The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Requiring no explanation, we went along with boys’ preferences for breasts, blond curls, and pretty legs. The supremacy of adolescent beauty had awakened our memory of beauty’s power from the earliest days of our lives within the family. The latency years had been a significant respite from the tyranny of looks, but now it was back and fueled by nature’s most powerful chemical: sexual desire.

  Male and female, we move to it, moth to the flame. Beauty is the currency of the land. It buys everything. It matters not that the beauty is our own sex; she has the elixir and we want to be around her. We absolutely understand why the best boy chooses the prettiest girl. We would do the same. Indeed, my own closest friends through both the latency years and then through adolescence were the prettiest girls; I must have felt that just to be near them was to be warmed. Standing in their radiance, I probably hoped that some of their afterglow would reflect on to me. Maybe one of the beauty’s rejected suitors would settle for me.

  “Starting in the third grade, perceptions of appearance for girls goes down the tubes, whereas boys continue to think they look fine,” says psychologist Susan Harter. “More than intelligence, athletic competence, and other areas of self-content, how people think they look is highly related to their self-esteem. It is true for groups as varied as the male and the female, the handicapped and the gifted. Among all these groups, the evaluation of one’s looks takes precedence over every other domain as the number-one predictor of self-esteem, causing us to question whether self-esteem is only skin deep. Why should one’s outer physical self be so tied to one’s inner, psychological self?”

  We are not alone in giving our looks influence over our whole selves; as in kindergarten and the latency years, friends and teachers too imbue the lovelier ones with special talents: A 1987 study found that “the classroom teachers of the early adolescents rated physically attractive students as more scholastically, socially, and athletically competent… than physically unattractive students.”

  Without any discussion, we girls reshuffled the deck according to the seismic workings of beauty in our lives; the leaders of the latency years automatically took a backseat to the adolescent beauties, fully aware of the appropriateness of natural selection. The tragedy was that, opposite beauty, our mental, physical, and social skills looked to us to be so paltry, sometimes even a deficit, in the erotic, romantic dance in which we now yearned to move.

  The irony for adolescent girls is that while we may desire our image in the boys’ eyes, the judges who still rule life are The Other Girls, whose eyes are no less harsh, no more tolerant than mother’s. A boy’s eye can be caught, but there is a higher power without whose approval we cannot live. When The Other Girls’ eyes judge us as having gone too far with a boy, shown too much in our exhibitionism, we are inconsolable. Not even the beloved boy can bring us back to life; only when we are forgiven, restored to The Family, do we feel whole again. Living on Girls’ Rules while attaining the love of men is a balancing act that has nothing to do with the adventurous, creative girl of the latency years just previous, who is now all but useless. Yes, friendships with girls were important then, vital, but boys have introduced an intensity of sexual competition between us for which we are totally unprepared.

  Thrown into sexual rivalry with the girls who have been our life for years, we become passive zombies, waiting, waiting to be chosen, because to take the initiative with boys puts forbidden competition into play. At their heart these friendships have a powerful No-Compete Clause, a red light that switches on whenever we feel the urge to outdistance another girl. It is the same No-Compete understanding we had with mother, to whom we always tearfully capitulated. It was never a true competition, for winning meant losing her.

  I’d grown up with the boys of my early adolescence; I’d wager they would have been pleased if I’d telephoned them, made the first move. But taking the initiative was totally taboo then, unless, of course, we did it as a group. I would sit by the telephone, staring at it, waiting, praying for it to ring. Forbidden to reach for the boy’s hand at the movies, I placed it in its most pleading position on the chair arm between us, or in my lap, and prayed. Teen magazines today say that the majority of both girls and boys think, “There’s nothing wrong with a girl asking a guy out.” That is a plus, but the same polls agree that, “Girls who go out with more than one guy at a time get reputations as sluts.” It’s the same old Zero-Sum game: If you get more, that means there is less for me.

