The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  “The biggest problem girl athletes have in the beginning is going all out against their own teammates during practice and then remaining friendly with them off the court,” says Geno Auriemma, who coaches the Connecticut team. “One of the first talks I have with them is, ‘Listen, there’s not going to be any of that girly stuff. No She said that you said that they said, that is so associated with girls.’ And they know exactly what I’m talking about. Let’s say two guys on a high school team are vying for the same position. During practice they absolutely kill each other; the intensity level is sky-high. Practice ends. The two guys get together and go out, maybe grab something to eat. And they come back tomorrow and do it all over again. And that’s called competition.

  “Girls have a hard time doing this. They carry the competition from the court off the court. ‘I’m not going to talk to her.’ Or, ‘She’s trying to beat me out and that means she’s my enemy.’ It’s difficult to teach girls that someone should try their hardest in a competitive situation. The game is about playing your best, not about ‘Who’s my friend, who’s my enemy.’ Playing your hardest doesn’t ruin the friendship.

  “I’ve got a girl on my team, Jennifer Rizzotti, who is without question the most competitive person I have every coached, male or female. We need women like that. ‘I want it now and I’ll work for it until I deserve it,’ she says. She is confident, fair, competitive, and a great team player. She’s probably the best point guard in the country this year. And she’s five foot five.

  “I think women will work longer and harder than men. But they have to learn to work as a team instead of always leaving someone out. They have to believe they can compete their hardest and then go out and have a drink afterward. The same at work when they get older. People say, ‘Women can’t handle competition, they’re too emotional.’ Baloney. Women are stronger than people give them credit for.

  “Young women who handle responsibility well are the most competitive. ‘Gee, you have six players on the dean’s list,’ people say. Of course we do. That’s why we’re the national champions. If you can be great in competitive sports, that means you have discipline and commitment. Women can handle anything. Anything. They need permission to be competitive, that they can beat the other girl and still be friends.”

  To whom, then, do young women listen, to the clarion call of healthy competition or to the old party line as laid down by the Matriarchal Feminists? Steinem has said that competition is detrimental to feminism and alongside her, Carol Gilligan asserts that women’s superiority resides in our innate reluctance to indulge in competition.

  In fact, it is the lack of safe rules of competition that makes the tyranny of beauty so deadly. Instead of acknowledging beauty’s power and the inevitable competition it arouses, we revert to a sameness, which seemingly protects the beauty from resentment and supports the Have-Nots. Rather than deal with competition, the group dress and group look announce, “See, I’m not angry, I look just like you, I feel just like you, talk just like you, walk just like you. I don’t want to be unique. I want to be a replica of you and you and you.” That original person, fired by the sexual growth unique to these years, is never created in this Second Birth of adolescence.

  There was no one day on which we discussed The Rules that dictated how we should live our adolescent lives. I only know there were things I wanted to do that I did not. It was as though The Fairy of Adolescence had visited each of us in the night as we slept and whispered The Rules. One day we got up and dressed for school and we were less adventurous, more watchful of one another, though a spectator might have called it more intimate/symbiotic. Fear of being left out, more than anything, glued us together.

  So dependent on one another were we girls who had grown up together, we now approached adolescence, boys, sex, our arms linked, a kind of aquatic gene pool. The Esther Williams school of ballet. We never broke the magic chain that was our support—and our guarantee too—that no one girl swim off with more than her share of the forbidden fruit. We got our first menstrual periods on days in different months, but we were emotionally on top of one another in each girl’s experience of everything.

  So few of us fit the stereotypical look of youth demanded in that time and place where we grew up. Years later we look at the old photos and laugh at everybody’s penny loafers, the cashmere sweaters with pearls or the miniskirts and poor-boy sweaters, the sameness of hair, long, short, ironed, frizzed, beehived, whatever was essential to belonging. As powerful as the need may be to be recognized and loved by boys, the restraining tug of The Group keeps us in check. No one girl getting any more of the pie than any other is what makes the Nice Girl Rules bearable. We may not be ready for sexual intercourse, but we crave more life than the wagging fingers of the girls allow. We miss the loud voices we had in latency, the intellectual stretch at school, the pride in athletic achievement. Everyone loses when competition over adolescent beauty is not dealt with. The irony, of course, is that the competition goes on regardless, denied, disavowed, and called by other names.

  No one had actually said precisely what you could and couldn’t do with a boy. Maybe this was what made The Rules so portentous: They left each of us unsure as to exactly what the other girls were doing in the dark, meaning only that we had gone too far in a moment of passion and must therefore write our own ticket to hell.

  I’ve always felt closer to men in my sexual drive than to women. It is not a boast, but a suspicion, a fear, that I am not “normal.” Why should I even care? There is no Nice Girl Club today from which I can be tossed. But you see, there is. They never really go away, The Girls. Every now and then something happens to jolt me into an awareness of women’s ability to condemn me to hell, their lifelong hold on me.

