The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Our culture never has stopped smiling on this kind of glued-at-the-hip relationship between mother and daughter, preferring to see a desexualized woman, a clone, rather than a daughter with her own strong identity, standing equal, loving—but separate. Today no one keeps us from fulfilling what we started twenty years ago more doggedly than other women; the loudest and most influential are those who control Matriarchal Feminism, which is anti-men and antisex.

  Making competition synonymous with betrayal gives a grown woman permission to deny her own rivalry with an adolescent daughter at a moment when youth and beauty are center stage. The beauty contest is all about competition. Adolescents and grown women walk the street in short, body-revealing, nipple-baring clothes. “Look at me!” their outfits demand. But no one looks because everyone is in the competition for the eye. Asked by Seventeen magazine, “How do you see your generation?” 60 percent of the adolescent respondents answered “competitive.” These girls can name the emotion, but they have not been raised to deal with it, and so it rages out of control.

  Today’s supremacy of looks/beauty/appearance leaves adolescents with the untenable anxiety of competing hard against other girls and their mothers, all the while fearing that competition destroys love. It is an either/or paralysis learned early in life from our dearest rival. If mother doesn’t go through the stages of healthy competition with us, again and again until we believe it is exciting to vie, to win, and that we are as good friends as ever afterward, then when/if we are forced to compete, it is with fear and rage.

  I believe the mother-daughter tie can be women’s greatest source of strength, but not if there is a nasty worm called denial at the heart of the lovely red apple of love. I’ve seen veiled competition over beauty in the most seemingly perfect relationships; it is all but invisible until “something happens.” When I was in my mid-twenties I visited my lover’s family. It was a weekend, and we were to go to the country club for dinner. My lover’s mother was a beautiful woman in her early sixties, very carefully turned out from top to toe. The daughter could have been equally attractive had she not been dressed in a shapeless garment with dowdy accessories to match. The loving closeness between the two women was evident, but so was the understanding as to who would be the star.

  Our photograph was taken that night, and when we all looked at our likenesses on our next weekend together, the daughter retired to her room, in tears. Her brother, knowing full well what was going on, told me, “My mother buys all my sister’s clothes. She’s always dressed her that way, even when she was in college. I think the sight of you and mother looking so great together and her in that awful dress… well, what is she to do? It can never be discussed.”

  This mother loved her daughter; the daughter loved her mother. But there was no room for two beauties in the family. It was an arrangement that could be lived with until a photo made an inadmissible truth all too clear. Today the daughter has daughters of her own and dresses them in the clothes from her own childhood that her mother kept in the attic. These women speak every day on the phone; their love may be real, but it is at the cost of suppressed rage.

  When a daughter such as this grows up and marries, it is still mother’s world; the other woman on the tennis court, the other woman at whom her husband stares automatically becomes the competitor against whom she could not win; an a priori defeat. Why be responsible, adult, when the wound has been preempted by the person who has always controlled life and whose loss of love would feel like death? Let mother take responsibility for her sex life, her genital disease, the problem with drugs, or let men pick up the slack; she gives herself over to passion and assumes that he, like Mom, will take care of everything.

  If the workings of beauty aren’t discussed honestly, along with sex, which is so allied to adolescent beauty, then mother’s denial is taken by the girl to mean that these are areas she cannot control and over which she has no responsibility. Boys learn early on that promises of love and repeated assurances of the girl’s beauty—telling her that it is so overpowering, he must have her, cannot help himself—melt her defenses. Finally hearing what she has always wanted to hear, that she has indeed attained that consummate goal in women’s lives, the power of beauty, she puts herself in his hands.

  A 1992 study showed that girls with “traditional values” had sex earlier than those who didn’t, and were also less likely to use contraception. What was meant by “traditional values” were such beliefs as the following: “Most women can’t take care of themselves without help from men”; “Most women are [not] very interested in their jobs and careers”; “A husband should be smarter than his wife.”

  Because mother works out at the gym and watches her diet, she can wear her daughter’s clothes. The new, hot music on MTV, her daughter’s channel, is the identical music in mother’s beauty parlor, on the radio when mother drives to work, and if she is divorced or a single parent, it is the music mother dances to at her clubs, her favorite bars with her date, who is possibly younger than she, somewhere between her age and her daughter’s. The latest fashions in the store may look more appropriate for the daughter, but do we expect mother to dress like a matron? Out of the question; these are the best years of her life, or so she was feeling until her daughter’s sexual beauty began increasing daily.

  Mother loves her girl, still feels like her guardian, keeper of the rules, disciplinarian, the “woman” of the house. What does she do with feelings of competition, for which she was not prepared by her own mother, and which even now she would not call by that awful name, competition. She uses everything in her arsenal to deny the nasty feeling, beginning with, “Compete with my daughter? Why, we’re best friends!”

