The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  When I got my first paychecks I wandered through Saks and Bergdorf Goodman looking for something that was Me, but when the polite saleswoman approached, I had no words to describe what I wanted, who Me was. Then I discovered Jax, just off Fifth Avenue on Fifty-seventh Street. Jax explained why the Nice Girl dresses at Bergdorf’s didn’t satisfy. So unschooled was I in fashion that I had never studied my body, never appreciated what I had until I saw myself in the mirror in Jax pants. Something awoke, a slumbering realization that I too had the power to draw people’s eyes to me in that way I’d seen other girls being taken in, visually adored. It was exhilarating.

  In their not so small way just minutes before Pucci, Courrèges, and the miniskirt, Jax pants signaled the Sexual Revolution brewing at sea. Those amazing lengths of wool jersey and checked gingham were cut narrow, straight, stitched in such a way as to make a well-turned ass and long legs irresistible. I’ve known women who say their lives began in Jax pants; I would number myself among them.

  What bliss to twist at the Peppermint Lounge in Jax pants, a mix of music, sex, and a look that came together by design. To twist in sensible clothes would have been self-defeating. Not everyone who grows up feeling invisible, losing early battles within the family to more beautiful others, automatically turns into an exhibitionist, but that there are so many of us today, male and female, parading in search of latent voyeurs who will see us, pick us up, and love us, is not surprising. As single-parent families have multiplied, so have short, tight, transparent fashions.

  My lovers in the early sixties were as distant as I could get from the Nice Boys with whom I’d gone to college. Was my choice of men of whom mother wouldn’t have approved in retaliation to her refusal to recognize me, even to see me? Perhaps. Or was I following in my admirable Aunt Pat’s path, seeking the company of architects, painters, actors, and musicians? Perhaps. But unlike my aunt and mother, I wasn’t looking for marriage, and the possibility of motherhood was so distant as to be unimaginable. Marriage, motherhood, meant stopping. Life was just beginning.

  To me New York seemed a woman’s town. On the arms of different men a girl could move nightly from uptown to downtown to crosstown; men, on the other hand, seemed confined and defined by their individual milieus, where their circle of friends seldom changed, a group pretty much determined by their work. To my eyes, men were like the demoiselles of Amsterdam, each offering his unique specialty in his unique milieu; men were happiest with their own sort, and each group—Wall Street, advertising, music, art—had its own appeal, publicized by the speech, dress code, and professional expertise in that particular world. Socially speaking, men seldom left their communities; Greenwich Village types didn’t turn up at Upper East Side parties, nor did Wall Streeters frequent the West Side lofts of filmmakers.

  But a woman, ah! On any given night she could accompany a man into a world where she had never been, where she would meet people who led totally different lives than she had ever known, who would bring up topics never before discussed and, most of all, who would see her in a way that she had never been seen before.

  I was an anomaly, a nice girl from a nice family tripped by adolescence into a state of semi-retardation; like Humpty Dumpty I was trying to get back on my wall. Men helped me. Men were my postgraduate course in areas of living and study I never knew existed, and they were patient teachers to a good listener. Especially the men I met on the West Side and downtown, who didn’t look like the Harvard and Yale men from my past. They had a reckless way about them, as though they had dressed in the dark and didn’t own a mirror, by which I mean there wasn’t a Brooks Brothers suit in sight, but their eyes looked at you without apology, taking you in like a good meal. There was no masking of emotion on these faces.

  The most interesting were Jewish. They expected you to have opinions, and listened as you formed thoughts never before expressed, no one having ever asked. Their laughter was loud and spontaneous, and the eagerness with which they argued, the volume at which they laughed, all told me that I was wise and lucky not to have married after graduation like all the Nice Girls on the Upper East Side. I had been formally educated in fine schools, but in the eyes of these people I was uneducated, and I wanted to learn, explore their worlds, become like them, relaxed, easy, assertive, and self-supporting. Much more than other women, these men were my role models.

