The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  We’ve been remiss, dangerously so, in denying how beauty operates and is traded on behind homilies and platitudes. Instead, we hype beauty in every medium and count the bucks we make on our young. Today’s birthday parties for nine-year-olds take place in beauty parlors, where group makeovers include manicures, hairstyles, makeup, the works; top modeling agencies advertise videos for the youngest adolescents on “How to Become a Model.”

  If I were setting up a curriculum for preadolescents, I would prepare them for the new appraisal of and by the opposite sex that is just around the corner. I remember adolescence as a door abruptly opening, and there they were, boys. I didn’t even know what I’d missed until I saw them and the music began; then, all the desperate yearning rose from the earliest days of my life to demand satisfaction. Every song I had sung on my bicycle, arms outstretched as in dances at the movies, now had a purpose.

  Until adolescence my childish exhibitionism had been to win attention and approval from the world at large. Now, from the moment that small, almond-sized part of my brain dropped and spread its elixir throughout my bloodstream, I recognized my true audience: boys. Only they could take me in, love what they saw, and in that gaze return me to myself. The Gaze. Never experienced at the appropriate time, The Gaze of infancy now swam up from the toys in the nursery to demand another chance, this time with boys instead of mother. The unfortunate catch was that sexual desire was confused in my thirteen-year-old mind and body with the infantile yearning for symbiotic bliss.

  The libidinal energy now available to intellectual and social development was detoured and rerouted to service my irresistible need to be held. Had intellect and leadership been prized in these earliest mating rituals, I might have continued growing. No one said a word, but one quick assessment of the boy/girl lineup told me that if I were going to dance, be held in a boy’s arms, then silence and smallness would serve me best.

  And only one boy would do. In my eyes, only one had the power to awaken me. Malcolm, leader of the pack, James Dean, Elvis, alter ego to my little-girl self buried inside the self-confident, I-can-take-care-of-myself shell I’d built. What did I know of the difference between sexual desire and the need for oneness? To me, Malcolm, the tough guy in the windbreaker, the sleeves on his T-shirt rolled high above the muscles in his arms, his eyes and shoulders unyielding, to me he was the rock to which I would cling, the unattainable prince for whom I would slay any dragon. A contradiction, but such is the character of adolescence.

  But Malcolm didn’t even see me. He looked right past me to a girl I’d known all my life, who couldn’t hit a baseball, climb a wall, or lead a class. A girl who was beautiful, of whom today’s researchers in beauty ideals would say had the perfect alignment of large eyes, narrow chin, broad cheekbones, childbearing hips, and, of course, breasts.

  Did I envy her? On some preconscious level I’m sure I did, for I never lost sight of Malcolm in those adolescent years, never stopped desiring him, the unattainable one, the very essence of romantic love. But I couldn’t afford to hate the girl he chose, who was my friend and would vehemently have denied that I felt competitive. Boys were the goal, but my crowd of girls was home base. Instead, I employed one of the finest defenses against the recognition of envy: I idealized my rival. She was beautiful, perfect, so far out of my league as to be unthinkable as a rival. I smiled in her presence, hugged her as close as ever, and told myself I was happy dating one of Malcolm’s lieutenants.

  If I was no longer my crowd’s leader in this new game of desirability, I would be the most imitative in collective identity. Though my entire dream life, waking and sleeping, was now taken over by love of boys, I would never question home rule. I applied my competitive spirit to outdistancing everyone in the Nice Girl Rules, which said No Competition and No Sex; try as I may, I cannot recall anyone ever saying The Rules out loud or suggesting that breaking the antisex rules would automatically eliminate you from The Group. But they existed more strictly than any perimeters I’ve known since.

  My crowd of girls was the collective bosom on which I laid my head, the Big Mother that stood in for her disciplinary eye; though I’ve always felt that no one in our crowd desired boys more passionately than I did, simultaneously, no one held more vigorously to The Rules than I did. I’ve occasionally thought of telephoning and asking the girls of my youth if they tasted the forbidden fruit. Was I the only one, dying to cross over, to give myself utterly to the beloved boy in exchange for love, who abstained?

  Actually, what I found to take the place of sexual intercourse was quite fulfilling in its way. I would go so far as to say that some of the most passionate, extended hours in life were spent in parked cars, romantic music on the radio fueling the sense of lost boundaries, of floating out of my body, of somehow creating the most orgasmic sense of entering the boy’s self so completely that I willed myself into a state of semiconsciousness. The more I study women’s orgasmic potential, the power of fantasy alone to create orgasm without any touching whatsoever, the more I’m convinced that this is what passion achieved in those cars of my youth. I never did understand why my pretty white cotton panties with the lace trim were soaked through when I returned home. My breasts were not allowed to be touched, nor my genitals; it was all in my head.

  Sexual satisfaction does lie more between the ears than between the legs. I could live without penetration, which loomed like Hell itself with its threat of ostracization from The Group. What did we foolish virgins know of how pregnancy actually happened? It was my cognitive promise to myself that worked better than any store-bought device: a “mental rubber” determinedly planted inside my head by my aunt and teachers, along with the books I’d read and the movies I’d seen, which determined me to see the world, to be an adventuress.

