The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  The psychoanalytic dictionary has an expression for this reenactment: It is called “Identification with the Aggressor.” It works quite simply, as the words imply, and it is precisely what two little girls do to a third. The more intense the friendship, the more it awakens what went right and wrong with the most important woman in life. Competitive struggles over father, with brothers and sisters, get played out when three little girls get together. Competition is not named, but the air is filled with it. Since mother “won” all the unspoken competitions within the home, then her daughter identifies with her in this struggle between best friends for the ownership of love, meaning that someone must “lose.” The other best friend is thrown to the wolves.

  Little girls measure love and life as if there were just so much out there; when mother turned to someone else at home, there was always the feeling that there was less for us, for the left-out one. The girl envied father, sister, brother’s power to take away mother’s love, but her greatest teacher and competitor had never taught her to acknowledge that one could fight the good fight, be angry, compete, and that there would still be love afterward.

  A little girl grows up instead with this sense of a priori defeat; why try to compete? She would lose anyway. Competitions therefore terrify her. Unless, of course, victory can be guaranteed. When the new girl approaches, she drops and betrays her best friend, siding instead with the newcomer, but competition has been avoided! It isn’t necessary to strike out, actually to hurt her or to say anything evil. The avoidance, whispers, giggles, an emotional pulling away does it. Isn’t she sobbing? Hasn’t a symbiotic union been created, a victory scored?

  If you confronted the two girls—as concerned mothers often do—they couldn’t explain why they did it any more than grown women can. It goes on all our lives, we women whispering, conspiring, testing the irresistible urge to excommunicate another woman, conspiratorially drawing our heads together as we feel the adrenaline rush brought on by a friend’s sudden look of misery. Oh, as time goes by Big Girls learn to do it deftly, with their eyes, just a signal across a crowded room. It’s called The Look. In progress, The Look is smug, clandestine, and mean, indulged in by two or more grown women at a restaurant, for instance, after an unfortunate member of the party has gone to the ladies’ room. Heads together, eyes narrowed like cats, the women are ten-year-olds in full makeup. They are deadly but cool, having handled this ammunition for years; deep in their gut, they feel the old rush as headily as ever. Two Little Girls Are Leaving Out One Little Girl, who was their best friend five minutes earlier.

  The Look may sound like a minor piece of business, but it is significant, a flaw not just in our relationships with one another but in our self-image; we know we are untrustworthy, as capable of betrayal as of being the next victim in women’s world. What do you think this apprehension, year after year, does to a woman’s face: We are always at risk, the little trace lines of anxiety and tension never relax and so become incised; do others see us as “too flashy,” too drab, too loud, underdressed, overdressed, not just right?

  “Within the first years of life children learn to control some of these facial expressions, concealing true feelings and falsifying expressions of emotions not felt,” says psychologist Paul Ekman. “Parents teach their children to control their expressions by example and, more directly, with statements such as: ‘Don’t you give me that angry look.’”

  As we grow up, Ekman says, we learn “display rules” for the management of emotional expression, which operate automatically, altering our expressions without choice or awareness. Even when we become aware of our display rules, it is not always possible and certainly not easy to stop following them. “I believe that those habits involving the management of emotion—display rules—may be the most difficult of all to break,” says Ekman.

  In time, our faces become maps of our lives. More often, beginning in childhood, our emotional expressions lose their spontaneity, and what Ekman terms “masking” begins. Forcing muscles to conceal our emotions must make for a lot of wear and tear. The false face. Small wonder the cosmetic surgeon has become a staple in these years when there is more nasty emotion to mask, beginning in the earliest years when children have fewer mirroring eyes than ever to catch and respond to the look of love.

  In our feminist, matriarchal age, women seem to have more power than ever over other women’s looks. We respond, weather vanes to the slightest glance, not to men’s judgment but to the critical gaze of other women, who decide our fate as they rule our little world; boys enter dramatically at adolescence, arousing sexual desire, but in most cliques The Girls retain dominance. Adolescent girls who switch allegiance to men are Bad Girls.

  Women’s rule over one another, established with just a “look,” is a plot device in more than one Bette Davis movie. It goes on in the best of friendships; cumulatively, over the years The Look gains profound influence over how far we dare to go, how much to show, how much success, how much sex, how much beauty given the women looking, appraising, judging, their heads together, lips moving, though no words are heard or required, given their eyes on us. Some heroic women don’t give a damn; they too are notorious in film and literature, the character played by Rosalind Russell or Katharine Hepburn, who didn’t change her demeanor when other women were around; actually, with that kind of woman, men were around instead of women, which in itself tells a story.

  After today’s working lunch, for instance, telephone calls were made, gossip was shared regarding another woman’s promotion, her new sexual conquest, her exhibitionistic clothing, her “self-importance,” or so it felt to her sisters, whose lives now seemed less opposite her win. How dare she break the unwritten laws that keep all women equal? How dare she make us mindful of what we don’t have compared to her? She has awakened the forbidden feeling of competition that lives, suppressed, at volcanic heat. Knock her off. Give her “The Look,” or the silent treatment.