  One summer in the mid-sixties, I was at Fire Island, lying naked in a bed with my lover, Stan. It wasn’t our bed, but Stan loved to fuck in forbidden places, and the party in the adjoining room roared in our ears, the cloud of grass hanging in the rafters. Remember, these were the years of No Rules, the only rule being to break any you ran into. Not just Stan and I but everyone on the other side of that door was deeply into rule breaking. Fucking on the fringe of the crowd was bringing Stan close to orgasm when suddenly a woman’s voice rose above the rumble of the party, a definitely critical voice meant to reach into my erotic fantasy and yank me back to reality with the terrible indictment of a judge’s gavel. “Guilty!” it said, though in fact her words were, “Nancy is in the bedroom fucking Stan.”

  True. But it was the tone of female censure; or did my overly harsh conscience twist a matter-of-fact comment into a term of banishment in the never-ending Nice Girl/Bad Girl identity problem? The Nice Girl Rules will go with me to the grave. I take to heart their public censure in the media whenever I write about sex. Though I anticipate their prissy criticism, indeed use it as creative fire in writing my books, feeling my words punching them in the nose for spreading sexual guilt among women, nonetheless, they reach me. I like to think that this is changing; the new generation of young comediennes, for instance, The Bad Girls on The Comedy Channel, they spit in the eye of girlish censure with every bawdy joke they tell, heralding better times.

  Looking for My Father’s Eyes

  My father. The words are so foreign on my lips, my fingertips, laying them down on paper. A kind of treason, breaking the unspoken vow of silence. Even now it seems dangerous, writing about him, meaning the lack of him. As a good girl, it was my duty never to ask, “What happened to him? Where did he go? What did he look like?” So loaded was the subject, my mother never said his name, ever. His name was Walter. There, I’ve written it.

  It is time to speak of him, especially in this chapter, which cries out for fathers; he has taken up too many frames in my dream sleep of late. I know that his absence, especially in my adolescence, was a profound omission, as it must be for every fatherless girl. Until that abysmal night at the Yacht Club, when no one chose me, I’d made do without a man in my life, except for my grandf
ather. I had, in fact, tried to take my father’s place within the family by being responsible, uncomplaining, brave opposite my wilting, anxious mother and sister, or so I chose to see them. Now, overnight, I wanted to be a star member of that sex from which I’d walked away, that private club of womanly women to which my mother and sister belonged and which I’d never been asked to join.

  Having no father in the house to bless my femaleness, I set out with some desperation to find male approval elsewhere. I suppose this is what psychiatrist Leonard Michaels meant that day years ago when I interviewed him at Payne Whitney: “A child who grows up in a house without a father never stops being hungry for a man.”

  By nature, I am a father’s girl, a lover of men and “mannish” in my determination always to prove myself. Though my love of men stemmed in part from the desire to find in their eyes the adoration I’d missed with mother, the twin to that need was to become my man’s soul mate, thereby fulfilling his adolescent dream of a girl who would meet him halfway in everything. I have always known that if I could just get a man to lower his defenses and let me in, he would recognize me as the woman who accepted him utterly. I would be the mirror reflecting back to him the self he feared no woman would love; knowing there was nothing he showed me that I would not accept, he would surrender. He would never leave me. Where would he find me/himself again?

  One hot day in my adolescence I did see his picture at the bottom of my mother’s lingerie drawer. I remember the stillness of the house, the sunlight on the dark wood of the mahogany bureau that I would one day inherit. It wasn’t the first time I had explored my mother’s closet and bureau drawers, for I was always searching, rummaging when she was out of the house. Consciously, I didn’t admit that it was for clues of my father that I searched but suddenly, under the pretty lace slips, there he was, looking up at me, a handsome man with dark hair in a suit and tie. My secret father, the person of whom no one spoke, the missing link in our family and in my life; the eyes I had always missed seeing me, taking me in, approving of me, loving me.

  “Your father was a great favorite with the ladies,” one of my mother’s sisters would tell me years later. “He was what we call a ‘womanizer.’” Of course I have always assumed that I would have been his chosen one, as my sister was my mother’s.

  Would his presence in my life have lessened the competition I felt involved in, not just opposite my mother and sister but now in adolescence with my childhood friends? If he had been there to hold me and love me, perhaps the old nursery sibling defeats would not have risen so starkly from the grave, reducing me to tears when my role as leader within my group was surrendered.

  Of my gender identity I was never in doubt; what I died for was to see my desirability confirmed by the opposite sex. The tragedy was that I did not look as female as I felt. By the time some looks arrived in my late teens, the die had been cast; the mirror has always shown me the failed-in-beauty girl of my thirteenth year; sometimes I smother her in store-bought glamour, but without the paint, she reemerges. I’ve never doubted that my exhibitionistic need for approval in men’s eyes is a reaction against having lost the beauty contest to my mother and sister.

  One day during my therapy sessions with Dan Stern, that year after my house burned down and I’d separated from my ex-husband, I selected from the back of the closet a dress I hadn’t worn in years, a bright yellow, full-skirted ingenue number with an off-the-shoulder neckline that wasn’t my style at all, nor an appropriate garment to choose to wear to a session with one’s analyst.

