The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Fascinating, isn’t it, that we learn about the life-determining need for early intimate parenting at the very moment that we lose the extended team—mother, father, grandparents, the lot? Not that having many pairs of arms around the house automatically guaranteed perfect oneness and separation. Nonetheless, we look at Woody Allen’s Radio Days or Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, and sigh for the eccentric but lovable aunts and uncles who used to live in the family spare bedrooms.

  I’ve been thinking about the people I love and admire most, probably because so many of them have died recently. They didn’t get oneness and separation, but they did have someone like my aunt Pat, who focused on them. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but that person’s admirable image and love was fuel enough to move out into life on a kind of charming crutch. Ironically, it was the lack of early symbiotic love combined with the crutch that gave us a peculiar talent for getting ourselves seen and picked up.

  That so many of these people grew up to become actors, dancers, composers, writers, directors isn’t surprising. That so many of the best of them died early of AIDS says, to me, Who wouldn’t want to lie down with them? Long, long ago, they made themselves irresistible in order to survive. They wrote songs, plays, and books about finding and losing love because that is what they knew best. Up and down passion’s scale they zoomed, falling in love with people who were unattainable, who betrayed them or whom they betrayed. Passion and agony always rode alongside. And when they died, the memorial services at the theaters were jammed with those of us who cried for ourselves, having loved them precisely for who they were.

  It always comes back to the old existential argument with Robertiello: “Would you rather have been born beautiful and loved as the Christ Child and never let go, or invisible and had to invent alternative means of survival to get yourself seen?” Me, I always choose the latter; it makes for very high highs and lows you don’t want to know about, but the very young beauty gets cheated too: It doesn’t last, whereas the talents learned from an Aunt Pat, or a fascinating uncle who was a ventriloquist, a violinist, an opera singer, well, they can last a lifetime.

  What I hope is that young people will read this chapter in particular, and even if they don’t see themselves will recognize the untapped possibilities that are out there, opportunities unique to the eight- or ten-year-old to get close to some admirable other. We never get this precious time again in which we are so malleable and free of the demands of family, their projections, and how society wants us to be and look. Even if we forfeit our fine ten-year-old self in the hall of mirrors that will be adolescence, the victories of these years remain intact, inside us.

  I can assure you that it is never too late to go back and claim an image created when we were nine or ten; upon examination it still fits perfectly because it is internal. Ten years ago, I finally came of age; by which I mean I shed the skin in which I’d lived my adult life, stopped trying to create with men what I hadn’t had as an infant. Where I went to find the skin that fit just right was here, in the enchanted years.

  Remember to mark this spot in life, as pirates marked the buried treasure on their maps. We must know where we left the admirable person whom adolescence overshadowed.

  4

  The Dance of Adolescence: Girls

  Pretty Babies Get Picked Up First, Again

  No one forgets adolescence. No one.

  On a day that begins like any other, an almond-sized section of the brain called the hypothalamus signals to the body that we are now ready to begin sexual maturation. Awakened by a need that lures us from our childhood games with people in whom we’ve seen ourselves for years, we turn to meet the judgmental eyes of the opposite sex. Drawn to them, we look for a new reflection. Do we suit them, do they like what they see, are we all right, good enough? Whatever self-esteem we’ve acquired, we feel dependent now on how they grade us. We wait to dance.

  If I were to choreograph adolescence—dance being an appropriate art form in which to express these years—the curtain would rise on the slow and easy last days of childhood. Imagine the stage evenly lit, boys in their group stage left, girls right, a sheer curtain between them. Neither group is mindful of the other, so engrossed is each in its own dance. Movements are full of unencumbered life, a lack of self-consciousness, big stretches that extend bodies so that they almost seem to grow in front of us. They follow one another, imitating, challenging, especially the boys, who are far more competitive and combative in their interplay than the girls.

  On the other side of the curtain, the girls dance together to a different music, some in each other’s arms; they comb each other’s hair, whisper, read together; others play a game of ball until a dispute arises, competition threatens, and the game dissolves. Suddenly a gaggle of girls comes apart at the seams and a girl is tossed out, left to stand pitifully alone and then just as abruptly swallowed back into the group. They are intensely loving, quickly mean; ambivalence labels their play, expressing a desire to break away from the sameness of the group and at the same time to be contained and comforted by it.

  We see a few girls approach the curtain to spy on the boys; they invite them into their game, but the boys are mindless of the girls, even disdainful, so intent are they on their own dance.

  The competitive energy of the boys’ movements is constant, and when it builds to a pitch that threatens to destroy the camaraderie, the most powerful, cleverest boy reaches out his hand in a formal gesture, a handshake that is repeated by all the boys until all the daring movements of the leader have been imitated by the gang, taking them to a new level of communal excellence. The excitement of the all-boy team is a clash of energy and challenge carrying the entire male ensemble higher and higher in developmental skill until a height of breathtaking flawlessness is reached. All the while, the athletic beauty of the chorus is seen to be held together by the repeated handshake, the motif that constantly quells disruption.

