The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Now, on playing fields, in secret clubs, dark, dirty places chosen specifically for their rankness, their dank, smelly, rough quality, so antithetical to females, a new language and posture is fashioned, practiced. Learned so carefully, at such risk and with so much promise that many men never unlearn it. “Shit! Fuck! Puke! Who farted?” They yell it, they do it, masturbating, farting, shitting together, anything that doesn’t look female. If boys exaggerate it is because they are desperate to be opposite from us. In a few years, a young boy will be expected to have mastered the seeming manliness of having everything under control. Be a man! Make that goal! Storm that beachhead!

  I loved the scene in John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire, in which John and his sister Fanny shit together on the path that the football players take on their way back to the gym and then wait to see them step in it. That would have been grand, thought I, wishing for the thousandth time that growing up, I had had a brother. Or a penis—not now, but back then when I fully appreciated the boy’s fixation. The penis is such a unifying symbol, so out there, so graspable and clean.

  What else do boys have that better distinguishes them as different from women, who have up till now dominated their lives? Of course they douse the campfire in a communal piss, cavort naked in locker rooms, and play masturbatory games of who can shoot the farthest. Joyfully breaking mother’s strictest rules and getting away with it injects them with bravado. It is an act of defiance and victory. The boy is proudly claiming ownership of that part of himself that, a few short years ago, she controlled but didn’t like. This is something he has that she doesn’t, and there are few objects of which this can be said. Every time a boy masturbates, it is an exercise in separation from women and a declaration of maleness.

  How many chances does a boy have to see himself in another male, to admire and love the sight of the beautiful, young, male body? Girls/women touch, look, adore, lie down together without threat. But the boy has but this brief, shame-free period of time in which to allow himself to adore someone who is like him, a kind of hero worship. Soon enough will come terrors of homosexuality at just thinking of another man, “Oh, my God, I must be gay!” A 1969 movie titled If contained a scene that memorably captured this picture of hero worship: The older boy swings effortlessly on high gymnastic bars, his elegant, disciplined body in perfect coordination. The younger boy, watching, is clearly in love with the perfection of form and prowess, perhaps in love with the other man, who might in time be he.

  A boy’s decision to forfeit looks in favor of alternative means of getting attention is part of his separation from mother. Earlier admiration of his long lashes and blond curls is now brushed off in favor of near-miss feats of courage, which would alarm if not disgust mother, but which gain points with the gang. Losing her adoration of his beauty is a trade-off for the ground he has won as a man. Beauty’s power has become an inferior girlish asset, and if mother should now smooth his hair and gaze upon him—“Let me feast my eyes on you”—he would push her away, saying, “Aw, Mom.” His standing in the eyes of the gang has planted in him a sureness that strength, badness, might is how he proves maleness, his distance from mother/girls. Within the gang, beauty does not count.

  Appearance becomes intentionally disheveled, even dirty. Television commercials that portray his mother as a laundress focus on her gratitude to detergents that get out the young scoundrel’s dirt. The note of pride in her “little man” is apparent—“Now try not to get so much mud on my nice clean uniform!”—is said with fond resignation, an acceptance of boys’ dirt that does not extend to her daughter. Not all boys are athletes—of late, the nerd with the plastic “nerdpak” has become an alternate hero—but for boys who have the ability and courage, sports are still where the preadolescent most successfully identifies himself as male.

  It will be interesting to see what happens to the evolving look of the ten-year-old as appearance becomes an increasingly important part of the male makeup. It isn’t just grown men who are getting deeper into fashion and grooming, enjoying the power that comes with looking good. Television has made male beauty an increasingly profitable business. According to my friends with young sons, looking good has trickled down to their boys’ age group. Hair gel, mousse, the right Nikes, the correct shirt and jeans can matter deeply to a nine-year-old. What confuses the boy are the girls telephoning him, following him home from school; he is dressing to be part of his gang of friends, not for girls, not yet.