  On the back of my lover’s Honda I wore my Jax pants below Fourteenth Street, once the significant line of demarcation above which many prided themselves on never going, so boring, so life-inhibiting was the uptown scene considered. The formidable women who held court downtown referred to me—not quite out of my hearing—as an “uptown chick,” meaning that I was overdressed. These women made a religion out of not dressing, which was, of course, a fashion statement in itself. They were five minutes ahead of The Sexual Revolution, deeply into Norman O. Brown and Timothy Leary, and their parties took place under an omnipresent cloud of marijuana. The drugs in the bedroom were the first mescaline and psilocybin I encountered. If I drew the line at group sex, it was more out of the terror of losing my beloved to another woman, or man, than morality.

  What gave me courage and allowed me to stand my ground in that mysterious world were my newfound looks. Intelligence, wit, social graces had been mine, but I had grown up watching eyes pass over me and arms reach out to the beauty standing next to me. When my looks arrived, it no longer mattered a bit whether I was right or wrong about the past. Because I radiated belief in my new sexual self, this is what others saw. “What’s it like to be you, pretty girl?” a woman whose sculptures hung in galleries asked me one night. Another woman had never called me “pretty.” Confident in my Jax pants, I felt equal to these amazing people on West Thirteenth Street, pioneers in the various revolutions about to happen. I bloomed. The more confidence I gained, the more sexually exhibitionistic my look became.

  One day, walking west on East Fifty-fourth Street—it was morning, maybe 9:00 A.M.—I saw a bright tangerine silk shirt and traffic-stopping fuchsia skirt in a brownstone window. I stood outside until the boutique opened, only to enter and discover that there was a coat of the reversible colors as well. Thus was I introduced to Rudi Gernreich and serious fashion, meaning I began to save my money. When I eventually slipped the rainbow over my head, edging the narrow skirt over my hips, the look was transforming, as in a fairy tale. The colors of clothes may seem a strange way to proclaim one’s separation, but given the significant role of sex in establishing identity, Gernreich’s tight, bright clothes became my racing colors. In wearing them, there was no longer any waffling as to whether or not I wanted to be seen.

  The following year I found a Gernreich white silk/jersey tube, sleeveless, floor length, and with a V in the back so deep that underwear was out of the question. An architect who was my date that New Year’s Eve had given me a dazzling white feather boa to complete the picture. Upon entering our first party of the evening, an older woman accused, “You used to be a pretty girl,” convincing me that I had for the first time in my life aroused the envy of beauty in another woman.

  The following year, 1964, Gernreich made history with his topless bathing suit. The bra-burning protest, four years later at the Miss America Pageant, generally gets the credit for convincing women to throw away their bras, but it was Gernreich’s topless black suit with its little suspenders that started it, that memorable photo of the model, black hair cropped, that tells us what time it was in history. As Robin Morgan states in her collection of “Historical Documents” in Sisterhood Is Powerful, published in 1970, “Bras were never burned. Bra-burning was a whole-cloth invention of the media.” Women may not have bought Gernreich’s suit, but we certainly bought the symbol.

  The colors of the early sixties were like nothing that had gone before. Since then, we’ve periodically recycled all of our once meaningful statements of freedom. But for those of us who were there the first time around, the brazen colors and exhibitionism were a “look” we had never seen our m
others wear.

  We abandoned traditional beauty as a slave might his or her chains; we were tearing up the deal that had regulated the exchange of our beauty for men’s wealth. Though no one I knew had yet read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which had been published in 1963, its message was in the air. The role of the miniskirt and bralessness in the sixties was meaningful in more ways than anti-men, antisex feminists want to count. As novelist Tom Robbins wrote:

  I can think of two material items from the 60s and 70s that ought to be honored: the miniskirt, for its glorious debut, and the brassiere, for its martyrdom, its retreat. The widespread donning of the miniskirt and doffing of the bra symbolized the rebellion against constraint—sexual, cultural, political, economic and religious—that characterized the era. Our culture was being re-feminized, and unharnessed women in abbreviated loin-wrappings… expressed this in a way every bit as direct and immediate as men in waist-length hair…. Women might protest an unjust war or battle for civil rights, but as evidenced by their attire, they refused to let the issues of the day make style victims of them or drag them down into despair…. Short-short skirts have come back several times since then. But you know I’m right when I say it’s not the same.

