided with our well-scrubbed Calvinist-Protestant ethic. Don’t judge a book by its cover, indeed. Why, it is exactly what we are doing, all the while preaching the same homilies our parents preached to us.

  Children must be yearning for straight talk. At school, on television, on the billboards that paper the highways, children see absolutely what beauty buys, the power of it. But nobody, no adult discusses it out loud, explaining the natural attraction we feel to beauty: “You’re a sight for sore eyes!” Nor do most parents explain how envy works, precisely why we want to scratch out the eyes of the adorable one, our baby sister, or that girl at school.
Yes, we know that envy and jealousy are sins, that we aren’t supposed to feel them, but then we do, and it makes us sick, this gnawing at our guts, the desire to destroy. “Be good, be kind, be generous,” the teacher says, but none of these much talked about virtues gets a child anywhere near the amount of attention that the latest pair of Reeboks instantly buys. Meanwhile, children are born into families who pretend that appearance isn’t what really matters. The child grows up maneuvering to fit the lie.

  During pregnancy, parents “transfer many different emotional investments to the child-to-be,” says psychiatrist Ethel Person. She continues, “As Freud suggested, a predominant kind of fantasy investment endows the child with potential to realize our unfulfilled fantasies…. Feelings develop for an imaginary child in a process similar to the choice of a potential lover. Both involve a preexisting fantasy, with both conscious and unconscious components, about who one wants the other—lover or child—to be.” A mother may see the child as the hated self or the idealized self, a replacement child for one who previously died, a copy of a hated sibling, or even “a substitute for the mother’s mother. This fantasy text is often enacted when mother comes to lean on the child…. Examples are mothers who cultivate their daughters as their best friend and confide in them—even when they are in their preteens or early teens—material as inappropriate as their own adulterous affairs…. However the unborn child is imagined, the fantasies affect the mother’s perceptions of and responses to the child…. If [the mother] cannot align the fantasy and the reality, at least to some degree, she may deinvest in the real child or actually come to hate it, viewing it as the clone of a hated husband, parent, or sibling, or as a disappointment, inferior to the imaginary child.”

  We each have our story of how we were seen within the family and can imagine, if we haven’t actually been told, how our parents anticipated our arrival and pictured us in the nine months of our becoming. Other things happen that will determine how our lives turn out, but looks, defined as the image of ourselves in our parents’ eyes, have something to do with it. The promise we saw in their eyes is what we will remember.

  There are mirrors in the offices of plastic surgeons, one side of which shows a face we recognize, which is how we are used to seeing ourselves; the flip side of the mirror shows the face that others see when they look at us. “Oh, how ugly!” I exclaim when shown this latter image. “We don’t know how others see us, though we think we do,” explains plastic surgeon Sherrel Aston. Which face is real? If our parents loved what they saw from the day we were born, would we see the same face in both sides of the mirror, carrying as we did inside us their loving image as “good enough”? Maybe we would not even look in mirrors, having such healthy self-esteem, which is at its core a good opinion of oneself.

  “Even children with defects, who are deformed, can turn out okay,” says Nancy Poland. “It’s the love and the nurturing that they get from parents. They’ve been made to feel beautiful. Someone has talked to them about human worth so that they are able to transcend their appearance.”

  But to make the invisible qualities of kindness, generosity, and goodness believable—qualities that last longer than a pretty face—don’t we first have to acknowledge beauty’s power, especially today? I think we are getting there, growing more and more impatient with the prissy disclaimers that have kept beauty in the closet, guarded by such Pollyannaish sentiments as “beauty is as beauty does.” Nothing announces our readiness more than today’s emphasis on beauty, models being the icons of the age. Several seasons ago, smocked baby dresses, pinafores, and patent-leather Mary Jane shoes stole the fashion limelight. These were baby clothes for adult women who indeed wore them with unabashed enthusiasm. After my initial reaction of horror, the look struck me as absolutely appropriate for a society in desperate need of understanding its beginnings.

  Simultaneously with baby clothes comes fashion’s fascination with enormous breasts—nudity, not just cleavage and transparency, but photos of male models nibbling on, kissing women’s bare breasts, shots of models with a child suckling, the expensive garment opened wide so that the baby, and we voyeurs too, can witness… what? An exercise in discovering through fashion and looks where and who we are? With the millennium at hand, as our society unravels, we have perhaps intuitively returned to view our selves naked, in baby clothes, not yet fully formed, our self-image just beginning. Maybe in bare breasts and baby clothes we will find a look with which we can live.

