The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  “Be a Man!”

  In those brief latency years between dependency on mother and the arrival of adolescent girls, the boy has weaned himself from his adoration of the female form as part of his separation from mother. In the company of other boys he learned to “forget” his love/envy of the body that once contained him, its power to sustain him. He built with his own hands and imagination a world of Boy Power that reinforced his newfound sense of independence without woman. Instead, he visually fixated on the perfect older boy. Hero worship.

  And then, one day, comes adolescence. Suddenly, the girls who were invisible and useless to him yesterday are seen in all their magisterial beauty, awakening his almost forgotten yearning for the female body; but this new longing compounds potent memories of the beauty of the breast, the female skin and smell, with sexual longing.

  “It seems to me that many men fix on their object of desire at a place that is deep in the recesses of childhood,” writes Paul Theroux. “Their libidos are coded at an early age. The childish aspect of lust is for most men the hardest to admit or come to terms with. It is the childishness that all prostitutes and role-players know… [it] is based on an infantile or adolescent memory,” which is why most men are reluctant to reveal the source to a woman, “because revealing it to you will give you power over him.”

  Such a wise admission, this memory of Theroux’s, which goes back to his own early adolescence when he walked into a friend’s summer house one day and saw the boy’s lovely young mother sitting in her loose shorts, barefoot, wearing only her white bra:

  The cone bra like an icon, the day’s humidity, the bare feet, her eyes, her smile, her skin, her posture, my wolfish breathing… I was not supposed to be there. That was part of the thrill—that I had entered a house that was not my own and saw my friend’s mother, who was more naked than I had ever seen any woman…. I desired her. Though the word desire was not in my vocabulary, this was my ravenous awakening…. Being away from home… was a distinct part of the thrill. I am sure that my urge to travel began that day…. Is it any wonder I have spent almost 35 years wandering? The word wanderlust is one of the truest words in the language…. There is no such thing as mature desire. The feeling is rooted in a man’s youthful unconscious.

  And Theroux was only ten at the time. I would wish that every woman would read this entire essay and feel for the ten-year-old, better to understand the boy grown to manhood.

  Given that we all, men and women, begin at the breast, the adolescent girl has no infantile unconscious of a male body, is not awakened to sexual urgency when she looks at boys her own age. Should she walk into a friend’s house unannounced and see a grown man almost naked, would she be aroused, remember the shape of the man’s penis beneath his shorts as “an icon” inspiring her to wanderlust? I doubt it.

  Instead, she must create a new vision out of the beauty of the male form, with its roots in the here and now of age twelve, thirteen; and if the ground is not ready, welcoming, and fertile, if she has not been raised on the love of men, her imagination will not accept the erotic vision of young men. Her life’s training under women’s rules, her lack of familiarity with her own body, leaves her even less inclined, less stimulated by the vision of the male form, and less likely to be a voyeur. Never having seen her mother visually enjoying the appearance of men, in adolescence the girl does not share the boy’s awakening to the erotic stimuli of looking. Her libido is not “always loaded and cocked,” to quote Theroux. It isn’t just that she lacks the boy’s external organ announcing arousal; it is deeper, meaning older, going back further in time. The boy begins life in love with the texture, smell, and sight of women’s bodies, especially the lovely conical breast in its “chaste white bra.” We women like to look at her too.

  (I love Theroux’s comment on wanderlust, his sense that his own desire for forbidden, exotic experiences offered in travel was “an escape from the strictness of home.” It is an idea to which I too respond, having always known that the feel of sex wasn’t present excitingly in my mother’s house, and therefore when I first felt it in unfamiliar surroundings, sexual excitement was commingled with the forbidden; to be experienced, to be lived through, and not just imagined, I had to journey, get away.)