  It has often been pointed out that Proust used clothes to speak for his characters; just so, we imbued our clothes with meaning, and they returned the favor. The walls here in my writing room are covered with the fashion revivals of the past four years. They say absolutely nothing new.

  The various revolutions on the horizon foreshadowed by clothes, music, art, and dance made me hungry for a voice of my own, a voice that had once been mine, prior to adolescence. I began to seek out men at parties on whom I could practice talking, something at which I’d become rusty since swallowing my tongue at adolescence. I’d noticed that people who were at ease in phrasing their thoughts spontaneously had a more open look, an unaffected stance. I wanted to lose the Nice Girl rigidity, and men’s relaxed posture while talking suggested that there was more to gain in opening up the conduit between brain and tongue than just words. Men didn’t say brilliant things all the time, but they were easy in their skins.

  I don’t exaggerate this business of relearning speech—it cannot be said often enough—but it was perhaps the major building block in putting myself back together. I found that some of the best talkers were older men who were not lovers, men who had lived in Burma, fought in World War II, directed films abroad for USIA. I recall standing at a bar in the Village—standing at bars and talking used to be a great pastime—and discussing something with a man, saying it spontaneously before all the juice had been edited out, and how he cocked his head and looked at me more closely, saying, “Where did you learn to talk like that?” He said it with such admiration and cool curiosity that my face burned with pleasure. If there were a moment in time when the rigidity of holding back, compressing myself into a small Girl Girl that had begun in my eleventh year changed, it was then.

  There has been so much written against men as profiteers of women that I would like to paint them as I saw them in the sixties, which is pretty much as I see them today, people as likely to be as kind or abusive as the people of my own sex. When I walk around my house today, I recognize men who were friends, lovers, teachers. My gratitude for what they gave me isn’t for physical gifts so much as a love and appreciation of art, cooking, music, books, along with an addiction to building, leaving me unhappy without the sound of hammers and saws. They made me think beyond the printed pages I had studied at college, made me want to fill pages with my own words. There is a university education, and there is life. “How did you get away?” a man asked one night at a party, recognizing the Nice Girl school behind my remarks. The truth was that I hadn’t yet gotten away. When I eventually did, that success was greatly due to the kindness of men, their generosity of spirit, intellectual encouragement, and the praise they were not too envious to show me in their eyes.

  Women who love men know that they are more mutable than we, their empathic emotional expression having been capped early in life so as to appear manly, and that there is nothing more exciting than removing that cap, freeing them from their “compartmentalized” life wherein they only dare show masculine feelings. I have remained friends with most of my old lovers because the gratitude has been so deep on both sides.

  Wonderbras and Power Suits

  The way we looked back then, on the cusp of all the revolutions, was the way we were. Nice Girls looking for Nice Men to take care of them had a virginal look that promised continuity to would-be suitors; as advertisements for themselves, women knew that they must project their side of the societal bargain by reflecting outside what they were inside: good mother material, meaning kind, submissive, noncompetitive. This projection allowed the man to fulfill his side of The Deal, to enter the grimy, unkind marketplace and bring home the bacon.

  Women packaged themselves for the eyes of men so as to capture their protection and power. “I’ll die if you leave me!” wasn’t just a line from a 1950s movie heroine, it was real life, how it felt. On their side of the bargain, men in their gray flannel suits looked providerish, permanently planted in the ground in their heavy, dark shoes, a look that promised women that all their years of denial of independence, adventure, speech, but mostly sex, had been worthwhile.

  Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, and, yes, Jack Kennedy had that look down pat. They were substantial. Even short, far less handsome men broadcast security to dependent women. Divorces happened, and they were often grimmer than today because most ditched wives had no work skills. But there was pressure to stay together; divorce didn’t look good on a man’s résumé. Companies liked family men. As late as 1970, my husband remembers what a scandal it was in Detroit that the president of General Motors had divorced his wife to marry his hot-looking secretary. A man’s adultery was preferable to divorce, and women lived with it. The women with whom a married man took up, sexual women, had a recognizable look.

  When I lost my virginity—meaning complete penetration and not just the tip of the penis in the vagina—I went immediately to the mirror to see my new self, so sure was I that sex changed a woman’s looks. To my surprise, I looked the same. Luckily, my years as a sexual single girl happened on the advent of what would be called The Sexual Revolution, into which I threw myself wholeheartedly. Now I could look like The Real Me, the girl who had always died to be seen, to be desired.

  The advertisement of my sexual self didn’t sit well with my Nice Girl friends on the Upper East Side, but that didn’t deter me. It was “beyond my control,” as the male character in Les Liaisons Dangereuses said, defending his erotic adventures. Having been strictly raised on The Rules of Nice Girlhood, I was well aware of the penalty, real or imagined, that I paid for having changed my look. The phrase that summed it up was one I would hear from men in the sixties who would smile and wipe their brow after a hot twist on the dance floor, handing me back to my date with, “Too much woman for me!” It didn’t sound like a compliment. What did it mean? I assumed there was no such thing as “too much woman” for a man; I didn’t yet understand The Deal, which meant that even economically powerful men were put in a vulnerable position by a Bad Girl who visually advertised sex. Success, money, to the man in the dark blue suit meant that there was an even greater distance to fall should he be cuckolded, should the hot woman by his side show him to be a weak sister who couldn’t hold on to his woman.

  As much as this may sound like ancient history to women in their twenties and thirties who never saw the early sixties, be assured that these deep feelings don’t go away in the speck of time that is thirty years. Women today may wear their underwear out to dinner, and men too may flash their sexual beauty in a way their fathers couldn’t, but a man looking for a mate still shrinks at the cuckold role more than anything. Approximately 25 percent of young men still want a virgin bride, and that percentage hasn’t wavered much since researchers started counting.

  Was it yesterda
y when I saw the review from Milan of men’s fashions for next winter? Never mind the exact date; since beginning this book, fashion’s revolving door is out of control. They are now calling it The Power Suit, Armani’s new large, broad-shouldered jacket, not exactly what Gregory Peck wore in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but close enough. “Why can’t men be glamourous in a masculine way?” Armani asks. To which I respond, “Here, here!” It has been suggested that what has prompted men to seek a more powerful image in the mirror is “the Wonderbra-clad, stiletto-shod, boa-draped, disco-hopping vixen that women’s fashion has been promoting so brazenly.” Meaning that if women were going to up the ante of their sexual exhibitionism, men had to balance the picture.

  “A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck,” wrote Germaine Greer in 1970; “it endears her to the men who want to make their mammet of her, but she is never allowed to think that their popping eyes actually see her.” We may have dismissed the full bosom in the late sixties as the signature of enslavement to men—making it impossible to find a push-up bra for thirty years—but they are back, not in answer to men’s demands but to women’s. Women want big, big bosoms again and eye their owners with obvious envy.

  Society once felt cheated when people appeared one way and acted another. “She looked like such a Nice Girl! He looked so responsible, not at all like a man who would walk out on his wife and children!” We still expect people to live up to their advertisements of themselves, which is why fashion continuously recycles. We don’t have a New Deal between the sexes to replace the old, an understanding that would enable us, via what we wore and how we wore it, to flash our suitability, our content, to a prospective partner. The question is, do we have any content at all, beginning with, what is masculinity if women are also good providers?