The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  What a fistful of rage I must have swallowed at adolescence. All that bravado, intelligence, and wit I’d previously acquired of no use whatsoever in winning love. My strengths were exactly what was not wanted, were in fact masculine. The boys in my adolescent life must have been overwhelmed by the intensity of my passion. Grown men have been. How could any of them have known that they were holding a baby, not a young woman? With my eyes closed, my body embraced, I did indeed feel very small, all needs being satisfied with kisses of deep oral satisfaction.

  The lyricists of romantic music, the really good ones, are clued in to the infantile needs of adult passion. Did you know that studies have been done showing that nothing is more arousing to adolescent girls than romantic music? Not movies, not pictures in magazines, but the pictures/feelings in our heads when we listen to Take Me-Hold Me music. “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is,” wrote Noel Coward in the 1930 play Private Lives. I’ve never doubted that Coward’s aching sophistication hid a besotted romantic.

  Dear Peter Allen had his own brand of irony, but his music and lyrics were a dead giveaway to the susceptibility of his heart; he wrote a song, wrote it right here where my typewriter now sits. I was lying on the sofa behind him, listening to him sing—“I’m falling fast, why can’t we stay together”—and I thought how some of us just can’t get enough of that broken-heart feeling, don’t even require a specific beloved to get high on the sighing/dying/crying feeling of the lost loves of adolescence.

  It is the essence of adolescence that we can will ourselves weightless, captured by romantic music and words; we are in love with love, desperate to give ourselves to sexual arousal, oral passion, sensory deprivation, though we call it romance.

  So many adolescent songs hang on The Gaze. When we buy a new dress, our first high heels, sleep on painful rollers in our hair at night, our objective is to find ourselves in The Gaze of the unwitting lad who hasn’t a clue to his power. Poor boys of my adolescence, how could they possibly have known how I wanted them to see me when I didn’t have a good enough internalized image of myself? All the dresses over all these years could never elicit for more than an evening what I wanted then, what I want even now: to possess it for no other reason than to walk away and honestly say, “Enough. No more dresses. No more mirrors.”

  In my rush for adolescent beauty there is nothing abandoned that I regret more than my power of speech. I suppose I was aiming for an appealing Little Girl neediness. It wasn’t a thought-out master plan. But I disavowed the thinking/talking me, the girl who had stood repeatedly at the head of the school in assembly, taken the lead in plays. I swallowed my tongue, turned off the circuitry between brain and the formation of words. It wasn’t a conscious ruse to deceive boys. On the contrary, it was the most unconscious of surrenders. But it was certainly part of the eventual surrender of self that would lead to lack of responsibility in my first sexual experiences. The anger that became the dark side of my love for men wasn’t fury at them: “After all I gave up for you in my adolescence!” My rage was that I never could get men to love me as I’d wanted my mommy to love me. Poor boys/men, how could they know this passionate girl/woman wanted to be seen as The Christ Child?

  Speech in motion is obviously a part of our look, how others perceive us. An articulate girl/woman’s face is alive, her whole body involved in the act of forming thoughts into words. Silent women who wait for others to speak for them, order for them in restaurants, make their decisions on weighty matters such as investments and wills, their faces are windows with the shades pulled down. Masks.

  Speech, I have always known, was the saddest forfeit in my life. Words release anger, humor, inspiration; grabbing our thoughts, forming them into words, all the while the mind racing ahead to capture a subsequent thought that only came alive as the last words were leaving our lips; is there anything more exciting than good talk, individuals sparked by the electric current of one another’s words and our own? We grow in these exchanges, we become, we reinvent ourselves. And until recently women had lost all this in adolescence. Thoughts kept inside, words swallowed, bring down the corners of the mouth, build to a look of resignation, behind which is anger, ahead of which is sickness, physical and mental. How could it be otherwise? Speech is power. If we do not speak, others do not know who we are, and neither do we. One day life ends and they write on our tombstone: She was a nice person.

