The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  What is wanted from parents is the spoken encouragement to form other close ties, something along the lines of “I think it’s wonderful you’ve found someone who appreciates your love of reading, of tennis, languages. How kind of him to give you his time and attention.” Do parents realize how many opportunities small children turn down out of a fear of disloyalty? With our parents’ goodwill at our backs, we feel free to walk, talk, think, dress like significant others, and, lo and behold, we discover that our new self hasn’t cost us a drop of family love. We have grown.

  Each time we fall in love, the initial excitement is at being seen as someone unique. When that excitement of giving someone our special self changes to fear of being abandoned, we lose our separateness, usually without any decision to do so. Who would choose to lose identity? We fall back into the baby’s unseparated, symbiotic neediness: “I’ll die if you leave me!”

  The Years of Invention stand out in many women’s memories because they were that thrilling time between need of mother and need of men. For a while, we were free of rules, free of all-seeing eyes, free to invent a self. Of course women are angry today; look what was given up.

  None of us wants to be left by a beloved, but when we read desertion in the slightest turning away—when he just looks at another woman—our anger terrifies us, and him. If we never learned that anger is part of love, its inevitable other side, then it lives at its original killer heat. If it were not allowed to be expressed during our growing years, aired, and the terrible words allowed to hang in the air until they dissipated, the air once again cleared between us, then this is how anger always feels, titanic. It is a dangerous world, but nowhere near as dangerous as many grown women imagine; I think of myself as fearless, but all my life, whenever I am alone in the house at night and hear noises at doors and windows, I imagine killers; Robertiello says it is my own rage, never aired when I was a child, that lives on in the unconscious, only to be projected on to evil forces “out there.”

  What attracted me, like millions of other young girls, to Nancy Drew was her bravery. She didn’t hear murderers shaking the windows and doors when she was home alone. I read every book in the series—each won for perfect attendance at Sunday school—and it wasn’t her looks I wanted to emulate. It was the determination with which she intuitively met injustice and opposition. She didn’t waffle—“Oh, dear, what will the other girls think?”—she acted. Nor did danger make her pause and reconsider—“Oh, I couldn’t possibly go in that big, dark house alone!” She went in. So did I at ten. Big empty houses, railroad cars down by the waterfront, high trees all beckoned; the element of danger didn’t hold a candle to the reward of mastery. It was only in my mother’s house, when I was alone at night, that I feared the unspeakable threat in the dark beyond the windowpane. My own rage projected outward, projected on to killers who would destroy me: “I one my mother, I two my mother… I ate my mother.”

  Conversely and simultaneously I practiced courage like a swordsman, daring my band of friends to climb higher onto the brick walls that surrounded the secret gardens between our houses, until we could see every belfry in our lovely city of churches. Even now the unexpected appeals more than comfort, in which I feel uncomfortable. It is certainly not everybody’s choice of a life, but given today’s unknowns, courage is not a bad thing to teach a girl, and there is no better time to practice than the tenth year.

  It was that same Nancy Drew adrenaline that grabbed me when I saw Thelma and Louise, a film, you may remember, that stirred up the most amazing brouhaha in 1991, was on the cover of Time magazine, and got the drawers of many feminists in a twist. Disillusioned, unfulfilled, closer to the end of their lives than the beginning, the two heroines fall into an adventure that reunites them with their libidos, their courage, their expansiveness. They sling guns, rob a few stores, blow up a truck, and generally “act just like men.” So? Isn’t this a movie, make-believe, and aren’t we already acting just like men, except for bravery?

  My, my, what an uproar that film created, especially among those Matriarchal Feminists who like to keep all the badness in the world blamed on men. Women were telephoning one another all over the country for days, arguing, yelling, some furious, others laughing, but alive! It was a good feeling to have the argument out there, and the movie was the first of many in which female leads stalk the streets, blowing up buildings right and left. But because it was written by a woman, Thelma and Louise got an especially rough reception from certain feminists who flapped their wings and scolded, like film critic Sheila Benson, who saw it as a betrayal of feminism, which “has to do with responsibility, equality, sensitivity, understanding—not revenge, retribution, or sadistic behavior.” Oh?

  Each of us takes away from a film what we saw; what I saw in Thelma and Louise and have seen in more and more films since are moving-picture allegories of women in roles in which we have never been seen. But we know the cruelty, we’ve felt it in real life, women’s rage as well as the kindness. It is freeing, reassuring, sometimes entertaining to see the bitch in us. It tells us that we, the voyeurs, are human; it tells us to take off that frozen mask that we think hides our cruelty—I’d far rather see the whites of my enemy’s eyes—and it reminds us to make a more conscious choice the next time we feel sadistic.

  To take these films any more literally than the standard stories of male heroes, to see them as an incitement for women to become gun-toting outlaws is to miss the beauty of the message. This is who we have become, maybe not literally, but we didn’t take Clint Eastwood taunting, “Make my day,” literally. We accepted that men, some of them, were killers; well, so are women. Do these finger-wagging feminists think the rest of us need a Set of Rules to follow, their rules, because we are too unformed to make our own life choices? Feminists are “sensitive,” “understanding”? Puh-leeze!