  When Hillary Rodham Clinton got too big for her britches too soon after her husband’s inauguration, men could never have sandbagged her without women’s full cooperation. Make her suffer! Make a joke of her ill-advised wardrobe. The same women who admire Hillary watched her demotion with ill-disguised satisfaction. Better she had stayed in the frumpy clothes. Better she had turned a deaf ear to Annie Leibovitz’s irresistible encouragement to show the camera eye the seductive power of beauty she’d kept hidden under a barrel. Better she’d kept the barrel.

  If a man treated a woman the way certain women friends treat her, she would leave him. We cannot leave our women friends; next week, next month, this same woman who shunned us, whispered about us, and left us out of the dinner party will be the one who runs to our side in an emergency. Hasn’t this been the ritual of our lives, a cycle of intimacy, exclusion, and pain that keeps the urge to compete at bay, though it is in itself a sick form of competition.

  Girls and boys bully their peers differently, says a senior counseling manager of Childline, a telephone counseling service for children in England. “Boys try the macho, aggressive form of bullying; with girls, it’s more likely bullying means exclusion from their friendship group.”

  In her novel Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood catches the nasty taste of this girlish business when Elaine, the nine-year-old heroine, is trying to fit in with her first girlfriends: “I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too. It will take hard work and a long time…. With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger. But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends.”

  Men can be rats. They forget to telephone and do not return our love. But women can live just fine without men; we are proving that in increasing numbers. If men live with less of this life-and-death drama in a love affair, it is because most have a
stronger sense of self; most managed to separate more successfully for no other reason than the fact that they are a different sex from mother, who, like it or not, is enjoined by society to reward her son’s independence.

  One last comment from Atwood, who is so good on women: “I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way,” says Elaine. “Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. But it pleases me somehow to cut out all these imperfect women [from the women’s magazines], with their forehead wrinkles that show how worried they are, and fix them into my scrapbook.”

  Years later, we are still trying to paint the perfect face, wear the perfect dress, say the perfect things; does any woman honestly believe that our terrible anxiety, which men do not seem to share, has anything to do with what they have done to us? Even if men do leave us, it would hurt less if we believed in the possibility of another love, another man, if we hadn’t grown up feeling that the breaking of the dyad was death, and competition a bad feeling for which there was no safe, practiced outlet.

  How much suppression of anger can a body take? Fatal Attraction was a popular film for many reasons, not the least of which was a beautiful woman in high sexual gear very actively seducing the man; but the real attraction for the audience, I thought, was that we got to see modern woman, fury written all over her seemingly in-charge Armani image. She was deranged, but no more so than a lot of aggressive, seductive, in-charge women in designer suits on the brink of something-like-murder. The person who gets our rage, when the dam breaks, will be a man; do we honestly believe that the kind of titanic fury erupting all over town from women gets its roots in adolescence, when boys enter our lives? Oh, no. Women’s rage today has far deeper, earlier roots. We don’t dare show other women the kind of fury we can show a man.

  I suppose the young boy is dear to my heart because I was so boyish myself in my preadolescent years, not just in dress and behavior but in my total innocence of what adolescence would bring. So determined was I never to be like “them,” my very feminine mother and sister whose dyad excluded me, that age ten was how I planned to live forever. In the mid-eighties, when I was a writer in residence at the San Francisco Examiner, I wrote an article about the preadolescent boy’s life, the bucolic years between mother and the power of young girls’ beauty; why, I wrote, wasn’t there at least one magazine for these boys, something to celebrate these years but also to prepare them for what lies ahead? There are dozens of such magazines for girls this age. The day after the column appeared, the publisher approached me and, laughing heartily, said, “If we had such a magazine, I’d call it ‘Crybaby.’” Clearly, he didn’t want his son to have it any easier than he had.

  The preadolescent boy is making his own plans for an imagined life, seeing himself as athlete, inventor, interplanetary traveler, whatever suits his inner eye. The full weight of father’s briefcase has not yet come into focus. A Good Provider isn’t on his list. Girls? Well, girls are reminiscent of mother, whom he loves and still needs too much; if he is to be a Real Boy, the way mother/girls are is opposite everything he must become. Mom is Mom and she is great, but girls? Girls are absolutely not wanted in The All-Boy Club. Signs outside the clubhouse make it clear: NO GIRLS.

  There is a truism in Hollywood: Both sexes go to boys’ movies, but boys won’t go to girls’ movies. When A Little Princess was in the planning stages, it was suggested that the heroine be changed to a hero. When the film was screened, the heroine’s gender intact, it got rave reviews, but the pundits had been right: Nothing much happened at the box office. The film Pocahontas may have had a budget that equaled the hugely successful The Lion King, but the former never measured up, “because of the girl factor,” said one Hollywood insider. “Boys won’t want to go to a girl picture.” When you are a ten-year-old boy, all of life is focused on pinning down exactly what a boy is, and the first answer is: everything that is opposite mother/girls.