  Learning to speak our anger should have been part of our earliest separation from mother in the first years of life. Found manageable in the presence of the person upon whom we are dependent for life, we would learn to trust how we handled anger; in the process we would find that anger need not lose us love. It is one of life’s most important lessons. If we didn’t learn it then, we remain terrified of anger, for it always feels as destructive as in infancy. All our life we will keep trying for perfect love, the reward mother promised if we swallowed anger, as she had swallowed hers with her mother. In our eyes, because nothing was ever mother’s fault and all ours, the seed of anger remains our disease, the cancer grows. Mother remains perfect; we are the bad ones.

  In adolescence we imbue the romantic object with mother’s perfection, she being our model of love. Now, this boy will adore us in that perfect way we have always longed for. He is our reward for being a Good Girl. When he is less perfect than the way we have programmed him to be, when we do not see ourselves constantly adored in his eyes, we die. We could kill him, or so it feels, but this rage cannot be felt in the conscious here and now. Again, we bury the anger, turning it silently against ourselves.

  The most successful films about these adolescent years resonate no matter what age we are; they capture young people’s inability to get themselves seen by parents, society, as who they really are. These are films like Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, and one of my favorites, Dirty Dancing, the low-budget sleeper that struck an international chord. In each of these films, the adolescent’s inability to get his or her internal, real self recognized had led to a “false” face, a mask behind which he or she hid anger at the outside world’s rejection, until, of course, the hero/heroine could no longer repress real feelings and identity.

  Until these sexual years, everything was noticed and commented on within the family. The adolescent waits with faith for confirmation of what is happening to her. What is so terrible about sex that it cannot be admitted along with everything else that is happening to mind and body? The adolescent feels the lack of trust, that while all eyes are focused on her sex, it is dishonestly handled. Very well, the girl feels, if what I am going through is so forbidden, I will act accordingly and write the truth only in my diary. But diaries are often ferreted out by anxious parents who excuse their invasions of privacy on the grounds of “doing it for the girl’s own good.”

  That she has neither privacy from mother nor a separate life of her own teaches the girl a grim lesson. “My mother is always in my room,” a teenage girl writes to Seventeen magazine. “She goes in while I’m at school or out with my friends. I always find things moved, borrowed, thrown away, or just general signs of her snooping. I feel like my privacy isn’t being respected. I’ve tried talking to her, but her response is either, ‘Why do you care? Are you hiding something?’ or ‘It’s your room but it’s my house.’”

  What we need when we are young is an outlet for anger within the family, good arguments that build and then subside, allowing all to see that no one has been killed, that anger is another one of life’s emotions. Melanie Klein’s example of how the omnipotent rage of the infant is assuaged over time by the awareness that while mother may not respond instantly to the child’s demands for food, warmth, holding, she does eventually arrive, again and again, offering the breast, pulling up the cover, holding her darling baby and beaming her adoration into the baby’s eyes. In time the infant learns that while mother cannot be omnipotently controlled, she is “good enough,” a feeling that inspires gratitude and, eventually, love.

  In a way, thi
s earliest practice in rage and love is what must be repeated in adolescence. Now the child’s needs are for recognition of a more mature self, one who has opinions, rights, a need for privacy and an assurance that love remains even when resentment is aired. Love always remains, it must be felt. If we cannot say our piece within our family and have the meal end with a verbal handshake, smiles all around, we will not trust our anger, ever. Rage will remain stuck at that infantile, omnipotent stage. We suck anger back inside until enough of it becomes manifested in a twitching eye, migraine headaches, the herniated disk.

  “Just like your father,” murmurs mother at her son, not loving his contradiction, his angry refusal to comply, but “This is how men are.” She would like to hold on to him, but society will grade her a “bad mother” if she doesn’t let him go. Her daughter is another matter. Mother will not tolerate “that voice” from her girl.

