The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  This is what the adolescent goes through, a recapitulation of earlier childhood. Opposite these tender reminiscences there is a defiant, rule-breaking teenager; clothes, hairstyle, a new lingo, a new dance and music invented to distance him or her from vulnerable feelings of “the second birth,” and to distance them too from us adults. That we buy our adolescent children’s disguise so wholeheartedly speaks of the complex emotions that parents feel in the presence of their newly sexual children. In an earlier historical age, parents would shoo them out of the cave or off the farm, get them married, or let them get pregnant. But we have bought our children this gift of time; we have advanced up the ladder of civilization, haven’t we?

  We give our children a gift of years but act like children ourselves who cannot bear to part with the lovely gift we have brought to another’s party; sullenly we hand over the years but hold back instruction on how to use them, how to make the gift work. Without our understanding of their adolescence, and our very good wishes too—“Happy second birth, my darling!”—the gift is awkward and, often, dangerous.

  No, it is we who want to be young and beautiful with another shot at adolescence! “We’re best friends,” the mother says, not wanting distance between her daughter and herself, she in the role of older, wiser parent, disciplinarian. Still in need of closeness with mother but wishing for someone wise, the daughter smiles agreement but misses the rules that only an elder can enforce. Today’s adults don’t want to look parental, cosmetically or behaviorally. They want their children’s looks; the most loving of sons and daughters must, on some level, resent it.

  What happened to the optimism of the eighteenth-century intellectuals’ idealistic vision of the adolescent as being in a “state of nature”? How did we get to the verge of a twenty-first century and our view of adolescents as greedy consumers and irresponsible sybarites? It is our doing. If adolescents are self-obsessed, it is because we adults have made them into shoppers who spend on anything that will give them an identity; poor little Empty Packages, they replicate their parents, who also feel invisible unless they wrap their hollow selves in the latest, hottest, new signature clothes. Look at me! See me or I will die!

  The latest Calvin Klein advertisements posed young children in underwear for the eye of the errant pedophile and were greeted by so much brouhaha in the press that Klein’s sales went through the roof. This is precisely how the marketplace works, and our adolescents know it and laugh at us rather than question the morality of the event. On the contrary, they will take the mercenary Klein himself as a role model.

  We don’t raise children to move beyond the love of self to a love of the species; they certainly haven’t seen anything in us approximating this selfless behavior. Our society is consumed with unhealthy narcissism; adolescents see us wearing our identity on our backs, our self-worth and morality in our adornments and possessions. They see our unscrupulous, duplicitous national and international leaders on the evening news. Rousseau would tell us that these are the turning years, the moment for the young mind to question, challenge the culture’s standards, to probe itself, analyze, question, contribute. Already self-absorbed, adolescents should be, could be—in spite of us—the very people to further their own cause. They are their own great hope for the future. What better obligatory course at school, college, for the adolescent student than “Know thyself”?

  Referring to adolescence as that period in life when the next generation was either advanced, in terms of civilization, or lost forever, G. Stanley Hall went so far as to declare that he did not believe it was possible in later life to make up for what was lost in “the second birth.” I would agree. Although I sentimentalize my own adolescence, I realize the amount of ground I did indeed lose then. I never regained that momentum; I accept that a higher level of thinking might have been mine had I not forfeited so much to the immediate satisfactions of these years. I would have been intellectually richer, more ethically organized, had I been able to take with me into adolescence the achievements of childhood.

  I remember in early adolescence returning briefly to my beloved dolls; I resurrected Lulu from the basement and with my friend Daisy retreated once again to her attic where we “played house.” But it wasn’t like before. This time around they weren’t babies; instead, we invested our dolls with a language and an identity separate from us. We told ourselves we could hear them talking and moving around in the attic, enjoying a life secret from and not the least dependent on us. We would creep up the stairs to catch them in the act, convincing ourselves we saw them move. I haven’t a doubt that this brief episode was both my saying good-bye to childhood and allowing Lulu to act out my own next independent phase of life; Lulu had to live without me as I knew I had to live without my mother.

  No one had spoken to any of us in my group of friends about what was happening to our bodies. There was no sex education at home or at school, or we girls who had known each other most of our lives would have discussed it. If biology was unexplained, certainly these years were not framed for us as they should have been, with the rewards of continued intellectual growth spelled out dramatically as a far more exciting future than a too early marriage, a too early pregnancy. We should have been the generation that would take society the next step up the ladder, go beyond our parents, build a better world. Society must not have wanted that or it would have happened.

  Superficially, today’s adolescent world bears little resemblance to the world of my youth, and yours too if you are over thirty. But the inner picture of self—which interests me far more than the package’s wrappings—remains the same: turbulent, vacillating, and desperate for recognition: “How do you see me so that I may see myself?” Our teenagers awaken us to our own adolescences, the lost opportunities, the sexual excitements we denied ourselves. When we were young we didn’t understand that sexual energy also fueled intellectual and social development; but on some unconscious level we know it now, that much was lost back then, not just sexual adventuring but the whole world that we never got to taste, the loss of which we are reminded of by our own adolescent children.