  Friendships, camaraderie, trust, all matter greatly, for The Boy Gang pins down exactly what a Real Boy is. One boy may let down another, but their friendships do not form and re-form like garden worms, separating, rejoining, always excluding someone. And if there is a break in friendship, the boy can do something with the “left out” feeling; he has a voice for anger. Mother gave him more leeway than his sister to argue, disagree, raise his voice—“Such a little man, just like your father!” Boys fight, argue, challenge, but when there is a competition, be it a fight or a game, there are learned rules. You don’t fight dirty.

  The boy who doesn’t play by the rules is left out, and he knows why. Games are about winning and losing; by definition, someone is always left out, today him, tomorrow another boy. Both winning and losing must be accepted and dealt with. After the game, hands must be shaken. Unlike his sister, the boy grows to believe that life is an ongoing game with endless winnings.

  Boys can be cruel, but they encourage and applaud bravery. The boy leader of the pack is followed because he has outstripped the others. He breaks records set by heroes before him on the playing field, and bends overly rigid rules that prohibit freedom. Other boys may feel angrily envious and competitive, but if they don’t learn to lose in these years, to shake hands in the belief that today they lost but tomorrow they may win, they are not eligible to be part of the gang.

  Boys have close one-on-one friendships, but they belong to a larger club. Sometimes the club is organized and has a headquarters, a tree house, someone’s father’s garage, a basement. And there are No Girls! A free-floating feeling of camaraderie stirred up outside an enormous stadium becomes a club. Men get to be part of it by learning to win and lose. In time, of course, it becomes the Men Only Club on the corner of Main Street.

  Male bonding isn’t akin to that of a girls’ group, which is based on sameness and the avoidance of open competition. Ask a child psychiatrist; young boys don’t come home crying, “Yesterday he was my best friend. Why did he run away from me with that other guy? What did I do? Why won’t they talk to me?”

  Women have so much more power over one another than a man can ever have over us. We are one another’s great permission givers, and we are one another’s jailers. These powers will greatly accelerate in adolescence and will never let up. The potential to excommunicate another woman from women’s world is what hinders women’s networking professionally. The juice is extracted from healthy competition because buried in the challenge to compete with another woman is the dilemma: If I win, will she still love me, or will she kill me? The two are not so far apart.

  Girls who work hard to live up to an inner drive that propels them toward their unique identity cannot help but feel in opposition to mother, even if the older woman says nothing. Without healthy separation, she is inside our heads, or so it feels when we act differently than she. Guilt is our middle name. There would be less guilt in women’s lives for betraying mother if there were a father as dear and close as she. Listen to Bettelheim’s splendid advice:

  The child begins to feel [herself] as a person, as a significant and meaningful partner in a human relation, when [she] begins to relate to the father. One becomes a person only as one defines oneself against another person…. Some very rudimentary self-definition begins with defining oneself in regard to [mother]. But because of [the] deep dependency on the mother, the child cannot move out into self-definition unless [she] can lean on some third person. It is a necessary step toward independence to learn “I can also lean, rely, on some person other than Mother” before one can believe that one can manage without leaning on somebody.

  Who better than a father to be the first “significant other” for a daughter, to teach her how competition works safely, that there is life beyond the dyad? Father presents an alternative. “When the father first emerges to offer the girl a tie that can supplement… the tie to the mother,” writes Dorothy Dinnerstein, “he makes available to her a new way
of handling… the ambivalence at the heart of the infant-mother tie.” Father has a “clean slate,” says Dinnerstein, unmarked by “the inevitable griefs of infancy,” with mother. By attaching to him, the little girl “gains a less equivocal focus for her feelings of pure love, and feels freer to experience her grievances against her mother without fear of being cut off altogether from the ideal of wholehearted harmony with a magic, animally loved, parental being.”

  Until girls are raised from the beginning to feel there is great reward in becoming a unique individual, someone who is her mother’s daughter but not her clone, we will go through life seeking other women’s approval, fearing their disapproval. Let there be arguments without fear of reprisals, anger without fear of loss of the relationship, and let there be healthy competition with her who is our born teacher in learning how to win and lose. Until this happens, three little girls will not be able to play together, work together, be together, without fear of exclusion.

  I understand women’s professional need today to be included in men’s clubs, but I feel some sympathy for men because they are losing their “rooms without women.” Men still need to reconstitute their sense of self, whole maleness, in a world where, even at the height of Patriarchy, they feared women’s power. When I say this to my egalitarian husband, he reminds me of the business deals executed in these places from which women used to be excluded. Yes, I understand. Nonetheless, not all of life can be explained in terms of fairness in business.

  Men and women need their separate rituals and places that allow us to coexist socially and sexually as well as professionally. I’ve always been aware that women’s happiness with men, and theirs with us, becomes more wholehearted after men have had a period of time away from us. It goes back to the first years of life, where the baby boy was totally dependent on the Giantess, leaving him with all that infantile rage still focused on women.