The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Put more men in the nursery and I predict that women will be more gracefully received in the all-male club, and less rudely treated, less harassed, in the workplace. Until then, men will feel even more trapped in a world where women’s power, already considerable in men’s eyes, is now greater than ever. Men will find places somewhere, somehow, to be alone together, without women, if only to be able to love them.

  Don’t let there be another generation of women who are one another’s vigilant jailers, determined that no one woman should get more than any other. When I was a girl, it was difficult to rouse a team of competitive girls who played to win. Giggling and dropping the ball was applauded. It drove me crazy. Watching women’s sports teams today makes my heart soar. These young women take another woman’s victory as a benchmark to be matched, a safe outlet for the fires of competition. When the University of Connecticut’s girls basketball team, the Huskies, had an undefeated season in 1994–1995, it was a beautiful sight to watch that last game, the picture of the players and of the crowd too. I felt that I was seeing the turn of the century.

  And if the runner, the skater, or the basketball player is beautiful too, how do other women and men react to this accumulation of power? How does she? It is appropriate that today, beauty, unbound, runs the streets like a loose electric wire, alive with current. What to do with it? Women no longer have an exclusive on beauty; as we become more competitive, men become more beautiful. Styles for males and females of all ages fluctuate constantly, as if life is caught in a revolving door. Kids on the street, men and women in offices, lengthen, shorten hems, hair, swapping generational as well as cross-gender styles.

  Looks and sex are inseparable and become that material with which we reinvent our societal roles. Just as when we were children and put on our parents’ clothes, aping their voices and mannerisms, today we grown-ups, and children too, try on everything, all the costumes and sexual poses. Understandably, the archconservatives are nervous, remembering what happened in the sixties and seventies, on which they would blame today’s chaos. But they might as well blame the ethos, the winds of change, since the sixties and seventies themselves grew out of the rigidity and bigotry of the fifties. And so it goes, or went.

  Whatever we do, we must pay close attention to beauty and sex, which are moving us mysteriously across the Ouija board; we have been given a rare opportunity to create a new way to live and should see the passing fashions and gender poses not as the end product but as a means to the end. We want to be the creators of our future, the molders of the clay and not the clay itself. The looks on the street are telling us something: Unlike our parents, we can consciously choose how much importance to place on beauty, how to use its power, which by extension includes all other forms of power too: love, sex, work, the lot.

  To choose wisely we should call in all the chips, use everything in our memory banks, not the least of which are these so-called Latency Years. We just might find in them our favorite portrait of ourselves, inside and out, not a fashion slave, or a slave to money, but a young person who never looked in mirrors because what we trusted was how we felt about ourselves internally.

  The Search for an Ego Ideal

  Between the confinement of home and the equally restricting Nice Girl Rules of adolescence, I had two heroines, two loves, who for this brief period took me over, so thrilling were the images of them, and of me in them. Each awoke me to a promise of a life as yet undreamed of. They need do nothing, just be. Each had the power to break my heart, so enamored was I, wanting to be near them, to stare at them and imitate what I recognized as ways in which I wanted to move, talk, act, look. One was my creative, the other, my erotic muse. One was adult, the other, just two years older than I. Both were female, and to this day I recognize their imprint on me.

  My aunt Pat came to live with us when I was nine. My mother’s youngest sister, she arrived as an interplanetary visitor, so beautiful to my eyes in her originality of look and behavior. She was like no grown woman I’d ever seen, like no one’s mother, like no teacher. She was a born heroine. It was easy to stare at her—tall, like me, and a blood relative—and find both a portrait of myself and a pattern to follow. I was certainly not glamorous like she was, with her red hair swept up in deep waves of curls, her billowing skirts cinched with wide belts, her ballet shoes, but I adored her differentness on sight, knowing in my heart that I too was different from all my comrades, an otherness that went beyond my not being a born Southerner and the only girl without a father.

