The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  It is a riddle to a girl child who sees her brother both cleaner in his ability to control urine and yet dirtier in his habits; soon, the boy will work at outdistancing his sister in dirtiness, making himself as different as possible from her and mother-whom-he-loves-too-much. Before she even enters school, the girl will stand alongside mother tsk-tsking her brother’s muddy footprints on mother’s clean kitchen floor, identified with mother in clean floors as well as in the vials and jars of cosmetics in the cabinet over the bathroom sink.

  She may not yet understand their application, but she has grasped that they mask a woman’s unmentionables, make her pretty. One day, in full ignorance of its function, the little girl puts a sanitary napkin between her legs, playing “grown-up lady,” a ritual of daintiness, which has more to do with the sewer than she would want to imagine. Oh, no, not blood, not there! In time, everything the girl puts on her body—clothes, lipstick, lovely lingerie—is camouflage, a veil, theatrical makeup to please the eye, to divert attention from the birthmark, the blemish, the sewer.

  “Over the years, many patients of all ages and backgrounds have asked me during their pelvic exams, ‘How can you do this job? It’s so disgusting,’” says gynecologist Christiane Northrup. “The most common reason that women douche, moreover, is their mistaken belief, handed down from mother to daughter, that this area of the body is offensive and requires special cleaning.”

  It is demoralizing to think that our intimate relationships as adults are reactions to what we had with Mommy: Nowhere do women fight so hard to love our bodies than in our erotic reveries, where the desire to feel sexual does battle with Mother’s Nice Girl; nowhere is women’s anger quite so misplaced as when it is deflected away from mother and projected onto the Bad Men of sexual fantasy, who “force” us to feel what we have always dreamed of, the orgasmic pleasure that originates in his penis, his hand, better still, his mouth, on that dark, forbidden, dirty place.

  Long ago—it seems like another lifetime—when nice women were identified and graded by their roles as homemakers, television commercials projected Mr. Clean into the kitchen, catching housewives off guard as they used the wrong detergent and warning them that their floors weren’t clean at all. Bad, dirty women! To attain the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, every woman needed a jolly giant product of one sort or another, a “big man” for a “big job”: cleanliness.

  Today’s commercials are aimed at the New Woman, who runs between office and home, frantic that she isn’t fulfilling any of her jobs adequately. These go straight to that area that Mr. Clean only symbolized: Ladies, you’re not getting it really clean! You may be doing a man’s work, even paying your own way, but you’ve overlooked home base: Douche it! Spray it! Massengill Douche has put Mr. Clean in the closet.

  How wonderful for a little girl to be bathed, powdered, and toilet trained by someone who doesn’t think the sight and smell of excrement are loathsome, someone who doesn’t see the vagina as a sewer that must be scoured again and again. Most men’s idea of cleanliness isn’t absolute, nor do they feel their own identity is at stake, that the world will judge them if a child touches her genitals, as babies do. What about the history of masturbation if it were left in Dad’s hands instead of Mother’s? Imagine growing up masturbating when you felt like it, naturally, learning the rules of privacy, feeling entitled and therefore more responsible for your sexuality?

  When the former surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, was asked at an AIDS conference what she thought were the “prospects of a more explicit discussion and promotion of masturbation,” she replied, “I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel that we have tried ignorance for a very long time, and it’s time we try education.”

  Brave and well-chosen words that sadly hastened President Clinton’s request for Elders’s resignation. I’ve never been more disappointed in the man for whom I voted. It is unforgivable that a country drowning in the loss of lives to sexual ignorance should deprive its young people of knowing that they have the right and obligation to own their bodies. My only difference with Elders is her choice of the word “teach”; we don’t need to be taught, but were we allowed to masturbate without fear of the loss of love, we would.

