The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  When the researchers studied the girls in relationships with other males, they found that girls from divorced families spent much of their time in places where young men hung out and tended to use their bodies to get attention; they dated more often and had sex more often and at an earlier age than girls in the other two groups. Girls whose fathers had died dated later, tended to avoid males, and seemed sexually inhibited. In the study, psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington writes, “For both groups of father-absent girls the lack of opportunity for constructive interaction with a loving, attentive father has resulted in apprehension and inadequate skills in relating to males.”

  The findings indicated that if a father isn’t part of the family, his absence has a strong influence on the daughter’s attitude toward men, which continues long past her adolescent years, “The women from intact families made the most realistic and successful choices of husbands and reported more sexual satisfaction (including number of orgasms) in their marriages than did women who grew up without fathers.”

  Does the above study come as a surprise? The fact that it makes sense is the saddest reaction of all, for it implies that we have always known the influence of father deprivation on young girls but chose to live with it as part of the silent trade-off of power within Patriarchy. To keep men focused on the wheel of industry, father’s role of good provider was idealized just as mother’s monopoly on home and children was elevated to Madonna status. Today, either sex can be a good provider, and we have a societal imbalance.

  If we continue to portray the role of the caretaker as powerless, fathers will not push to demand a share, and mothers will continue to raise the human race while also competing with men in the workplace. What is wrong with this scenario? Women prefer to take on more work than we can handle rather than demand that fathers be part of their children’s lives. Men are going to have to press for their paternal rights as doggedly as women demand equal power in all areas still dominated by men.

  All the weighty judgment of the first years of life should not rest in women’s eyes alone. When adolescence arrived, father should recognize his daughter having crossed the threshold into young womanhood; instead of turning away, he should be there to urge her continuing to practice intellect, speech, and all the other preadolescent skills she’d mastered. He should talk to her about sex, explain boys as real people, with their own inadequacies and strengths.

  Why should a girl have to wait for an opinion on her success at beauty from another adolescent, a boy ill-prepared to grasp what is being asked of him, when she has the perfect judge at home? If he neglects this ceremonial appraisal of her rite of passage, the importance of peer approval becomes too weighty. When the adolescent boy does offer the praise she’s been longing to hear, she will read so much into his adoration that she will offer herself to him in gratitude.

  Parental compliments may be shrugged off as part of the adolescent’s break with the past, but the words must be spoken, for they are indeed heard. “It’s very clear that for most adolescents parents continue to be the major influence,” says Jeanne Brooks—Gunne, president of the Society for the Research of Adolescence. “Even though peer influence gains in stature during these years, when you look at studies of the importance of academic achievement, importance of grades, post–high school goals, even things like smoking and drinking, parents still matter more than peers.”

  Father’s recognition of the growth that goes on even as the adolescent sleeps—Sleeping Beauty—will be the mantra pinned over her bed, the last thing she sees at night, the first in the morning, reminding every adolescent girl who cried herself to sleep that father’s trusted judgment is right. Eventually, when she awakens from the torpor of adolescence and is in need of a promise made long ago, his faith in her will be remembered, will have always been remembered.

  The daughter who lacks beauty will learn from father that not all men are looking for a beauty; he will make her believe that other qualities and attributes are important to men. It may be cool comfort, but she will take it in nonetheless, more than she would from mother, because he belongs to that world of boys/men to which she is so drawn. His advice to her not to abandon talents that have nothing to do with the mirror will have weight. She will believe him because she has learned to trust what she sees in his eyes.

  Until now, women have believed that only other women’s eyes could judge beauty; that monopoly derived from women’s total dependence on mother/women all our lives. As more fathers continue to help raise their daughters from birth, their eyes and verdicts on appearance will be as credible and sought after as women’s/mother’s. The answer to the old saw, “For whom do women dress?” will be “Men and women.”

  Asked what an adolescent girl needs most, Judith Seifer replies, “She needs to have a nonseducible adult male around with whom to try on social and vamping skills. She can’t do this with her girlfriends. And yet the very culture that is not giving this to a woman is also teaching men that all women are potential sex partners. Women and girls are so eroticized in our culture that the only way most husbands or fathers in a household can deal with their adolescent daughters is to deny their sexuality. When father withdraws, she doesn’t understand why this person she loves is pulling away from her. We punish young girls for growing up. If father doesn’t endorse the physical changes his daughter is experiencing, in a nonseductive way, she has a whole line of boys out there who are all too willing to endorse them.”

  Why do we assume that fathers are less capable of dealing with a daughter’s sexuality than mothers with sons? Why should a man be less able to restrain himself from crossing the incest line? I sometimes think our readiness to see men as unable to control their sexuality, in all areas, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We look at a man who is responsible for a beautiful young girl and automatically have ideas of his molesting her; what is wrong with us?

  The given of paternal incest has gone on for generations because it suited society. Erotic fantasies of people in our families happen, but a fantasy is not a predetermined act. If society didn’t want fathers to retreat from their daughters, didn’t choose to see men’s lust as uncontrollable, we would have educated men, raised them to understand fantasies as ideas and images that come to mind, just as thoughts of murder sometimes do; we don’t commit murder/we don’t commit incest.