  My aunt, an actress, painter, and writer, threw her head back when she laughed and smelled of a musky perfume that seemed to come from the ancient Greek coins she wore on her wrist. I followed along beside her to the waterfront, where she furnished a studio on the second floor of an abandoned warehouse. There she set up her easel, threw shawls and pillows over old sofas, stoppered Chianti bottles with candles, by which light she and her actor friends read aloud from The Lady’s Not for Burning, The Voice of the Turtle, and Bell, Book and Candle. And I, this nine-year-old, was allowed to join in, even given parts to read. The generosity of them, the kindness! I have never forgotten.

  Some nights we would go to the Dock Street Theatre—the oldest theater in the country—and I would watch the man she would later marry direct her, his leading lady, in Shakespeare, Wilder, O’Neill. On summer days we would go to the graveyard behind St. Phillips Church, where she taught me to use watercolors, and very soon it began to feel as though I couldn’t live without her. School was out during that first summer she lived with us, and I would lie on my bed, suffocating in the heavy magnolia air outside my window, because it seemed I couldn’t breathe until I heard the sound of her footfall on the gravel path, the squeak of the big iron gate. She was back!

  I was in love, and the wonderful part of the story is that Aunt Pat allowed me to love her; she wasn’t the least self-conscious of my worshipful gaze and must have recognized the pain I felt when away from her, for she included me with her adult friends whenever possible. Sitting in the dark of a movie theater, I would allow my arm to be close to hers, feeling in the physical contact something like, but not exactly, what I would feel in a few years for boys.

  Her interest in me let me believe that in time I might look, even become, like her. She embodied the first hope, no, more exactly, the first real desire I allowed myself to dream of looks and of being looked at. What gave me this faith was her vision of me as being someone worthy of imbuing with great ideas of accomplishments. There were reading lists drawn up, acting lessons, and pride in height and posture was taught. Mostly, there was the sight of her typing a play on a card table set up in my bedroom, where she would write of an afternoon, her gold cigarette holder wafting a trail of dreamy smoke, carried on the light summer breeze across the room where I would take it in, the whole picture, as I watched, not even pretending to read the book in my lap, so in love was I with the image of this lovely young woman, the first person in my life who had ever seen me and made me feel loved.

  Simultaneously, I met and fell equally in love with Poppy, a girl two years older than I, whose family had bought a house beyond our garden wall. In these years I traveled around my neighborhood on the brick walls that surrounded the lovely gardens in our part of town. A few had shards of glass along the top to discourage trespassers, but I was not dissuaded nor did I ever feel unwelcome in the yards into which I unceremoniously dropped. Those in residence seemed to be expecting me, by which I mean, they were never taken aback or angry if they walked into their yards and found me playing with their pets, or sitting in their trees. Perhaps it was my friendliness, for I never questioned their hospitality and had long known the power of a smile and a good story well told.

  Mostly it was the time and place. Charleston was still “the best-kept secret in America”—my uncle’s words—and the people, well, they were certainly not Empty Packages, hollow souls desperate for expensive clothes, labels, jewelry, or fancy cars that drew attention. Filled to the brim with kin
dness, character, manners, and an inherited sense of who they were, they peopled my childhood and made it blessed. The high walls along which I raced, instead of confinement promised compartments of adventure like chapters in a book of fairy tales. DuBose Heyward had once lived several walls to the west, and it was said that the scene for his Porgy and Bess was near our maze of walls; just south of our house lived one of the last black families in the neighborhood, and the children would sit on their porch railing, shaking their heads in disbelief as I waved from the three-story wall skirting their property, a crumbling free-standing structure whose bricks broke loose underfoot, alerting the Dobermans on the opposite side to crash through the underbrush, barking furiously. Where did I get my fearlessness, and where did I lose it?