  Today, the look of the Beat Generation is back, reminding me of a book by Joyce Johnson that came out in the early eighties, in which she describes her life with such Beat luminaries as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. She understood that the look and feel of the Beat movement was that of the “boy gang” gathered round the sacred fire. Women like Johnson were allowed to be there but were excluded from the inner sanctum; women never really belonged. At one point she writes of how her friend Elise “watches wistfully as they [the men] play their dangerous games, killing time between now and the final disaster.”

  Girls in Each Other’s Arms

  Contrary to boys, young girls bring to their intimacies with one another the same passionate symbiotic glue they had with mother. Girls come to life in sleep-overs, nights of sharing everything they can dredge up from their short lives, any secret, any bit of self they can offer to show trust, in the hope that the other girl(s) will return the confidence, thus sealing the oneness between them. Yes, we want to live our own special life, but the only pattern we know is the dyad. We never walked alone. Try as we might to be different from mother, we are saturated with her, how she was with us and how we have perceived her all these years.

  Little girls crawl into each other’s beds to whisper, giggle, tickle each other’s backs, hug, touch, look. We cannot look too deeply, for the other girl is us and we are she. We begin to love ourselves. This is what a girl is, not mother, not sister, but the best friend who is so like me that when we are apart we remain connected by telephone, so desperate are we to hang on to this new image of self. Mother was our mirror, but now she is too tall, too old; her clothes closet is exciting, but her dresses are too big, her dressing table fascinating but too complicated to grasp. Our dear little friend, however, she is our new reflection! No matter that she is brunette and we are blond. We are soul sisters, she the bridge to the great unknown, the totally trustworthy “other” who supports our tentative steps away from home, her hand in ours, her eyes shining back to us a sureness of self. Until she betrays us with another girl, leaves us out and without our self.

  The world doesn’t want to think of the nine-year-old as sexual; puberty comes soon enough, and our dogged refusal to accept a child’s sexual feelings from life’s beginning reflects our own fear of sex. If we don’t think about it until adolescence, when reproduction can occur, then we don’t have to worry. It is pathetic that we deny what science consistently tells us and instead raise young people to suppress a vitality they might otherwise use in areas of growth other than sexual intercourse if only we could come to terms with our own sexuality.

  Sexual energy is fuel to be applied to learning, to sports, to social communication, to all talents and skills; children are capable of learning this, and also that early sexual intercourse could ruin a young life. We cheat them by not educating them on the age-appropriate uses of sexual energy. By the time adolescence arrives, there is little desire to take responsibility for something so “bad” that no one dear to us ever acknowledged how exciting it is; in fact, their blindness to what we have discovered, the thrill of sexual feeling, makes it something “they” couldn’t possibly understand. And we wonder why children tell us nothing of their sexual feelings.

  More than our brothers, we girls have internalized mother’s anti-sex attitude, given that we are the same gender and she our unavoidable model; but when we play our sexually exploratory games with other little girls and boys, the notion of mother with her wagging finger and threats of withdrawal of love if we are caught only ma
kes the game more exciting. “We sat on the edge of the sandbox,” a woman tells me, “we were maybe eight or nine, girls and boys, and I’ll always remember the grunting noises we made, like little animals as we pulled down our pants and showed ourselves to one another.” The thrill of the forbidden; it is the cornerstone of the sexual fantasies that women will continue to embroider for years.

  The most popular erotic daydream among both heterosexual and lesbian women today is of sex with another woman, and the earliest memory of such real sexual exploration goes back to these Years of Invention. Of course the memory of first arousal stays with us, the touch of a finger the same size as ours, the awareness that this is another little girl’s, who shares our thoughts, up till now kept secret. We believed we were the only ones, that all females were like mother. But here is this darling companion, who softens mother’s rules until they melt. Together, partners in mind and deed, we distance ourselves from mother. On the one hand, it makes us mother’s protector, we will not tell her; secrets are part of separation, but simultaneously, the forbidden element of breaking her rules becomes endemic, so deeply associated with sex that for many grown women “forbidden sex” is the only kind that excites; after marriage, sex loses its kick.