  “Are you wearing that pretty yellow dress for me?” were his opening words, as gentle as a father’s to a child and with the dearest smile on his face.

  He had seen through me, knew my intentions better than I. Yes, of course I was out to seduce my analyst, had been at it from the moment we’d met; my favorite position during our sessions was to lie on the floor on my back, and while we talked I would run my stockinged foot up and down his leg. In my defense, I will say that I have a bad back and often lie on floors, but I am dodging the obvious; I was crazy about my father/my analyst, and the yellow dress incident caught me up short, for I was playing the seductress not as the adult vamp but as an adolescent girl.

  “Haven’t you read Proust?” I asked haughtily in a hasty attempt to salvage my sophisticated composure. “Half of À la recherche du temps perdu is about what Albertine was wearing. Clothes advanced the plot.”

  “And what plot are you trying to advance, Nancy?” he asked.

  “Our affair, of course. Which you refuse to recognize. Instead you leave me to go off on your stupid boat.” It was almost August, national vacation month for analysts. And then we laughed, though mine was half-hearted. No one knew better than Stern the influence of my absent father.

  “I’ll be back,” he said to his big baby in the yellow dress.

  I was not convinced.

  It is remarkable how readily we accept a father’s absence from his adolescent daughter’s life when it is so obvious in what ways he might help her, he being male and therefore knowledgeable about boys, on whom she is now so fixated. Imagine a father humanizing the male sex for his girl and at the same time explaining, far better than mother, the powerful effect of her sexual beauty on boys. If father were close to his daughter, he would tell her of the boy’s insecurities, his dreams, his fallback on the macho role because he is unable to handle his emotions in opposition to the girl who, to him, seems to have all the power in the world.

  The whole world is raised by women who know nothing about men. Ours would be a different world if it were customary and expected that men, like women, remain as close to their adolescent children as they had been in the child’s infancy. Leaving adolescent girls solely in the hands of women guarantees that they will grow up with no more understanding of the opposite sex than their mothers had.

  In adolescence, father’s eyes are new territory for a daughter to conquer; she would light them up as this dear person she has known all her life recognizes what has happened to her. Standing before him, hanging on his arm, she waits for his verdict: “See me,” she would say. “Let me know that I am doing this right, succeeding as a pretty girl. You’re the only person whose opinion I can trust.”

  “Leave your father alone, you’re a big girl now,” mother says. If mother interferes, if father retreats at this crucial stage of the father/daughter relationship, the girl learns that closeness to men loses her the beloved ties to other women. And father will relearn what he has always known, that his wife jealously guards her ownership of the children, and of him.

  If he does withdraw from the competition between the women in the house, he fails his daughter. So many women remember being “dropped” by fathers who had been close companions until adolescence. “I was my daddy’s girl,” the story goes, “his favorite person, who went with him on fishing trips and sometimes traveled with him on selling trips. But when I reached adolescence, he dropped me.”

  Where to put the confusion and anger, the sense of betrayal? How not to think that what has happened to her body has something to do with it, and that it’s bad if it loses her the most important person in her life? And how easy to shift her father’s infidelity on to all the subsequent males in her life: “That’s how men are! They leave you.”

  That so many of us, for a variety of reasons, entered adolescence without father’s loving approval of our sexual awakening is a loss that never stops kicking back. The adolescent girl doesn’t actually mean to steal father away from mother so much as to test her skill at flirtation on the only man she can trust. If he recognizes what she needs and knows his lines, he will say with genuine love in his eyes, “You have grown into such a beautiful young woman.” Recognizing that he means it, she will believe him. The gift will have been exchanged. If I’d had such a father, my life would have been different. Of one thing I am sure, I have inappropriately looked for him in all men, never totally believing their words either of love or their assurances of my beauty. />
  I can remember no girl from my adolescence who had a strong relationship with her father. Not one. I may have been the only fatherless girl in our group, but at this stage all the girls might as well have been. There was no paternal advice or knowledge that any one girl passed on to the rest of us, and when I visited friends’ houses, fathers were like ghosts, shadowy figures reading newspapers in wing chairs.

  In a study done on teenage girls who had grown up either with or without fathers, one group came from divorced parents and hadn’t seen their fathers since the divorce, the second had widowed mothers, and the third group had both mother and father at home. There were no distinguishable behavioral problems among the groups, but there were definite differences in how they reacted to men.

  As part of the study, each girl was shown into an office where she was interviewed by a man. There were three chairs in the office for the girls to choose from. The daughters of divorce usually chose the chair closest to the man and sat in an open-legged, sprawling position; they were flirtatious, talkative, and leaned toward the man, looking into his eyes. The girls whose fathers had died chose the chair farthest from the man and sat stiffly, their legs together, neither smiling nor making eye-contact; they were shy and timid. Girls from two-parent homes acted in a manner between the extremes and were much more at ease with the man. When these same girls were interviewed by a woman, these differences didn’t show up.