The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Because feminism refuses to acknowledge the power of female beauty, to understand how the dark as well as the bright side works on us, we leave our adolescent children at a terrible disadvantage, both sexes tyrannized by beauty. Yes, we expect a preoccupation with looks, but today we have elevated beauty as the power that rules us all. It is bad enough to be middle-aged and motivated by beauty’s mysterious force, but it is untenable when you are fourteen, eighteen, and more motivated by external appearance than by any moral structure.

  What does “Be a Man” mean? The boy must learn to appear in control, to hide emotion. Young men invent a fad, a way to dress, which others quickly copy. Thirty years ago, they let their hair grow, demanded the Beatle Look even as their fathers winced. There were numerous cartoons of dads and sons going through this ritual at the barber’s. But today’s look is not cute; the adolescent boy is desperate for a look that can stand up to girls’ power over him. Not just clothes, but behavior, a stance, a certain kind of walk and facial expression are required to hide the anxiety within. Perhaps he is not yet aware of Political Correctness, but its disdain of him has trickled down. He learns to wear a false face.

  As physiologist Paul Ekman notes, when a person is wearing such a mask he will sometimes betray his feelings in an expression that lasts a fraction of a second; sometimes, if a true expression begins to leak out, the person will squelch it. Using antagonistic muscles to cover a truthful expression—forcing lips together to hide a smile of pleasure is an example of “Masking.”

  Last night, I thought of Ekman’s masking research while leafing through a copy of an Italian Men’s Vogue; there were maybe eight full-page shots of adolescent boys, most in underwear, posing nearly nude for a photographer who sometimes caught the “mask” of their seemingly cool faces. Other times, what leaked through was the sweetness and vulnerability of a boy obviously aware of his genitals on display. These pages were photographed by Steven Meisel, who also shot Calvin Klein’s campaign of nearly nude adolescents wearing his fabled underwear.

  What are Klein and Meisel pretending to do? Show us Boy Toys, Pinups, and if so, are they for the voyeuristic pleasure of other males, as it would seem they are? I can’t help but wonder about the impact of these suggestive photos both on the young models and on us voyeurs who don’t know quite how to take them.

  There is another predicament a sexually unsure young man must face, which is how to respond to the new lesbian chic on college campuses. I’ve mentioned this before, but in the context of the adolescent boy, it very much warrants amplification. The New Lesbianism, on and off campus, is not so much a product of Gay Liberation but of Matriarchal Feminism; women’s new economic freedom allows young women to be able to choose another female as sexual partner rather than look for a husband. The New Economics has written the New Lesbian Chic.

  Across the country, feminist teachers in classrooms occupied by males and females often paint the world in shades of Them and Us, meaning “Them” as the Bad Men, the rapists/harassers/enemies of “Us,” the good, virtuous women. In many classrooms, anything created by dead, white, male intellectuals is rejected. One feminist teacher even demanded that a reproduction of Ingres’s nude be removed from the wall.

  I can see where the grown man might mistake the Lesbian Chic for a real-life enactment of his own erotic dreams. It is one of men’s most popular, has always been a dream come true when a man could persuade two women into his bed. But some of today’s daughters of modern feminism are quite different in their turning to one another; certainly the men their own age don’t always look upon female-to-female kissing, oral sex, living together, as just another turn-on. These women don’t need men, not at all, a message that puts a young man’s sexuality, as well as his future, into question.

  After graduation, many of these college lesbians fully expect to enter into heterosexual relationships; their earlier sexual affairs with women are irrelevant. It is an option not available to young men: Two women lie down together and the world shrugs, but when a man even thinks of sex with another man, well, he labels himself harshly. A man is either straight or gay, but for a woman, the world is our oyster.

  Male homosexuals prize the act of sex. Once made, it is a decision not easily reversed, at least not in the man’s mind. But the lesbian sorority can be a sisterly choice that isn’t life-defining so much as it is an inclination to stay where the young woman has always been, close to women.

  Once upon a time, the male adolescent saw the female breast as his goal, the shape and texture of which was so appealing he could not help but look, desire, admire. He didn’t tie his fascination into nursery dependency, but saw the breast of the adolescent girl as whole and new. Today, The Power Bosom, clothed in the Wonderbra, is not flashed at him but at other girls. Young women, much more consciously than their mothers, look to other women’s eyes for approval and desire too.

  Is the boy then in competition with other men or with other women for that beautiful breast across the room? Should the boy live out his father’s favorite fantasy of two women having sex, how does he fit into this complete couple, who don’t even look at him, see no beauty in him, whereas he, being heterosexual, yearns desperately for female beauty, for their eyes to reflect him to himself.

  The so-called Lesbians Until Graduation—or LUGs, as they are known—may come and go, but the sorority of women with women grows steadily, leaving men to wait, and wonder, it being unmanly to protest women’s sexual affection for one another. When an article on college lesbians recently appeared on the front page of the second section of the Wall Street Journal, not one man I know brought it up. “Look, the way I figure it,” one LUG commented in this piece, “today everything is so tough with trying to find jobs and being as successful as your parents—to let love pass by because of something like labels of someone’s sex just seems really stupid.”

