The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Even if women could leave the workplace—an unrealistic possibility—we would never again be able to infuse “mother” with either the omnipotence or grace she once had; we’ve now seen too many women who act like men to ever again believe in the idealized mommy of yesteryear who, by women’s own hand, has been brought down to earth, a hand as big and sometimes as cruel as any man’s.

  This leaves the door to the nursery fortuitously ajar. Women’s workload, grown prodigious both in and outside the home, demands that certain tasks be reassigned; to each person should go that job for which he or she is best qualified. Given the top priority of teaching tiny children genital respect, the obvious candidate is a man, father. Training a child to control his or her bladder and sphincter, even as he or she sleeps, is where genital respect begins. If it is done with ease, with reward and not punishment, everything “down there” is not freighted with disgust, fear, and the threat of loss of love. I’d give anything to have been toilet trained by a man.

  I realize that this is not going to be a popular discussion. Though it has nothing to do with accusing women of being bad mothers, it will be taken as such, the usual defensive tactic used to make things go away. I will be labeled a mother blamer and taken to task. But I am on the side of the angels here. This subject is at the very heart of this book: Our feelings about our genitals, the image we have of them, which began even before toilet training, is an unavoidable lens through which we see every other part of our body. How could it be otherwise?

  When women look in the mirror, what we see that is unattractive, that is never right, is the dirty secret between our legs, something that we know is ugly and not clean. Aren’t women, first and foremost, “clean”? Consciously, our genitals may not come to mind, but they are like a disfigurement that no amount of beautiful clothes, scent, or embellishment of other areas of the body can cancel out. Nor can any honey-tongued man ever persuade us that he loves “it,” for we have a memory lodged in our earliest years in which the most important person in our lives imprinted upon us her feelings about our genitals.

  Neither sex is born loving or hating its genitals more than the other. It is learned, all learned. And it is learned at a time when we are so tiny and impressionable, given our total dependency, that the lessons are never forgotten, freighted as they are with the promise of or withholding of love, meaning food, warmth, shelter, safety, life.

  We women accuse men of being too much in love with their penises. We bitterly resent that love affair because it leaves us out, yes, even to the point where you could say we are jealous of the time he spends alone with “it.” We don’t necessarily want it, but that doesn’t mean we want him to enjoy it, thus reminding us of our own failure as sexual people. In some part of our brain we women know that sex is healthy and natural, that there have been good times when we too enjoyed it, but not like him. No, he could do it, have it far more often than we. We’re not just jealous he’s left us out of his masturbation, we’re envious too; though we would never admit it, we secretly admire someone who masturbates without guilt, maybe even with it. Imagine being able to feel guilt and have an orgasm too!

  Since men and women spend so much of their lives out of sync with one another regarding the beauty of genitals, our own and one another’s, the quandary is worth pursuing. Could it be, for instance, that women, seeing ourselves in mother the caretaker, unwittingly take on her attitude about private parts, and that boys, being mother’s opposite, spend their lives proving mother wrong: denying and defying her? That so many men go through life measuring, masturbating, visiting “bad” women for forbidden sex, and that most do not abuse women but instead mask their anger, even turn it against themselves, says how very deep the cut was, that first estimation by the most important person in the world.

  Think of the sad little volume that might be compiled of humiliating nicknames like “Sissybox” applied by a kind and loving mother to a little boy’s penis. Let us be methodical about this, for the picture of our genitals with which we grow up is integral to the whole self-portrait: What does mother see or feel when she holds her boy’s penis in the course of teaching him the ABCs of toilet training? Though this one is no bigger than her thumb, has she ever held a penis this close before, ever wanted to, or kissed one, brought it to full erection in her mouth? Yes, yes, this is her son and he is only two years old, but this is a penis, and, before you know it, he will grow up and away. She calls it his sissy-box, not consciously clipping his wings, but clip, clip, nonetheless.

  Of course boys grow up “programmed” to flaunt their penises in the company of other good fellows who share many interests but none of them quite as liberating as the sexual relief of having gotten away from the Giantess. The penis is the flag staking out territory won in spite of her; behavior with genital associations that once threatened the loss of mother love becomes a male playground and a source of pride. No little girl would dare to fart in class, but to boys the public breaking of Women’s Rules is a defiant victory, all the more joyous when little girls (little mothers) wrinkle their noses in disgust.

  Any hope that adolescent girls share the boys’ interest in exploring the forbidden part of the body is dashed when female indignation informs him that girls are just like mother. The boy has the unhappy choice of acting like a girl or hanging defiantly with the boys, setting up the sad division between the sexes wherein each perceives the other as the beloved enemy, or simply, “the enemy.”

  How much more implicated are women in men’s obsession with their erections than we would care to admit? Who can blame the boy for going to “bad” women for sex when he has been raised by a woman to separate love and sex? When he meets a female who adores his penis with an enthusiasm to match his own, after the initial, thrilling gratitude comes the question, Why? What sort of a woman is she? The old line about there being girls you fuck and those you marry hasn’t been around this long without reason.