  Just yesterday our best friend was our world; today, The Group takes her place, spreading its wings over all of us like a mother hen. In fact, The Group is a big mother, a source of love and identity as well as the sometimes overly harsh tribunal. After school our group ritual was to drive around, up and down those lovely old streets until we found the boys, generally on one or another playing field. We would never do this alone, but Group courage was huge.

  A driver’s license could be had at age fourteen, and the designated driver would pick up each member of The Group until seven or eight of us were crammed into the car. Oh, the anxiety of waiting by the window for my friend’s car, fearing I would be forgotten, though it never happened. It was a fear I’d conquered in prior years, when pitching a game of softball I would encourage my more timorous friends to be brave. Now I was back in the waiting position, and while no one ever mentioned my lack of beauty, I’m sure it was the cause of my rearoused fear of abandonment.

  Had I been able to take my comfort with competition with me into adolescence, I surely would have found something in my abundant character with which to vie with the beauties. But given the supremacy of beauty in the South, I fell back into my noncompetitive role within my family, where I had always been invisible. There, I’d been able to persuade myself that I didn’t need “them,” my mother and my sister, but I needed my group with all my heart.

  “Adolescence is another stage of trying to become an independent, psychological self,” says clinical psychologist Jeanne Murrone. “You get it at eight months, at age two, again at four and five, and in adolescence. The way adolescents still negotiate this stage of individuation is not to be totally alone, but to have a substitute family, the peer group. For the first time in life, your peers are probably the most important people, rather than your family.”

  I’ve confused love and sex most of my life, finding in men’s arms far more than they bargained for. Once kissed, I was enslaved to a passion that had nothing to do with the boy/man. He was merely a figurehead, a mythological solution to my errant heart’s lifelong search. Twice kissed, and I felt equal in beauty to the girls whose looks moments before had made me feel inferior. Now I too had arms to hold me; I was a genuine member of The Group, where beauty and its prize, the prince, were prerequisites for membership.

  I loved my adolescent years, dancing to beach music, the hours in the drive-in movies. But the intensity of romantic yearning dumbed down my brain; I lost the rhythm of the accelerating process of mental growth. Considering how much energy was focused on group beauty/sex standards and the distance I felt I had to run to keep up with those ideals, I had no fear so rigorous as the judgment of the mirror. What was demanded was that I abandon Rousseau’s opportunity to move beyond “love of oneself” to a “love of the species” and be reborn into a mirror reflection of a popular adolescent Girl Girl.

  Once boys had moved into our tight ranks and plucked us girls from one another’s arms to take us off individually into the night, our loyalties were strained. We longed to be chosen and went happily, but boys’ offers of love and praise would never be invested with as much influence as the voices of the other girls.

  We felt more comfortable with girls because we all shared a lack of belief in boys’ love. Drowning, we clung to one another, despairing that boys could not make us believe they loved us and that they could walk away. Of course this kind of love didn’t restrain us from also, on a summer day of intoxicating girlishness, giving one of our dearest friends “the treatment.” We loved her/we wanted
to punish her; love and rage, the earliest and most important model of intimacy.

  Standing out from The Group, being different, being “more,” can mean rejection and isolation, says sports psychologist Cheryl McLaughlin. “To be accepted, particularly during the late junior high and high school years, girls have to be like each other, dress the same, have their own slang, everything. Choosing to stand out by showing your talents often has serious consequences. On high school tennis teams, talented players often choose to hide their skills, lose matches to their friends and then play the number three spot because they don’t want to risk losing their friendships. Girls and women at all levels tend to back away from competing for such reasons as, ‘How can I feel OK winning when it means the other person is going to lose?’”

  When we do compete, it is with stealth, denial, and in the dark. We love our best friend but sometimes we just can’t help ourselves, the iron hoops that keep girls/women together are tested: “I lost my virginity last year,” a young woman writes to Seventeen magazine, “and since then my best friend has been trying to compete with me. If I sleep with one guy, she sleeps with two. It seems like every time we compete, she sleeps with that extra guy to win, and she always rubs it in my face. I don’t know what to do. Am I stupid for using all these guys in this ignorant competition?”

