The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

Perhaps the boy does love her, but he cannot comprehend how very much girls genuinely confuse love and sex. What does he know of women’s love, from which he ran away, so tight were mother’s arms? The boy is as unfamiliar with the girl’s definition of love as she is with his acceptance and understanding of sex.

  Adolescence has taught him that girls control sex. Soon enough he learns that they have the same low regard for his genitals that mother did. This person his own age may love his face, his shoulders, his chest, but she turns away from that part that defines him as male, his penis. Her low opinion puts him on the defensive and makes him angry. He thinks less of his overall self-image, which throws beauty’s power even more into women’s court.

  “High school girls are less comfortable with their sexual experiences than are their male counterparts,” announced a nationwide survey in 1994. Is anyone surprised that boys enjoy sex more or that “while 81 percent of the sexually active boys said that ‘sex is a pleasurable experience,’ only 59 percent of the girls said they felt that way”? We wouldn’t be surprised if the same figures turned up in men and women twenty years older. We still don’t expect women to enjoy sex as much as men do, giving such reasons as men’s insensitivity to women’s needs, when the truth is that most women still expect men to make us sexual.

  “If the boy really accepts women’s opinion that his penis is an ugly, dirty part of his body, then the girl who really loves to make love to him is also not a very nice person and certainly not somebody you would want to marry and have kids with,” says Reinisch. “It’s very unconscious. It may sow the seeds of the Madonna/Whore idea.”

  The plight of the adolescent male used to be the stuff of books and plays. The character Marty, for instance, in the classic film that bears his name, was a young man who physically and emotionally felt that he didn’t measure up to society’s expectations. Eventually he finds his kind of girl, his type. We have all known Martys, who never go out of style. But the hero in Bill Inge’s Picnic, played in the movie by the young William Holden, is less in vogue these days. Society doesn’t respond so eagerly to the irresistible male sexual force embodied in the tough young stranger who hops off a freight train one hot summer day and into the lives of a family in a small town. In the late fifties, when Picnic appeared, we didn’t automatically associate villain/brute/rapist with an erotically powerful young man.

  No woman in this family escapes his musk, from the Old Maid schoolteacher, to the adolescent girl who understands, in the purest sense, exactly why her lush, beautiful older sister responds to him in a way not aroused by the Nice Young Man who is her steady beau, a fine fellow but lacking heat.

  Before the stranger arrived, the lovely sister was just that; but she is not quite alive, not as she will be when the stranger’s threatening sexuality ignites her. When it happens, appropriately after she has been crowned the town’s beauty queen, we feel his bad lust making her bad too. But we cannot blame her, for Inge’s skill makes the audience cheer for her lust; the hero has seduced us all.

  Whether or not we recognize it, Inge is telling us that great sex is only made evil by our own convention. Yes, the hero almost destroys the family, the whole town, but he has done nothing, merely appeared, as sex does in our adolescence. We make it ugly, and no one recognizes this more plainly than the adolescent young sister. In a recent interview, Paul Newman mentioned that he was rejected for the lead role in the film Picnic because he wasn’t “threatening enough.”

  No one writes plays like Picnic nowadays. Young men like Brad Pitt are sexy but don’t own the kind of musk that comes packaged with this warning: Danger. Feminism should have split the musk between the sexes, giving women our due share along with men. Instead, it chose to leave sex in men’s hands, sex being such an easy foil for evil. Men and women aren’t as sexually excited by one another nowadays because we’ve lost the Satyr, the beautiful male force who is the other half of our sexual beauty. Instead, we raise another generation of foolish girls to wait for a boy’s key to reveal them to themselves.

  A Farewell to Penis Envy

  You don’t hear much of penis envy these days. There’s a dated ring to it, bittersweet, as in 1940s movies, conjuring up images of men in gray flannel suits bringing home the bacon, protecting women. These were the heydays when just the word envy triggered the prefix penis.