  What does the smitten adolescent boy have to offer in exchange for female beauty? It doesn’t occur to him that his own looks are even worthy to put on the scale opposite the girl’s face, her body; nor do her own eyes fasten on him, loving the look of him, awakening him to his worthiness, learned in her eyes. He feels powerless. It is the girl who will teach him what she wants, which boy she feels weighs in opposite her beauty. Alas, she makes this decision blindly, without full awareness or even consideration of what the boy feels, of her effect on him; oh, she knows he looks at her, but she has no sympathy, no empathy.

  And much to his unhappiness, she is repelled by the sight of his penis. In time, it will be her decision as to whether he can kiss her lips, touch the breast, the contour of which awakens him in the night with an erection. The girl doesn’t realize the extent of her power, but what is also missing from this scenario is that she doesn’t see his beauty. Nor has he been raised to acknowledge it, but surely he yearns to be taken in. Isn’t this what women do—love you with their eyes?

  But no. We abandon adolescent boys to struggle with their bankruptcy opposite the supremacy of female beauty. I suppose it is meant to toughen them—“Be a man!”—so that they more quickly learn their role as provider and problem solver, the purchase price of beauty. The grim side effect, however, is that it has always left men very envious of the power of female beauty.

  We must reactivate admiration of male beauty, teach lazy eyes to awaken to the hypnotic curve of the male torso, which is all over town, on playing fields, in gyms, standing over there at the bar, his foot on the brass rail thus accentuating the beautiful ass. It is already happening. In 1995, 73 percent of boys from twelve to nineteen said they either “try hard” to keep up with or “care somewhat” about keeping up with the latest fashions. Aren’t we all a bit sated with the power of female beauty these days? Time for male beauty, and none is lovelier than the adolescent.

  We leave adolescent boys at a terrible disadvantage, many of them knowing, having come from fatherless homes, that girls, like their own mothers, can do without men. This leaves the boy to deal with his vision of the all-powerful girl, who has aroused feelings in him from he knows not where, urges and desires that he must attempt to hide, since they are so one-sided, the girl obviously not suffering, not looking at him.

  My own memory of an adolescent night: We are parked on the beach, at the drive-in. The memory is so sensory that I could play it for you better on a musical instrument, a feeling of my silent prayer that he will turn his head and bring his mouth to mine. My eyes are closed, my lips wait, my tremulous hands, which might have reached up and gently turned his head and brought his lips to mine, are clasped in my lap. None of this passivity was me. Let me add that this anxiety, fear, holding back was not him either. He was as jellied by the power of female beauty as boys are today. I was not allowed to initiate, to make the first move, but isn’t this precisely what feminism has won for our adolescent girls, not just the right to take the initiative but also a shared responsibility for it, which includes the courage to risk rejection?

  We adults, who have not taken sexual responsibility for our own selves, are poor candidates to teach our sons to see themselves clearly in the mirror so that they might enjoy a share of the power of beauty, learn to use it wisely, and be accountable for what it provokes. Believing this, the boy would enter adolescence as a contender instead of feeling whiplashed by the dismissive toss of the beautiful girl’s head. Having something of his own, he would not take her rejection, knead it into a ball of rage to use against her one night when she is vulnerable. We haven’t even taught our daughters the uses and responsibilities of beauty power, much less raised them to appreciate the beautiful line of a male torso.

&nbs
p; Doesn’t the experience of women’s beauty awaken the young man to the full spectrum of life itself? Theroux links his own earliest awareness of female beauty to his lifelong desire to see the world, to feel everything. What an amazing door our beauty opens to men! In recognizing men’s beauty, couldn’t we teach our daughters to give men a reflection of themselves that they are literally dying for?

  If we can teach young people the workings of money, why not explain the currency of beauty: how it has been traded under Patriarchal Society for centuries, how its rate has evolved under modern feminism. With women in the workplace doing what we used to call “men’s work,” the return of male beauty power has been inevitable. It would be a good thing if we adults, along with our children, understood beauty’s powerful exchange. No more “beauty is only skin deep.”