  Competitiveness is a natural feeling; it is we who are ignorant because we have not been prepared to handle it with safe rules. There is no area in which rivalry is more inevitable than where beauty abounds, and that time in life is adolescence.

  Similarly, a young man tells me of an incident in his school a few years ago when his best friend’s girl got pregnant. She was one of the prettiest girls and belonged to a particular group who were the school’s cheerleaders, as well as the brightest in their class. They were a tight clique, dubbed The Vestal Virgins. When it was discovered that one of their own had broken the cardinal rule, they banished her. The boy chose to marry his girl but not before he had walked into the cafeteria and, in front of the entire school, announced to The Vestal Virgins, “How dare you turn on my girlfriend! Let me tell you who else in your holier-than-thou midst has had sex with me: You and you!” He pointed to two girls. The group blew apart, never to be mended.

  One of the great female sexual fantasies, beginning in adolescence, is to seduce a man. Grown women dream of what it would be like to return to adolescence and, breaking The Rules, to approach the adored boy and show him all the forbidden forms of seduction. Whatever the rules when you were growing up, the most rigid were probably those that regulated how a girl could display her body.

  We go through life buying beauty, dieting for beauty, mutilating our bodies to acquire a power look that we never believe in. Even the natural beauty doesn’t permit herself to show too much pleasure in her advantage. It’s luck, just good genes she got from her parents, Cybill Shepherd would have us believe, tossing her gorgeous blond hair in a TV commercial for L’Oreal. “Yeah, right,” we say enviously, feeling a wee bit of pleasure when we read that her marriage has fallen apart. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” pleads another film beauty from the pages of a women’s magazine, which is more to the point.

  Here is a lovely quote from William Faulkner’s The Hamlet that captures The Beauty just as I remember her:

  Eula Varner was not quite thirteen…. Her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof. She seemed to be not a living integer of her contemporary scene, but rather to exist in a teeming vacuum in which her days followed one another as though behind sound-proof glass, where she seemed to listen in sullen bemusement, with a weary wisdom heired of all mammalian maturity, to the enlarging of her own organs….

  Through that spring and through that long succeeding summer of her fourteenth year, the youths of fifteen and sixteen and seventeen who had been in school with her and others who had not, swarmed like wasps about the ripe peach which her full damp mouth resembled. There were about a dozen of them. They formed a group, close, homogeneous, and loud, of which she was the serene and usually steadily and constantly eating axis, center. There were three or four girls in the group, lesser girls, though if she were deliberately using them for foils, nobody knew it for certain. They were smaller girls, even though mostly older. It was as though that abundance which had invested her cradle, not content with merely overshadowing them with the shape of features and texture of hair and skin, must also dwarf and extinguish them ultimately with sheer bulk and mass.

  To enter adolescence without looks can be a reversal of such proportions that many women never recover from their sense of inadequacy. Looks may arrive ten years later, but the reflection is never believed. Beauty’s tyranny holds us back because it has at its heart the denial of competition.

  Only in whispers, in secret with another woman who shares our resentment, can we vent our spleen. When an adolescent girl sees two other girls’ heads together, their eyes narrowed, the electricity between them sizzling, she recognizes meanness escaping. In their way, these occasional ventings of envy help The Group to hold. The beloved boy may be the goal, but if he breaks our heart, we know that The Girls will circle round, console us.

  We struggle in adolescence to be loved by the opposite sex and simultaneously not to lose our ties and identification with The Group. Can we have both? Why does it mean that for females it must be either/or? All too soon the expectant faces of young girls begin to record the anxiety of rejection by boys but also the suppressed rivalry with the people who are the bedrock of our world. The look of adolescence becomes tentative as we try to control the emotions that used to run across our faces naturally. Emotions such as anger and fear must be facially censored. A muscular pattern of expressions begins to be etched into our faces; the lines and wrinkles that we will later hate seeing in the mirror over the basin are being laid in. In time our faces become the road maps of our lives, not unlike the deep creases of a suit in which we’ve sat for a long time, creases that won’t smooth when we stand up.