  Personally, I never liked the expression. I was too in love with men, too needy of them, and therefore defended against any envy of their power over me. The mere mention of Freud’s name made my lip curl; I looked down on people in analysis, whom I saw as weak characters, squandering time and money. Then I became a writer, never expecting that I was about to meet someone scarier than Freud—Melanie Klein, who would teach me that there was something far more powerful than the penis, namely, the breast.

  Long before modern feminism, no one but the strictest Freudians still believed that women wanted to exchange their vaginas for penises; psychiatrist Clara Thompson’s famous paper, “Penis Envy in Women,” published in 1943, had set the record straight: Penis envy is primarily symbolic in that it demonstrates women’s feelings of inadequacy in patriarchal society. “Cultural factors,” she wrote, “can explain the tendency of women to feel inferior about their sex and their consequent tendency to envy men… so the attitude called penis envy is similar to the attitude of any underprivileged group towards those in power.”

  Today things look bleak for the endangered penis. Lorena Bobbitt’s butchery on her husband isn’t precisely what I mean, though it doesn’t altogether miss the mark. That Ms. Bobbitt was found not guilty is baffling, though it reverberates with Nice Girl Feminism: “We’re Good and They’re Bad!” Yes, Bobbitt was an abuser and deserved due punishment; but you just don’t slice off a man’s penis when he is asleep.

  What has really buried the supremacy of the penis is the rise of Breast Envy, growing by leaps and bounds. Opposite the power of the breast, the penis as symbol simply isn’t holding up. Breast Envy is big all over town. It was always there, but now it’s won celebrity status. Men of old, safe in the knowledge that the penis was king in patriarchal culture, used to ogle, not envy, women’s breasts. “I’m a breast man,” a guy would say, meaning that he ate nails for breakfast, so secure was he behind the Teutonic defenses of Patriarchy. A man could safely lose himself in pictures of women’s breasts and masturbate happily, knowing he was in Marlboro Country. “Envy” a woman’s tits? Hell, no.

  Today women push men aside to worship at the breast, to gaze rapturously at what has come to mean something more significant to women themselves than to mere men, who couldn’t possibly understand the real message of the breast. The role that breasts now play in women’s lives has nothing to do with men. Women get hot looking at other women’s breasts. In their sexual fantasies they describe in great detail the size, shape, taste of the other woman’s breasts; they want to lie on them, own them. Just as women buy sperm, they can now buy breasts. Who needs a man?

  Naked breasts, breast implants, breast reconstruction, push-up Wonderbras, breast-feeding on park benches… there have never been so many breasts and so little milk of human kindness. There was a day when a man could “steal” a feel, nibble on a nipple as The Nice Girl pleaded the required “No, no!”, meaning yes. Today she instructs him to suck harder, to knead her breast this way or that, to do it better, faster, like the other woman does it. Men are having the power of the breast thrust in their faces.

  In last year’s Fantasy Fest here in Key West, the man who used to be my housekeeper yelled to me from across the street, “Hey, Nancy, look at my breasts!” There he was, cross-dressed as a raging tart, with breasts the size of Jayne Mansfield’s. But it wasn’t just drag queens who stole women’s breasts, there were college guys, straight men with pointed conical breasts strapped on their hairy chests, along with “pregnant” men, including one who lay on a table and delivered a live chicken.

  As more and more women take their proud, pregnant tummies into offices, where they
compete with men for their jobs as well as demand maternity leave and extra benefits, how do men feel? Fairness and justice for women aside, how is the disenfranchised man supposed to react to this display of breasts and pregnancy on the streets, naked on the covers of magazines, advertised as THE fashion statement? Even macho male film stars get in on the act, donning full drag attire plus huge falsies in a movie about three outrageous queens on a cross-country journey, where they win a drag beauty contest and actually look more beautiful than some of the real women in the film. The poor old penis doesn’t even have a bit part.

  This is what we must remember as we try to understand the adolescent boy’s rage at women: Our most intense envy/resentment/rage is directed at the people we love and need the most. If the boy feels that mother/girls’ power makes him small and groveling, well, of course he is going to be ambivalent about women; he cannot afford to hate mother, and so his rage/envy of the power of the female body goes out toward girls whose breasts and genitals have become the objects of his adolescent desire.