  Tell the boy why he turns to Jell-O opposite lovely girls and why the girl who has chosen him has turned his friends into rivals. Uneducated, he sleepwalks, nods his head dumbly at the inevitability of the pairing of the prettiest girl with the athletic hero, the school leader, the guy with the car, the money. There is valuable information we now have that might explain to adolescents how these things work; for instance, early physical development, meaning broad shoulders, the growth of a beard, height, and a deep voice, translates naturally into psychological maturity, meaning leadership for the boy.

  According to psychologists, the same parallel doesn’t hold for the adolescent girl, where the early development of breasts, wide hips, and the onset of menstruation isn’t a forecast of leadership within her group. It is a difference between the sexes that resonates; the early developed boy, the leader, for instance, chooses the most beautiful girl. We know why, and yet we don’t. What this did in our group when I was growing up was to make judgmental eyes very envious indeed when our “best friend” blossomed before the rest of us. Very well, we accepted nature’s law that she should be chosen by boys, but within The Group she had to watch her step, not let her breasts go to her head, so to speak. Not surprisingly, psychologists have discovered that girls who develop earliest have the most psychological problems in adolescence.

  It is a meaningful imbalance between the sexes, this correspondence of physical and psychological growth. How each sex recognizes its members and leaders is a lesson we take into the rest of our lives. That so many physically unendowed boys, the nerds, pursue economic success with such dogged diligence may not be by chance; that so many of today’s successful women report feeling themselves “the less pretty one” growing up also resonates. Those who are underprivileged in beauty compensate with other talents. Are The Nice Girl Rules in women’s world today still demanding that no one woman get any more of the pie than any other really all that different from what we lived out through our teens?

  Only recently have we discovered that some of us, both male and female, are genetically more assertive than others. It is in the bloodstream. Once upon a time, boys had hormones on their side—or so they thought—meaning chemically, biologically, girls weren’t supposed to act aggressively. Today, we know that androgens and estrogen, once thought to be strictly divided between males and females, exist in shades of gray in both sexes. It seems that there is nothing the boy can call his own, not even testosterone, to back up self-confidence in picking up the telephone, risking rejection. Ten, fifteen years ago, feminists were quick to deny aggression in women: “No, no, men are aggressive and competitive, women are conciliatory.”

  Yet, one look at the sinister Bad Girls who grab the lead in today’s films and run all over men says that boys will have to look elsewhere for their “naturally” superior muscle. Only yesterday a girl saw hair on her upper lip as failure as a woman; what man would want to take care of a bearded lady? Today’s adolescent girls, without losing one ounce of womanliness, pursue boys, maybe share the price of a movie and watch beautiful Sharon Stone flash her pubic hairs.

  When today’s girl finds herself, no, puts herself in the arms of a boy whose hands explore her body, she is caught between two worlds. Her mother, for instance, never told her about her clitoris; very few mothers do. When the boy discovers it for her, his image is transformed into that of Prince, and she has gone from assertive New Girl into Love Slave.

  “When we don’t educate young girls about their bodies, we leave them vulnerable for other people to reveal them to themselves,” says Judith Seifer. “I guarantee you, as God is my witness, if the girl hasn’t found her clitoris herself, and no one’s encouraged her to, she is going to think she is in love with the first guy who trips over it. ‘Oh my God, this is what love feels like!’ And of course it doesn’t have a thing to do with love. Back in the halcyon days of sex education in the seventies, we really thought we were making a difference. But I realize, in today’s explosion of unplanned pregnancies, that we haven’t made an inch of difference in the way we raise our children.”

  As confusing as it is for the girl, imagine, twenty-five years into feminism, what a boy feels. It has always seemed to boys that girls have all the power. And yet, when he brings her to orgasm she becomes his baby, his Swept Away darling. He knows he didn’t do anything masterful, that the magic is her own. How empowering is this for the boy? It’s rather like being mistaken for someone else, or something else, meaning that he knows she could have accomplished the same thing with her own hand.