  When The Group replaces mother as lifeline, the girl finds that dissension is not allowed among these “little mothers” either. One-on-ones via the telephone may hiss anger across town, but when The Group again forms, loving faces are required. Girls become experts at denying anger—“Oh, we love her, she’s our best friend!”—which gives itself away in the frozen smile, the ever narrowing lips. The standard of excellence in adolescence—beauty above all—is limited to so few that envy is inevitable. Envy is resentment is anger. We swallow it, we smile, and like wax dolls we chorus, “Who, me, angry?”

  The Ugly Denial of Mother-Daughter Competition

  Twenty years ago, to suggest to a mother that she was in competition with her adolescent daughter would have aroused either an angry wall of denial, or stupefaction. Well, perhaps she would admit that her girl’s entry into puberty rearoused memories of her own youth and, yes, it did make her feel older. But in an era when thirteen-year-old girls looked their age and mothers were matronly, even these admissions would have been a stretch: “Compete with my little girl? You must be mad!”

  But today is another story. Our reverence for youthful beauty in women of all ages sets a more predictable stage for a mother/daughter face-off; suddenly there are two sexual females in the house. A face-off isn’t necessarily competitive, but it requires that the older woman look at her daughter in a new light, for the girl is now recognizable as society’s beauty icon, the model wearing the clothes that mother admires in her favorite magazine. Nonetheless, most mothers would claim that “nothing has changed” regarding how they feel about their girls; it is what mothers were taught by their own mothers. Competition between women, especially mother and daughter, is the smoking gun women still refuse to acknowledge: “What gun?”

  I know women who had highly competitive mothers and others, like myself, who remained invisible to theirs, but whether we were vaporous or threatening in her eyes, how she responded to our second birth, separation from her, shapes the rest of our lives.

  I would have told you until this book that I felt myself well out of the rivalry between my mother and sister, but it would be a lie. The truth is that upon reaching adolescence, my once valued ability to move in and out of the house without catching her judgmental eye now made me feel inferior; what had been a plus, invisibility, was now confirmation of my failure at holding the ticket to adolescence: beauty. It cut so deep that since failing at beauty in her eyes in adolescence, I have entered and left rooms self-consciously, simultaneously desperate for recognition and blind to any I received. The first years of life had set the mold; now adolescence cast it in bronze.

  How ironic that I was the first in my crowd to menstruate, even before Julie and Rose Anne, who had beautiful breasts. The shock of the telltale stains on my white cotton pants demanded my mother’s involvement, she more embarrassed than I at having to strap me into the ugly sanitary belt (interesting choice of word) that I’d often seen in the bathroom drawer and associated with her other female accoutrements that had kept me happily, or so I convinced myself, separate from her. Now I was one of them, she and my sister, and I didn’t want to be, though the truth is, I’d never been invited in.

  To my grief, I suddenly felt included in the competitive issues that made up my mother’s complicated relationship with my sister. For years I had sat at the dining room table—unfortunate setting of too many family arguments, not to mention eating disorders—and witnessed their strained debates over my sister’s dress, her late nights with boys, painful bursts of emotion that erupted out of my mother’s inability to deal with her oldest daughter’s lush beauty. In memory, these were also my mother’s most beautiful years. That my own arrival into puberty went all but unobserved was no doubt due to my bearing no resemblance to the two of them, with my straight hair, braces, and flat chest.

  I loved my mother, had always needed her, now more than ever, but my chosen role was that of the strong, uncomplaining one; as far back as memory goes, she had told people, “I’ve never had to worry about Nancy. She can take care of herself.” And so I did, until adolescence, when the world changed and group sameness required that I wear a bra, regardless of having nothing with which to fill it. I refused to ask for one after her amused comment to my aunt that I was lucky that I was “flat.” While her observation was true, my humiliation was such that when eventually I did require a bra, I shoplifted several from Belk’s Department Store. Nor did I ask her for the kind of pretty pastel dresses my friends wore, instead taking cold comfort from my sister’s hand-me-downs. I was in a pitiful game of refusing to ask for anything in the hope, I suppose, that one day my mother would turn around and see me.