  Young women are no better educated regarding the power of their bodies than are the men who desire them. In patriarchal days we didn’t raise either sex to be cognizant of women’s power; the penis was all. Now we have a society that bears no name, and we still refuse to acknowledge the influence of women’s bodies—breasts, genitals, skin, smell, texture—over all our lives. Today, no one is feeling that power more acutely than the adolescent boy.

  Look at the beautiful young women dancing topless at bars like Stringfellows. They massage their enormous breasts, self-absorbed, in love with their own flesh. They get sexually heated running their hands over the fullness of breast, and when they press their rosy peaked nipples between dainty fingertips, little sighs escape. Obviously aware of the hungry stares of the mesmerized men, the women’s self-love says, “Yes, I understand why you want these beauties; so do I. Eat your hearts out.”

  Male habitués of the burlesque parlors of yesteryear have described to me the mutual adoration that used to be parlayed between performer and voyeur; the joints weren’t as posh as today’s clubs, but the exchange between audience and stage was far warmer: The men were grateful for what the women showed, for letting them feast their eyes, and the naked women let the men see how much they loved being taken in.

  We live in the age of denial. Denial is the first defense against envy. Women are accustomed to denial; during our long-standing disenfranchisement, denial was our middle name: “Who me, angry? Who me, beautiful, envious, resentful? Oh, no!” But men are not accustomed to denial; when they feel anger, they act, especially adolescent males who are trying to be men, the long-standing definition of which still remains powerful, strong, and in charge. The young boys watch the neighborhood girls in their Wonderbras parading independently up and down the street, their message as flagrant as the naked women at Stringfellows: We don’t need you guys; we can do just fine without you.

  The boy takes hunger and rejection in hand and masturbates not only with longing but also with fury. His music gets louder, wilder, the lyrics speak of girls as whores and mouth contempt of women’s evil-smelling bodies, and no one has the time to tell the boy what is working on him. Instead, television shows him the emotion-free thug, the man who kills and rapes women without blinking. And he watches the new Bitch heroine in her crotch-high leather skirt who competes with The Terminator in murder. He has nothing left to call his own, not even emotion-free destruction. We look at rising statistics on adolescent male crime, drugs, imprisonment, suicide, and chalk them up to everything but the seemingly soft subject of the power of women’s sexual beauty.

  I take breasts very seriously. Melanie Klein says that the destructive power of envy begins with the infant at the breast; the infant loves the breast/the infant resents the breast’s power. If we don’t ameliorate envy’s nasty destructiveness so that we arrive at gratitude and love for the mother/breast, then bitter envy remains with us throughout our loveless lives.

  We have turned society on its head in the past twenty years; we choose to think our confusion is all about jobs, money, politics, when, in fact, we are hungry for the nurturing that women once embodied. We have all lost our mommies, including we women, which is why so many turn to other women instead of men. Give me a breast to lie on! Of course the penis has been replaced by the breast. Of course women pump up their breasts and stare as hungrily as men at other women. We’re all starved. And no one more so than the adolescent boy who hasn’t even had a taste, a memory of the good things that we unintentionally lost in the past twenty-five years.

  The Look of Anger

  Slowly, inexorably, as the onset of puberty grows younger and the average age of marriage older—today almost twenty-five for women and almost twenty-seven for men—adolescence stretches on and on. It could mean more time in which to develop intellectually and socially before the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. What better period in all of life to grow and experiment? It is hard to navigate adolescence when the look of the adult culture, its beauty ideal, is adolescence itself. Where is the adult? Far from finding something in us to emulate, adolescents resent our intrusion, and rightly so. With no visible boundaries between us, they assume the privileges of adulthood, become sexual too soon, drink and take more drugs than their parents, and carry weapons. We have put them in angry competition with us.

  When we accuse our teenagers of acting beyond their years, assuming privileges before they are of age, we should take a look at ourselves overstepping boundaries, backward onto their turf. We are as irresponsible as they—more so. We don’t discuss the tragedies of adolescents as our own creations; to admit it would mean how avidly we are against aging, not just getting old, but even becoming middle-aged.