  “I think that character does show through,” says Lynton Whitaker, head of plastic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, “because the mimetic muscles of the face are unlike any other muscles in the body: they attach directly from the bone into the skin. Therefore they show what you’re feeling in the way that you individually show it. It has to be recurrent over a period of time long enough to create the etching, like an etching in glass. It has to be done several million times, probably, before the lines become imprinted permanently. Maybe 20 to 30 percent of the people who come to me for cosmetic surgery ask me specifically to remove something that would be characterized as an emotion: sadness, anger, anxiety, fatigue. There’s no doubt that these wrinkles start in some people in the teenage years.” Imagine the muscular control demanded so that at all times the look of hate and anger doesn’t come through our pretty little faces!

  As for sexual self-acceptance—not intercourse, but comfort with our new sexual self—a lifelong pattern also forms. If life under mother’s roof did not earlier promise that she was on our side, that competition could be aired but that love always remained—“My daughter, right or wrong!”—then arguments and rivalry with both girls and boys whom we love will always feel like a threat to love; happiness is only possible in glued-at-the-hip togetherness. The near-death feeling in the tight, best friendships of our latency years, when two little girls abandoned a third girl for no reason, this anguish is not far from what The Group feels now when adorable, irresistible boys select out one or two girls.

  A boy wants the girl he didn’t even know he’d been dreaming of until last night, and there she is, she of the demure smile, white skin, lovely breasts, she who arouses in him a feeling that says, Dance with me. He doesn’t mean to break up the Girl Group or put down the also-rans; he has had to deal with choosing and losing for sever
al years. In luring her away from her friends, he is unaware of the risk, as well as the power, that she accrues.

  The tragedy for The Beautiful One is that more than likely she was just another girl until adolescence, when the swan emerged. While a part of her acknowledges success in the eyes of boys, she is wary of placing too much weight on her triumph. The look in the eyes of the other girls who love but also envy her requires that she lose in some way so as to balance her win. To moderate her new powers, she doesn’t try to excel in other activities, already having so much. The love of boys is wonderful, but the support and love of The Girls/Mother is the adolescent’s lifeline.

  Though we may have longed to be the homecoming queen or king, the inevitability of their union moves us deeply; we understand totally why they belong together. Power drawn to power. Together they reign over us, their role uncontested, until, of course, there is a chink in their perfect armor, revealing their vulnerability, inviting our envy. We insert the blade and release some of resentment’s mean steam, thus learning the reverse side of beauty’s power, that it encourages cruelty in the have-nots.

  Gossip is the plot device in popular adolescent films, whispers of scandal that embroider something overheard into exaggerated rumor; around the school the rumor flies, “Kill them! Knock them off! Feel a little better in their pain!” By the movie’s end, we rejoice in their reunion, their vindication, their beauty. Ambivalence.

  So intensely has smothered rivalry over beauty bubbled in women’s traditional world that the no-compete rule had to extend to everything in life. These anticompetition laws only began to melt when beauty was no longer our only source of power. Nowhere is this more apparent than in girls’/women’s sports. What a beautiful sight it was to see the Connecticut Women’s Basketball Team top their undefeated season by winning the NCAA National Championship. To watch these young women in competitive play was breathtaking. The healthy hiss of competition in sports, the flat-out effort of the players restrained only by good rules, is music to the ears and eyes. And to see young women playing as hard and gracefully as any boys’ team, to watch them rejoice in victory and shake hands with their competitors, who know they may win tomorrow, this, for me, was feminism at its best. My kind of feminism. It is wonderful experience for the workplace up ahead, and for motherhood too, should these young women choose it.