  By keeping men at a distance from their children, out of the home, society focused men totally on their role as providers, neatly balanced by women’s monopoly on everything domestic. The assumption that “men are sexual beasts” further inflated men’s image as powerful and dampened women’s own original lust. You may have noticed that we don’t live this way anymore. How can we look so squarely at women’s new rights to equal opportunity and keep our vision of men so skewed? Leaving the care of children to “good” mothers, to the exclusion of men, was a bad setup in olden times, but it certainly doesn’t wash today.

  We choose to think that mothers are devoid of incestuous thoughts, that mother/son, mother/daughter incest doesn’t occur. Of course it does. As women’s economic power has grown, the full range of our sexuality has come more and more to light. If the only way to get fathers more deeply involved with their children is to expose the dark side of women’s sexuality—we being no less human than men—then I am for it. The biggest impediment to a daughter having a close relationship with her father is feminism’s refusal to put women’s sexuality on the agenda, to see the whole picture.

  Maternal incest has been swept under the carpet because society needed idealized caretakers. The behavioral world denied that women even had sexual fantasies until thirty years ago. If society balked at accepting the fact that women even thought about sex, clearly the idea of maternal incest, thought or deed, was out of the question. We’ve made paternal incest such a juicy news item, the very stuff of daytime talk shows, and we turn away in horror at the suggestion that mothers not only have the incestuous thought, but actually commit the deed.

  What constitute
s incest? By definition, it isn’t simply intercourse. The mother who kisses her baby boy’s penis after she’s bathed and toweled him isn’t going to see her act as incestuous. So ironclad are maternal rights that bystanders watching this act would neither comment on it nor do anything about it. In her loneliness, mother crawls into her son’s bed while her husband is away on business. She sleeps with her arm around the boy, nothing more, but it is “something” to the boy, who lies there with his erection and remembers it for the rest of his life. A mother’s sense of entitlement includes physical contact with children long after the age when it is appropriate.

  We hear little of maternal incest because boys/men don’t tell. Mother loved him; some part of him enjoyed her lying beside him. The sexual feelings are his fault; he feels terrible guilt at the erection he got as he lay in her arms; mother is good/he is bad.

  Grown to a man, the son feels it would be unmanly and ungrateful for him to discuss it, even think about it; in fact, most men do “forget” such incidents. Weren’t they committed by the person who gave birth to them, cared for them all their lives, and to whom they are joined by knots of steel? The hundreds of men who have written and spoken to me of mother incest do not do so in a judgmental voice. Most prefer to think of it as love, and yet what can be more sexually confusing to a son than a mother who sleeps with him by night and plays rule maker opposite him by day?

  The sexes are composed of shades of gray. The rage that women used to dutifully swallow and turn against themselves today flies in the air, seeking other targets. Men are getting more than their share as women shrink from venting their spleen on other women, who are scarier than men. Younger women are especially quick to accept the new Bitch/Killer as a recognizable heroine to put in films, books, television, and cartoon strips. This is progress. It is healthy to show women as equally guilty of badness as men.

  “We’ve been acculturated to see mothers as loving and caring, totally self-sacrificing,” says psychologist Jeanne Murrone. “But there are angry mothers, some of them abusive, who struggle with ‘I don’t like this kid. I had mixed feelings about having this kid. Nobody ever told me it would be like this. I’m not crazy about this at all.’ As a culture we don’t talk about things like that, it’s not permissible.”

  We know that more than one million of the United States’ nine million girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen get pregnant each year; we know that teenage girls who grow up without their fathers tend to have sex earlier. It seems obvious that without a man at home, an adolescent girl is going to idealize men, to imagine how much better the “problem areas” in her life would have been had there been a father who had seen her as she would have liked to be seen. Of course she is vulnerable when she sees herself “that way” in a boy’s eyes.

  Once upon a time, a boy would press a girl “to go all the way,” but if she resisted, he would usually stop. Thirty years ago there were more fathers at home providing at least a semblance of an example of manhood to their sons. But today’s adolescent girl, as eager as ever to be taken care of, finds herself in the arms of a boy who has formed his image of manhood from television. Until adolescence, the fatherless girl has survived in women’s world; now she needs a mirroring image of her successful transition from childhood to young womanhood. She reads that image of herself into the boy’s eyes just as she reads into the feelings he has aroused in her the idea that he loves her and will take care of her; she gives herself to him, without any form of contraception, which in her eyes makes him responsible.

  “Daughters really need their fathers during adolescence, when the man’s awareness and approval allow his daughter to accept herself physically, her whole body image,” says psychologist Henry Biller, who has been studying fatherhood for thirty years. “But what the daughter wants is so simple: confirmation that what has happened to her physically and emotionally is good and admirable, and that in his eyes she has succeeded. She has become a lovely young woman.”

  Unfortunately, we have no father/daughter “tradition,” as it were; there are no stories, no wisdom passed down through generations in a family so that fathers today know what their responsibilities are in terms of an adolescent daughter. The modern father is inventing himself. His wife reinvented herself in the male workplace, where her mother may not have worked; very well, fathers must take courage in hand and, when they see, for instance, that there is competition between mother and daughter, they must involve themselves. Sounds terrifying? Well, the days of father retreating from “women’s business” are over.