  Sexual selection is stupid? In another newspaper that day, there is an article on a gay man being hounded out of the military. Young men read these articles and know full well that their own futures in the workplace might be in jeopardy if they acted like the woman quoted above. But the women in the Journal article give their real names and likenesses, and tomorrow they have the privilege of returning to heterosexual life and a man who will think no less of them as a woman. What a privilege! I wouldn’t take it away from them, but what of men’s rights? What of an adolescent boy who grows up in the heat of woman power and sees his elders shrugging off the privileges of LUGs, a sexual selection that would have very different implications for him?

  In his book, The Father Factor, Henry Biller writes, “Your son’s relationship with girls… will be based on the quality of his masculinity, which you have influenced by the example you set with your wife and with other women…. Your son will also learn from observing how you react to the sexual attractiveness of women…. Boys who do not have a strong relationship with their fathers or who suffer from father absence or neglect… may have problems relating to girls and women. Without a solid gender identity, they are less likely to feel secure with females.” Given that nearly two of every five children in America do not live with their fathers, “the absence of fathers is linked to most social nightmares—from boys with guns to girls with babies.”

  “We wonder where the violence, shoplifting, stealing, and mugging among adolescent boys is coming from,” says Jeanne Murrone, a clinical psychologist who treats adolescents. “Our culture breeds a sense of entitlement. When a teenage boy puts on television, what he sees advertised is a pair of $120 Adidas sneakers. He can’t afford $120 shoes, but to be accepted, he can’t wear Fayva’s $20 shoes. ‘I have to get the Adidas $120 shoes,’ he thinks. ‘I’m entitled to those shoes, to that down jacket. I’ll get a gun and put it in somebody’s face and take them off his feet.’” Today’s adolescents would laugh at Rousseau’s vision of them “struggling with moral tensions.” How are they to understand morality and idealism when there are no mature, rational, respected adults?

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nbsp; A study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the annual rate at which fifteen- to nineteen-year-old men were being murdered soared 154 percent from 1985 to 1991. We are quick to blame drugs for what goes wrong in our society, tracing the evil back to the seventies. In fact, the evil is in us, and whether our emptiness began in post-World War II consumerism, in the fifties with McCarthy, or in the sixties and seventies with Vietnam, or whether we choose to blame it on the greed that crescendoed in the eighties, the fact is that we have lost our best selves. Rather than confront the horror of our emptiness we dress ourselves in fancy wrappings and scuttle out of our once perfect Eden.

  Was it around the time of Watergate that integrity and kindness began to disappear, along with shame and guilt? In my memory it was the early eighties, and I was at breakfast with the Miami Herald and yet another front-page story on yet another high government official, another captain of industry who had cheated, stolen, lied; nowhere in these articles was their resignation mentioned. By the end of the decade, I and everyone else had ceased to be dismayed that neither thieves, liars, cheats—national figures all—apologized nor removed themselves from office out of shame. Nor did the public seem to expect them to. We’d gotten used to The Empty Package.

  Nowadays it is an anonymous man/child on the front page, killing himself or someone else without regret. When the highest leaders of the country break the moral code and community leaders cheat, lie, and steal, there is nothing left inside the gutless culture. We have become terrified of our own emptiness; how are we to judge ourselves and one another when the invisible traits that once identified a person no longer exist? Look to what is on the outside of the package, the wrappings. Dress it up! Hollow and frightened, we walk the streets, catching eyes, drawing sight lines, demanding attention. “Look at me, God damn it, or I’ll kill you!”

  “I Am the Father That Your Boyhood Lacked”

  The above line is spoken by Odysseus to his son, Telemachus, after twenty years of separation. How simple the words, like an inscription on a tombstone, as if there were not space or possibility to capture in a greeting all that twenty long years had comprised. I found the quote in a faded newspaper clipping from 1984, in which the poet Stanley Kunitz remarked that the Oedipus myth “holds less meaning in 20th-century America than the myth of reconciliation represented by the meeting of Odysseus and his son…. ‘And even when physically present they [the fathers] are spiritually absent…. The father is as lost in life as he is in the Army, the factory, the marketplace.’” In his own poem written fifty years earlier, Kunitz wrote, “‘Father,’ I cried, ‘return. You know the way.’”

  What does the young boy today do, growing up without a desirable male image that can stand up to the powerful look and feel of women? Where can he focus on an admirable man whom he would like to emulate, one who would make him feel he had arrived at adulthood among his male peers but who would also be attractive to girls? A year ago, “Take Back the Night” demonstrations on college campuses were all the rage. A headline on an Ellen Goodman column read, “Safety for Women? Try Removing Men.”

  Is it surprising that boys copy the look of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, whose second album shot to number two in 1994? His jet-black hair, black clothing, and pasty-white skin may not be precisely mimicked, but his attitude, along with the lyrics of his music, speaks for his generation; he sings of madness, suicide, the pointlessness of life and the reality of pain, and the crowd goes crazy; inside and out, he mirrors what they feel.