  At a moment when each of the groups is at its most definitive and different, when we least expect it, a howling wind blows away the curtain between the sexes and propels the girls, the boys, into two rigid formations facing one another, each visually riveted, staring at the people opposite who have been so near but of whom each has been oblivious. What do they see in one another? They do not know but they cannot turn away, cannot return to their individual dance, though one or two are seen to try, and fail. Instead they now respond to a demand that they accomplish a mutual dance, one for which they have had no preparation, but which they cannot deny. How to begin?

  One of the more extroverted girls begins to rush happily forward, initiating her own dance toward the boys, only to be hastily pulled back into the ranks and scolded by the other girls, who now have a more intuitive sense than their former leader of how the dance will progress. And, indeed, from out of the chorus several exquisite girls, who have been quiet in the background until now, emerge and dance, ensemble, the birth of sexual beauty out of the soft limbs of childhood. So exquisite are their movements that they seem to inform the boys’ ranks, selecting the several heroes who have been seen to be more athletic, handsomer, and more developed than their fellows. Crossing the line where the curtain had been, the male leaders move assuredly away from their gang, which obediently falls back to let their heroes perform what is felt to be their destiny: the most physically accomplished to lead the dance with the most beautiful girl. This is how I remember the choreography in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, West Side Story, and Oklahoma!

  Writing these words, I feel this dance as painfully as when I first went through it. Substantial a minute ago, I am airborne, imagining adolescence’s promise to answer my prayers, the needs of an infant who had never been held or loved. Such is the magic of romantic music and dance.

  Over the years I have written of that night at the Yacht Club, our first formal dance in the grown-up world of “the older crowd,” and of my shock, as though I were witnessing something as inconceivable as death, for how could I at thirteen possibl
y imagine my world, my self, disintegrating and falling apart? All my lovely years of invention blown away like the pages of a calendar in a movie, suggesting time passing. But for me, time was racing backward not forward as I stood in my horrible dress, shoulder blades pressing into the wall, watching my dear friends whose leader I had been dance by in the arms of handsome boys; and all the while that frozen, ghastly smile on my face, denying that I needed to be rescued. Why, even the girl who couldn’t shoot a basket for the life of her danced by. Though they all whispered to me to hide in the ladies’ room, I stood my ground.

  Whether it was that night or shortly after, I abdicated my role as leader, throwing in with it my bravery, intelligence, wit, speed; everything practiced for years now proved useless in my desperation to be held and led in the dance of adolescence.

  I’ve a photo of myself taken in our yard on what looks like The First Day of Adolescence. Someone has cut my hair into a lank pageboy with bangs; it makes my long face even sadder as I sit there in a white wicker chair, hunched forward, staring at the ground, hands tightly clasped in my lap, swathed in the loser’s agony of defeat. Who took that picture? I have no idea, though I remember the box camera aimed at me and that awful skirt and sweater, which had been my sister’s, as had the dress at the Yacht Club, fine for a beauty, but oh, so wrong for a tomboy.

  Adults whispered to one another, “It’s just a phase, she’ll get over it.” Psychologists still use these words, as though the pain and contradictions are inevitable. Are they? I am not convinced. I believe we all, men and women, give up far more than is necessary to fit the rigid standards of adolescence. The biggest mistakes I’ve made in life, the roads not taken and opportunities not seized, I am sure, today, might have been avoided if only I’d been able to take into adolescence the girl I’d been just prior to it. Reining her in, forcing her to obey the restricting rules by which all girls had to live made me acutely self-conscious, overly cautious, unsure of myself, second-guessing everything for the rest of my life. And angry, don’t leave out anger at abandoning myself, teeth-grinding anger that I dutifully swallowed and “forgot.”

  The rigid rules of adolescence turned me, like almost every woman I’ve met, into a very controlling person. Leading a little life when you naturally hunger for more is bearable only if all the girls suppress their appetites as well. It is perhaps the major reason that I decided long ago not to become a mother; I didn’t want to control another human being, to demand from a child the perfectionism, the rigidity I acquired in those years.

  And please don’t tell me that my voluntarily acquiescing to the stereotype of the Nice Girl was due to the dictates of bad and brutish Patriarchal Society. Men had nothing to do with the setback of my adolescence except that I wanted them desperately and made the mistake of believing that what they wanted was what women’s world demanded: passivity and beauty. Yes, men want the beauty, but they want other things in a woman too, such as warmth, kindness, a full heart, humor, initiative. It is we women who pin everything on beauty, on achieving whatever degree of it we can, only to disbelieve what we own, never trusting what we see in the mirror. And so, more today than ever, the competition over beauty unto death continues with the judgmental eye remaining other women’s.

  Adolescence caught me without a mirror to my name. For years I’d passed them by without conscious awareness of their power. The glass over the bathroom sink might as well have been a painted wall. So sure was I of who I was, seeing myself in people’s eyes, what need had I of glass? What people reflected back to me was approval and enjoyment, their pleasure in my presence. I felt their kindness and so stayed a moment longer, warming myself.

