The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  There is no part of my nature I hate more than my controlling side, no accusation from my man that brings me closer to tears than, “Stop trying to control me!” It was that side of my mother I swore never to inherit.

  How bitter that we have successfully stormed the barricades of the all-male workplace and have done nothing to help ourselves celebrate the most natural thing in a woman’s life, her bleeding. “It’s learned behavior,” says Judith Seifer. “Girls still don’t like their period. They still call it ‘the curse.’ If you grow up in a household with women who hate the experience, who disdain it and pathologize it, have cramps and who are taking over-the-counter pills for it or going to bed with a heating pad—what are you going to do in an attempt to mimic adult behavior, other than the same thing?”

  Writing Seifer’s words, I remember the shot glass of gin being carried upstairs to my groaning sister by my mother. From behind closed doors, the moans resonated throughout the house twice a month, mother and daughter. One day in history class, my period arrived; suddenly, I was doubled over in pain. I rose dutifully from my desk, asked to be excused, and like the hypnotized son in The Manchurian Candidate, I stumbled across the street to my friend’s house, only to find the door locked. Faithful to family tradition, I broke a kitchen window to get to the gin.

  “Primitive menstrual taboos were not necessarily a male invention,” wrote Susan Brownmiller in her 1984 book Femininity. “Seclusion in a menstrual hut, avoidance of sex and of men in general, and relief from agricultural and cooking labors were pragmatic ways of dealing with cramps and a copious flow…. Put squarely, menstruation is a nasty inconvenience… a dripping, bloating, congestive mess…. [It is] an imposition of cautious caretaker concerns: secure protection, check against leakage, carry the extra tampon, change the pad, or suffer the mortification of the drip, the gush and the stain.”

  I would not pretend to make a rose out of a cabbage, but why do Brownmiller and that earlier pugilistic feminist Simone de Beauvoir act “like girls” when it comes to that function that more than any other signals our childbearing power? Smells, as either good or bad, are learned, and the sight of blood, when soaked through the bandages of a warrior, for instance, is worthy of a salute. Why then is our blood not a triumphant banner under which women march in celebration of the life force that is ours alone, we the powerful sex that continues the human race?

  Instead, here is my heroine, de Beauvoir: “The sex organ of a man is simple and neat as a finger; it is readily visible and often exhibited to comrades with proud rivalry; but the feminine sex organ is mysterious even to the woman herself, concealed, mucous, and humid, as it is; it bleeds each month, it is often sullied with body fluids, it has a secret and perilous life of its own.”

  Shame is attached to a splotch of our blood, the mark of a curse, announcing the woman has not kept her house in order and has been negligent in self-control; the humiliation of it sends her running from the room to weep inconsolably, soothed by other women who can only be grateful that it didn’t happen to them. By not being sufficiently cautious and superhumanly controlling the magic of her menstrual cycle, which of course defies control, she feels less a woman.

  Some Jewish friends tell me they honor their daughters’ menarche by celebrating her bat mitzvah, the equivalent of the boys’ bar mitzvah. This is good, but only a beginning. The societal message must be reversed and soon, for leaving The Curse just that renders women too intensely focused on bodily imperfection. Today our work is in public, meaning that eyes are always on us, mirrors and reflecting surfaces surround us, distracting us with reminders that we are too fat, too short, too tall, and perhaps unaware that we have spotted our clothes. In the eyes of the anorexic, mastery over loss of flesh is a great blessing. Sufficiently emaciated, she stops bleeding altogether. Once the blood is gone, only the starved body, symbol of triumph and total control, remains.

  Before we expose girls to the competitive rigors of the workplace, why not an advertising campaign to set the record straight regarding menstruation? We might sell red armbands to wear proudly on those days we bleed. Twenty years ago I wrote that if men bled monthly, if they were the sex that could carry a child, give birth, propagate the species, they would honor it as publicly as possible. If the emission of blood were a male rite of passage, it would be marked by bravado, the shooting off of cannons. Instead of a wad of cotton strapped as inconspicuously as possible between his legs, the adolescent boy’s penis would be adorned, festooned with an amulet, an artful apparatus to catch the blood, package it to be used, you can be sure, in some religious or money-making scheme.