  Another prevalent detail within adult women’s sexual fantasies is intimate talk, the sharing of secrets, hours of words building an erotic bridge to the act of sex. Men don’t understand women’s fondness for the verbal preamble of hushed conversation before sex, words and words that build to trust, loosening antisex constraints, allowing the door of the cage to open and passion to soar. Little girls lie in bed and tell secrets; big girls want a candlelit dinner, low voices sharing intimacies, and, maybe later, romantic music, more words of love that make them wet with longing. Once we were promised we would be loved forever if we were good little girls. To break this symbiotic agreement with mother and be sexually free we want our lover to be more persuasive than mother.

  When we are little, when we are nine, we have already internalized the picture of our genitals as untouchable, except when it was necessary to wipe ourselves clean. We have never seen our genitals, but we know it is not a pretty picture. Here with this other little girl is a chance to discover that perhaps mother was wrong. If the other girl wants to touch us “there” and wants us to touch her, then the secret is no longer dirty and no longer a secret. Our vagina, our clitoris can maybe begin to be thought of as a part of us, part of our self-portrait. How hard it must be for men to understand this unique access women have to one another, the ability to persuade each other that our genitals are thrilling to touch, delicious to taste, and beautiful to see. We want to believe men, but they cannot imitate women’s persuasive voice.

  Some women “forget” their preadolescent adventures with other girls until, years later, the unconscious releases a feeling during intercourse or masturbation, which is the excitement felt in our first sexual self-discovery. Now in the grown woman’s fantasy during sex is a picture of a female with beautiful breasts and pubic hair, attributes not yet developed in the girls of our preadolescent sleep-overs; they are mother’s breasts, mother’s pubic hair, but in fantasy, today, she merges with our erotic playmate of the ninth year of life to form a whole woman.

  Many young girls would never dream of touching another little girl, lying on top of her, exploring her body. Should they do something bad, such as pee together in the tall grass, they are sure someone is watching and are filled with anxiety. Never having practiced separation, internalized mother’s love—“My daughter, right or wrong”—the girl has incorporated mother’s all-seeing eye. Years later, when she lies in bed with a man and her mother telephones, she is sure mother “sees” him naked beside her, the sheets soiled. The adoring eye of infancy still watches from a celestial height, monitoring everything she does and leaving her wondering, “I don’t know why I’m so guilty!” Standing in front of the mirror, she puts on and takes off the sexy new dress, her indecision rooted in an inability to believe in the erotic vision of her self, never separate or different from her mother’s critical view of her. Today mother’s opinion destroys her as effectively as it did when she was two, nine, or forty.

  Twenty years ago, women’s sexual fantasies of one another were relatively few in number. Today they are the most popular theme. Women, in fact, are sexually drawn to one another in real life as well as fantasy, drawn in numbers so universal that they lie down in each other’s arms in fashion ads, films, everywhere. It is a given that women move in and out of one another’s beds without a second thought. In a way, it seems the most logical thing in a world where women are reinventing who a woman is and how she looks. We do men’s work, but we are more desperate than ever to look like a woman. Who is she? What is a woman? We turn curiously, eagerly, to one another for close scrutiny and confirmation of what it is to be female, just as we did when we were nine.

  Do women ever stop and think what an advantage we have over our brothers in our ambisexual ease at entering into experiments with either sex without fear of loss of gender sureness? I’ve seldom heard women of any age condemn themselves with the kind of overly harsh indictment a boy/man feels for just thinking sexually about another man: “Oh, my God, I must be homosexual!” The spontaneous fantasy of sex, or real experience, with another female may enrich a girl’s self-portrait, but for the boy, the doors slam and the portrait narrows.