  Now suddenly I had to appraise my assets. I closed the bathroom door and stared at the tall person in the full-length mirror; as in the tests at school, I added up my hair, face, body, but this time I failed. Suddenly, I wasn’t even a contender. Used to winning, scholastically and athletically, I knew the skills and deficiencies of all my friends, having played basketball and baseball with them all my life. I was used to choosing teams and would never have picked myself for this new contest, which, to my grief, felt more significant than anything yet attempted. On the spot, overnight, I buried my fine inner self-portrait and threw all my energy into imitating the prettiest girls’ mannerisms, posture, dress; I even acquired a teeny, tiny voice.

  Suddenly, inside my own house there were unavoidable images of success at beauty: my lovely mother soon to be remarried and my sister The Beauty. The arguments between the two of them at the dinner table, heated disputes over makeup and tight sweaters, were loaded with significance. Until now I had prized my invisibility, sitting there between them, figuring myself well out of their competition. Now, I wanted them to stop bickering and bring to my plight their considerable know-how in this business of looks. Perhaps I would have rejected their offers of help, but I was so desperate for a beauty makeover that they would have found a willing candidate had they pushed past my childish defenses.

  Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. My friend Molly’s mother took one look at me and made me a pretty skirt and blouse to wear to dancing class. I put them on and returned once again to the mirror for a verdict; bending my knees under the full skirt made me shorter, which helped. Now I was able to put my head on the boy’s shoulder when we danced, but the bent knees had to be maneuvered in such a way so as not to collide with his and give away my “secret”: that I wasn’t really a little, adorable person.

  Looking back, I fully understand the plight of the anorexic, desperate to control everything in life, which is so out of control; only her wasted body obeys her. Very, very thin was not in vogue when I was growing up, but in the South, very small was. Had bound feet been in vogue, I would gladly have hobbled with the best of them. We were in a race, we girls, a struggle to outdo one another in a negative competition, the goal of which was to be less, not more. Even intellect, especially intellect, the good grades for which we had competed, was not something of which we could boast. Boys didn’t want a “walking dictionary,” our snide nickname for the girl who simply couldn’t help reading everything in the library.

  Before adolescence, what life had taught me was that anything practiced long enough could be mastered. Now my task was to unlearn everything, to slow down, speak less, think less, be less. It would be many years before I could again trust myself to speak my thoughts fluently, so expertly had I ruptured in adolescence the circuitry between brain and tongue. How many times in college, throughout my twenties, and, yes, into my thirties would I launch into an opinion only to feel a dizzying panic, a creeping paralysis that I was losing my train of thought; all eyes were on me and I was on the brink of humiliation.

  Twenty years later I would go through countless hours of therapy to realign my spine, which has never recovered from the bent leg posture I mastered in the art of being less. Mostly what I missed for years, however, was the absolute sureness of self, the bravery that I owned prior to adolescence, that self-image inside that made every door I opened an optimistic adventure; why would people not love me? Neither professional success, great friendships, nor the love of men helped me to recapture the degree of self-confidence, the inner vision, and, yes, the kindness and generosity I owned prior to the external mirrors of adolescence. Not until my house burned down could I begin to rebuild, though you can never fully regain the momentum that builds to what was originally in the making; some things are just too age appropriate to be fully recaptured later in life.

  Until the world changed, so quickly did adolescence happen, winning love had come to mean accomplishment. The realization that I could gain visibility and admiration through intelligence, humor, excellence in a variety of fields had been the most wonderful growing experience. When a teacher writes a congratulatory note on a paper we’ve composed, when we’re elected by our peers to be a captain, the leader, the president, we have been seen by them as someone different from the child within our home whose growth never changed the original assess
ment of the family gaze. “Carpe diem!” cries the Robin Williams professor to his sleeping class, awakening them to life in the film Dead Poets Society. Was there a member of that audience who didn’t resonate, remembering the lost potential?

  Only in the past few hundred years have we been able, literally, to afford these years called Adolescence, to give our children a chance to grow instead of toiling in fields and factories only to become parents themselves by age fourteen. Why the gift if we do not recognize them, gaze at the miracle of their physical and intellectual growth, as we gazed at them in infancy? Granted, they no longer have the infant’s beguiling dependency on us, which made us feel Madonnaesque; quite the contrary, adolescents can be maddening, crawling into our laps one day, demanding adults’ rights the next. It would be humiliating for them to request the loving reflection of themselves appropriate to an infant, but it is precisely what is wanted—The Gaze—when they aren’t demanding total privacy. Too much to ask of a parent? Then why the gift of these years?

  The morning paper is filled with stories of adolescent crime and pregnancy; photos of beautiful fifteen-, sixteen-year-olds in the latest fashions dominate the pages. We have created a monster out of what should be a valuable time period in which to prepare for life.

  I could weep for what we give up to fit the stereotype, today just as it was in my day. And in this abdication I would include the beautiful girls too, who come to believe totally in the ruling power of beauty. How could they not, given how the world bowed to them? How do you tell the heroes and heroines of adolescence that their few moments in the sun may be just that? I would answer that we must teach them the role of beauty, instruct them in how it works, pointing out beauty’s power but also showing them how to weigh the longevity of intelligence, wit, and compassion opposite the brief reign of looks/appearance so that these learning years are not squandered.