The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Ambivalence. When women work outside the home and it becomes essential for the husband to be the caretaker, even though they have agreed on their roles, many women remain conflicted. “[My husband] and I have a balance so far because I’ve been breast-feeding,” one mother confides. “But it’s going to be harder when I stop.”

  It is difficult to give up or even share a role as powerful as raising members of the human race. Until now, we have always chosen to read the mother’s role as one more of sacrifice than power. Well, men want some of that power too, and they are willing to make the sacrifice.

  The argument isn’t whether men have or don’t have nurturing qualifications, whether they can care for a baby as well as women. That has been proven. The issue is that we can afford to abandon the traditional womanly-looking mothers/women to the competitive workplace far more easily than we can part with our fantasy of Big Daddy. I sometimes think that his not having been emotionally present in our early lives has allowed us to cling to our exaggerated vision of fathers/men. And father is nowhere more opposite mother than in his genital erection.

  Dependent as we were on mother for everything, we could not afford to show her or to admit to ourselves the other side of our love, which was rage. But father can take it; father is big, tough; his granite-hard look is impervious to our anger. Tough-looking men keep us sane, and mother—whom we can’t afford to lose—safe from us. A man can take all that fury that our first enemy, who had all the power in the world, couldn’t. What would we do if men lost their hard selves, their erections? We would have to deal with the rage at its original source.

  We would send our men to fight and die in a foreign country, and they would go, more readily than we would see them enter the nursery. On some level we know that the current disintegration of society has something to do with women’s movement into the workplace and the subsequent lack of child care in the home. Our queasiness with the image of men doing women’s work isn’t all that far from consciousness. How interesting that the look of a man with a papoose is more upsetting than that of the corporate female captain, she who orders men around, makes big money, and is as tough as nails. But this is precisely what I mean: The big, bossy woman in the workplace is intimately familiar. In her tyranny she reminds us of the Giantess of The Nursery. To keep ourselves safe from her, and her from us, we need a monolith, a Schwarzenegger; lately he has also become the dumping ground for all of feminism’s complaints: Bad men! Where would women put their bile if men’s look mellowed?

  Today it seems inevitable when another New York Times article announces, “Pregnant Teenagers Are Outcasts No Longer.” And there is the photo of an adolescent girl feeding another child, her baby, and in the text, “Today, pregnant teenagers are even beginning to be viewed by some of their peers as role models.” Have we gone mad? Certainly no pregnant girl should be ostracized, but glorified, a “role model”?

  As with the story fifteen years earlier—which I couldn’t help feeling had contributed to this one—I wondered, Where is the public outcry? Shouldn’t a child have a chance for a father as well as a mother? The irony is that even as this adolescent girl’s place in society worsens, we continue to present this image in the press and on television of the single mother as part of life as usual, while a father is extraneous.

  “The women who try it alone come eventually to the realization of the need for a man,” Berry Brazelton told me years ago. “If you can help them see that nurturing had better be a shared proposition, they often come to it in time to save the child, which is my goal. It’s one thing for a woman to want a child all her own, but I get worried about the kids. ‘What do I tell my little girl about her father?’ a mother with a three-year-old asked me. ‘What?’ I said in amazement. ‘I know a little girl needs a fantasy of a father,’ she said. ‘She certainly does!’ I replied. ‘Do I make one up?’ she asked. And I replied, ‘I think you ought to find out about the father, let her know enough about him and at least give her some idea of why she’s different from everybody else.’ And the woman said, ‘You know, I never wanted a man at all, so when I went to get inseminated I told them not to tell me anything about the father.’”

  When I was growing up, I never knew another child without a father. I told myself that it didn’t matter. I had to.

  The mysterious absence of my father, I am sure, also has much to do with why I choose to write about forbidden subjects. My husband jokes that my epitaph will read, “What does it all mean?” Well, what does it mean, this idealization of mothers without husbands, women who choose to leave men out of the act of procreation? Do we think this has nothing to do with men’s anger today, or with the move to center stage of looks/fashion/the model as an icon, men’s decision to get their share of beauty power? It is all of a piece.

  On their own, most men will not enter the nursery to help raise their children without their wives’ approval. If ever there was a feminist issue, this should be it: to give a child a chance at having two involved parents, two adults who work out the warring issues between themselves instead of idealizing themselves and their individual adult rights over those of the child. Instead of drawing up ever longer lists of crimes committed by men against women, we should be asking, Why? Why do men commit these crimes of which they are accused? Why are men so angry, and what is the origin of a rage that makes them abuse women and children? These men are our fathers, husbands, lovers, friends, the seed of our children. Men can’t/won’t ask these questions of themselves (nor do we women ask how many of the same crimes we ourselves commit, and how much we contribute to the fury that drives a man to crime).

  Perhaps stoic silence is the last shred of what being a man means in this day of “women who hate men.” Perhaps men’s reluctance to defend themselves against women’s accusations is what my husband called his own “Jell-O defense,” opposite the angry women who entered his office to harangue—they would scream, shout, then cry; he would sit, nod, and then they left.

