by Nancy Friday
Until their teens, “boys and girls express emotions equally,” psychologist Warren Farrell points out. “It is adolescence that… pressures American boys… to withdraw emotionally.” The beautiful girl becomes what Farrell calls “a genetic celebrity.” Boys compete for her attention as if she were a star and the “genetic celebrity becomes entitlement dependent. As difficult as this is for girls, I believe that something is happening to boys during this time,” says Farrell, “that makes suicide a greater possibility.”
Males as villains seem to be the only viable models around these days. Given the almost total lack of women in the imaginary world of the video games and films that occupy preadolescent boys, the male’s sense of apartness, of alienation, ill prepares him for the spectacle of adolescent girls. With all the desire and ambition in the world, how can he measure up to the hero she has in mind? An adolescent learns from watching his parents’ marriage. When his father looks at his mother, how does that exchange work, how does it seem that his mother fills his father’s eyes?
When today’s father was growing up, there was not so much power in the adolescent girls’ camp; physical beauty wasn’t so openly parlayed the coinage it is today. How then does father assist his son in this new power exchange? According to the Glueck study, “Fathers who provided high levels of intellectual-academic support during both childhood and adolescence, as well as high levels of social-emotional support during childhood, had sons who achieved greater educational mobility.”
Paternal support in this study was measured in three critical domains—social/emotional, physical/athletic, and intellectual/academic—and it was found that it is impossible for fathers to be overinvolved with their boys.
What happens when feelings of competition arise? Yes, we expect athletic and intellectual success to stir envy in the older man, but what of the son’s sexual success, his superior physical development, which draws the eyes of women of all ages to him? Especially today, when a man of any age would have to be blind not to recognize the new ascendancy of male beauty.
If the New Fatherhood continues, and a father’s involvement in his son’s life accelerates, we will hear more of the paternal envy of a son’s physical attractiveness and sexual success, given how rapidly males of all ages are moving into the mirror. Competition over beauty between father and son—now there is a new version in the tired old debate between mother and daughter.
Why do men not write more of the adolescent boy’s dreams? Perhaps it is too unmasculine to dredge up these memories, which must also be filled with anger at the sacrifices made along the way. Maybe men don’t want to make youth any easier for their sons. In Winesburg, Ohio, novelist Sherwood Anderson wrote a wonderful description of George Willard, a male adolescent on the brink of life, saying farewell to childhood after his mother’s death:
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun. He shivers and looks eagerly about. The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.
Basic trust, optimism. I carried it with me when I left Charleston for college, as did the boys I met there. We had that look. Yes, we had George’s sense of loss, but it was offset by our expectations that we would meet our mate, who would also be our match. It is harder for today’s adolescents to feel that optimism. Their parents’ faces reveal the hopelessness that permeates much of society, and they are told to brace themselves for a lower living standard—something no other generation of Americans has ever anticipated. As for finding understanding in the opposite sex, it takes extraordinary optimism to rise above the alienation between the sexes that is so pervasive on today’s campuses.
Psychiatrist Peter Blos, who quotes Anderson at length, himself writes that in the farewell to adolescence, the boy/man feels “the limitless future of childhood [shrinking] to realistic proportions, to one of limited chances and goals; but, by the same token, the mastery of time and space and the conquest of helplessness afford a hitherto unknown promise of self-realization. This is the human condition of adolescence which the poet has laid bare.”
6
Feminism and Beauty
“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”
Being a single woman in the sixties was a gift of time and place. To live through the sexual awakening that came with reliable contraception and the independence it offered, especially in an era when men and women seemed to coexist happily, well, if you’d been there, it might help you to make sense of our difficult present. For me, those years are the bedrock against which everything subsequent is referred. If you became sexually active in the sixties, you probably grew up in the fifties and experienced the birth of the current War Between the Men and the Women in the old regime.
It all happened in a decade, less, for until Jack Kennedy died in 1963, taking with him the promise of a new world, we didn’t realize how much we’d counted on him to carry us to the climax to which we’d been steadily marching since the end of World War II. And so the dead father’s broken promise further embittered all those other revolutions: the Civil Rights Movement, the uprising against the war in Vietnam, the Feminist Movement, the hippie counterculture, the drugs, all of it.
I am not saying that Kennedy was the cause of our bitterness but that we grieve for ourselves even now when we see his picture. He stood for the best of the past brought to fruition in him; he was the promise of the future. If you were not there when it happened, when it was A Happening, as we called Big Moments in those days, it must be hell trying to figure out What It All Means. Even with the pieces of the puzzle, it is hard to comprehend because it is so sad, not just his death but the unfulfilled promise to grow beyond what we had been.
