The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Sibling Rivalry: “What Is Beautiful Is Good”

  I have no memory of myself as a child wanting pretty dresses, playing with combs and brushes, being held up to a mirror. Only in adolescence did this change totally and overnight. How early was it made, the choice to find ways other than beauty to get myself noticed? When did I decide to be a performer, to act a certain eye-catching way so that people who might otherwise pass me by would stop and smile, take me in and pick me up?

  So early did tiny eyes take in the landscape, assessing my chances at survival in a house of pretty women, that I sit here today convinced I was born inventing an identity to take the place of beauty. I never expected to be loved, like my sister, by dint of just standing there.

  Let me toss in badness too, a villainous feeling that I was not as nice as my lovely sister. This is a secret I’ve jealously guarded, and I tell it because my “secret” tallies so well with behavioral studies on appearance. It isn’t just the early caretakers who single out the pretty babies; little children do too. Preschoolers will tell you which classmates are cuter; they prefer attractive children as friends and expect them to be friendlier and less aggressive, less likely to hit without good reason. By the time little children enter kindergarten, they rate the more attractive kids as smarter, friendlier, nicer, more self-sufficient and independent than unattractive children; by contrast, unattractive children, particularly boys, are seen as more aggressive and antisocial.

  The Ph.D.’s who study appearance call it “The Halo Effect.” Prettiness, by virtue of itself, is good, so simple and loaded with potential. Think about all the dewy-eyed heroines in fairy tales; the goose girl didn’t punch, nor did Cinderella give her wretched stepsisters what they deserved. Nor did my sister. But I went after her aggressively in every game of cards and hopscotch I could inveigle her into. She lost so readily, cared so little for winning that I wanted to shake her. It was as if she knew that the game didn’t matter, that win or lose, there would be someone to take care of her. When she reached out to cuddle me, I shoved her away.

  Am I being too hard on myself? Remember Melanie Klein’s classic defenses against envy—idealization and devaluation—for I surely envied my sister’s closeness to my mother, which I must have perceived to be in part due to shared beauty. Without doubt, I idealized my sister, elevating her in beauty and saintliness into the stratosphere beyond my killer envy; and here I sit still devaluing myself by creating a self-portrait far meaner and unattractive than it probably was.

  There is a basic instability of threesomes within a family, or in any love relationship. “One sibling is always more prominent, eliciting passionate feelings of hate or love,” says psychologist Stephen Bank, whose special area of interest is sibling relationships; “rarely are such feelings distributed evenly.” It is a theory that holds true in friendships (three little girls can’t play together), and is characteristic of the psychology of love too, when the sacred dyad cannot bear interference from another. In any such threesome, “Two people will inevitably seek closeness, even fusion, leaving the third person to fend for himself or herself.”

  The Halo Effect describes perfectly how I saw my sister/my self. Because she was prettier, I thought she was a better person. She was good and I was bad. There are no photos of me before the age of four. Very well, here is what I remember: I am four, the straight, lank hair is tightly braided and my right eye, which has not yet been operated on, rolls inward—rather like Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo—behind my steel-rimmed glasses. Beside me stands my sister, whose hair curls softly around her pretty face, so similar to my mother’s. Was this the reason I always shoved her away? Were there unflattering comparisons made that I overheard from the cradle on? Judgments that decided my life, that I would not be like “them,” my mother and sister?

  I looked like someone from a different family, very well, I would act that way too, so originally that there would be no basis for comparison with my mother and sister. As far back as I can remember, I put different things into my body, refusing to eat fish, coconut cake, apple pie, all of which they enthusiastically endorsed; I even demanded that Miracle Whip be stocked, claiming I couldn’t stomach their Hellman’s on my peanut butter sandwich. They being so good (and pretty) and me bad (and ugly), I proceeded to flesh out my badness by lifting candy bars from stores at a very early age, filching small change from my mother’s purse. When screen doors were inadvertently left open, I would toddle out alone, knowing it was forbidden but also searching, I am sure, for gazes that would record “the real me,” the sweet darling disguised by necessity as a thief, forced to tell lies. Luckily, when I was four, the people I ran into on sidewalks turned out to be unimaginably kind; they took me home for chicken noodle soup and peanut butter sandwiches until much telephoning revealed to whom I belonged.

  How I hated being dressed in that little yellow version of my sister’s larger pink dress; until adolescence I would stubbornly avoid glass mirrors, preferring people’s eyes, which I knew how to light up by standing on my head. If I could pin a crime on my sister I would, and felt justified in my revenge, though I cannot think of any bad thing she did to me. How could she comprehend my revenge, which went back to the beginning of life? How could I “remember” crimes from the cradle?

  In Diary of a Baby, Dan Stern describes how a four-year-old has access to feelings dating from infancy. Are any memories from our distant past more constantly used, updated, and, therefore, as Stern says, “reworked and kept alive” than ancient feelings surrounding how parents and siblings loved or didn’t love what they saw in us; judgments linked to smiling, touching, holding, kissing, then as now, now as then? Where else, no matter how old we grow, does the intensity of emotion come from at family reunions? Stern’s description of memory takes these never forgotten feelings out of the unconscious and explains our acute sensitivity today to loss and rejection with family and lovers.