  Does anyone feel emptier than an adolescent inheriting our world? What if we were fourteen and all we’d ever known was today’s exhibitionism and voyeurism, where everyone is so afraid of being invisible, having nothing inside to fall back on? More than anyone, an adolescent is desperate to be seen. “The parts of the body do not all grow at the same rate or at the same time during puberty,” says Laurence Steinberg. “This… can lead to an appearance of awkwardness or gawkiness in the young adolescent, who may be embarrassed by the unmatched accelerated growth of different parts of the body.”

  These are also the years of increased introspection, self-consciousness, and intellectualization. Appearance has always been important to adolescents, but today’s teenager also sees an idealized version of a male adolescent as the hero of TV sitcoms, the lead singer/dancer on MTV, and looking very good on the covers of magazines. All eyes are on an idealized version of him, or so it feels.

  Men used to call women’s wagging finger and accusatory voice “nagging.” But it rolled off men’s backs then, when they held the power. The nagging wife/mother was the stuff of comic strips, accepted with good humor and dismissed; it made women angry, but women had no voice for rage then. “Aw, Ma,” the adolescent boy would complain, dutifully accepting mother’s efforts to control him, which is how he had seen his father respond. Having given his mother a hug, the boy would proceed to bend her rules, being careful, like Dad, to keep his “badness” out of her sight.

  Somewhere in between “bad” men’s control of society and “good” women’s efforts to control men, a set of ethical rules was created, a morality and code of manners which were very much a product of this goodness and badness that men and women owned. It was not a healthy system, but it worked for a long time.

  Today, women are as “bad” as men, but we retain our right to blame men for all the wickedness in the world, part of which is our own, but even that is explained away as being “men’s fault.” No man feels this more harshly than the adolescent boy, still very close to the feel of mother’s power, compounded by the demands of adolescent girls. The young man feels women’s anger spewed onto him and seeks cover. How should he look, what should he wear to protect himself from the fallout from females who already own s
o much but nonetheless want his balls, blame him for not giving them his job, for not providing the kind of love girls want, for not taking their verbal abuse, for not, in sum, rolling over and letting girls control him?

  Males commit many crimes and the statistics escalate, yet no one asks why our men, increasingly young men, act this way. It is verboten to suggest that feminism’s afterbirth has left any havoc in its trail.

  Every revolution, even our glorious women’s movement, leaves a mess in its wake, but the Victim Feminists want no responsibility. Women’s traditional privilege of blaming men is still in place. Maybe a grown man can roll over, but the adolescent boy is vulnerable; there is one grim thing he can do when the pressure gets too tough: Between 1960 and 1992, suicide rates for white males 15 to 19 increased by 212 percent compared to the female rate, which increased by 131 percent.

  As we go about our business of making money, marrying, divorcing, buying more clothes, more “things” to cover our emptiness, do we think our children don’t take this in? When home, community, society have no rules but are instead places where every bargain has been broken, beginning with that between once-married parents, what should adolescents hold on to? Adult rules are suspect if they cannot even support those who invent them. There is no basic tenet between grown men and women that holds, and no conscience, private or public. The one constancy that society offers that seems to bear fruit for young people today is the promise of power in beauty. What future is there for an adolescent when all the likenesses on billboards and magazine covers are of sixteen-year-olds, the adolescent’s own age? Why grow up when your image, tarted up to inspire envy between grown-ups, is the cult image?

  Adolescent boys as well as girls are aware of the outrageous incomes of the runway models. There it is in black-and-white and Technicolor: It is wonderful to be a beautiful woman and be rich too. Men much older and more powerful than the teenage boy squire beautiful young girls, taking in warmth from their reflection. The boy cannot help but look at his lovely female peers, but he must camouflage desire, for they are more powerful than ever today. The boy is reacting to the genetic, erotic pull toward lovely girls while trying very hard, as did his father, to appear cool.