  As consuming as was my love of boys, whose arms promised the symbiotic oneness I’d missed in the first years of life, more powerful still was the prospect of many men, many adventures, all of which would be forfeited by pregnancy, which meant repeating my mother’s life. Ah, the power of the negative role model. For the moment, the drug of choice was loss of self to the sound of romantic music.

  And yet I do not think of my teenage years as the Great American Tragedy. The people in that wonderful place where I grew up were kind, and in memory filled with acceptance and love despite my doomed efforts to become small and cute. No one demanded that I turn myself into this bad reproduction of a Girl Girl. The tragedy is that it has taken me most of my life to break out of that role. By the time I left for college, I believed I was the happiest girl in town. Wasn’t I voted the most popular girl in my graduation class? Years later, when I returned with my former husband to those lovely, narrow streets, he was told by people he met, “Everybody loved Nancy Friday.”

  They did. The smile that hid my anger at having abandoned my self became who I was. The gold circle pin that all we Nice Girls wore said I was one of the club. Just lying in a boy/man’s arms and feeling adored made it all worthwhile, and when in my early twenties I did eventually have sexual intercourse, I was my most acquiescent: I gave him full responsibility; I used no contraception. It was not the behavior of the dependable girl I’d been before adolescence.

  More strongly than words, women’s sexual irresponsibility says to mother that we’re still her little girl: “See, Mommy, I’m having sex, but I’m not an equal partner. I’ve given this man/boy ownership of my body just as I once gave it to you.”

  Puberty: “A Farewell to Childhood”

  G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist at the turn of the century, wrote of adolescence as “a second birth,” a time of heightened creativity. According to Hall, at no other time in life do we get such an opportunity. In these years, either the next generation’s future is developed, advanced in terms of civilization, or this precious time is lost.

  So much of our future will be experienced in reaction to what happens in adolescence; were these years a peak after which life went downhill or a distressing period of adjustment, whic
h, in retrospect, motivated choices that determined the rest of life? So painful is the realization that some of us do not measure up to the demands of adolescent accomplishment—not the least of which is beauty—that the ground lost in these competitive years is never regained.

  As psychoanalyst Peter Blos explains, “There is a progressive awareness of the relevancy of one’s actions to one’s present and future role and place in society.” Quoting Inhelder and Piaget, Blos writes that nothing distinguishes the adolescent from the child more than that “he thinks beyond the present… he commits himself to possibilities.”

  Why then do we tend to denigrate adolescence, choosing to see it as something between a comic opera and a troublesome period of adjustment? Adults smile or weep over the emotional extremes of teenagers, waiting for the problematic years to pass; we act as if we don’t remember our own adolescence vividly, which may explain why we are so reluctant to give our adolescent children the patience and understanding they deserve and which no one gave us. Could it be that we envy them? Here, we have literally bought with our hard work and prosperity these years so that they might more profitably go through the emotional/intellectual/biological stages of “the second birth” instead of having to labor and become parents themselves at a too early age. We give them the years but no mental tools on how to best use them. Yes, I think we do envy them.

  How else to explain why the role of adolescence, compared to the first years of life, has until recently been so neglected by modern behaviorists? English philosopher John Locke viewed the adolescent as waiting to be formed into an adult by education, literacy, self-control, and a sense of shame; in the eighteenth century the French political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic vision of adolescence was as that time of life when we most closely approximate the “state of nature.” But today, in our very technologically advanced times, I would choose the words of Peter Blos: “Western democratic, capitalistic society provides hardly any uniform processes or techniques to define the adolescent role, nor does this society recognize ritually the adolescent status change…. During adolescence, in sharp contrast to early childhood, the lack of institutionalized patterning is striking. Society, so to speak, abandons youth and lets it fend for itself.”

  “A second birth.” We are the only primates with this long developmental period in life called adolescence. Lower primates are born, grow until they can reproduce, and automatically do just that, again and again until they die, just as the generation before them. “Physically mature beasts simply are not welcome in the family den,” writes sociologist Virginia Rutter; “sexual competition makes cohabitating untenable. But for animals, physical maturity coincides with mental acuity, so their departure is not a rejection.”

  Imagine if we were thrown out of the house once we’d reached puberty; in fact, it isn’t far from how life used to be roughly three hundred years ago. It wasn’t just prosperity, the Industrial Revolution, but education, primarily the invention of the printing press, which in turn required the setting up of schools that created a body of years called adolescence. From then onward, the young had to learn to read to become adults. “Because the school was designed for the preparation of a literate adult,” writes Neil Postman, “the young came to be perceived not as miniature adults but as something quite different altogether—unformed adults,” or adolescents. Do you recall the paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I mentioned earlier wherein little children were indeed drawn as “miniature adults”? Well, book learning, reading, schools, education, prosperity altered the depiction of a young adolescent person in art just as in real life.

  Given all this trouble we’ve gone to, why have we so tenaciously avoided the psychological, moral, and sexual understanding of the adolescent? We have dozens, hundreds of fine books on infancy, the needs of the baby, physically and psychologically, and also volumes on parental roles; but where is the library on adolescence educating adults and young people to the complicated changes going on chemically, physically, emotionally, preparing parents to best assist their children?