  A majority of men’s sexual fantasies grow out of a man’s first love, when as a boy he was made to feel it was his mother’s love or his penis. In his fantasy the man cleverly manages to get around mother’s prohibition, in fact, to make her scary warnings about “bad sex” work for him. He imagines himself bound, chained, humiliated, and at the mercy of a Big Woman. She is in control, yes, but he wins. She may have the whip, but he gets his dirty little orgasm. Very clever.

  Why should a man expect “nice women” to love his penis any more than mother did? Indeed, the woman who combines mother’s niceness with an easy sexual familiarity with male sexual organs might be felt to have too much power. Should they marry, the man is often relieved when her sexual drive diminishes after childbirth. He prefers to find sex in a less complicated setting than home, where mother and children are once again present. Nowadays, she too may prefer to separate sex and marriage. It has everything to do with issues of control and love, the portraits of ourselves as either sexual or nice, conflicting images that are the emotional fretwork of what is fondly called The Battle of the Chamber Pot.

  Listen to a man writing about how his mother taught him to “pee into the bowl like a big man.” It is this event, he contemplates, that causes him in adult life to be “torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires.” The passage, from Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, was written almost thirty years ago, when the world was so in tune and Roth so funny and fine a writer that even the prissiest of readers saw something recognizable in it:

  I stand over the circle of water, my baby’s weeny jutting cutely forth, while my momma sits beside the toilet on the rim of the bathtub, one hand controlling the tap of the tub (from which a trickle runs that I am supposed to imitate) and her other hand tickling the underside of my prick. I repeat: tickling my prickling! I guess she thinks that’s how to get stuff to come out of the front of that thing, and let me tell you, the lady is right. “Make a nice sis, bubala, make a nice little sissy for Mommy,” sings Mommy to me, while in actuality wha
t I am standing there making with her hand on my prong is in all probability my future! Imagine! The ludicrousness! A man’s character is being forged, a destiny is being shaped….

  Poor Vagina, a Rose by Any Other Name…

  When I went to be fitted for my first diaphragm—long after I should have, silly virgin who played with intercourse, “losing” my precious jewel by centimeters—I sat in the doctor’s office with my new rubber disk and watched without seeing as he described the ugly pink model on his desk of a woman’s reproductive organs. I didn’t want to see, be informed, though pregnancy terrified me. I could not watch where his pencil lines had traced for hundreds of other blind women the trail from cervix to urethra, to bladder, and oh, no! not the anus. I had never seen either urethra or anus, and while nothing brought me closer to heaven than a man’s mouth in that area, I didn’t want to know about it. That was essential to the magic, I am sure, that he, my lover, wanted to put his mouth “there”; somehow, it made him powerfully male and dirty, allowing me, the innocent female, to be overwhelmed into orgasm by forces beyond my control.

  I’ve mentioned that there is an unthought-out way we tend to imagine everything “down there” as one hole, one aperture through which everything exits our body: the cloaca, Latin for sewer. To this day gynecologists tell me that many women still don’t know the precise location or the difference between the urethra and vagina; great strides have been made, however, since the invention of the vibrator, as to the location of the clitoris. That so many women prefer to masturbate lying under the pure water from a bathtub faucet isn’t surprising; not only is it a fine system but it eliminates having to touch oneself, promising cleanliness as absolution in the very throes of orgasms.

  “I don’t think penis envy is inborn, as did Freud,” says my mentor, Richard Robertiello, “nor do most people in the field today. I don’t think a woman’s born feeling she has a defective organ.” But like others in his profession, Robertiello feels that little girls, because of overly strict toilet training, because of mothers who are self-deprecating or masochistic, along with a perception that females are valued less than males in the family, well, it all adds up to a feeling that “there is something wrong with them, which is their genitals,” he says. “Women grow up displacing this ‘disfigurement’ onto their thighs, their breasts, their flabby arms. Have you ever met a woman who didn’t think there was something wrong with her physically?”

  I shake my head sadly, wishing I had a good argument. Robertiello and I have had this conversation often over the years. The more I write, read, think, live, the more convinced I am of the cloaca’s spillover, as it were, smearing the rest of our body. When we are little girls, we don’t want the penis as much as we want the control it represents. If we should also grow up witnessing mother’s erotic attachment to our brother, our conviction that he has something desirable we don’t is enhanced. Whatever differential treatment the boy gets, from family or society, can seem to have its source in that area of the body that we little girls feel is inadequate. I didn’t have a brother or a father; nonetheless, I learned this as far back as I can remember. As far back as “explicit” memory goes, I tried to pee standing up, rather unsuccessfully. As for my body: unacceptable!

  The fact is, most men do not have women’s lifelong dissatisfaction with their bodies; they may worry about the size of their penis, but they do not think of the penis and anus as a sewer. When young boys learn to disparage the vagina, referring to it as a “gash” or a “slit,” it is an intended slur, learned in part from girls’ own sensitivity about their “deformity.” The boy may have some envy of his own regarding women’s breasts and their ability to bear children, but he is best informed by the girls’ own self-consciousness regarding their genitals that here is a perfect outlet for male resentment: Disparage the girl, and in putting her down, get back at women who boss you around!