  For me, Thelma and Louise was the perfect grown-up sequel to the preadolescent years: the image of women being wild, ready for action, aroused too much envy, not in men, but in that breed of feminist who simply cannot abide another woman racing down a sexual highway with the top down on the convertible, gun in hand, ready to face oblivion rather than go back to a life of rules and regulations. It’s a road the inhibitors know they will never travel.

  These are the same feminists who would urge you to “Take Your Daughter to Work” and leave your son at home, to take resources from the educational system at the expense of young boys on the bogus accusation that gender bias in the schools has created a debilitating loss of self-esteem in America’s schoolgirls. The fact is that the majority of experts in the field of preadolescent development simply do not acknowledge a vast gender difference in self-esteem. “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America”—the academic study that prompted “Take Your Daughter to Work”—is flawed research with rigged statistics so dramatically presented that it drove the media into a feeding frenzy that hasn’t ceased.

  Have you spent time at a college lately? Are you aware of the matriarchal rule on these campuses where your sons as well as your daughters are being fed female-victim rhetoric that gains its fuel from the assumption that sleeping men will continue to back off from women’s rage? Wake up, men!

  It baffles me why men continue to cave in at the slightest murmur of victimization of women. Is it guilt, fear, or the traditional shared male belief that if you go along with women’s wailing long enough, they’ll wind down? Don’t count on it, men. That was your father’s reaction. These women don’t need or want you. Your sperm is of no value; they can pick up a vial at the nearest sperm bank. You are nonessential in their world.

  Since the Anita Hill affair, Matriarchal Feminism has sucked more profit out of victimization than anyone would have imagined, and it still goes on. I was no fan of Clarence Thomas or that congressional caricature of an all-male jury. But don’t assume that women’s rage will ever be voided on men alone. The giant heart pump of women’s anger-that-never-dies is the bottomless reservoir that goes back to our first years.
It is anger not at men, but at women. Given our inability to express it then at the person we loved and needed, infantile omnipotent rage never went away at all. Today women have a voice and no safer target than sleeping men. What woman dares name the real source of our rage, who is also the target of our love… “I one my mother, I two my mother… I ate my mother.”

  The Power of the Negative Role Model

  Opposite those people we idolized were those who represented a way of acting, looking, living that we hated and swore we would never imitate. Perhaps it wasn’t conscious then, but in our souls we swore we would not grow up to be like an overly critical father, a complaining mother, or a cruel sibling. Still dependent on our family, we couldn’t afford to say the words out loud, but the vow was made: I will not be like them! And we aren’t.

  When we look in the mirror today we don’t see certain physical similarities to an overly boastful uncle, a cranky grandparent, a physically abusive older brother. A cosmetic surgeon tells me that patients will look at their reflections, pointing out features they would like to change, never seeing the bump on the nose, the drooping eyelid; these were the characteristics of the negative role model. We vowed we would never be like them, and in our own eyes, we aren’t!

  I was captured by Doris Lessing’s depiction of her parents in the first volume of her autobiography, an image of the way her own life would not turn out: “There they are, together, stuck together, held there by poverty and—much worse—secret and inadmissible needs that come from deep in their two so different histories. They seem to me intolerable, pathetic, unbearable, it is their helplessness that I can’t bear. I stand there, a fierce unforgiving adamant child, saying to myself: I won’t. I will not. I will not be like that. I am never going to be like them…. Remember this moment,” the young Leasing warns herself. “Remember it always. Don’t let yourself forget it. Don’t be like them.”

  When was it that I vowed I would be economically independent, seeing the price my mother paid for her dependence on my grandfather? He was my hero, but like many grandparents who can build ties to their grandchildren, he was unable to be anything except a critical disciplinarian with his own children. He was a wealthy man, but his Calvinistic rigidity demanded that my mother work for him in partial “repayment” of the funds he laid out for her and us children. Maybe that sounds reasonable today, but when I was growing up in the South, no woman from “our class” worked; what I learned from my mother wasn’t the admirable image of a working woman—she resented that job—but her anxious air of resignation. I swore never to wear it. The sadness on her pretty face frightened me, especially at the dinner table, the battleground of so many families. When she was with her friends, at parties that often spontaneously happened in our house, then I saw her happy and laughing, but it was always with a sigh when she turned to me, or so it seemed.

  I would never sigh like that, I swore, and I never did, not over money problems, not ever. Like most children I accepted that I was the cause of those deep sighs, and it didn’t require much figuring out to conclude that their source was her dependence on her father. Never me, I decided. I will never wear that look of capitulation. Should I catch anything bordering on it today while passing a store window, I take a quick, deep breath and relax the muscles. I may have consciously resolved to be different, to be independent, but there are certain characteristics, looks, we cannot help but inherit for dozens of reasons, not the least of which is proof of love—“See, Mommy, I don’t hate you, I’ve become you!” My family smiled at my lemonade stands, at my rummage sales, at the plays I produced on our back terrace, using bedsheets as curtains, with one child collecting pennies at “the door.” It was considered unfeminine, unladylike, even to think of money.