  “Only a few years ago it was an open secret among serious students of human development,” writes developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, “that the field of adolescence was something of a shambles. There were, of course, a substantial number of elegant and exciting studies, but much of what passed for research was pedestrian at best.” Since 1985 and the establishment of the Society for Researching Adolescence, this has changed; but it is late.

  Where are the compassionate Drs. Spock and Brazelton of adolescence, the TV documentaries on how it feels to be thirteen, fifteen, dramatizing how these years are going to shape and determine so much of the rest of life? When did you ever see a how-to manual for parents of adolescents on the bestseller list? We manufacture an already flooded market of products sold to teens, which garners millions of dollars annually—nearly $100 billion a year in 1994—but we do not have the time or inclination to study their development as closely as when they were babies. We have an ever growing world of geriatric specialists to balance our world of pediatrics, but where are the “adolescentiatrics”?

  My quick but honest answer would be that we envy our adolescents. We resent the picture of their beautiful sexuality, the fact that so much of life is before them, and in contrast so much of our own behind us. Seeing them, we cannot help remembering our own adolescence with its promise of infinite life. Oh, we love them as well, our darlings, love them intensely, which is exactly why we also resent their going off into the night hand in hand, so young, so full of expectation, so reminiscent of our youth.

  The world of the adolescent grows increasingly complex and dangerous; why go to all the trouble and expense of caring for infants and small children only to abandon them, misunderstood, on the shore of puberty? Opposite lies adulthood and, alas, the line between teen and adult grows ever more blurred as adolescents become stars of adult movies, are top-earning models, MTV superstars, and idols not just of their own generation but of ours too. Just maybe—unconsciously, of course—we don’t want our adolescent children to outdistance us, remind us in the fullness of their burgeoning sexual lives that we are old.

  It is a paradox filled with ambivalence, and it is ruled by sexual beauty. We love our children, and perhaps at no time more than when they are little, dependent, “ours.” The possessive pronoun doesn’t apply to the adolescent, who is full of contradiction, demanding to be heard one minute, pleading for solace the next. The world today, the media, the fashions, the films, the marketplace, everything is focused on beautiful young people, as if these sixteen-year-olds were the center of the universe. It can be very disturbing to a parent on many levels. Setting rules for an adolescent is difficult in the best of times, and these aren’t.

  Parents aren’t immune to envying their children. We save our hottest resentments for the people we love most, whether they be lovers, parents, or children. The ambivalence of love knows nothing of familial ties or chronological age: The baby loves the breast, the baby bites the breast that has all the power; the man loves his wife, the man shoots his wife because only she could arouse so much rage, having so much power over his happiness, and the police will approach him first, so notorious are loved ones as first suspects in a murder.

  We wish our children well, have sacrificed for them, but when we beam on the fullness of their adolescent life, the picture of their beauty, their social, intellectual, and sexual success that takes them away from us and is beyond what we ever accomplished, we feel a mean prick of envy. Denied and called by other names—“I’m only doing this for your own good”—the terrible grrrr of envy only grows worse.

  Adolescence is sufficiently complex to require three developmental stages: preadolescence/early adolescence/adolescence proper, or, if you prefer, pubescence/puberty/youth. Listening to the names of the hormones marching through the adolescent body—androgens, estrogen, testosterone—I am reminded of Roman armies: “Insula est parva,” for these were the years
when we girls were learning our first Latin from dear Mrs. Jervey. Reading about the adolescent body secretions—fluids, chemical energy “triggering a growth spurt,” “alerting” pubic hair to sprout, I imagine a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, machine wheels, conveyor belts methodically marching in all directions.

  The boy sleeps and still the march continues, stimulating the descent of testes, growth of penis, every bone, organ, tissue pushing, growing, demanding more space. One morning he awakens with semen on mother’s sheets. “Oh, my God!” A friend tells me of nights in adolescence when he would stagger to the refrigerator for milk, bread, fuel for the advancing army inside him that was himself becoming. Another day his voice changes, an unsolicited erection occurs on the school bus.

  And there sits the girl, reading, dreaming, listening to romantic music as her armies initiate growth of clitoris, vulva, breasts, hairs, and, of course, pimples. One day in class she bleeds, soiling her dress. “Oh, my God!” From a child’s body a woman’s body, capable of carrying another child, is being formed. She raises her arms to look for the first hairs, spreads her legs when she wipes herself clean to see if a hair has sprouted, stands sideways before the mirror in the hope that breasts comparable to her friends have emerged. She has dreams and fantasies that signal her body to discharge fluid; daydreams too, longings for an intimacy that are a refrain from the days of infancy, which she cannot remember “explicitly” but which are nonetheless abundant with the nostalgia of being dear, precious, and protected. Remember Dan Stern’s description of a two-year-old’s memory of earlier infancy, not exact, not precise, but a “feeling” of having been here before, felt this way before. It is a process of associations that go back in time, and if we were to ask our parents, they would not remember, for they did not feel as we did.