  When the boy eventually learns women’s absolute control over whether or not there will be sex, his crude and embarrassing remarks to girls increase; what he would prefer, most of the time, is simply to adore the woman’s body. When he is abruptly put in his place and made to feel like an animal, well, he responds like one: Two men stand talking to each other on a street, all the while their eyes drawn to a woman walking by, all splendor. Feeling their gaze, she glares at them. Awe turns to anger: “Hey, Harry,” one guy says to the other, “look at those jugs!” “Crude brutes!” the woman says, consoling herself, hunching her shoulders forward.

  What sort of a war is this? When does it begin, and why? Men should not yell rude remarks at women, but they are playing on a sensitivity that has always been there, at best a fear of inadequacy that women learn from other women. The irony is that men have found the chink in our armor, a valuable weakness to know when, in fact, it is women, in the boy’s mind, who have all the power.

  “When patients come to me and say, ‘Body image is the size of my nose, my height, my weight,’ I try to get them to see how complicated body image is,” says psychologist Ann Kearney-Cooke. “Body image is not how you think about your body, talk about it. It’s about how you feel sexually; it’s about issues of control, which begin in how your body functions, beginning with the earliest lessons you had in controlling those functions.”

  Our earliest sense of our identity comes from how we feel about our body as children, how we are raised to see ourselves, how “they” saw us. “Your body is the house you live in, and if there is something going on inside that you feel is not right,” says Kearney-Cooke, “then the way you see your body is negative. When you began to crawl, to walk, everyone clapped. Learning sphincter control, to be toilet trained, this too is what gets you either love or a sense of failure. The more control you feel of your body, the more control you feel of yourself as a child, which translates into a good body image.”

  Control. Probably the last thing we would think of as key to body image; but think of its opposite, loss of control, soiling oneself, drawing attention to one’s self when we aren’t absolutely sure every little hair is in place. It is only, in fact, when we can control the observer, meaning attract his/her attention at the very moment when we are absolutely positive that we look perfect—as in a living tableau—that we are comfortable with being seen. Control, control, control.

  Where do we women learn our need—which men hate—to control the world? We learn it early, in the nursery and then in the adjoining room, the bathroom, where there is the toilet, on which we are placed to control sphincter and bladder, and thus win love, approval, or not, meaning we have neither control over ourselves or sureness of the love of those dear people without whom we cannot live. Suddenly love, acceptance, image rest totally on our ability to control the flow of urine and feces.

  “Girl babies are plopped on a toilet, they’re not to look at themselves, they’re not to touch themselves, but they are instructed that this is a body function they must manage, control,” says sex educator Judith Seifer. “Girl babies are given a consistent message of contamination, that what you have down there is dark, it’s dirty, you don’t touch it. After they do urinate the next thing they are taught to do is to wipe themselves clean with lots of toilet paper, and then to wash, wash their hands until clean. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to hold their penis, to aim it, and we give them great praise when the stream of urine hits the toilet bowl.”

  Let’s take our brother’s penis—so to speak—which is an external organ he can literally direct and aim. He may not be expert at learning the rigors of sphincter and bladder control, but to us, his sister, he has a unique advantage in winning mother’s praise and love. (It wouldn’t be called the battle of the chamber pot if it weren’t about her love.) To the girl, the manipulatable gadget he holds in his hand is like the handle on the faucet that turns the water on and off. If there is envy of the penis, it is acquired envy of something perceived to control functions in such a way as to make mother happy. Seated on the toilet, her genitals out of sight—no handle there anyway�
�the girl must assume that this place between her legs is unmanageable. If it were not so, mother’s face and attitude would eventually be relaxed and satisfied regarding everything to do with her daughter’s bodily functions.

  In a recent study of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse mothers with one- to four-year-old children, it was found that fewer than a third of the children had received accurate words for their genitals, learning instead expressions like “bucket,” “dinkie,” “garage,” “peabuggy,” “potato,” and “twattie” (for girls) and “aeriel,” “dingadoo,” “jugjug,” “peeper,” “schmuck,” and “wormywillie” (for boys). Some were given no word at all. And lest you think we improve with age and education, in the teaching programs of two different medical universities, pediatric residents “performing routine well-child care examinations either omitted examining the genitals, proceeded through the genital examination in silence, or prefaced it with comments such as, ‘Now, I’m going to check down there’; [a similar study] found that pediatric residents included the genitals in their examinations approximately half as frequently for girls as for boys.”

  Occasionally I was bathed and toweled in my mother’s pretty bathroom, and I’m sure I assumed that one day I would inherit all those lovely bottles and vials with their sweet-smelling elixirs that made mother so pretty and clean. The very look and scent of our future is in these carefully packaged accessories decorated with flowers and bouquets chosen to promise women, anxious about their odors, absolute success at daintiness. Being clean, smelling nice, different from our brother, has much to do with the toilet and the different manner in which we approach it; he stands holding his penis and chatting with chums when he urinates and doesn’t wipe but leaves drops on the floor. (Imagine if we left a puddle on the floor!)