  Books for fathers are waiting to be written, and one of the most daunting chapters will be on how father should deal with competition between the women in the house so that it is acknowledged, lived through with neither mother nor daughter feeling that they have lost him or one another. Not even the master, Dr. Freud, handled it well in his own house. His most famous daughter, Anna, grew up feeling that she could never get her father’s attention, and she knew it had to do with her lack of beauty. It was Sophie, her older, beautiful sister, who caught Freud’s eye. Anna Freud never did have a sexual encounter in her life, leaving us to wonder if having lost the beauty contest in the family led her to choose her father’s profession, given that she lacked the essential “feminine” quality that had drawn him to her sister.

  Today’s adolescent girls will soon face competition with both sexes in the workplace. They need to learn the basics beginning with the fact that the competitive feeling is all right, that it can be aired, argued; that there are rules that protect, and when it is over, you shake hands, knowing that next week you may need today’s adversary as an ally. Behavioral studies are showing that girls who play sports have a better chance at succeeding in business because they learn teamwork, cooperation, and risk-taking, all of which translates into networking in the workplace. This is what father knows best. We have a great resource; who better than father to bring his daughter into the next century?

  When I was single in the sixties in New York I avoided the corporate jobs offered me; I preferred jobs that required intense work but that had a beginning and an end. I would have given you all sorts of answers back then as to why I turned down high salaries in big companies, but I know now that I feared my competitive spirit. I would have been a success, but how could I appeal to men if they saw me as someone as powerful as they?

  It is a wonder that I didn’t marry one of those boys who held me close and remain a child/woman; the intoxication of being loved, finally, by an exotic “other,” so male, so much what I’d been missing in the house of women. If I idealized boys, it was because I’d had a life in which to imagine them in the absence of my father. Of course I filled it with an ideal. Though I must add that in reality I have found men to be more generous, fairer, and more appealing in their neediness of women’s love than most feminists paint them.

  Even without a crown of beauty, I loved my adolescent awakening to men. None of my early loves was The Boy Divine, Malcolm, he whom I would have chosen had taking the initiative been something A Nice Girl did. Had I put my hand in his, however, it wouldn’t have been a proper fit; I didn’t own the appropriate beauty to match his leadership, nor could I disobey The Nice Girl Rules. He had rules too, and sex was what he wanted. He told me that, the only time I ever lay in his arms, the night before I left for college. When I pushed his hand away from between my legs, he said, “This is why it wouldn’t work, Nancy. This is what I want.” He said it in a nice voice, making it sound fair, like a man older than his years. Well, he was the leader of the pack. Malcolm/father.

  How I had the heart to deny myself what I wanted most, I’ll never know. I was such a besotted, lovesick teenager; though I called it romance, it had a heavy dose of pure sexual desire. But the rules I’d made for myself were overly rigid in their self-condemnation; in the absence of my father in our family, I’d made myself the responsible one. Of course I was always chosen to be the leader at school.

  One spring day in my sophomore year a
t college, I decided I didn’t want to continue my career as class leader. I didn’t want to be the rule maker who said you couldn’t drink beer on the lanes around the lake; I wanted to drink beer with my date on a Saturday afternoon. More exactly, I wanted the choice, wanted to be more emotionally involved in what I chose to do with men. I longed to drop the Nice Girl Rules and be myself, whoever she was.

  My decision confounded my faculty adviser. It may sound like a minor event, but it was a turning point, and it had a lot to do with sex and a need to invent a life with men based on new rules. Rules are important, the making and the breaking of them. Rules are especially important to a girl who grows up without a father, always hungry for men.

  I understood the full significance neither of that glass bank in which I’d saved my nickels and dimes nor, foolish virgin, my biology, even as I played with penises and near-insertions in parked cars. As for the power of beauty, while those were still the days when beauty was the paramount price for the best prince, all these enormous influences that had ruled my young life—economics, sex, and looks—would not be fully grasped until my house burned down in 1980.

  Young women today don’t have the luxury of my own extended naive youth; my generation was the last to know the basic optimism built into the Protestant work ethic, which prevailed for so many generations. Today we no longer trust that if you raise your children to work hard, believe in God, that they will have a higher standard of living. The work ethic, optimism, inner beauty, morality are gone.

  The naked power of money, sex, and external beauty all come together in adolescence. More than ever before, father, a “nonseducible adult male,” is very much what is wanted in an adolescent girl’s life.

  Without him, without any feel of a man growing up, my own determination to take care of myself economically got seriously twisted; I became an excellent earner, a good provider, but when I married that first time, I handed the money over to my husband. I didn’t want to understand how economics worked. In a bargain that said I was the child and he the daddy I’d never had, I simply endorsed my checks over to him. When he mentioned totals in the bank, my brain went fuzzy. It wasn’t until that fire and my talks with the nonseducible Dan Stern that I began to separate the powers of money, sex, and beauty that adolescence had confused.