  We don’t want to think about preadolescent sexuality; it makes us uncomfortable imagining small children as sexual—just look at what it did to Freud’s career in Victorian Vienna!—but we are also loath to resurrect our own earliest sexual stirrings in our parents’ house, where watchful eyes gave us no privacy. There we were one day straddling the arm of the sofa, rocking back and forth as we often did, except that this time we felt an exciting sensation that began between our legs, coursed through our bodies from toes to fingertips and up to the brain, where pictures of pirates holding us hostage told us this was scary. Though we were only four years old, we knew from the place of origin that what we were doing might be wrong, but it was mother’s sudden appearance, her voice and the expression on her face, that warned us that we must never do it again. But do what? Was it the rocking on the sofa arm, what we were imagining, or the warm glow spreading through our bodies? Was it that we must never touch ourselves “there,” or was it that she knew what we were feeling, that she had felt it too, once, and that it wasn’t nice at all?

  Mother’s disapproval is now woven into our sexual feelings. She is good—of that there can be no question—and therefore we and that nice feeling aren’t nice at all. If we give up the feeling, she will never leave us. We disavow it, or try to, and quarrel with its return for the rest of our lives. Even the faintest stirring of sexual arousal, ten, twenty years later, comes mixed with anxiety that tightens muscles against it in our belly, slams doors shut in our brains where passion has already begun to trigger surrender; we don’t remember the incident on the sofa arm but when our own child is four we recognize our anger when we catch him touching himself, and we feel closer to mother. We forgive her and scold him.

  If there had been another source of love, equal to mother’s, in the house when we were little, someone who wasn’t against rocking on the sofa arm, we might like our bodies more. I realize that not all men are comfortable with sexuality, especially when dealing with their own daughters, but part of men’s discomfort with both sex and women comes from their own female-dominated childhood. This discomfort would lessen over time if father were a second caretaker, a different voice. Children wouldn’t fear mother’s disapproval so totally. Her occasional criticism wouldn’t loom like doomsday, and we would come to love her for her self, a person who was both as good and bad as any other human. We would not automatically incorporate the parts of her we hate—her anxiety and possessiveness, her asexuality—in order to prove our love. “Mom is wonderful, but I am a different person and I love her for allowing me to become who I am.”

  You have noticed the amazing effect of great sex on appearance. Women’s faces acquire a radiance, a glow, an easing of the lines of tension we didn’t even know we carried, so constantly are we on guard. Have you ever gone out, say to a restaurant, while that flush is still present and noticed your postorgasmic power over the room, how grateful the maître d’ is, the waiters’ faces adjusting and softening in response to your including them in your magic circle? It is a terrible waste of natural resources that we don’t go out of our way, especially in these strained, difficult times, to educate more women to beam postorgasmically upon the world. Imagine if all women were raised to enjoy great sex, responsibly: what warmth, what happiness, what a dream.

  That women, instead, spend so much time and money on beauty and so little in bed, which is free, explains the iron hold of the antisex rules on which we were raised. Think of the roots of our rage at having denied ourselves sex, our hellish bad temper that is barely contained so long as all women subscribe to those rules. Damn any woman who spreads her legs more than the rest of us and wears that postorg
asmic smile, for she mocks our forced goodness, reminding us of what we have sacrificed.

  Even the recent economic success that women have won doesn’t lessen the resentment at the sacrifice, begun long before adolescence, of sexuality. I often think women’s rage is even worse today and grows, commensurate with the increase in our economic power, as if to say, “Here I sit, mistress of my universe, and I still hate my body! Damn those Big, Bad Men who are responsible!” Poor men, always a safer target when they probably had nothing to do with teaching us to loathe our bodies. Men didn’t bathe us, toilet train us, or teach us to think of our genitals as dirty. However, to face the origin of self-loathing, the person for whose love we abandoned sexual identity, is today as fraught with anxiety as when we were children. It is demoralizing. The only thing that makes it better is when we repeat with our own children exactly what she taught us; her behavior comes to us easily, automatically. By becoming her, we forgive mother. See, I don’t hate you, Mommy! Am I not just like you? Now I understand: This is how mothers are!

