The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  A father who does not see women’s bodies as dirty is the ideal candidate to break this generational curse among women.

  “One of the most dramatic findings in the research into father infant care is its relationships to subsequent sexual abuse of children,” writes Kyle Pruett. “Whether the child is the father’s or someone else’s, if a man is involved in the physical care of his child before the age of three, there is a dramatic reduction in the probability that that man will be involved later in life in sexual abuse of children in general as well as his own. The humanization of both father and child inherent in such activity erects a strong barrier against later exploitation of that intimacy.”

  From the moment we are born, finding home in father’s arms, seeing ourselves in his eyes, the first impression of “beauty” will be learned in part as his touch, his smell, his voice, musculature, as well as a woman’s. With this beginning, a female child might grow up to believe in men’s words of praise, men’s vision of their beauty, and not rely totally on the opinion of other women. As for a son, a boy would take in from his father an essence of maleness as beautiful, having seen himself thus in that first man’s eyes. He would not have to run from woman/mother in order to prove his maleness, to get away from the Giantess; and when he grew to be a man, he would not have to acquire beauty through a woman he wore on his arm, in turn disparaging her for having such power over him, for as far back as he could remember, power was shared.

  Today men move steadily into beauty, reclaiming a share of it in reaction to women’s movement onto their traditional turf, the workplace. How much more agreeable men’s reentry into the mirror will be, how much less anxiety and rivalry women will feel opposite men if, from the beginning, both sexes found an estimable self-image in the eyes of both a man and a woman.

  2

  Envy

  The Dark Side of Beauty

  Mother basks in the admiration lavished on her newborn baby. The tiny person is a miracle, still feels a part of her, therefore praise of the baby’s beauty spills over onto her, drawing her even closer, which is good, given the child’s total dependency.

  “What a beautiful baby!” strangers on the street cry, and still mother smiles, understanding their awe of her baby’s beauty. Until one day—a day like any other—she stops smiling and verbally puts herself between the admirer and her baby. “Oh, but he cries a great deal,” she says, her words deflecting the praise away from her child. Why? If beauty is baby’s ticket to survival, why interfere with its acknowledgment? Because admiration, especially admiration of beauty, can quickly turn to envy.

  Envy is pernicious; it seeks to destroy the object of admiration. How then to protect the baby? “Kenehore,” the Jewish mother murmurs, the ancient mantra against envy when too many compliments fly in her vulnerable baby’s direction. This is a modern mother, someone who runs an office as well as her home. She didn’t learn to say this at Lamaze, hadn’t consciously planned to say it. Perhaps it came spontaneously, out of an unconscious memory of her own mother, a feeling as primal as throwing her body over her child to protect him from an oncoming truck.

  “Instinctively you know that too much admiration will bring bad things,” says my friend Catherine, whose young son is exceptionally beautiful. “You feel threatened.” She warms when heads turn to admire her boy on the street, for she is accustomed to being praised for her own beauty. A career woman of great ambition before she decided to become a single mother, it is as if she intentionally decided to keep the weight she has put on during pregnancy, as if, I suggest to her, “it would be excessive, too much beauty, if both of you were eye-stopping.” Without a blush, she concurs. Recently she allowed a lover to sleep over; it was the first time a man had shared her bed since her son’s birth. The next morning the boy broke his arm and replaced the intruder in his mother’s bed. “We don’t need him,” he told her.

  Malocchio is the Italian expression for “the evil eye,” which cannot stand another’s good fortune and projects misadventure onto the envied object. For centuries, cultures have had their respective rituals and potions to keep the admiring eye from souring, from going from praise to poison. So much rests on the need to be seen and nourished by an appreciative eye, but even in the process of visual regard, the admired one senses danger, a delicate line between desire and destruction; as for the hungry eye, at what point does the pleasure of regarding beauty turn to resentment that the power is not within ourselves, but is without? In the very process of absorbing beauty, we despair that we can only borrow and not own. The eye seeks to destroy what it loves most.

  Nothing defines our badness more precisely than envy; the loss of innocence is in us all. Eve “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes.” When she and Adam had eaten the fruit, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

  Nothing good can be said of envy, that meanness of spirit which describes the convoluted influence of beauty on our lives, especially women’s, for whom beauty has been our traditional source of power. Life around us changes at the rate of geometric progression, but the deeply entrenched rituals surrounding beauty’s uses and abuses do not disappear in a mere thirty years of social and economic upheaval. The laws surrounding beauty’s power and the envy of it are as timeless as the stones on Easter Island.

  Bringing envy into this discussion stiffens my spine in apprehension, and my resolve too, for nasty envy is the most spoiling emotion in life and is at the very heart of this book. If I can persuade you how beauty inspires envy and then how resentment sucks all the joy out of beauty, I will have accomplished something that is not easy for me, for I have envied nothing more in life than beauty, envied it in others and never believed in a bit of what I might have owned; to have enjoyed my own would have invited the spiteful envy of others, or so I feared. It is not a pretty statement to make about oneself, not ladylike or feminist, but it does describe my territorial claim to this subject, for which my earlier books prepared me.