  The infantilism of our culture is broadcast by our refusal to look and act like grown-ups; motherhood may be in vogue again, but no one wants to look like a mother, meaning old. Women’s and men’s eagerness to steal their children’s fashions, to wear anything the mad tailors have whipped up in the night while we slept, lampoons adulthood. There are no adults, therefore no respected parenthood. The luxury of childhood is also at an end. The very concept of childhood is based on secrets from which the child is excluded, and there are no secrets anymore. Television has seen to that. It is fitting that the riddle of looks and beauty should carry us out of this century and into the next.

  Pretty Babies Get Picked Up First

  Did you know that pretty babies get picked up first, are held more, and get their needs attended to before the other babies? We don’t need scientific studies to confirm our own life’s lessons, that all eyes go to the Gerber baby, the adorable one whose dimpled cheeks and puckered lips send irresistible wavelengths to our hungry eyes: See me! Kiss me! Love me!

  The judges in the studies on infant attractiveness aren’t civilians like you and me, but are professional caregivers in day care centers and pediatric wards. They are people trained to respond automatically to a wailing baby who needs feeding, holding, and clean underwear.

  Mothers too respond to this irresistible attraction to their own pretty babies, cooing and smiling at their children, kissing and holding them more often than do mothers of plain babies. What an auspicious beginning to have this power of beauty that grabs the attention of those who can save our lives.

  And lest we think that this motivation is felt only by women, a study finds that fathers’ expected degree of responsibility for infant caregiving was significantly related to infant attractiveness: “The greater the infants’ attractiveness, the higher were fathers’ expectations for involvement.”

  Writing of her study on mothers still in hospitals with their newborns, psychologist Judith Langlois concludes, “The less attractive the baby, the more the mother directed her attention to and interacted with people other than the baby…. By three months… mothers of more attractive girls, relative to those with less attractive girls… more often kissed, cooed and smiled at their daughters while holding them close and cuddling them.”

  There seems to be no getting away from the universality of beauty’s power, for we also seem to agree on the facial features most likely to get an infant labeled “cute.” In a study done by psychologist Katherine Hildebrandt, line drawings of infant faces, ages three, five, seven, nine, eleven, and thirteen months, were altered millimeter by millimeter, each picture varying in the measurement of forehead, eye height and width, iris size, pupil size, nose length and width, mouth height and width, and cheek size. When the adult subjects were asked to judge the drawings for cuteness, they tended to agree: Cute babies were the ones with short and narrow features and large eyes and pupils and large foreheads.

  As for the babies themselves, they too prefer to look at pretty faces. According to another study by Langlois, babies look longer at attractive faces than at unattractive ones, regardless of their own mother’s appearance; twelve-month-olds prefer to play with strangers (women other than their mothers) and dolls that have attractive faces. Nor does it matter whether the babies are white, black, or Hispanic.

  These studies on infant attractiveness began to multiply in the 1980s, when appearance in people of all ages began once again to take center stage. Fashion designers were being elevated to the rank of celebrities; the birth of the m
odel as idol had begun. But there is something timeless and fascinating when the beauty study findings are focused on such tiny people, barely alive and already loaded with expectations. Here are the results of two more studies by Hildebrandt, in which photos of newborn infants were rated by three groups of adults: male college students, female college students, and pregnant women. All three subject groups perceived the more physically attractive newborn boys and girls as “more sociable, less active, more competent, more attractive, and physically smaller and more feminine” than they did less attractive newborns. Three years later, in 1990, she did a study that confirmed the stereotype that “what is beautiful is good,” but also suggested that “for infants… what is beautiful, happy, and male is especially good.”

  Yet, luckily, life is not a series of quantifiable studies in which we act reflexively. We are pulled momentarily toward a pretty face until something alters our decision before we are even consciously aware of it. So we turn instead to the other face, the one that reminds us of something or someone. There is a study, for instance, in which nurses in a day care center who were more experienced chose to give more attention to the less attractive babies, “presumably to compensate for the lack of attention these children received from the new [less experienced] caregivers.”

  The new scientific findings, weighted with objectivity, resonate because they separate us from emotion, telling us truth, wisdom, in a different voice. Both emotion and cold fact play a part in our understanding of the role of beauty in our lives, a subject so loaded with admonition we would only recently approach an understanding. “What is there to say about beauty? It exists, right?” friends quizzed me when I began this research in the mid-eighties. I wasn’t yet sure, but I knew beauty was once again out of the closet, stalking the streets in high heels, red lacquered nails. The studies quoted above were done in the past fifteen years. Today, nobody questions why I or anyone else is looking anxiously at the effect of appearance on our lives.