  Science and economics have converged to make youth available longer to all who can afford it; still, no one wants to take the grrrr out of competition with learned rules that teach women that it is a human emotion, one they will encounter in the workplace and which is best practiced in the first competitive relationship at home. “No!” mothers declare, reaching instead for the Band-Aid of mother/daughter look-alike togetherness. Fears of feeling older opposite the sexual beauty of her daughter are put to sleep; doesn’t everyone say they look more like sisters? Which one is the mother?

  We say we are raising our adolescent girls to believe that they are architects of their futures. Consciously, they take this in, but in response to unconscious pressures they act like my generation, which waited to be asked to dance, waited for him to advance the seduction as choreographed in our imaginations, as we would do it if we were in his place. Of course he does it wrong. The new generation may invite the boy to a movie, to dinner, but when it comes to sex, she hands responsibility to him.

  My friends who have teenage daughters bear no resemblance to the mothers of yesteryear. I look at photos of my own mother when I was in my teens, and while she was lovely, she was obviously older by a full generation. When today’s media applaud the mother-daughter sister team, who has succeeded, the younger woman in looking older or the mother in turning back the clock? Obviously the latter. There is something so deeply disturbing in the interchangeable mother and daughter, especially today when the value of looks has replaced civility: The beautifully wrapped package is empty.

  What does today’s adolescent girl do to set herself apart from the mother whom she loves? How to announce her exit from childhood and arrival on the brink of a new generation she and her friends will create? There are profound reasons for adolescent dress, music, dance, and vocabulary that traditionally shock and bewilder the outraged older generation. We are desperate to be seen as ourselves in adolescence, to feel inside that our “difference” has been publicly noted. It is a period of great narcissism. Coming out from behind mother’s shadow, we emerge, childhood behind us, feeling so unique inside that we go to extremes. “We, as a group, are different from you,” the group’s look declares to the elders. Should they, the “old” generation, refuse to acknowledge the passing of the torch, the wilder the look
and action of the new generation becomes: “God damn it, look at us!”

  The elders are meant to be aghast at our look; in its way, it underscores the incest taboo: Keep off the grass, stay away. Today, when grown-ups imitate their young people’s look, they are forgetting who they are; they don’t have to look and act old, but they should not cross the generational line. Stay young and healthy-looking as long as possible, have a surgical nip and tuck, but respect the distance between generations, which serves a purpose. An adolescent hasn’t the resources to demand that mother maintain this distance between them.

  It is mother’s role to honor privacy, to be the one who makes the “sacrifice” of looking and acting like the older, responsible generation. Adolescents are compulsive self-doubters whose comparison with other females is automatic. The last person a daughter needs to be judging herself opposite is her own mother, who looks better in her “teen fashions” than she. If mother wins the contest, grabbing the spotlight for herself, the daughter will go through life calling competition by every name other than what she honestly feels, conceding defeat and secretly hating her rivals for “winning.”

  If men once “wore” their beautiful women to bring attention to themselves, then surely this is what parents do today. So children grow up with the importance of appearance thrust in their faces. For more than a decade now, the older, parental generation has preempted their children’s celebration of adolescence by grabbing their styles, their music and mannerisms as quickly as they are invented. The latest adolescent “group look,” intended for the purpose of separating parents from progeny, is stolen overnight by the manufacturers of clothes, videos, music, magazines; these manufacturers are the parents.

  Mass-produced on the streets, in stores, on billboards, the purloined adolescent look of the moment is re-created by expensive high-fashion designers and sold to parents whose co-option now forces their kids to invent yet another look. Manufacturers of both teen and high fashion make billions from both markets as each generation searches desperately for a look, an identity, something that will give it visibility in the age of The Empty Package.

  Clothes were always a badge of identity, but today’s adolescents have been raised to see themselves as the center of attention. So greedy is the economy to get rich on young people’s enslavement to beauty that The Look changes constantly; so fleeting is the fulfillment found in a new pair of jeans, the latest footwear, jewelry, that happiness must be constantly recharged, repurchased, for there is nothing internal, no sense of self to fall back on. The unchecked rage that walks our streets, rattles the dishes in homes, anger that used to be governed by grown-ups who knew and acted their role, is now taken on by younger people whose identity is stolen by adults.

  Adolescent sexual fever fuels to a frenzy the desperation to be seen. Daughters who starve themselves engage in the darkest competition of all, for the winner dies. Girls/women eye one another enviously, comparing the diminishing diameter of ankle and waist, crowing, “Oh, you look wonderful, you’re so thin!” It is ostensibly about being more beautiful, this competition, but it has nothing to do with men. Binding women’s feet, cutting off our clitorises so that we have no sexual feeling, may have kept us in our place, but anorexia and bulimia grow out of the unspeakable issues between women.

  The emergence of adolescent supermodels, who are aped and adored by adults, puts the ordinary adolescent in an untenable position. The model, the cultural idol of the age, is the adolescent. Why grow up?