  I may not be as evil as the villainous Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, but I nod my head when I read of him: “did ever anybody seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since its lodgment is in the heart, not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.”

  Some say that envy is in our genes, meaning that some of us are born more temperamentally inclined to be envious, just as some of us are born lovelier. Do not expect, however, to sight the haves and the have-nots easily; beauty and envy are not mutually exclusive. They often come in the same pretty package. Fearing that the killer envy will be directed against them, to deflect it, the beauties quickly spoil their own good looks by pretending to take no pleasure in their power: “Who, me, pretty? Have you seen my ugly thighs, my big nose?” Nor do the envious want to be recognized as vile and so deny, “Who, me, envy her? I could care less!” It is all a game of mirrors; nothing is what it seems. No wonder the character Beauty is often called Poor Beauty in fairy tales.

  The sorrow is that envy begins with admiration. For a moment, there is the Ahhhh! of seeing someone, something that catches our critical eye, mellowing it, warming us until reality bites, awakening us to, “Why that person and not me?” Instead of the world being a sweeter place for beauty’s presence, and our feeling some gratitude for having spied this oasis of loveliness in a cold world, we grind our teeth and smile when the six-foot-tall runway beauty trips in her stiletto heels.

  We call this period in which we live The Age of Envy; do we realize that we are labeling ourselves as mean-spirited possessors of that emotion of which nothing good can be said? Characteristically, we are determined to let no one have more than we do, meaning power over us, even if it is the power to love us and make us happy. Love, family, community, even the air and water we have p
olluted in our greed, which is envy’s close relation. It is as though we cannot bear the good feeling of gratitude for what we have been given; for the envious, to be grateful feels like impotence. Of course beauty is the icon of our Age of Envy, deeply rooted in our dysfunctional society. “Envy is the sin that festers in hierarchies and families, in structured societies of all kinds,” writes novelist A. S. Byatt.

  Do not confuse envy with jealousy, which is an appropriate emotion to feel when we are in danger of losing our loved one to a rival. Jealousy is always a triangle involving the loved one, ourselves, and the rival who would take away our beloved. I would not want a lover who did not feel jealous at the prospect of losing me; would you? It is how we deal with our jealousy that shows us to be either base or noble. Within the jealous triangle we may envy what our rival possesses—greater beauty or wealth—or we may envy our loved one’s power to raise us to heaven or dash us to hell. In the instance of a Cyrano de Bergerac, who loved truly and withdrew from the triangle to ensure his beloved’s happiness, we would say that his jealousy inspired nobility. In contrast, envy, as The Oxford English Dictionary puts it, is “the feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another.”

  In societies all over the world, a person who stands out above others is regarded with ambivalence. Anthropologists cite a phrase that is universal: “He will be brought down.” Especially in the traditional women’s world of limited resources, isn’t this how women regarded the beautiful woman, the feeling being that there is only so much beauty out there, therefore, when one woman gets more than her share, it feels as though she has deprived the others. Envy feeds on deprivation: Why you and not me? We love the beauty/we hate the beauty. We want to bask in her glow, share her power/we wish her ill. Ambivalence.

  Writing about envy in a primitive tribe of Indians in Mexico, anthropologist George Foster might easily be describing women and beauty in what he calls the Image of Limited Good. These Indians seem to feel that the world bestows only so many rewards. Your gain must be my loss. To assuage your resentment I would be wise to devalue my good fortune. Writes Foster, “If good exists in limited amounts which cannot be expanded, logically an individual or family can improve its position with respect to any good only at the expense of others.” Hence, if you do or get something much admired, you are a threat to the entire community, despoiling the rest of us. Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists—practically every social scientist has made note of this all too human phenomenon, calling it “The Zero-Sum Game.”

  Hence, the fashion models of today who earn a million dollars for a television commercial quickly remind us, “Oh, I hate my ears, my hair, my feet, the way I looked when I was twelve!” Conversely and similarly, when I approach a group of women sitting by a pool, gossiping snidely about the gorgeous woman on the diving board, they quickly deny the evil intent of their whispers, “Oh, we don’t dislike her! She’s our best friend, we love her!” It is said without embarrassment or hesitation; they hate her/they love her, and feel both simultaneously.

  Ambivalence. The baby loves the breast/the baby hates the breast because it has all the power. The baby bites the breast. Some of us, however, feel envy more than others and I go along with Melanie Klein, who believed envy to be both learned and constitutional. Let me quickly add that Klein emphasized that any predisposition toward envy will be heightened by bad mothering and ameliorated by good mothering.