  I’ve read that menstrual blood is excellent food for plants, gardens; now, if men menstruated and knew this, they would have cornered the market. The smell would be inhaled deeply, like Chanel No. 5, applied to the body as an aphrodisiac, signal of sexual power. Oh, yes, I do think that if the roles were reversed, bleeding once a month would be a celebration to which the boy looked forward.

  We raise our daughters to believe that they can accomplish anything but saddle them with our miseries regarding menstruation. The taboo is so embedded in my own unconscious that as I sit here surrounded by recent literature on ceremonies, books, classes, rituals on how women might initiate their daughters into a healthy, even joyous, acceptance of menstruation, half of my brain says Yes! and the other half, Witchcraft! Intellectually, I believe that no physical handicap inhibits women more than the mindset regarding the bleeding female body. What good is an equal wage if we see ourselves flawed, always at risk unless we control everything?

  “Designed to stop accidents before they start,” reads an advertisement for menstrual pads in a teen magazine. “The bus is late and you’ve got killer cramps. You’re retaining so much water you feel like a baby beluga…,” reads another, the closing line of which promises, “As good as it gets until it’s gone.” What is “it”? Maybe 20 percent of our childbearing years, those days, lost, ugly, and at risk, if you believe the advertisements that continue to brainwash young girls and their mothers.

  Just as beauty’s sovereignty in women’s lives reemerged in the mid-eighties—after years of dark blue serge Dressing for Success—the full-page ads for feminine hygiene products also began to soar; in 1986, $23,974,600 was spent on magazine advertising for these products and by 1994 the figure had risen to $40,931,300. Even more startling were the television commercials that suddenly filled our living rooms, popping up like ugly jacks-in-the-box when we least expected. Today, more than a decade later, the ads and commercials proliferate, making the curse more personally hideous and threatening than ever before. It will be fascinating to see how subsequent generations of en masse working women with their own bank accounts deal with the increasing demands of beauty in the shadow of The Sewer.

  “We don’t know how to mark the physiological and psychological changes of becoming a woman or how to celebrate it,” says Tamara Slayton, director of the Menstrual Health Foundation. It was her own unintended pregnancy at the age of fifteen that set Slayton on the path that led to a government grant to fund the courses she teaches on fertility awareness and the celebration of the menarche.

  “When I began working with pubescent girls,” she says, “I found that they saw no redeeming value in menstruation. So deep was their hatred of bleeding that many young women, I felt, subconsciously wished to get pregnant in order not to have to deal with their periods. In our culture, pregnancy is seen nowadays in a positive light, even out of wedlock, while menstruation remains a negative experience. The hormonal changes going on in the body at this time lead to behavioral changes, but we don’t have any way of marking that. Girls come up to the challenge of the physical body, of making decisions on their own, of directing their own life, but they do it through an early pregnancy. So this whole pregnancy phenomenon in young girls may actually be taking the place of a rite of passage that could be instituted at first menstruation.”

  Not only are teenage mothers accepted, many receive the ben
efits of welfare and food stamps along with the respect of their peers, who see them as “beauty ideals,” meaning they have turned the ugliness of bleeding into an advantage. The preposterous idea of orphanages as a solution to the epidemic of teen pregnancies is a cruel nonsolution to a problem that has its roots in women’s attitudes about our bodies, the societal view of the menstruating women as unclean rather than beautiful, proud, and in charge of her body. It is sex education that is wanted, beginning in the home and emphasized in school.

  “If a mother feels negative about her body, she shouldn’t talk about it around her children,” says Ann Kearney-Cooke, a psychologist who specializes in appearance issues. “Early in life children begin identifying with their parents, to borrow from their self-esteem. A parent must try to understand her own body image history so that she doesn’t project an aversion to certain parts of her body on to her child. Mothers who are ashamed of their sex, their breasts, their genitals, without saying a word transmit this to their daughters.”