  Several fashion seasons ago a glowing review of the designer Donna Karan’s DKNY collection for fall appeared in the New York Times, where the critic wrote, “the designer insisted that fashion today is multicultural, that mothers can wear the same clothes as their daughters and that fashion is as important on the job as it is in the gym, at clubs and at parties.”

  Three days later, on the opposite coast, the lead singer of Nirvana, the grunge rock group that had sprung to prominence four years before, killed himself. Kurt Cobain came from a working-class background, a family broken by an angry divorce, and his songs, which attracted an entire generation, were of a primal rage, death and alienation, filled with psychic damage. It is bitterly ironic that his obituaries noted that he is given credit for having invented The Grunge Look, a recent fashion craze, which copied the singer’s torn, faded, totally “unrespectable” look.

  I remember the summers at Sullivan’s Island when my group was growing up. The place where we used to meet was called The Pavillion, our dance was the Shag, and my own invented uniform a pair of regulation white navy trousers, bought at the navy surplus store and taken in so tightly that I could all but hear my mother’s gasp when she and her friends drove by. “Nancy, those tight pants, the way you were dancing, that loud music!” she would sigh the next morning at the breakfast table, which I would summarily leave, taking with me a new feeling of satisfaction because I had at last gotten my mother’s attention. When she rolled her eyes like that, heavenward, other grown-ups around the table would smile and so would she, and so would I.

  Fortified with a box of chocolate Mallomars and a Coke, I would spend the entire day on the beach, religiously tanning my too long body into a deep golden hue, which the mirror had shown me to be transforming. The magic of that lovely Pocahontas shade that I mastered on beaches around the world made me one of the great sun worshipers. Restless by nature, I could spend whole days standing knee-deep in oceans, lakes, seas, at peace, totally content in the knowledge that I had found my special beauty secret, a way of getting noticed. Feeling lovely when deeply tanned, I walked with terrific posture, up and down the world’s beaches, basking in the heads that turned to see me pass. In one admonition my mother was right: I did irreparable harm to my skin. Nonetheless, these were some of my favorite years, in which I learned the power of conquest.

  During those adolescent summers, my mother’s disapproval of my clothes, my music, my dancing, my hours in the arms of Citadel cadets in the big rope hammock, all was reassurance of my becoming me and her remaining part of the past, loved but distanced. In this distance I had engineered and she honored, I recognized a growing sense of responsibility for myself when I was more and more out of her sight: If I wasn’t going to look like her or behave like her, I had to take care of myself.

  How can I emphasize that in the adolescent’s creative effort to set ourselves apart from our parents is born the opportunity to establish a set of self-protective rules? “It is an odd fact that what we know now of the mental and emotional life of infants surpasses what we comprehend about adolescents,” says Louise Kaplan, “these older children of ours who could—given the opportunity—speak so eloquently about their sexual and moral dilemmas.”

  There is no room for healthy competition between a mother and daughter who are “best friends.” Such a goal leaves the girl in the position of having to yield to the older woman; she never takes responsibility for herself, never challenges another woman—or perhaps challenges women at every step. When there is no father in the house, a man who might more readily recognize competition, there is virtually no one else to help the adolescent girl beyond symbiotic attachment and into her own life.

  When we argue, when we disagree, when there is a contest with safe rules, competitive feelings don’t destroy love; it is when competition exists and is denied that we are paralyzed. Let it be a mantra: It is possible to love and compete. I would take it further; there is a surge of camaraderie when the competitive struggle is honestly played out, with a winner and a loser, followed by the embrace, the handshake that says, We played our best, by the rules, and we are better friends than ever.

  The Good Mother finds her “best friend” outside the mother/daughter dyad, which is inappropriate for confidantes. A best friend should be a peer, and mother’s voice, in reaction to whatever secrets are told to her, sexual and otherwise, carries a judgmental authority rooted in her role as the Giantess of the Nursery. Even if she says nothing in reaction to her daughter’s confidences, t
he younger woman knows exactly how mother feels, has always known. As for the beauty contest, the daughter can’t afford to outdistance mother, for in winning she loses the only person she has been raised to believe really loves her.

  The Group—The No-Compete Clause

  Where were the boys of my adolescence prior to that fateful day when they stood on the horizon, suddenly imbued with all the power and glamour of the sun, moon, and stars? I suppose they’d been around, shooting baskets, just like me. But I hardly remember them prior to adolescence. We girls had been inseparable, sleeping together in one another’s beds for years, our friendships completing each other, our reflections in the others’ eyes making life whole. Now our mutual appraisals demanded that we judge one another through the eyes of the opposite sex. Suddenly boys were the judges and we, unquestioning, lived by their scorecards; how they rated us made us see one another in a different light.

  Certainly we girls had taken into account the value of a pretty face during our latency years; but comparison and competition were easily folded into the more powerful emotion of togetherness. Now, the male selection of certain girls from our group, the reasoning behind the most desirable boy’s choice of a particular girl, set up an undeniable new pecking order.