  Do you remember the ditty chanted by little children that I quoted in the first chapter that begins, “I one my mother, I two my mother,” and ends, “I ate my mother”? The rhyme was accompanied by an assuming illustration depicting the tiny baby actually consuming the nursing mother. Well, that is pure Klein. The baby loves the mother/the breast, the baby envies the mother/the breast because she/it has all the power. And so the baby bites the breast. Only with constancy, with the mother being “good enough,” is the baby’s envy lessened, until a feeling of guilt juxtaposed with the mother’s goodness is born. Guilt, says Klein, is the paradoxical beginning of the turning of the infant’s envy/hatred into gratitude and love. Following guilt, the infant makes “reparations,” meaning that he smiles, sensing that mother does her best, for here she comes again to hold and feed him; he touches the good mother to make up for his earlier envy of her total power. Gratitude has entered his life. And gratitude, says Klein, opens the door to love.

  I can think of no emotion other than dark envy that better explains our convoluted attitude and behavior regarding lovely beauty; let me therefore quote Klein’s definition of envy, she being the grandmother of our understanding of that emotion: “Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. Moreover, envy implies the subject’s relation to one person only and goes back to the earliest exclusive relation with the mother.”

  What she is saying is that how you react to beauty today—your own and others’—has everything to do with what went on between you and the first most important person in your life. Can you take pleasure in the good things that others possess? Can you enjoy your own accomplishments without diminishing their value? Families are always the stuff of analysis because, like fairy tales, the outcome depends on the beginning.

  For instance, a man marries a beautiful woman but after a while grows anxious about the envious stares of other men who admire his wife and resent his having her; he loves his wife’s beauty, he hates it, and he soon turns to other women to assuage his resentment of her power over him: He bites the hand that feeds him, just as the envious baby bites the breast. Turn the story around to the wife’s point of view: Her wealthy husband is giving her all she desires; but at any moment of any given day, he could take it all away. He has all the power. She loves him/she hates him. She envies his authority to ruin everything; she turns to another man or denies her husband sex; she bites the hand that feeds her.

  While Freud placed great emphasis on the constitutional differences in people’s sex drives, Klein lays it on the line with even more emphasis in her seminal tome Envy and Gratitude: “I consider that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal-sadistic expression of destructive impulses, operative from the beginning of life, and that it has a constitutional basis….”

  For ten years—and the clock is still ticking—we have been living in the belly of beauty, focusing on it as never before in my lifetime, and deriving little pleasure from it, I might add. Nothing satisfies, nothing endures; we go through fashion statements as we go through love affairs and marriages. Beauty is the allegory by which we will remember these years, a metaphor we will later ponder, asking, Why was no one happy then? Whatever we may buy to please ourselves—cars, houses, vacations—we buy beauty with more desperation, investing in its power because of the gnawing envy we feel when we see beauty in others.

  When Klein explains that some of us are born with the potential to be more or less envious of beauty’s power in another, we should listen. It means that we will be especially aware of other people’s envy of our own beauty as well as more disposed to resent good looks in others. And the advertisements, the billboards, the beauty magazines, and the television commercials fan these flames of resentment: Why them and not me? Look at your friends; not all of us react with the same emotional heat when a good-looking person joins the group, or drives up in a Jaguar. Some people rest easy, while others become anxious when beauty’s power skews the status quo.

  Better still, look at your family, parents and siblings, your genetic inheritance back through the generations; were they envious of what the neighbors owned, always comparing wealth, power, handsome features within the immediate family to what cousins and other relatives had, never allowing themselves to enjoy what was already possessed out of anxiety over other people’s envy? Or did they take pleasure in the success and possessions of others, giving easily and genuinely of praise?

  Children, raised by parents
to succeed, find it confusing when the parents envy them for achieving the very things they know their parents admire. Having worked and sacrificed to produce a successful son, a beautiful daughter, how could father and mother now resent their children’s happiness? Do not look for logic in envy. When parents ruin their children’s happiness by constantly comparing them to someone more beautiful, more successful, unhappiness reigns. “In a house where envy is in the air, however, the child need but look, listen, and breathe to be instructed in consolation and counterattack,” says psychoanalyst Leslie Farber. “If he accepts the conditions offered him and agrees to be instructed by the example of his elders, thus will their envy breed his own.”

  When I look at my own extended family, I’d say we were an envious lot. The adults were very clear as to just who the beauties were, and comparisons were made among us children. Having envied beauty so acutely in others as a child, I am quick today to inform an admirer that my Geoffrey Beene dress is ten years old.

  Nowadays, any constitutional inclination toward envy is exacerbated by advertising that pummels away at us, devaluing everything we already own in the effort to make us go out and buy whatever new model of television, car, computer, or clothing that was designed last night while we slept. Gratitude is not encouraged, for appreciation of what is already owned is antithetical to commerce, which survives on greed. In The Age of Envy, children are particularly susceptible to the messages of a society that puts no value on invisible virtues such as kindness, honor, generosity.

  And it isn’t just commercials and advertisements that nudge our envy; in the content of newspaper articles and popular books, brand names specify exactly what it is that we don’t own; beautiful people who lead beautiful lives stare out at us from the tabloids, ruining what had up till now been a fine day, their clothes and houses making our own look shabby and inadequate by comparison.