  I’d go a step further and urge mothers to tell their daughters honestly how they feel about their own bodies and about menstruation; the girl already knows. It is hearing mother say it out loud that begins to free the girl, especially when mother adds that she wants her daughter to have a better self-image than she. If she can’t say it and mean it, then the Good Mother should arrange for the girl to talk with someone who does have a healthy attitude regarding menstruation. That, to me, is one of the great mother/daughter gifts.

  I agree with Tamara Slayton that we have a “silent initiation into shame, in which the young girl is given a very clear picture of what it means to be female and how to ignore her rhythms as a source of strength and inspiration.” This silence that surrounds our bleeding also cuts into our vocal cords, making articulate twelve- and thirteen-year-olds mute, embarrassed by our bodies, which we no longer trust; yesterday’s well-spoken, inventive girl is now unsure, reluctant to draw attention to herself, afraid of speaking out before she’s checked the sentence in her head as well as her physical image, smoothing her skirt, fluffing her hair, and tentatively checking the back of her dress to be sure it is clean. What if she drew attention to herself at the very moment her body betrayed her? Better not to speak at all.

  Familial and societal silence that surrounds the menarche explains the negative makeover at puberty of once lively, self-assured girls. Add to this traditional setback today’s exaggerated spotlight on beauty and appearance, and we have a generation of young women raised to earn their way in a competitive workplace where they will remain preoccupied with menstrual anxiety.

  Centuries ago, the menstruating woman was considered blessed; the word blessing derives from the Old English bletsian, or bleeding, according to Webster’s dictionary. From Aristotle’s time, writes Barbara Walker, author of The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, humans were thought to be formed in the womb from congealed menstrual blood, a belief taught in European medical schools until the eighteenth century. In Middle Eastern and other creation stories a goddess created mankind from mixing clay with her menstrual blood; the influence of this belief can be found in the Old Testament name “Adam,” from the Hebrew word adamah or “bloody clay.” However, when Christianity spread through Europe, the idea of women’s menstrual uncleanness spread with it.

  Somewhere between the ancient worship of menstrual blood and today’s hysteria regarding women’s menstruation lies sanity and acceptance. “Young girls today learn that they can’t trust their body,” says Judith Seifer. “They say, ‘I can only rely on my body to make me smelly, dirty, crampy, achy, and bitchy.’ Now PMS is officially labeled a psychiatric disorder. What is the difference between that and what went on in Victorian times, when female hysteria was assumed to come from a woman’s menses? It was involutional or it was cyclical. Women were institutionalized for it.”

  Whether we are age five or fifty-five, the number one predictor of self-esteem is perception of our physical appearance, says developmental psychologist Susan Harter, who has been studying issues of self-esteem for twenty years. Here is the girl on the brink of adolescence, when romance, love, and beauty occupy her night and day dreams. She has never been more sensitive about her looks, which will bring her love and romance, kissing, holding, the re-arousal of oneness and weightlessness in the boy’s arms: “Take me, hold me, never let me go,” sings the dreamy voice on the car radio.

  When he moves his hand between her legs, the Swept Away feeling is shattered. Since she began to menstruate, she thinks of that place as doubly untouchable, and he wants to put his hand where the blood gushes, the smell originates? How can he ruin everything by making her feel ugly just when she was feeling loved? Her inner picture of herself plummets: Not just the romantic moment, but her whole self-esteem is now zero.

  Adolescence is precisely where this discussion belongs; here is where the self-loathing begins in earnest, genital abhorrence inherited from mother who learned it from her mother. Ah! Now we understand why mother hated her genitals. We have become links in the generational chain that will be passed on to our own daughters, the sad, dark disgust regarding menstrual blood.