  It is childish to avoid this interesting dialogue on the grounds that it is blaming poor old mom. How can a mother who has abandoned her own sexual life be overjoyed when she finds that her daughters are sexually curious? I don’t mean sexually active, simply open, self-accepting. There is great envy attached to people, yes, even one’s own daughter, who appear to be more sexually at ease; they awaken awareness of what we gave up and we hate them for sparking that memory of what might have been. When women tell me stories of mothers who angrily berated them for masturbating when young—“No decent man will marry you!”—I hear mother’s envy talking.

  What makes women’s policing of sexuality so devastating is that it becomes necessary to control not just their children but the world around them as well. Owning our sexuality is vital to a sense of completeness, of feeling whole, the awareness of oneself as sexually alive. When others partake of the forbidden fruit, it is unbearable. Sexual self-loathing and abstinence can only be lived with when everyone agrees to go along with it. The right-wing, antisex community—men and women—get their extraordinary energy from envy, the rage that has no end.

  To suggest that even the most adoring mother is going to teach her daughter love of her vagina, her son love of his penis, when she doesn’t share these feelings, is asking her to invent a new kind of mothering. It is asking her to act like a man, or to invite her husband to help her change women’s antisex legacy by joining her as an equal in the nursery. We should think hard about why we are so willing to concede that women have a right to enter the workplace, but question men in the nursery. Some men can run a nursery as well as some women can an office.

  It must become acceptable to say this, talk about it; it should be one of those discussions lovers have when they talk about their future, about marriage. Both may want a family, but she shouldn’t feel guilty admitting that she doesn’t fancy raising children. It would be an important reason for her choosing a man who loved the idea of full-time fathering, or part-time, while she worked outside the home. We choose partners for religious reasons, economics, looks, a shared love of old movies and fishing trips. Why shouldn’t a match be made on grounds as significant as who is best at raising children and/or earning money? Twenty years ago, all hell broke loose at the suggestion that there is no such thing as a “maternal instinct.” Well, there isn’t. Love is learned by parent and children.

  The return to the idealization of motherhood in recent years is obvious in the relentless standards of perfection celebrated in the new crop of Mother’s Day cards. Meanwhile, advertisers wring their hands as to how to appeal to the “typical” mother. “Advertisers are so afraid of offending their best customers,” said Barbara Lippert, the advertising critic for Adweek magazine. “If they show mothers staying at home, the working mothers tune out. If they show them as frantic working mothers, the stay-at-home mothers tune out.”

  Imagine a generation in which both sexes bring their own unique qualifications and life experiences to the care and education of a tiny child; imagine growing up loving one’s amazing sexual parts, seeing them as beautiful, the vagina, the penis, the anus, the works. Are any of the problems surrounding men being more intimately involved in the raising of their children more daunting than those women confronted twenty years ago? What could be tougher than getting men to abandon their monopoly on the all-male workplace? Legally, morally, we women were in the right; even men saw this, and many fought alongside us for our equal rights. Well, the success of getting men into the nursery—as moral and ethical an issue as women in the workplace—lies in women’s hands. Men will not enter that area where a woman once totally controlled them until we relinquish absolute control and not just invite men to share responsibility, but demand it of them because it is what is best for their children.

  Change will not come easily. Perhaps this is why I am so touched by a scene from Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, in which Moses Herzog, packing a pistol, drives to his former wife Madeline’s house to seek revenge on her and her new husband, Gersbach. Looking through the bathroom window he observes a hand—a man’s hand!—reaching into the tub to shut off the water. Then the hated rival Gersbach playfully, kindly, orders his stepdaughter “to stand, and she stooped slightly to allow him to wash her little cleft…. Steady and thorough, he dried her, and then with a large puff he powdered her. The child jumped up and down with delight. ‘Enough of this wild stuff,’ said Gersbach, ‘put on those p-j’s now.’” With that, all of Herzog’s rage is dissipated, and he leaves. “Firing this pistol was nothing but a thought.”

