The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  The other reason for the omission, however, is sadder still, namely that Gilligan wanted to avoid flak from other feminists “for supposedly implying that women are ‘essentially’ different from men,” says Roberts. “Were they to begin emphasizing menarche, they would be accused of joining the backlash against feminism, cloaking the old sexist argument that ‘anatomy is destiny’ in up-to-date garb.”

  And so, a major feminist, a brilliant thinker whose words carry enormous weight in women’s world, omits mention of menstruation for fear The Other Girls will ostracize her. The tyranny of men can’t hold a candle to that of women over other women. It is exactly by omission that these feminists emphasize “anatomy is destiny”; to bleed monthly is our destiny, symbol of our power to continue the human race. It is precisely female denial—and not Bad Patriarchal Society—that has led some women to obliterate their bleeding through starvation. If we don’t soon salvage menstruation from the sewer and learn to celebrate it, we will have missed meeting at the crossroads.

  In Praise of Masturbation

  Imagine the difference it would make if we grew up thinking of our genitals as an elegant design and a natural source of pleasure; what if the taboo were removed from that part of our body that is a lifelong reminder of contention and filth? We know from studies by Simmons and Rosenberg that boys and girls have roughly equivalent self-images until adolescence, when self-esteem changes dramatically along gender lines, and far more girls than boys become highly self-conscious. Asked “How good-looking are you?” early adolescents were less likely than younger children to answer “Very good-looking.” And the more they cared about their looks, the worse their self-consciousness.

  Because of the physiological changes taking place in these years, it would be unusual if adolescents weren’t more conscious of the mirror. At this age, girls and boys tend “not to distinguish between what others are thinking and their own self-preoccupation and therefore assume that their peers are as obsessed with their behavior and appearance as they are,” says psychologist David Elkind. It is hardly surprising that the primary basis of friendships in these years is outward appearance.

  We would prefer that our adolescent children value kindness and generosity more than looks; our morality is in the right place, but we forget that we were no less “appearance conscious” when we were their age. Nonetheless, there are ways we can help them past surface assessment, beginning with the encouragement to accept their bodies, especially their most intimate parts. Adolescence is late, but better late than never to allow a young person to explore his or her own genitals (no one needs to be taught how to masturbate) until a warm, loving feeling has been aroused, the likes of which there is no other. Imagine how natural it would be for a girl to learn to respect and protect this area that brings her so much pleasure; sexual responsibility should be discussed until the light of recognition dawns in an adolescent’s eyes. If the parents can’t do it naturally, easily, credibly, then they must find someone who can. That is their duty.

  For all of its being written about in recent years, self-esteem is at heart a good opinion of one’s self. We mistake arrogance, vanity, and pride for self-esteem, when more often the grandiose person’s boastfulness hides a very bad opinion of herself. Simply put, how can we have a good opinion of our selves if we think of our genitals as ugly, meaning that we harbor a sewer? If a female, young or old, cannot touch her genitals without revulsion, her efforts at self-respect are doomed, no matter how she may flaunt the number of suitors who pursue her.

  When the person who cannot pleasurably put her dainty fingers on her clitoris has sex, she will be disinclined to get involved with the insertion of a diaphragm; the very image of her hand “there” is alien to the fantasies in her head of being swept away by this prince who now holds her in his arms.

  Masturbation is something we would have naturally come to in the exploration of our bodies over the years, had the unspoken rules against it not been so freighted with dire consequences. In the first years of life the tiny hand went between the legs because it felt good. Unless someone important repeatedly took the hand away, murmuring negative noises with furrowed brow, we would have continued learning about our anatomy. In time, we would also have learned the simple rules of privacy.

  Nowadays the statistics on unplanned pregnancies appear frequently in newspapers and magazines. Every year, twelve percent of all fifteen- to nineteen-year-old girls become pregnant. Knowing this, how can loving parents not prepare adolescent children in every way possible? Whatever the adults’ own opinion of masturbation, personal or religious, if it helps prevent pregnancy, which would derail their child’s future, what can possibly weigh against it?