  Straight men don’t dare play with fantasies of other men; instead, the most prevalent theme in men’s fantasies remains the one that shows how very deep, often unconscious, is that first woman’s power over her son and his rage that she never recognized and blessed his sexuality. “There are an awful lot of men, especially if they’re heads of corporations or very powerful in their day-to-day existence, who want to relinquish that power,” says Norma Jean Almodovar, head of COYOTE, the sex workers’ union in California. “And they want to do it in a very safe situation, where they would trust the person to whom they are giving power over them. They want to be tied up and told what children they are; they’re into the words, more than any physical abuse.”

  In erotic dreams of degradation, the man turns his rage at women against himself; infantilized at the feet of the Big Woman, the dominatrix, the groveling man gets back at women/mother; he gives her the whip, the power of authority over him, but he triumphs with his dirty little orgasm.

  Some young girls accept mother’s sexual rigidity so completely that they will never grow beyond her dislike of all things sexual; oh, they will enter puberty, marry, have sex, and become mothers, but they will never see themselves as sexual people. When they look in the mirror, they will not imagine a man responding to the curve of their lovely breast, length of leg; they will never have seen themselves in that way. The sexual feeling was given up long, long ago and will never be missed.

  You have seen these women, you know them—and some men too, though they are fewer in number. They have a look, a way of dressing, a cast of features that warns: Do not look at me as a sexual person. They are called Latency Women, which means they never emotionally experienced the sexual coming of age that is adolescence. They aren’t lesbian, they simply aren’t sexual, and are more comfortable with other women than with men. In marriage, they may try to set up with their men what they had with mother, but most men fear losing themselves emotionally in a soft, tight merge. Very well, their women decide, if you won’t form a symbiotic union with me, I will remain your wife but feel most relaxed and happy in the company of the other girls.

  So long as these Girl Scout women keep their antisex attitudes to themselves I wish them well; it is when they turn their judgmental, holier-than-thou eyes on the rest of us, demanding that we live as they, that I regard them as the enemy. Give up riches, give up the eating of meat, dancing on Sunday, but give up your sexual center and you will grind your teeth at night imagining others partaking of the forbidden fruit. Sexual abstinence is only tolerable if everyone else abstains.

  Antisex men are as mean-minde
d, nosy, and critical as their women. I have never doubted that the Radical Right Wing gets its ramrod of envious rage from the insufferable vision of others enjoying what they, the abstemious, self-proclaimed God-fearing haven’t enjoyed in years. Nor do I doubt that the most religious readers of pornography are those who, after reading, rush forth into the world to seek absolution for their own dirty orgasms; they find forgiveness in their red-faced condemnation of any damned soul who reads the book they just soiled.

  When I write about the coming Matriarchy, I see its most obvious roots in the female-dominated homes today where a man’s absence isn’t questioned. It is, in fact, preferred. Total control of her children may feel good to a woman, but without a father, girls and boys arrive at adolescence with no feel whatsoever for a man. The boy will lean all the more heavily on his all-male group; the girl expects intimacy with a man to mirror the only love she’s known, mother love: Men’s eyes are expected to reflect her as mother’s have. It is a doomed expectation of boys, to say the least.

  Many of us women do not want to live in a Matriarchy; we fear women’s rigid rules and restrictive power as much as, if not more than, Patriarchal Society’s. But children growing up only surrounded by woman power don’t have our adult choices. Instead of love of men, they get a daily dose of anger at terrible men, reinforced by their depiction as abusive, cruel, and brutal on television and in print.

  When a fatherless boy grows to manhood and responds obnoxiously to the unexpected arrival of a woman in an all-male environment, it is the ten-year-old’s overreaction to women’s power, the knee-jerk reminder that to be a Real Man he must act the opposite of mother. A boy isn’t predisposed genetically to be a voyager alien to women. But men will not stop preying on women’s vulnerability until the boy gets the feel of an empathic man’s power from day one and the grown man rediscovers his capacity for compassion in caring for his own dependent child.