  One day I dropped from my bedroom window onto our wall to discover that two yards away a new family was moving into our community. Which is how I met Poppy, whose opening greeting was, “Who the hell are you?”, an expression I’d never heard a Nice Girl use, but which had in its power to shock a definite come-hither quality. I swung down into Poppy’s yard and was instantly infatuated, for she was more hell-bent than I and, along with her family (who, people would say, came from the wrong side of the tracks), had the most obvious sexuality I’d ever encountered. I sensed it, smelled it, felt it before I knew its name was sex, though I would soon learn the word from Poppy and her three older sisters, each of whom wore a shade of lipstick that marked them: Bad Girls.

  I was unaccustomed to a girl near my age outstripping me in bravado, to which Poppy also brought the customs of her blue-collar world, making my private girls’ school environment tame and strait-laced. I didn’t know how much I’d missed the steamy side of life, embodied in the look and feel of Poppy’s entire family, until I fell into their midst. Their house was not well kept, nor did boughs of magnolia leaves decorate the fireplace in summer, or candles light the table at supper; in fact, they ate in the kitchen and communicated with one another by yelling. But mostly, it was the sexual thing, something my other heroine, my aunt, didn’t impart, but which now had instant appeal.

  In my Girl Scout shorts I would sit for hours—which is what it took—watching Poppy’s sisters prepare for dates with the Citadel cadets who waited downstairs for these bosomy young women, heavy, with blond hair and makeup. All their beds were in one large room, and sandwiched between the four of them were dressing tables, copious mirrors into which they would stare at themselves for hours, plucking hairs, slowly, skillfully applying makeup, mascara, rouge, eyebrow pencil, expertly blending colors, licking their fingers to smooth errant hairs. Then the nail polish, the fingers spread across the naked knee, the blood-red painted on as delicately as priests must have drawn the Book of Hours. All the while, the Citadel cadets downstairs waiting, expecting, hoping. I wanted to say to these deliberately slow women, “Hurry, hurry, or they’ll leave!” But they knew better.

  My mother and aunt wore very little makeup, while these females had drawers jammed with jars and bottles of ointments, lotions, pastel-colored creams, and on their crowded dressing tables were so many brushes of all lengths, curling irons, combs that whenever anything was picked up, clouds of powder billowed up and swam around them, shaven gold, giving the whole scene a surrealistic magnificence.

  I knew they were preparing for something so momentous that it made my heart race; someday I too would be a part of this, and I studied them as closely as I studied my aunt. Here were two sides of becoming, and they were, if not contradictory, certainly complex to combine into one: There was my aunt’s handsome world of accomplishment, with its promise of creativity and applause; and here was this world of forbidden sexuality, with its equal guarantee of eye-catching visibility, something for which I had a decided appetite, nourished by years of invisibility within my family.

  One sleep-over night that began like any other, Poppy crawled into my bed and took my hand, moving it over her breasts, showing me, directing me, before crawling between my legs and putting her mouth and tongue all over that part of my body I had never touched except to wipe myself clean. It was an exciting feeling made all the more so by the known badness of the act. I was only ten, but I knew it was forbidden and that I could not tell the other Nice Girls about it. But I have always loved forbidden sex.

  My aunt did not approve of Poppy. One day she caught me furtively applying hot-pink lipstick behind an azalea bush just inside our big iron gates; I was in my jeans, old flannel shirt, and with my pigtails and braces, I must have been a confusing image. “Why do you see that girl?” Aunt Pat asked. If I’d been able to read my yearnings, I would have answered, “Because she arouses in me a way I want to feel, something inside that is as much a part of who I am as what you have brought to me.” But I said nothing; rather, shamefaced, I ran, moth to the flame.

  Adolescence hit Poppy overnight, and I became useless to her. She disappeared from my life as abruptly as she’d arrived. She was surrounded by boys who were in heat over the look and musk she had been raised to emanate. In the steps of her sisters, Poppy went forth to attract men with the same allure that had attracted me. Heartbroken, I returned to the company of the girls I’d known all my life. I became one of them again, but inside, I was different.