  I would do everything in my power to persuade an adolescent to postpone pregnancy. The risk of pregnancy and disease aside, there are such sane, persuasive arguments in staying on our own, open to growth, the mind and imagination expanding as it only can when we are independent in this amazing period of becoming, which is adolescence; there is a glory to the way we grow, a time-specific miracle that occurs in these years, and it simply doesn’t happen if we become part of a couple, meaning marriage or parenthood. We can’t regain it, can’t make up this growth later; with a child, a husband, life is experienced as a couple, meaning ideas, feelings, possibilities are filtered through this merge of self with another.

  I’m not saying don’t fall in love in your teens. I’m not crazy. It is intercourse and the outpouring of emotion that it triggers, even when we are twenty or thirty, that a fourteen-year-old simply isn’t prepared for, especially a young girl who is likely to be programmed for symbiotic oneness. When we give our bodies over to sex, we can’t help feeling that this precious gift to the boy is something he recognizes as just that: We are his.

  One minute we are growing intellectually, socially, physically, and then suddenly, in a moment of Swept Away passion, a boy puts his penis inside us and the miracle of a young girl becoming a unique individual is interrupted by a wave of abandon that goes back to infantile neediness. “I want you/I need you/I can’t live without you!” is how we feel, clinging to the boy, who wonders what has happened, where the sexual heat went and where this baby girl came from. Believe me, young girls, believe me in this if in nothing else: Adolescent sex isn’t worth what is being forever lost.

  Was there anyone more starved than I in adolescence, more vulnerable to “that feeling” boys aroused when I was held and kissed? Had I let them enter me, had the emotional floodgates been opened by sexual intercourse, I would have become enslaved. Nothing would have mattered except being with him again, and again, for he had the key to my life, or so I would have felt. As stupid as I was about contraception back then, I knew I would never realize my dreams if I let him “put it in.” I was right.

  Would that I’d been encouraged—no, would that I had not been discouraged—to learn about sex from my own body. Most adolescent girls still don’t understand that sexual intercourse isn’t just the insertion of the penis into the vagina. If the girl has not learned from self-arousal that her sexual feelings reside in her alone, and are not something another person has the power to ignite in her, then the magic belongs to the boy. She confuses love and sex. She becomes addicted to “his” magic, what his hands and mouth can do to her.

  Until she discovers that her own hand touching herself unleashes some of this same feeling, it will be the boy-prince who holds the key; she will sit by the telephone and wait and wait in expectation of the next magical moment when he holds her in his arms and “makes” her sexual. That so many girls and so many grown women give into “his” magic and eventually allow full intercourse, without contraception, has everything to do with who’s got the magic.

  And we castigate men for being overly proud of their penises. Who teaches them the magnificent power of erection? Yes, the boy likes his genitals more than girls do theirs; he thinks the world of his penis. But we women give him his summa cum laude. “Wow,” thinks the boy, seeing that his peni
s has transformed the reluctant girl into his love slave, “I knew it was good, but I didn’t know it could do that!”

  The adolescent girl wrestles with her own desire for love and the boy’s desire to touch her “there”; how can he want to explore the sewer with his fingers, his mouth! Doesn’t he know what goes on there, can’t he smell it? Hasn’t he seen the commercials on television? But the media have also informed her of the ecstasy of oral sex and its promise of orgasm. Behind her self-loathing there is the wish to feel this mysterious ecstasy she has read about and seen repeatedly on the rapturous faces of beautiful television and film heroines. How does she reconcile erotic desire with the ugly mental picture of “it”?

  The touch of his lips solves her dilemma. Like the fairy tale frog who turns into a prince when kissed by the princess, the unloved sewer becomes less hideous when kissed by the prince. He who accomplishes this for a girl becomes adored: She forgets the lack of beauty between her legs when his brave, hungry mouth is on her. What an animal he is! How desirous he makes her feel, wanting sex so much he will do this unthinkable act and bring her to orgasm too. The magic, however, is in his mouth, not her clitoris. “Just let me go down on a woman and she’s mine!” I’ve heard men boast. But if she gives his mouth all the credit for her orgasm, she will hand herself over to him body and soul. Now, when he moves to insert his penis, her infantile desire for symbiotic love automatically awards him full responsibility for her little self.