Kennedy, the adolescent hero, was the dream of every young girl and the way boys longed to look. In him we saw our selves as we might have grown into maturity, having reached that higher moral level of which Rousseau wrote, if only JFK hadn’t abandoned us. We’ll never know about that, of course, but the rage since his death is that of inconsolable adolescent orphans who remain furious at father for walking out.
Since the end of World War II we have been the richest country in the world, but the rest of the world—they, so much older than we, so much more jaded, having been around for so many centuries, been invaded so many times, been betrayed and repeatedly sold out to foster parents/countries—looks at us and wonders why, like spoiled, rich children, we have squandered our inheritance. Well, we lost our daddy; with Kennedy we lost our image of ourselves.
Prior to the Revolutions of the sixties and seventies, just before the world changed, I had come to live in upper Manhattan, where ev
erything looked pretty much as it had for generations. The grown-ups in those fine old families with whom I dined on Sundays resembled their parents who, in turn, resembled theirs. Only the fashions in the photos on the polished sofa tables changed. For a few moments I belonged to that world still seamless with the fifties, and for this I am grateful, for it remains my point of reference to this day for everything that followed.
I had been raised in a world of sameness, in which everyone had good teeth, a certain income, and education instantly recognizable by their Episcopalian niceness, good hair, affable expressions. Manners were important, very important; I think I miss them more than anything. But women were the custodians of manners, and when eventually we began snapping at polite men who held doors and chairs for us, they began to stare more fixedly at us in that way we say we hate. “Very well, if you tell me in that rude voice not to hold your chair, bitch, I’ll look at you any damn way I wish!” This is not to say that women are responsible for our mannerless world, simply that revolutions have their spin-offs.
New York in the early sixties still had an innocent look, as did the girls on the Upper East Side, where I shared an apartment with two other virgins. There were three twin beds in the room where we slept, one clothes closet, and a telephone answering service that recognized the voices of the men to whom we didn’t want to speak. Gristede’s left our groceries on the back landing, and the doorman’s presence assured our parents that no harm would come to us. There was less traffic, less noise, less garbage, and the white glove counter at Bonwit Teller did a brisk business. Not a picture some feminists or politically corrects would smile upon, but it did last a long time and many enjoyed it.
My roommates and I were in a constant state of romantic love, and though the objects of our affections changed regularly until we had each in our turn lost our virginity, no one had a diaphragm. That one of us would get pregnant was inevitable. Maybe innocent isn’t the right word to describe us, but “stupid” is too harsh a word for my beautiful roommate, with whom I walked to the corner of Second Avenue one Saturday morning and with whom I wept as she drove off to an abortion that would leave her bleeding and in excruciating pain for days. Soon after, she married.
I was careful whom I slept with. I appreciated how profoundly a man who had been a friend would become an addiction after sex: As powerful as I felt working my magic on a man standing up, I became enslaved once supine; it was my mouth, my body, my cunt that gripped and drained him, but he would rise, postorgasm, rejuvenated, would do a better day’s work, while I would lie mesmerized, unable to function until he telephoned or, better yet, returned to give me another fix. I knew my addiction to romantic music was partly self-induced, that the perilous sense of mortality I felt had nothing to do with the individual man, who merely turned the key into my secret garden, but for me, as for all addicts, intellectual understanding didn’t lessen the craving.
We girls in the East Fifties and Sixties were different heights and weights, but there was a practiced, interchangeable look among us that I would say in hindsight was our way of avoiding competition. Nothing accomplished this so readily as the way we dressed; no one stood out in an exhibitionistic way so as to catch men’s eyes. Men were the goal for which we’d been raised, but landing one had to be accomplished without seeming to try too hard. Earning money, being so competitive and time-consuming, meant the last thing a man needed was an exhibitionistic, seductive woman. Yes, he wanted a beauty, all the better to signify his economic success, but once married, he wanted her siren song turned matronly; a working man had no time for jealous suspicions.
When they were away from home, traditional men knew they didn’t have to worry about their women wandering. Women policed one another, making sure no one got more of the pie than her share; envy of a sister’s sexual appetite would have made the Patriarchal Deal unbearable for all the others. Pre-Sexual Revolution, the world was distinctly divided into Good Girls and Bad, and nothing drew the line more obviously than a sexual look that Hollywood had down pat. There was Doris Day and there was Marilyn Monroe. In those days, a girl’s clothes, makeup, hair, shoes, and certainly the way she cast her gaze—never too directly at a man—said everything.
Nothing captured this moment in time like the snowy day Jack Kennedy was sworn into office, that march with pretty Jackie in her pillbox hat up Pennsylvania Avenue that climaxed the American Dream. All previous historical lines converged here, the look of how we wanted to think of ourselves inside and out, our Camelot. They were both so beautiful, so clean-cut, she with her little voice that allowed his words to embrace our highest ideals. This was what a woman did: “Take care of my husband, the President.” That he was an adulterer, that there was a long history within the Kennedy family of crime that seems, still, to have no end, didn’t and doesn’t matter. In preserving them, the look of them, somehow we preserve ourselves, the promise.