  Don’t mistake my self-portrait for self-pity, for I would not exchange this life for any other. The way it has turned out has everything to do with how it began. Those qualities I honed back then to gain visibility are now my most trusted self. I’m no one’s fairy godmother, but I’m not the wicked child I painted myself to be when I was small. Early invisibility fascinates me not because of its sadness but rather because of its high drama, a testament to the little child’s earliest determination to survive. The lesson is this: We must stop denigrating ourselves, devaluing not only whatever pleasant appearance we may have but also whatever goodness we possess. We are not as bad as we think we are.

  Certainly my early adventures with danger, and sometimes the law, were “acting out” in reaction to the surety that my mother loved my sister more because she was prettier and sweeter. “Very well, if you will not love me, then I will be the bad person you think I am.” Sitting on the stairs one afternoon I overheard my mother and her sister discussing how “kind and generous” my sister was. Did they say that I was not “kind and generous”? Did this really happen? Did I become bad because I envied her beauty and was/am badder than anyone else?

  “Sibs are marvelous for learning about revenge,” Dan Stern once told me. “They are good for learning all the realities of the legal and penal system. They work that way much better than parents do. What they often give you is a much better indoctrination into daily reality than your parents.”

  So there we were, the three of us, and though I never remember a cruel word from either my mother or sister in those early years, the anger and anxiety at feeling excluded from what I “perceived” to be a bond between them, very much beginning with their similarity in looks and temperament, determined the direction of my life. Let me add, however, that my foolish efforts at “revenge” have left me deprived of more good times and good things, because “they” owned them or did them, than I would care to count, not the least of which was my rejection of piano lessons because “they” both played. My writing table here, now, sits exactly where my dear friend composer/singer Peter All
en used to have his piano. I would wander in and out of his apartment, adoring the sight of that man sitting barefoot in his Hawaiian shirt, composing songs of unrequited love. No one could write them like Pete.

  If ever there was a time for telling fairy tales, it is now. The real world is scary. All deals are off. Resentment, anger, and envy rule where traditional codes of behavior, ethics, and manners once dictated. Enough “beauty is as beauty does.” Today beauty is a player, out there stalking the streets, bare-breasted, stiletto-heeled, fly unzipped with a massive hard-on. And you want to read your child The Little Engine That Could? Reach for Grimm. Grimm is how it is, and children desperately long to hear reality spoken out loud.

  Still close to purity of emotion, children recognize in their bones exactly what the wretched stepsisters feel toward the more beautiful Cinderella, having felt the same murderous cruelty that very day toward their own brother or sister, whose golden curls, once again, won the last cookie on the plate. Nor has the pretty one escaped awareness of what the golden curls get you: killer sibling envy. When mother doesn’t honestly acknowledge the meanness and fear inherent in the cookie incident, when she simply tries to make nice and pretends that everybody loves everybody else all the time, then children fall into caricature wherein they see themselves and others as exaggeratedly evil or angelically good.

  Fairy tales divert children from these overly harsh accusations by giving them events and characters who represent and play out everything the child is feeling; the child no longer has to internalize the bad feelings, turn them against himself. The stepsisters in “Cinderella” not only get what is coming to them, they are so very evil that they make the child’s own hatred mild by comparison.

  “Since [the child] cannot comprehend intermediate stages of degree and intensity, things are either all light or all darkness,” writes Bettelheim. “One is either all courage or all fear; the happiest or the most miserable; the most beautiful or the ugliest; the smartest or the dumbest; one either loves or hates, never anything in between.

  “This is also how the fairy tale depicts the world: figures are ferocity incarnate or unselfish benevolence. An animal is either all-devouring or all-helpful. Every figure is essentially one-dimensional, enabling the child to comprehend its actions and reactions easily. Through simple and direct images the fairy story helps the child sort out his complex and ambivalent feelings, so that these begin to fall each one into a separate place, rather than being all one big muddle.”

  If beauty did not play such a major role in our lives, it would not feature so prominently and so often as the theme on which fairy tales turn. Pretty babies do get picked up first in the broadest sense of the phrase. Eyes are pulled to them, voices warm at the sight of them, sighs and loving words are drawn from the mouths of caretakers who can’t help themselves, feasting their eyes for just a moment on the adorable one. Other little children take in this reality, a more powerful truth than the later recorded, “I love my children equally.”

  Being seen is everything when we are little, a truth that endures until it’s time to tell a story to our own children. Long before fairy tales were written down, this memory of what really mattered in the nursery is what parents told their children. It is what they chose to remember. They could have made up prettier stories representing the admirable life they dreamed of for their child; instead, instinctively, they protected their babies with tales, not about how life might be, but how it feels.

  Whether we provide for ourselves, choose to love another woman, or live alone, beauty prevails because childhood was beauty’s kingdom and no one, boy or girl, forgets eyes that passed over them to fasten adoringly on another. It is far, far more generous and wise for feminists to encourage fathers to enter the nursery than to write newfangled fairy tales that suit grown-up agendas; father is another pair of eyes, arms, another dear voice, smell, touch, another source of love and another opinion of beauty. Now that would be a richer life.