  I’ve thought often of this scene of a man who comes bearing a gun and is disarmed by the sight of his rival tenderly washing his daughter’s “little cleft.” I love that. So bombarded are we by stories and statistics of male abuse of children, we begin to believe it is latent in all men, which is no more true than it is of women. A woman kisses a baby boy’s penis and the world shrugs; a man does the same and is jailed.

  A poll dating back to 1977 found that 51 percent of the husbands surveyed would spend more time with their families if they had a shorter workweek. The Los Angeles Times conducted a poll in 1990 that found 39 percent of the fathers surveyed want to quit their jobs to have more time with their kids; 74 percent of men in another survey would prefer a “daddy-track job” over a “fast-track job.” We also have studies that indicate that men who have been intimately involved in the raising of their children think better of themselves, which translates into higher self-esteem; and these men are less abusive. It seems so obvious. Why aren’t planes writing it in the sky? Doesn’t it also suggest that a boy raised by a male as well as a female might grow up to be less abusive?

  Until we design a new agreement between the sexes, which includes men’s rights as well as women’s, our men will grow ever angrier, and women will too, even as we edge toward economic parity while retaining the trump card, the ability to bear the human race and shape it without men. The coming Matriarchy.

  A hundred years ago men and women had a dozen offspring to compensate for the inevitable mortality rate among little children. Now that we have medicine and technology, our problem is that we have children, but no parents; and we have lost the extended family of grandparents, uncles, and aunts who once provided not just extra hands but laps and additional loving eyes that reflected a child to himself or herself. Adult attention, says Penelope Leach, “is one of the scarcest commodities in our materially rich homes.” Children “…cannot be themselves with no attention at all. They would rather have disapproval, anger, even punishment, than be ignored and will often provoke negative attention if that is the only kind available to them.”

  What a bitter irony that we have made such medical and technological strides and lost our humanity in the process. We give our children more things and less of our selves, perhaps because we place more value on possessions than we do on ourselves. Intellectually, we know that life’s patterns of thinking and behaving are laid down in t
he first years. Only two, three years old and already veterans of some of life’s most impressive battles. By then, our children will have the bedrock of a sense of self, identity, separate from us, or they will not. When they look in the mirror, they will see someone who is fine just as she or he is, someone “good enough,” loved enough so that later suspicions of not measuring up don’t arise. Otherwise, their reflected image will be distorted by humiliating defeats, hidden behind the defenses of memory, battles lost to more beautiful siblings, to the plain sister whose envy was feared, or to caretakers who tried to make them into their own beauty ideal. No one ever saw them as finished: “Go, my child, you are perfect just as you are.”

  3

  The Years of Invention

  Freedom, Ah, the Feel of It, the Look of It!

  There is a chapter that is strangely left out of the telling of life’s story, as though it had no drama and simply didn’t matter. Yet, if I were to pick the time when true self-image came most in focus and I felt like the heroine of my own story, I would turn to these exhilarating years bookended between mother’s all-seeing eyes and the strobe lights of adolescence.

  We are how old—maybe eight, nine?—and we are out of the house, relatively unfettered compared to what went before and lies ahead. It is unfortunate that Freud called these years The Latency Period, making them sound boring, as if we sleepwalked through them, when, indeed, there is greater potential for creativity and optimism than we will ever have again. Nor are we devoid of sexual feeling as the word latency suggests; it is rather that, after the bad opening night reviews of our Oedipal years, we have learned to keep sexual stirrings to ourselves.

  Yes, we are young, but we have a unique combination of curiosity, bravery, and the infallibility of innocence; we may have been hurt in the competitive struggles within the family, but those losses have the advantage of being framed within the walls of home. As far as the brutal weeding-out process that will soon go on in adolescence, where we will be labeled for life, well, who at nine or ten can possibly comprehend its enormity?