  The most generous gift my mother gave me was not to judge or in any way limit my adoration of her younger sister. It is not at all unusual for some women, even though they are totally disinterested in mothering, to resent their daughters fixating on another grown woman, but my mother allowed me all the closeness in the world with my aunt, whose friends followed her down from the North. They were women, like Pat, cast in a unique mold; in New York they edited magazines and wrote books. Men too arrived, tall, handsome architects, poets, playwrights, all proposing marriage to my aunt; one made two trips on a Greyhound bus for this very reason and was twice rejected; years later I would meet him in New York, where he is still one of Broadway’s leading directors. I would live in my aunt’s shadow until the day adolescence struck me too like a fever and I was off, into the next chapter.

  What I took away from this love affair with Aunt Pat was an image of a way to look, not in the sense of fashion or makeup but of an internal way of seeing myself that came from her. Of course, it never erased the infantile fear of being abandoned for a prettier other. The two do battle to this day: a powerful belief in self, which she gave me, and the plain child who never measured up. Ambivalence.

  From Nancy Drew to Thelma and Louise

  Ambassadors for ourselves, we ten-year-olds go looking for alliances, our credentials being the trust we get from our families. Do we go with their blessings to find models other than them of how to be a woman or a man? Do our parents love to hear the stories we bring home of the wonderful people we have met, the father of our friend, who is teaching us to fly-fish, the beautiful teacher who says we have a gift for languages, painting, for maybe even being a great soprano and going to Europe to sing at a place called La Scala?

  Or do we get a sense of treason, a whiff of disloyalty? What we need at ten is permission to lovingly imitate others beyond the family; we need to hear from the people dearest to us that they genuinely want us to be open to alternatives, models beyond themselves. Actually, we’ve needed this generosity from them since the beginning, from mother’s urging us to move toward father, her smiling on the portrait of our love for and our closeness to him, feeling it took nothing away from her.

  If instead, for instance, we felt that our affection for an older brother, an uncle, was taken by mother as a betrayal, we clung more tightly, feeling her unspoken pain at our disloyalty. Mother, father would deny that they resent our alliances beyond the family; the sense of ownership a parent has is so easily called by other names: responsibility, concern, fear of the outer world, which is indeed real. But knowing the difference between real and imagined danger is the parent’s role.

  How do you tell a father or mother that it is one of the greatest acts of parental love to encourage a child to get close to o
ther people? Children are naturally drawn into the world to find themselves, which is why we love the old stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and their adventures with colorful characters they meet outside the home, people who change their thoughts and lives. Young girls need heroines too, now more than ever, given the choices that lie ahead, decisions that will be hard to make if choosing to be different from mother is experienced as treason. The variety in the world beyond home is looked forward to when mother’s and father’s spoken encouragement has convinced the daughter and son that going their own way is a good thing and in no way diminishes love within the family. Women have been waiting for this larger stage for years; today our variegated world has been thrust upon us and these are the prime years to prepare for it.

  We are nine or ten, desperate for heroes, not even knowing it until they arrive, awakening us from the torpor of confinement that was home and family, whom we love but have outgrown as regards imitation. We know them inside and out and want more. We have pockets of different kinds of love uncalled on by our parents. The loose skin of our life lies in folds, waiting to be filled; we need instruction in the form of heroes who have practiced ways we too want to be. In our minds, a vacuum of cells waits for the inspiration of an admirable other who invites us to see our identity in him or her, a picture to put in the cellophane envelope of our new wallet. Who are we? We don’t even know the question exists, but it presses us out into the world.

  In theory, separation is something we complete between the first and second years of life, but in fact it is something we work on all of our lives. We are never too old to expand identity, shore up our feeling of safety unto our selves. If we have the love of family internalized, we have fuel to move on. As for children who miss out on the security of unconditional love, well, in these few years there is still an eagerness to find someone, people “out there” who will embrace us, will look us keenly in the eye and recognize our spark of individuality. Adolescence will anesthetize us; the time is now.