  In this age of adolescence, we have created our own poor Frankenstein, who lumbers about dangerously, terrifying the populace with his gaudy, noisy appearance, all the while looking for the daddy who created him. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was inherently good, capable of great intelligence, but so desperate for love and so doomed by his appearance to ever find it that the poor creature struck out furiously at all around him. His father had left him. Shelley created her monster out of the political, social, and economic turmoil at the last turn of the century, a classic Romantic hero who resorted to violence only as a last resort because of the treatment he’d received from fellow living beings.

  When a boy grows up without a father, not even a memory of him, an inkling of who might have loved him, maybe chosen him to be his favorite child, it shapes his whole life. With all the love in the world showered on him, how to comprehend his mother’s decision to leave men out of her life and his? Since he is also male, is there a hidden rage in mother’s heart at him too? What is so awful about people of his sex? He can’t grow up to be like mother, a woman. Who is he to be?

  Yes, bad men abandon their children and walk out on child support. They are morally wrong and I join in the public outcry for their punishment. But I also fault those women who intentionally deprive a child of a father from conception. It is a selfish act. So far, men have reacted to this exclusion with relative silence; but it has to have influenced the recent years of male brutality, as much against themselves as against women. If we don’t need men in the human race, well, they might as well act as if they were superfluous.

  When fatherless brute-boys meet fatherless young girls, says psychiatrist Frank Pittman, “girls are likely to choose boyfriends who are violent and highly seductive.”

  Robert Bly, in his bestselling Iron John, looks at the increasing power of women as requiring grown men to aid the younger generation in ceremonial gatherings separate from women, where they can “bond” and assume their lost masculinity. “It seems to me that Bly has framed his cure the wrong way round,” comments educator/author Marina Warner, continuing, “The monsters of machismo are created in societies where men and women are already too far separated by sexual fear and loathing, segregated by contempt for the prescribed domestic realm of the female, and above all by exaggerated insistence on aggression as the defining characteristic of heroism and power…. The presence of fathers will only reduce the threatening character of maleness flourishing around us if sexual polarities are lessened, not increased.” In any case, what is clear is that boys need more time with men.

  Today’s adolescent boys grow up learning what it is to be male from films, television, comic books, video games, and the new modern myths and/or fairy tales. What is the look of the male hero? “Fear of men has grown alongside belief that aggression—including sexual violence—inevitably defines the character of the young male,” adds Warner. Gone is the witch, the traditional scary intruder. Instead, she says, there is a “new fascination and unease surrounding men…. Boys are not raised to be cozeners or tricksters [as in old myths and fairy tales]—it’d be unthinkable to train the future man in lures and wiles and masks and tricks; they’re brought up to play with Action Man, and his heavy-duty, futuristic Star Wars arsenal; they’re taught to identify with Ninja Turtles, as crusaders, vigilantes, warriors… the Terminator, Robocop…. I’m not advancing the con man over the soldier, or the cozener over the honest gentleman—that would be absurd; I’m observing a trend toward defining male identity and gender through visible, physical, sexualised signs of potency rather than verbal, mental agility.”

  Studies tell us that close to three quarters of young criminals in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes; such young people are also more likely to drop out of high school. In a sad way, the better a single mother is at doing everything a man can do, the more the boy is left to wonder why women need a man at all. In contrast, there are positive findings that fathers involved in their sons’ early lives get as much from the relationship as the boys. The Glueck study, for example, tracked 240 Boston fathers and their children for four decades. It determined that not only do fathers who participate in their sons’ development produce higher verbal and social skills in their boys, but that the fathers too are rewarded with greater career advancement, marital stability, and happiness in middle age.

  What if there was a noncompetitive father who had been with his son from the beginning, had held and bathed him, had shared th
e love of him so that the boy felt himself seen and adored by both a man and a woman? And what if separation from them had not been fraught with the desperation boys feel, when there is just a woman representing all love and intimacy, making these emotions something he must renounce in order to be male?

  Wouldn’t there be less need for the boy to overemphasize his difference from women/mother, the person who held, fed, bathed, and gave him the only safe haven he has known? Her power was extraordinary, and now he, only age eight or nine, must turn away from her to be opposite, to pretend he has power when it feels as if she still has it all.

  It is a Herculean task for a boy, something he can only seem to accomplish over the years with braggadocio, a show of might and muscle. How different it might be if a man had shown his son from day one that a man can be tender and loving as well as strong. If there were identification with father from the start, and an effort on the older man’s part to temper competition, wouldn’t adolescence and the years just prior be less intensely colored by the condemnation of all things female?

  In adolescence, perhaps the boy would not fear the desire for intimacy, but instead, like the girl, he would feel he had come full circle, back to something long ago for which he’d once had a talent: love. He would understand what the girl wanted and not be afraid to gaze at her in that personal, intimate way she desires. He would enjoy losing himself in her beauty instead of needing the safe distance offered by objectified photographs of women in Playboy. No one, in my opinion, but a father can raise a boy to be this kind of man.