When Jackie died in 1994, we huddled together nationally—no, internationally, as when her husband died and the world mourned; once again we stared at the old photos with nostalgic grief, yes, but also to see if they might tell us who we had become. We resonate to their look, because it is how we once wanted to be, a look that said who we were inside. Where did it go, the feeling of being good people? Never mind that it was often a sham, we want it back, the look and the feel.
When I tried to recapture my impression of life on Fifth Avenue in the earliest sixties, what swam up from memory was the title of Irwin Shaw’s short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” The words evoke how I imagined life had always been in New York, the seamless change of years as summer followed spring and men got out their seer-sucker Brooks Brothers suits to stroll with pretty bare-armed girls in pastel dresses. Actually, Shaw’s story was published in 1939, not in the sixties as I had thought, and it took place in Greenwich Village, not Midtown. Well, that’s memory for you. However, I never mistake the precise time when we girls threw away our underwear and shortened our skirts to the crotch, when the look and feel of Nice Girls changed to New Women, when we began paying our own way and initiating sex.
Whatever went wrong back then, we’ll never get it right until we assimilate the past with which we are so absorbed, and consciously decide if there aren’t some things—politically incorrect as they might seem—we’d like to have back. You and I, with our intellectual dogmas, can do without, but when my editor tells me that her ten- and eleven-year-old sons can’t get enough of the reruns of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and The Dick Van Dyke Show, we should listen. When children today stare hypnotically into a screen, watching the same thing again and again, they are hungry to understand, “What does it all mean?”
The past is with us as never before, and no one feels the itch for the old more than the young, who never knew a society of lavender-scented grandmotherly bosoms. They should be wanting something absolutely different from the past world, but they can’t move on until they get our mess straight. They know this better than we who threw out the invisible things they are looking for, like courtesy and patience. Teenagers put on the fashions we wore thirty years ago, reinvented by grown-up designers who don’t question why they imitate instead of create. Children inherit the black holes we forgot to replace because there is nothing with which you can replace ethics.
Today’s mail brings the latest W, the fashion bible, in which Cary Grant, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, and Sophia Loren are featured in a section titled “Before the Brat Pack, before the Jet Set, there were the Beautiful People… in the Fifties.” “They look so chaste and old-fashioned,” says my husband. But we stare at them as if for a message. A few pages on is the latest fashion statement, The Slip. Not a dress that looks like a slip, but a slip like women used to wear in the fifties and early sixties. Only this one is sheerer, though it is intended as outerwear. Sophia and Grace probably had one on under their outerwear. This is not prurient criticism. What strikes me is the look of past and present: Somewhere in time they meet, today’s emaciated teen m
odel in her insubstantial slip and the fleshed-out movie stars of the fifties/sixties who look strangely younger.
Jax Pants and the Twist
I’d arrived in New York looking and dressing pretty much as I had throughout college, where my luck had changed. I was seen differently in the North. Perhaps it was that the men were taller, or were looking for someone with a quality I possessed that was as yet unknown to me. I’ve never understood why, at our first college mixer with Harvard men, the handsomest fellow in the room cut a path through the crowd to me. There I stood, smiling that phony smile I’d learned to replace the natural grin, expecting the worst. He was a hero, a star athlete, and I became his maiden, wore his enormous maroon crew sweater with the big “H.”
To my surprise, I was light-years ahead of him in the sexual dance, meaning prolonged hours of kissing and fondling, and was also used to fending off the Southern boys raised to go as far as they could with a girl. This prince, however, had been raised in a cold climate, and strangely enough, it was disappointing to find myself more heated than the man. It was as though we danced to a different beat. Though he begged for marriage by our second year together, I had lost interest. I’d found that there was more to a man than a pretty face.
In him I discovered I had the power to attract men. Perhaps I also learned from what he lacked, that I should/could display my own preference. In any case, I began to look for sheaths rather than full skirts. I would have blushed had you said that I wanted to be noticed, for it wasn’t thought out; only in hindsight do I recognize where my life as an exhibitionist began. Virgin that I was, and would remain for several years, I nonetheless wanted to wear my true colors.
The girls I knew in New York had inherited our mothers’ philosophy on dress; we all wore Nice Girl clothes and sensible shoes that quietly signaled one’s station in life. There was a respect for “good clothes” that one was expected to wear for at least a few years; winter wardrobes were stored with the dry cleaner and brought out the following year with an addition or two. That was how I had grown up. When a box arrived from my great aunt Mildred containing elegant dresses and suits from Hattie Carnegie that were barely worn and beautifully kept, my mother was thrilled. Dior’s famous New Look may have made international news in 1951, but the vast majority of Charleston women in “our class” dressed sensibly.