  Men don’t write much about their pain and anger at competing with and losing to women in the workplace. This is the area in which men traditionally prove themselves. Their fathers never had to compete with and lose to a woman, not here. Nor were their fathers consistently accused of the litany of crimes women today say men commit against them. If men were accusing women of harassment, child abuse, and rape—and some rightfully could—there would be a furious chorus of women defending themselves in emotional, articulate voices. The few male voices who have spoken up against anti-male feminists sound as lonely as moose calls; a “real man” just doesn’t join in.

  My feeling is that as more men realize what they are losing, this is changing. The pioneers in the men’s rights movement require steely backbones, for they are on tenuous ground and nowhere so much as in the issue of child care. Even when the woman cries, “I need you!” to her husband, when he enters and holds the baby, she criticizes. He wants to demand that she treat him as an equal, but in the nursery, her critical voice reminds him of another woman, the mother who dominated him. So he leaves.

  How good it would be for the man as well to hold his child, to be reunited with the tender part of himself most men have forgotten how to express. Just as women in the workplace have reacquired skills and talents lost in adolescence, men can find the missing part of themselves in caring for a child. Given the man’s independence and resilience, already practiced for a lifetime, he will be a fine teacher of loving separation for his child. Studies have already found that fathers do not hover over their small child’s eager desire to explore the world as closely as mothers do; father watches, encourages, but does not transmit a mother’s anxiety.

  By the nature of their lives, men are already equipped to encourage the process of maneuvering out of and away from the loving arms that hold a baby; they do not see danger where it doesn’t exist. Father’s own mother may have tried to keep him close forever, but because he was male, she was reluctant to discourage his tentative moves away from her. Which is precise
ly how separation, The Second Birth, begins: an exploratory crawl into the next room, powered by a baby’s curiosity about his or her life. The more bountiful the blissfully symbiotic union, the more eager the baby is to move on.

  “Fathers bring a different kind of nurturing to a child, which complements the mother’s,” says Shirley Hanson, professor of family nursing at Oregon Health Scientists University. “Where women tend to cuddle and hold the child close, fathers play more psycho-motor kinds of activities, toss the kids up in the air, then put them on the ground and step them, help them walk, use their legs, move out and into the next room. They broaden the child’s horizon in this way. They enhance a child’s physical, social, and mental growth and development. This playfulness adds a different dimension than women bring. A mother is actually more able to fulfill her potential with a father present.”

  I doubt that most women would call their decision to control procreation and caretaking “competitive,” for we have been raised to deny the emotion even as we feel it. Oh, yes, I would definitely call it competition, this angry denunciation of men, the desire to create a matriarchy in which women will continue their competition with one another, calling it, you can be sure, by some other name.

  Competition begins early in a child’s life. Not all men carry it to deadly limits, but they do know the rules of how to win and lose, which many women haven’t yet learned. What takes the fear out of life and opens the heart to the larger adventure is practicing, until the sureness is internalized, separation with the two most loved and important people in our lives. “I can have my own life and the unconditional love of my parents too. It is not either/or. I know this because from the very beginning I have practiced these moves away from them and into my own identity again and again. Creating my self has never felt like the loss of them. This knowledge is money in the bank for my life’s journey.”

  I see my relationship with my mother nowhere as clearly as when I write about sex, where I am faced with what she taught me silently, without saying the words: Sex is dirty, bad, my genitals ugly and unacceptable. Her mother taught it to her just as mothers and daughters today continue the legacy of The Cloaca, which is Latin for sewer. This lesson of The Cloaca begins in the earliest communication between mother and child and is the hardest image for women to unlearn. Mothers don’t have to speak to communicate. But the unmentionable Cloaca is part of the emotional glue that keeps us from separating into our own safe selves; every time we part our legs, no, every time we even think of sex, the image of our own unappetizing parts comes alive as a negative, uneasy feeling. Imagine. After all my writing about sex, the inherited taint of The Cloaca remains.

  Oh, Dad, poor Dad, would that you had been there! Would that a loving man in that first precious year of life, which never gets a rewrite, had communicated to me men’s far more liberal and healthy attitude toward genitals. Isn’t this dirty place that will never be prettified at the root of women’s conviction that our faces and the rest of our bodies too are never lovely enough?

  If my fears of being abandoned turn up at night in my dreams, this repugnance for what lies between my legs is fodder for my daytime fantasies, those erotic plots that get their energy from defying my mother/woman’s rules against that forbidden, foul little area between my legs. In my sexual fantasies, men overwhelm women’s legacy by adoring what they see.

  Knowing men, loving them, how can I not wish one of them had bathed me, kept me clean, toilet trained me, and passed on his opinion of genitals from day one? If a man’s eyes and loving hands had given me my first preverbal sense of self, if as an infant there had been no disruption in the harmony between us because there was a part of my body whose emissions offended, surely I would have grown to be a woman who had a good enough opinion of her genitals. For this reason as much as any other, and because I wholeheartedly believe that women’s lifelong unhappiness about appearance lodges here, between our legs, I would wish for every child a father as intimately involved as a mother. We know that babies’ tiny hands finger their genitals, that area that responds so pleasantly to touch. Why do I think that fathers would be less likely to take the little hand away; not all men, not all the time, but less likely to make disapproving noises and wrinkle their noses, thus turning the loving, open face into an anxious, less symmetrically pleasant one?