  And invariably in any tale of beauty comes the plot of cruelest sibling rivalry, made extreme for a purpose: to give the child a widescreen version of emotions her parents are calling by other, more civilized names, but also to let the child off the hook a bit. Cinderella’s stepsisters, for instance, are so grotesquely evil, it is okay to hate them, to recognize that you don’t want to be that terrible, and last, to acknowledge that you aren’t as awful as you feared. When children associate goodness with beauty, they simultaneously rank themselves, with their imperfect looks, as mean, bad, the worst, which becomes their secret selves, the blackness they will grow up to try to hide. Those of us who were the plainer ones often try to conceal this “bad character” with pretty finery, an exaggerated effort to please, behind which lurks the suspicion that when the phone doesn’t ring or the invitation doesn’t arrive, the world has seen through our lovely exterior to the blackness within.

  Children love to hear fairy tales told again and again, as confirmation that they aren’t “the only ones” to harbor dark, cruel emotions. It is the grown-ups who forget and now flinch at the horror of fairy tales: “Dear, dear, how can you tell a child that?” How can you not when it is the only honesty around?

  Transformations are the stuff of fairy tales, their promise to the listening child, near sleep but never far from her own desires and/or overly harsh self-judgments; to the child there are no shades of gray: The bad self wars with the good self. The fairy tale is part of the resolution, allowing her to sleep, promising good will prevail and is in her, alongside the bad, but that ambivalence must be learned, meaning we can make choices.

  “It is, in the final analysis, love which transforms even ugly things into something beautiful,” writes Bettelheim. “It is ourselves alone who can turn the primordial, uncouth, and most ordinary content of our unconscious—turnips, mice, toads—into the most refined products of our mind.”

  The promise of the “beauty makeover,” the hottest hour on television at any hour of any given day, isn’t simply the physical transformation of the sad-looking woman in the third row. It is also the belief, hers as well as ours, that, for being lovelier, she will be a better person with a better life. The Halo Effect. Yes, we want to be beautiful, but like the child about to go to sleep, we want to think better of ourselves by getting rid of the enviously mean-spirited thoughts that make us want to strike out at someone like a sibling. It is a shame we stop reading fairy tales so young; we should, in fact, raise our children to read them back to us once they are able. It would be an interesting exercise to hear, in their voices, how well they still apply to all of us.

  It all happened so long ago, we refuse to believe that nursery rages have anything to do with our reactions today. Why, we have children of our own, how can you suggest that what went on with my brother/sister still influences me? Where else would you look for reasons to explain the influence of looks over life today, the many trips to Bergdorf’s, the orders made too often from catalogues, all that junk from QVC? Everywhere we go, eyes are judging us, pushing that memory button that calls up feelings from the first years of life, comparisons made. When our beloved looks at another person “in that way,” our overreaction is not due to an act on his part—nothing happened—but to that “frequently used and updated” feeling we experienced when the new baby brother first entered our lives.

  Intellectually we know why and how our beloved feels about us. Where then does the inappropriately overwhelming rage come from? The fact is, the feeling of being “the plain one” never gets a rest, never goes away. It remains “highly available” with all the intensity felt by a powerless, dependent child.

  You and I, we don’t believe compliments offered by loved ones—not as readily as we would an evil story about us; we’ve spent half our salary to put together the person in the mirror, but she is a fabrication, only good until the wind blows. The judgment of Paris is the first assessment, the one we swallowed whole when we were totally dependent, when being seen as our selves, and not someone else’s fantasy of how t
hey wanted us to be, meant life.

  All we want, we say, is to create an image of ourselves with which we can live more happily, as if it had to do with hiring an image consultant, when it is more likely buried in battles won and lost long ago opposite a brother or sister who stole the focus. “Do you love me?” we ask our new lover, whose fervent “Yes!” isn’t credible. We can’t see anyone lovable in the mirror and so we press again, and again he repeats, “Of course I do, yes!” until finally we triumphantly find a loophole, some flaw in his protestation: “No, no, you don’t love me!” we cry, filled with despair but a speck of self-righteousness too. “You’re right,” he gives up, agrees. “I don’t.”

  Here in Key West, it is Christmas morning and I am in my garden, prowling barefoot among the palms, the Phoenix robellini, Monsteria deliciosa, the Cocos plumosam, looking for my beauty makeover, the double white hibiscus that I will wear in my hair today.

  One perfect day of beauty, that is the life of the hibiscus. Not a long life, but not a bad one. Born in the morning’s first sun, voluptuous by noon, the flower shrivels at night and falls from its stem. Unless, of course, I chill it until evening, prolonging its life and mine too, for I feel like a different (better) person wearing one, two, sometimes three. I move the pots according to the sun’s orbit around the garden whenever I get up from my work. I want my crop to reach perfection. Plucked at their peak, stored in the fridge until the pumpkin/carriage arrives that evening, I wear hibiscus from ear to crown. I only wear the enormous double white version, which when perfect has exquisite tones of palest pink and Devon cream shot through its petals.