  Having focused all of our punitive energy on the suppression of young sexual activity—as though we have the power to stop it—we shut down the whole machine. Unless we chain them to the wall, we can’t police teens to keep them from having sex. It is our refusal to supply them with sex education and protection that guarantees that they will not outstrip us or remind us of our own paltry world of social and sexual fulfillment. Today, teens face increasing rates of depression, suicide, substance abuse; close to 30 percent have had sexual relations by age fifteen. It’s true that birthrates among teens were higher in the mid-1950s than they are today, but in those days pregnant adolescents tended to marry, “and the economy was such that even a non-high school graduate could support a family,” says youth advocate Margaret Pruitt Clark. “What people are really concerned about today is teen pregnancy that results in welfare dependency.”

  Those who preach that giving young people information about sex is giving them permission to have sex reduce their children to the level of trained animals. In refusing to believe that a young person can come to see his or her body as a temple worth protecting, says Virginia Rutter, we show our hand: “It also hints at the negative feelings Americans have toward adolescence—we consider it a disease.”

  There are good reasons not to have sexual intercourse at an early age. As powerful as the sexual fantasy may be, a teenager is quite capable of putting an even more dominant pressure into play: his or her own dream of the special life ahead that would be ruined unless sex were postponed or contraception used. When a principled adolescent chooses to subordinate sexual gratification to The Grand Scheme, but a parent neither trusts nor assists him or her, then the dream of the responsible self can be irreparably damaged.

  When a girl feels emotionally betrayed by a mother who is rivalrous, or has not prepared her for adolescence or recognized her daughter’s sexuality, then pregnancy is waitin
g to happen. “Almost always, in an unwanted teenage pregnancy there is an unconscious wish to be reunited with mother,” says psychiatrist Louise Kaplan, “and a rebellious vengeance toward the mother who took her love away.”

  Adolescents today don’t perceive us as admirable models whom they want to emulate by pressing mind and body to grow beyond our achievements. Working hard so that our children would have a better life than ours was what the famous American Dream was all about. Today, it is a disaster. More than 1.6 million young people ages five to fourteen are left home alone each day. How many of our adolescent sexual surrenders that end up in unintended pregnancies happen out of a passionate cry of “Take care of me! Adore me!” rather than a desire for sex, which could be had responsibly? Giving up responsibility creates the dependency of infantile oneness never enjoyed. Not having taken in the feel of one’s life being witnessed in the first birth, the hungry child reaches the second birth of adolescence and snatches a moment of symbiotic bliss in another adolescent’s arms rather than wait for some factitious, untrustworthy promise of an adult life.

  We have addicted our adolescents to the power of The Image. They have felt our envy of their youth and beauty and watched us steal their adolescence from them, their fashions, their music, their dance, everything they invent to separate themselves from us. Shameless, guiltless envy—all learned from us—has become their mindset.

  Temple or Sewer? Today I Am a Woman, or Is It a Curse?

  At the very moment when beauty matters most, we are awakened as from a nightmare to the shocking awareness that we have no control over what is happening to our bodies. Our breasts grow, the clothes that fit us yesterday are this morning too short and too tight. And then one day we bleed and soil ourselves.

  We have been here before. This feeling of unavoidable shame awakens a chapter of our history buried years ago. The scenario of the first years of life’s defeats reemerges: loss of pride, scared little baby stuff we thought we had conquered for good, forever, with the recent accomplishments of childhood and our years of invention.

  Just when we thought we had found our place on the ladder among our friends, shifted our identification from mother to people our own age and size, the undertow of a tidal wave of physical and emotional change drags us back in time to nursery humiliations. The blood of menstruation reawakens fear of loss of control from the first years of life, a sense of bodily filth learned from another woman, who feels that way about her own body. We have always known that mother didn’t like her body; now we understand why. It is an ugliness that may happen only once a month for a period of five or seven days, but in the other days of the month, we wait, always aware that we are only clean until we are dirty and unlovable once again.

  Whatever self-image a young girl has built prior to her menses, that portrait will now change; the negative feelings that accompany bleeding will put in question the beauty of every part of her body. So emotionally profound is menstruation and all of its attendant rites and rituals that the girl will never again look into a mirror and see herself as optimistically as she did prior to her first bleeding, when face, hair, thighs, and upper arms were good enough. In rearousing the feelings of loss of control from the first years of life, now capped by bleeding that soils, smells, and defies control, menstruation becomes beauty’s most feared enemy. And it needn’t be so.

  When I was growing up, the only references to feminine hygiene were the full-page ads of beautiful women in elegant gowns and in a corner the discreet message, “Modess Because.” Because what? Prior to that first blood I didn’t think about the mystery of menstruation, though I would say today that its polite message had been incised on my brain. But when I began to bleed, I “knew” without being told that if I didn’t keep my dirty little secret to myself, like the elegant lady in the photo, I would never qualify for Niceness. Foolish me to think I wasn’t impressed by these ads; didn’t I circle the counters in our neighborhood pharmacy until there was a woman free to sell me a box of Tampax, so ashamed was I to ask a man?