  There is no scientific study, not yet, that I can locate that indicates that a man would be more open than a woman to a baby learning that it is all right to touch himself or herself. When that study is done, it will be a fine argument for bringing men into the earliest caretaking. When we love our genitals, we are more likely to love ourselves, to respect and take care of our sexual parts. In an age when sex and death are spoken of in a single breath, how can we not see father as a lifesaver?

  We may not consciously remember infancy, but on some level we “know” certain things. We have been collecting pictures and sensations since we were born. Even before toilet training has taught us what others think of our success or failure at controlling emissions, we have been reading the eyes of those who take us in, felt in their hands and heard in their voices precisely how they feel about that area between our legs; they, being our whole universe, will decide what we in time will also think.

  Who can argue with the opportunity to give children a healthier picture of their genitals? If we love our bodies, we will take care of them, be responsible. If we grow up feeling that there is something wrong with what lies between our legs, we will not just see that place as repugnant, a sewer, The Cloaca that we can never make beautiful, but we will assume that like the ugly birthmark on a leg or arm, this is what people see when they look at us. The original ugliness is, of course, displaced; one day it is our hair, the next our weight or fat arms—but the scar, the disfigurement, the memory of it never goes away. No matter what we do with makeup or surgery, we imagine the eye of the beholder seeing and rejecting the lifelong source of our own happiness about beauty.

  We adults like to think that we have carte blanche in the nursery; what does a tiny baby know/remember about our feelings regarding genitals and their functions and excretions? According to UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, an infant’s brain is not physically able to form explicit memories until the age of three years, mostly because the hippocampus, where such memories are stored, is not fully developed until that time. Explicit memories are those you can tell someone about; you’re aware that you are remembering when you think of them. But implicit memories begin forming at day one of life, and remain with us our whole lives because they are stored all over the brain. Implicit memories are those you don’t remember learning and are not conscious of remembering, as with using a spoon. Emotions, how our parents reacted to us, whether they enjoyed us, the model of who we are with others are all implicit memories.

  “Our implicit memories are based on our experiences with our earliest attachment figures and are fundamental to the way we continue to experience ourselves as we grow,” says Siegel. “We may not have the capacity to be aware of what these internal representations are, but they are always, always, always affecting how we experience life and how we are judging the world. These earliest memories are the filter through which we perceive the whole world, the human experience of reality. They are that fundamental.”

  Lessons in body love, or loathing, begin at the beginning. Woman born of woman is not a good teacher, especially in that area where she has been taught to deodorize, to treat as an offensive necessity. As erotically aggressive as the New Woman may appear in her leather bikini, paratrooper boots, and little else, she still carries the passport photo imprinted in the first years of life: the implicit memory of her sexual self in her mother’s eyes. Did her mother love her own genitals as well as her lovely hair, face, hands? When she looked at her tiny daughter’s body, did she smile at the dear sight of the tiny cleft between her legs; or did the look and smell of it shift her gaze away, make her shoulders rigid and elicit a clicking of tongue against teeth? And if some men grow
up to be overly penis proud, is it in part a reaction to the disapproval of the first and most important person in their lives? “Very well, if this part of me that distinguishes me as different from you offends you, then I shall flaunt it as my flag, my weapon!”

  The average father may not love the soaking diapers, the vomit, a little body smeared in its own excrement, but he is less likely to make a terrible face and take in his breath in disapproving tsk-tsks, thus giving baby a bedrock impression of the value of the natural function of genitals. We are not born hating the smell of shit, sweat, the look of penis and vagina; it is all learned.

  Men bring to the nursery a respite from absolute cleanliness, the every hair in place obsessions more characteristic of women; father is less likely to be constantly straightening the little garment, cleaning hands and knees dirtied in the effort to stretch, walk, move. Even if I am only partly correct in this, isn’t it worth solving the existing problems of getting men into the nursery to have a generation of women grow up who aren’t besotted with cleanliness, odors, feminine humiliation, all of which boil down to an obsession with looks?

  The entire world is raised on women’s attitudes regarding genitals. By the time we lie down together, our feelings about sex, our image of our partner’s genitals and our own will have grown from the seed a woman planted. Oh, these pictures will in time be modified by our rebellion, influenced hopefully by healthy education, but it will all be in reaction to the first years of life. Wouldn’t it be a terrible disservice to raise another generation of women as uncharitable about the poor vagina as we?

  So long as “it” is dirty, we will never believe in whatever beauty we possess. We will always find fault with the shape of our nose, the breasts, the thighs. Things will never be right so long as that one thing is “wrong.” The ugliness between our legs is a lifelong reminder of our failure at beauty, a defeat that sets us in competition with all other women whom we suspect have mastered the art of beauty better than we, a rivalrous loss that goes back to the beginning of time and which we refuse, according to Women’s Rules, ever to acknowledge.