  It is distressingly ironic that for some of us it is easier to let a man’s mouth touch us “there” than to explore ourselves with our own fingers. In my own case it was a honey-tongued Citadel cadet quoting Baudelaire who got me past “No!” He sweet-talked me beyond self-loathing into orgasm. I’ve never forgotten his mouth, the feel of the sand on the beach, and to this day he and the essence of forbidden sex wander through my fantasies.

  Why did it take another ten years to discover I could accomplish “his” magic with my own hand, by myself? I believe I simply didn’t want to be alone with my orgasm. Mine was the mindset of a little girl who refused to learn to braid her own hair for fear that her beloved nurse Anna, feeling unneeded, would leave her. Even as we revile men and blame them for all the wickedness in the world, this is precisely what we girl/women do with the boy/man: We leave the key to our sex in their hands; we don’t want to masturbate and bring ourselves to orgasm, for this would say we are independent, and we aren’t, not emotionally. The vagina unexplored, clitoris untouched by us, we lie there like a lox, waiting: “Give me an orgasm! Make me sexual! Don’t leave me or I’ll die! Take care of me, for I am a little thing and helpless without you!”

  Call it self-respect or self-love, our opinion of our genitals is central to the image of our entire being. Thinking we have a sewer down there influences how we see ourselves, clothed or unclothed. We don’t admit it consciously, but when we look in the mirror or imagine how others see us, our unconscious takes the sewer into account and our self-image is distorted by the ugliness hidden between our legs. Like the taint on Lady Macbeth’s hands that can never be washed clean, our genital disfigurement is displaced onto other parts of our body, becoming the ugliness of our underarms, the fleshiness of thighs, the nose, the feet, the legs, wrong, wrong, wrong!

  Why do we stiffen with anxiety at seeing the workmen on the sidewalk up ahead? When they stare and whistle, commenting among themselves, we automatically assume they are disparaging us, mocking us; we thought we looked good in the mirror before leaving the house. But their X-ray Gaze reminds us that we are never at peace with the way we look; our slip is showing, our skirt too tight, something is wrong! Something is always wrong. Bad men!

  Anger: “Not a Pretty Face”: Swallow It

  I had stood, all eagerness and impatience, while my sister’s old evening dress was pinned on me before that fateful dance at the Yacht Club. I didn’t even know enough to look critically at the mirror and see that the strapless gown didn’t suit me, especially after the dark brown velvet straps had been added to keep the dress up on my flat chest. I placed no value on looks. Having not had this rite of passage explained to me, I hadn’t a clue that beauty was the prerequisite to adolescent stardom. Certainly, the new longing for boys had made me awkward in their presence; but I’d noticed that they were awkward too. Accustomed to being chosen first for any team of girls, I didn’t question success that night, couldn’t remember failure, so carefully had I buried nursery angers under trophies of recent accomplishments. Had the boys been hesitant in the choosing of partners this particular night, I’m sure I was prepared to solve their problem by taking the initiative myself. Assuming responsibility was who I was. In recent years my life had been a great adventure, in which there had been no comparisons made to my mother and sister. In my mind, they were boring, tediously arguing over my sister’s looks and her evenings with boys.

  That night at the Yacht Club marked the end of childhood, the finish of an adventure story with me as heroine. In one fateful night I took it all in and made my concession speech to myself. I watched my friends, whose leader I had been for years, watched them happy in the arms of desirable boys, and I recognized what they had that I lacked, saw it so clearly that I can re-create the film today, frame by frame: They had a look that went beyond beauty. It wasn’t just curls, breasts, prettiness but, more important, a quality of acquiescence, the agreeable offer to be led instead of to lead; a submissive appeal that cried out, “Take me, for I am little and cannot live without you.” My own face was too eager, too open, too sure of itself. I needed a mask. I needed a new face that belied the intelligent leader inside and portrayed the little girl, no, the tiny, helpless baby who hadn’t been held in the first years of life and had been waiting all these years for what boys now offered.