  Most females think they bleed in a great gush of blood, an unstoppable flow, when the truth is that most bleed about six tablespoons of blood during any one period. If we exaggerate the amount of blood, it’s understandable why we also imagine that the vile drainage has disfigured other parts of our body. Adolescents obsess about their fleshy arms, fat stomachs, bulk of thigh. Very well, if they can’t control the flow or smell, they can control their weight; whatever curves they desire can be developed at the gym if, of course, they have the energy to exercise.

  What do young people today think of Rubens’s masterpieces of fleshy women, bulging with rolls of fat, painted in gardens, with swans, in men’s arms, riding on the backs of bulls, animals/men who carry them off for sex? Sex, with all that fat? How gross! Today’s beauty icons, whom adolescents and their mothers emulate, are so rail thin as to be embryonic, some with eyes bulging, their faces waiflike, emaciated. It is not for men that we starve ourselves but for the approving eyes of other women, who respond admiringly to the success of she who has managed to turn the lovely roundness of her body into sharp angles.

  I can’t remember when it was born, this mental picture of my mother standing in front of the fireplace in the house where we lived when I was eleven. It is the cocktail hour, and she and a man are talking, laughing, and I am sitting on the sofa watching them. Suddenly I see that there is a pool of blood on the floor where my pretty mother is standing and I am horrified, as speechless as is she. It is the man who goes quickly to the kitchen and returns with paper towels to mop up the blood. He is not in the least uncomfortable, but we two women—for I am now united with her in bleeding… at this point, the camera in my mind jams and will not proceed with what happened next, if indeed this incident ever did occur. I’ve never known for sure, and my mother, whom I’ve just telephoned, is aghast at the story. It is all in my imagination, the nightmare of humiliation of the eleven-year-old who has just become a woman. Or is it? Memory, wrote Oscar Wilde, is the diary that chronicles things that never happened and couldn’t possibly have happened.

  Some men handle women’s bleeding bodies better than we and I cannot help thinking fondly of those lovers in my life who have readily purchased the emergency box of Tampax in a crowded pharmacy; their lack of shame informs me, as have the men who genuinely loved my body during menstruation, withdrawing their bloodied penis, soiling the sheets with it in an abandon that told me something… something important, but what? That my shame might be unlearned? I have never doubted, as I said earlier, that if it were men who bled monthly, instead of we women, every day of the month would be a red-letter day. What bitter irony that we successful working women create the advertising and plan the marketing that enables the highly profitable feminine hygiene industry to hype the image of ourselves as dirty.

  I can remember twenty years ago when
my aunt—my heroine when I was growing up—told me of her idea to write a book on menopause, which she had just entered. “I telephoned your mother,” she added, “but she didn’t want to talk about it.” She never wrote the book, but in recent years other women have. Almost daily an article is published on yet another new piece of research on women’s health; as we live longer and become more affluent, new divisions of companies are established to manufacture an ever growing line of women’s health products. And yet, our inquisitive minds stop at the edge of menstruation as though it were the River Styx. Rather than understand the origin of the loathing of our bodies, we dedicate ourselves more than ever to the pursuit of beauty, a pretty, empty package that would deny what is inside. Is our chosen ignorance a way of holding on to our own mothers and grandmothers? As our lives change at the rate of geometric progression, is ignorance how we cling to the past?

  Almost fifty years ago de Beauvoir wrote: “It is not easy to play the idol, the fairy, the faraway princess, when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs; and, more generally, when one is conscious of the primitive misery of being a body.” When Brownmiller quoted these words in Femininity, I wished she had corrected de Beauvoir, brought her up to date with a new feminist appraisal, linking menstruation with the full, powerful spectrum of fertility.

  In Carol Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads, which documents the dramatic changes in preadolescent girls as they move from one stage of life to another, this Matriarchal feminist avoids altogether any mention of menstruation. What kind of avoidance is this? According to an article by Susan C. Roberts in New Age Journal, the private girls’ school where Gilligan and her colleague Lyn Mikel Brown did their research, “frowned on explicit mention of such subjects” as menstruation. Unmentionable? How can you write a book on the passage from latency years into adolescence and leave out menstruation, which is the symbol of The Crossroads?