  How must it feel to young girls today, growing up bombarded by feminine hygiene commercials that enflame the issue to epidemic health proportions? Gone is the understated “Modess Because,” which was bad enough given that it left everything unsaid; in its place are visions of happy teenagers on the beach, of mothers and daughters walking in fields of cornflowers, grateful that they have made it through another month without humiliation thanks to one or another of the dozens of feminine hygiene products the marketplace offers. Women in advertising, some of them no doubt cum laude graduates, write prose for feminine hygiene products that acknowledges women’s loathsome spectacle of our genitals; why do we not turn it around, create a true revolution in women’s self-esteem?

  Long before her menses, the girl has come to terms with the fact that she can control her bladder and sphincter, yes, even as she sleeps; all the childish fears that her brother had more control than she because of his “handle” that could turn things on and off, well, that has all been forgotten. Or has it? There is no way to control the onset of monthly bleeding, no way to know when it will begin or to be absolutely sure that this time we won’t spot our clothes in public. To make it worse, we now realize that the area between our legs is the source of sexual pleasure as well as of imminent shame. How can we even think about the conflict?

  For years we have seen the familiar boxes of Kotex and Tampax, whatever mother uses; we’ve seen them but cannot imagine their function until it happens. How could we? I can remember one day, having a few odd moments, taking a Tampax out of the blue and white box under the basin, unwrapping it, disassembling it, and another day stuffing a Kotex into my underpants and strutting around the bathroom. Ha!

  I must have accepted these items as my future, but I didn’t dwell on it. Riding in the branches of high trees, exploring empty buildings with No Trespassing signs, now these were investigations worthy of my time. No detective work deterred me except the close scrutiny of my own body. Masturbation should have been on my agenda but curiously wasn’t.

  “We are not equipping women to be responsible for their bodies,” says Judith Seifer, who has studied puberty and taught adolescent sexuality for more than twenty years. “In sex education classes young girls are still not told they have a clitoris. I’ve been fighting with two drug companies for eighteen years, Ortho and Wyeth, both of whom make plastic models that are used in doctors’ treatment rooms. The Ortho model is a little pink and blue thing in clear plastic originally designed to show where a diaphragm goes. I have never seen a female model produced by a drug company for sex education that has a clitoris on it. The girls in my classes who are in the sixth to ninth grades pick these models up and look at them and if they have been lucky enough to find their own clitoris and they don’t see one on the model, they will never believe another word that comes out of my mouth.”

  We reach puberty earlier than ever before, largely due to better nutrition, meaning that we are big enough to carry a child. For instance, in fifty years the hipline of a size 10 dress has grown from 34.5 inches to 37 inches to accommodate today’s larger population. Since the mid-1800s, puberty—the advent of sexual maturation and the starting point of adolescence—has inched back one year for every twenty-five years elapsed. It now occurs, on average, six years earlier than it did in 1850—age eleven or twelve for girls; age twelve or thirteen for boys.

  “When I was growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, it was twelve years and eight or nine months,” says Seifer. “Pre–World War II, it was probably age thirteen plus. The reason ten- and eleven-year-old girls in the inner city are beginning to menstruate so early and getting pregnant is that many of them have more body fat than previous generations; they eat foods that are not necessarily healthy but which produce fat cells, and estrogen is stored in fat cells.”

  As our menses begin ever earlier, menopause grows increasingly distant, leaving us with thirty or forty years in which to bleed, and worry. It will happen to ever
y girl, menstruation, and there is consolation in that; indeed, if it doesn’t come soon enough, we begin to fear that it never will. One of author Judy Blume’s most popular characters speaks for every little girl when she urgently prays for her first period: “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. Gretchen, my friend, got her period. I’m so jealous God. I hate myself for being so jealous, but I am. I wish you’d help me just a little. Nancy’s sure she’s going to get it soon, too. And if I’m last I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh please God. I just want to be normal.”

  Now, more than ever, sameness is what life is all about; when the humiliations associated with menstruation loom, sameness binds us together in tight groups; we share our best friend’s mortification when she spots her dress, for we know it could as easily happen to us. Control alone can save us. We must watch ourselves, each move, guard against loss of control at every moment.

  We become mistresses of control once our periods begin. The Rules that used to command our group of friends, unbreakable rules that could get you ostracized but that kept us all equal, now become more ironclad than ever. This new controlling goes beyond the pool of blood as if to monitor everything we girls now do. Fastidiousness/purity/control was always there, of course, not just in early toilet training but subsequently in mother and teachers always reminding us to lower our voices, modulate our raucous laughter, slow our full-throttle running; and then, of course, came The Group’s control of dress and behavior, everything.

  Now, with boys, there is also control of passion, unspoken rules that today in certain groups may allow for sex with one boy, but when a girl has two boyfriends while everyone else has drawn the line, she is punished, labeled, shunned, left out. The threat of excommunication from The Group takes on added grimness and loneliness after the arrival of menstruation and its unspeakable partner, humiliation.