  Miserable as I was that night, I acknowledged the work ahead: The girl I’d invented, who had become me, who was so full of words waiting to be spoken and skills to be mastered, she had to be pushed down like an ugly jack-in-the-box, the lid sat on. No boy was going to take on a package like me. Deny me, hide me, forget about me.

  Ready as I was to pay whatever price for the love of boys, a part of me must have been filled with rage at having to abandon what I thought to be a fine person. That rage would have been titanic, commensurate with the infantile need for love. What did I do with all my fury? I had no voice for rage. I belonged to a family of women who wept, and by not weeping, I’d made myself different from mother/sister.

  That night I became a woman; I wept and wept after someone’s father drove me home while the rest of My Group went off into the night to a late party with boys. I showed my grief but not my rage. I had no model of a girl/woman who took rage in hand, shaped and transformed it into constructive energy. I did what most women still do; I swallowed my anger, choked on it—no doubt triggering a series of physical problems that would manifest years later after repeated swallowings; I bowed my head, in part to be shorter, but also, like a cornered cow, to signal that I’d given up.

  The shame of my bankruptcy at the Yacht Club dance was all the worse for being so public, for I stood there the entire night, shoulder blades boring into the wall behind me, refusing on principle to hide. Even more destabilizing was the immediate throwback in time to a feeling of being very little and unable to catch my mother’s eye. Once again I was invisible! This time around there was no denying that what I didn’t have was beauty, a power I may have been able to devalue in the past, but no longer. Now beauty reigned supreme.

  By morning, I’d buried and mourned my eleven-year-old self, the wall walker, and had become an ardent beauty student. From now on I would ape my beautiful friends, smile The Group smile, walk The Group walk, and, what with hanging my head and bending my knees, approximate as best I could The Group look. But I was very, very angry; not then, not consciously, but I can recognize it now. How could I not be, me and every other girl who doesn’t fit the mold?

  On the eve of adolescence I put my anger in the same hermetic
ally sealed room in the unconscious where I’d stored the ancient anger at my mother. Of anger at mother I would emphasize that some of that anger is as inevitable as the dark side of any love affair. The clue to understanding adult rage is to return to the earliest source; if we deny anger at mother and try to understand rages at people we love later on, we lose the key. As much as today’s beloved may be to blame, if our anger is out of proportion to what just happened, the volume of our unhappiness and rage does not spring from what they have just done or not done. Look further back.

  The angers of infancy and their recapitulations in adolescence stoke the furnace of the dark side of our adult love affairs, when we want to strike out at our beloved, hurt them, maybe kill them. They are called crimes of passion and in some countries are grounds for clemency, so close to love’s passion is murderous rage.

  We can’t consciously remember infancy, where the patterns of love and rage are first laid down, but adolescence, when all these themes are rearoused, is available to us. Find the umbilical cord of anger in adolescence and follow it back as far as you can to the nursery, to infancy and mother, original source of The Gaze. Did you get The Gaze? Adolescence is when we try again. Did you get it this time around? Were you lovely at adolescence, beamed on, seen, reflected? Were there angry competitions over beauty within the family or outside it?

  Certainly there are alternatives to beauty; men have always had elective talents and skills to practice. Now young women can pursue these same options, but we still practice beauty, more than ever. What does it mean? Follow the umbilical cord. Try not to question too dismissively the foggy pictures in the mind from the first years of life; remember that while that portion of the brain that stores memory isn’t fully developed until around age three, we still have impressions from before then that have stayed with us all our lives. Mark Twain called these fuzzy recollections “stretchers,” meaning that they were caught somewhere between fact and fiction. They can be some of our most valuable memories. I have discovered quite a few “stretchers” while writing this book; after pestering relatives from my earliest years, I’ve managed to confirm most of them as reality. It’s a great relief discovering that there are real reasons for my lifelong rages, denied until I became a writer.