  All this began at about age seven. I saved my money in a glass bank shaped like the world. As I watched Portugal, then France become opaque behind my pennies, nickels, and dimes, I imagined these coins buying my ticket to voyage to the brightly colored countries on the postage stamps my grandfather sent from his travels. That my bank was a globe mattered, for as I can recall, I dreamed of moving on, travel, adventure. I just couldn’t repeat my mother’s life.

  I would come to have enormous sympathy for what my mother went through, but when I was little, I didn’t know the background of her unhappiness. My father, whom I’d been taught to believe dead, was actually still alive; she lived with that, along with the chagrin of her reliance on my grandfather’s “largesse.” I saw only the exasperation, and what I read as a lack of joy when she saw me, her shoulders rounding in resignation. And so I brought home straight A’s always, and won awards, trophies, games, was elected captain, president, of everything in sight. But she took no delight, and so I resolved never to bring problems, or prizes, to her door. I tried to be responsible for myself.

  That is how I grew up and remain today, economically and emotionally. No one has ever paid my rent or bought my food or clothes. It is not a proud manifesto, simply a given. I remember the first man who bought me a piece of what I suppose is called “serious” jewelry. He was an Italian film producer whom I met in Rome in the sixties. “Is this real?” I asked ungraciously, pulling away from it, a gold pin encrusted with tiny diamonds and rubies. He was taken aback. I protested that I had no intention of prolonging our love affair, that I was returning to New York, to another man, but he laughed out loud and put his hand over mine. “Nancy,” he said, “it is just a little gift.” When I look at that pin today, I recall my fear that taking the pin might be read to mean that I was surrendering some degree of my independence; I understand what the younger Nancy felt and feel it still.

  With all our celebration of successful women, there remains a deep, traditional resentment in our society of women who have succeeded economically. The System applauds a man “having it all,” but when a woman accrues wealth, fame, looks, and power, she is cut down to size, even in Hollywood.

  Between my aunt, the positive role model of independence, joy in the creative life, and my mother, whom I fear I represent unfairly as only a negative role model, an emotional blueprint developed that still applies. What has changed is conscious awareness that my mother’s laugh, her zest and competitive spirit are mine as well, both genetically and by way of imitation. I was too angry for too long to admit how much I owe her; the gratitude was suppressed along with the rage. She didn’t see me when I was little. That grieved me deeply. She is my mother. In Key West, when I see her with my friends, drinking martinis around the pool and leaning seductively toward the man who is my dearest friend, I see myself.

  And when she sees my life, the way we live, fly around the world, the clothes I wear, she says, “My, my, aren’t you the woman of the world.” It’s all right now. I can live with her envy because I understand it: Genetically and temperamentally, she was as capable as I of having my life or any other; she simply didn’t have as good a negative role model as I did.

  Ambivalence. If I could make that fact of life acceptable—that those we love most get our hottest rage—I would have accomplished something.

  The Tree House Versus the Sleep-Over

  That preadolescent girls and boys, once out of the house, head in such diametrically opposing directions states the urgency of their business: Each sex is eager to find people like themselves, to form friendships, groups that replace family intimacies with look-alike, carbon copies of what a girl is, what a boy is. We are desperate for another face and body our own size and with our own needs.

  Girls nest together in sleep-overs, touching, talking into the night, reassuring one another that each is like the other, loves the other. The last thing the boy gang wants is a pretty chintz bedroom. Better to sleep in a tent, a tree house, and to compare, compete on a baseball diamond; it is as opposite from his sister’s grouping as his body is from hers. The preadolescent boy must find contact with other boys for no other reason than to get away from the sight of himself in the eyes of women/mother, whom he loves but who has dominated him from the time
he was born. Who am I? he wonders. What do I look like in eyes other than hers, which cannot really see me, her body being so different from mine, and I am beginning to believe that her thoughts and needs are also different. Therefore, while I love her and must protect her from my secret self, I must find other people my size, who look like me, in whom I see my self, and whom I can trust.

  The entry of fathers into their sons’ intimate lives isn’t keeping pace with the number of women raising boys totally on their own. Are we surprised that boys/men so often come off sounding, looking, and behaving as if they were antifemale? Just for a sample of “what might have been” or “could still be,” let me quote from a recent article in Esquire about a study by Robert Sears, who documented a group of men for several decades and who found that “those who were best able to resolve conflicts through compromise when they were twenty-three were raised by parents who shared equally in child rearing when they were five… their fathers were as engaged with them as their mothers. When the same men were assessed for empathy at age thirty-one and their social relationships and intimacy were measured at forty-one, the greatest determining factor turned out to be the level of their fathers’ involvement.” Given a choice, I’d prefer fathers involved from day one, but I’ll take what I can get in this contentious but crucial debate on shared parenting.

  Left to themselves, preadolescent boys form The Boy Gang, prototype for the future poker game, all-male club, saloon, any place or time boys/men can hang together without girls/women.