  Boys today have to look cooler and more in charge than ever; with so many markets focused on the billions of dollars they spend annually, we forget that the person standing in the $135 Nikes has been growing close to twelve inches in four years, growing as much as three and a half to four inches a year by the time puberty is over. Girls get their growth spurt earlier than boys, around age twelve; the boy’s doesn’t start until roughly age fourteen, but these inequalities matter more today when the boy is as eager to be admired as is the girl. The culture has no sympathy for the male experience. The feminist rage at men has become the culture’s rage.

  With fewer fathers at home than ever, no model of a man to emulate, the boy’s invisibility and lack of power opposite Big Women leave him to identify more than ever with his peers. The boy invents his own look, language, and behavior out of the raw desperation of adolescent anger. Is it so surprising that with so much woman power making him feel small, he tries to bring us down a peg, denigrate the beauty by mocking her in ways that keep her and her formidable power in her place. “Her body’s beautiful, so I’m thinkin’ rape—shouldn’t had her curtains open, see, that’s her fate,” rap the Geto Boys. When rude men make disparaging remarks at women on the street, it is envy crying out; when young rap singers mouth the crude, ugly lyrics about women’s bodies, our most sensitive parts, their nasty resentment is the voice of people who feel insignificant opposite the women who today act as if they don’t even need men.

  Read these disturbing lyrics by the group Nine Inch Nails, and tell me if they don’t protest too much. “I am a big man (yes I am), and i have a big gun. got me a big old dick and i, i like to have fun. held against your forehead, i’ll make you suck it. maybe i’ll put a hole in your head. you know, just for the fuck of it. i can reduce you if I want. i can devour. i’m hard as fucking steel, and i’ve got the power. i’m every inch a man, and i’ll show you somehow, me and my fucking gun. nothing can stop me now. shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. I’m going to come all over you… me and my fucking gun, me and my fucking gun.”

  How Girls Project on to Boys the Ugliness of Sex

  One of the first things a boy must learn in adolescence is to hide his insecurity; while girls may seem to have all the power, they want to be led, to be taken care of. Self-consciousness opposite girls is a new feeling, and his ignorance of what they want must not betray him. Therefore, he must cast his features, the muscles of his face and his body in such a way as to belie feeling anything. Imagine the amount of muscular control that goes into facial denial, the mask, when he is off-balance as pretty girls approach. Within a few years the stonewall look will be natural,
and a few years after that the deadpan similarity of successful men’s photos in the newspaper will be baffling.

  “What are you feeling?” women ask, looking impatiently at the impassive male face. “What are you thinking?” Women get exasperated with men, who give nothing away in their look, while we, the emotional sex, can be read like books. In time, the boy/man becomes stonewalled inside too, sensitive reaction quickly suppressed. The adolescent heroes in today’s films never give themselves away; they stare into the wind, their faces hardened and lined by the elements, not by tears, not ever.

  There is a reason adolescent boys hang in clusters to practice voyeurism: It is too scary alone. This urgent demand to give large parts of their attention to staring at girls instead of shooting baskets is new. Even earlier fantasies of sailing to Africa are taken over by dreams of female bodies. When girls walk by, his jaw drops; what does he know initially of girls’ sensitivity to being stared at? We know nothing of his involuntary reaction to the sight of us, neither understanding nor sympathizing. Had our infantile sensory pleasure and dependency been focused on a male body, so that we came to anticipate the sight, smell, and dearness of men, we might stare back at boys in adolescence, recognizing in them our new erotic selves.

  Since we refuse to recognize him, the boy picks up on our discomfort. Sorely missing the eye contact, any mutuality of a shared gaze, he combines our powerlessness with the chink we have shown him in our armor, and he gives us “the look” that we hate, that up-and-down appraisal. It is, however, a rare boy who will stand alone and gaze; by the time he has grown to manhood he may look at women on his own, always hopeful that one will smile back, but in adolescence, the full tribe is required. The old gang’s camaraderie takes on new meaning in adolescence when the powerful sight of girls makes the boy too small on his own.