  Eventually, when my looks did arrive, she never noticed; when her friend Betty commented ten years later in the ladies’ room at the 21 Club that she thought I had become the prettier daughter, my mother looked at her friend as if she were daft. To alter her opinion of my sister would put in question many of the decisions she’d made regarding her own life. It never changes, the family grading system. I accept that my mother will never focus on anything I’ve achieved; there is a bright side, which is whatever success I have had with looks, men, work has been fueled in large part by her blindness to me.

  According to psychologist Laurence Steinberg, a child’s adolescence is typically that time when parents find themselves reviewing their own lives. While it is especially painful to the parent of the same sex, mothers and daughters generally have more difficulty than fathers and sons. “In either case, the children tend to serve as a mirror of their lost selves,” Virginia Rutter summarizes. “[The adolescent’s sexuality] can raise doubts about [the parents’] own attractiveness, their current sex lives, as well as regrets or nostalgia for their teenage sexual experiences…. Parents of a teenager feel depressed about their own life or their own marriage; feel the loss of their child; feel jealous, rejected, and confused about their child’s new sexually mature looks, bad moods, withdrawal into privacy at home, and increasing involvement with friends.”

  The analogy of adolescent separation to the earlier separation in the first year of life is readily apparent; emotional and physical drives pull the adolescent forward, out of the house, only to have her return and crawl into mother’s lap, lie beside her in bed. Granted, we are not giant babies now grown sexual, but when the adolescent vacillates between demanding her own space and hanging on mother’s neck, she is in the throes of something as precarious and brave as the baby’s first steps into the next room. She needs rules, yes, reasonable rules that set safe boundaries but also encouragement and affirmation of both her new separate self and her parents’ ongoing love—“Go, my darling, with my unconditional love, my daughter, right or wrong!”

  If so many of us get stuck in adolescence, never becoming responsible adults, it is due in part to a lack of faith in the future, in ourselves, meaning an inability to let go of the past. We work at separation all our lives, but there is no time more uniquely suited than adolescence in which to invent our identities out of the daydreams of our futures.

  Beauty has always crowned adolescence, been that pr
ize for which we compete. But beauty today drives males and females of all ages; the more youthful, the better. With mother and daughter sharing the same objective and the girl younger than mother, how is the important business of healthy competition to be recognized, much less discussed?

  One of the most destructive and backward moves of recent Matriarchal Feminism has been the effort to restore the ancient idealization of the mother/daughter relationship. These mothers’ children comprise what the demographers call The Second Baby Boom. They may be working outside the home, unlike their own mothers, but they want with their little girls the very thing we worked to outgrow in the seventies: togetherness with Mommy. The rewards of individuation are now disparaged.

  Now, as mothers, the “letting go” of their daughters is overwhelmed by a stronger yearning to set up with the girl the tightest possible relationship. For many of these mothers, the daughter is their nearest and dearest relationship, maybe their only one. Because these women are providers as well as caretakers, they often have an added sense of “entitlement”; perhaps it isn’t thought out as such, but making the money and raising the child on their own boosts their sense of ownership and control. Didn’t the role of breadwinner make men feel that they “owned” their women?

  What chance has a daughter to find her unique identity if her so-called feminist mother is against letting her become her separate self in the full assurance that mother remains on her side? Instead, mother will preach equality but will stamp her girl, like a cookie cutter, in her own identity. These young daughters of the nineties are reminiscent of girls from the fifties, the “good girls” who “share all their secrets with Mother…. They are, and usually remain, carbon copies of an idealized version of Mom—imitating the way she combs her hair, dresses, eats, talks, walks,” writes psychiatrist Louise Kaplan. “‘We were never as close as we are now,’ brags her proud mother…. Even after [the daughter] is married, her best friend is Mom. Mom is her confidante, her ally against her husband. No man can come between this mother-daughter intimacy.”