The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Wonderbras and Power Suits. Yes, I can see why yesterday’s “deconstructed” suit for men didn’t hold up opposite a woman in six-inch stiletto heels that throw her lovely body into a devastating S curve, reminiscent of naked women being “taken” by satyrs. Huge breasts and a spinal curvature that cries out for penile insertion makes men in deconstructed suits that flap in the wind look like pubescent, ineffectual boys. When the Wonderbra hit the news pages—the fashion page alone couldn’t contain it—I blinked; had I not owned lovely bras like this in the early sixties, when the little pads were insertable so that one could push up breasts or let them lie?

  When the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced a Special Award for “the Wonderbra, for its contribution to fashion,” I thought, Hold on, this is a revival, not an invention. And to prove my point I searched the basement of our barn until I found the trunk containing memorabilia from Great Nights of the Past. Sure enough, there they were, a collection of lacy push-up confections purchased at Saks in the sixties. I have little else from those years except for some remarkably large black shades, which along with my Wonderbra and nothing else would make a very contemporary fashion statement.

  Thank You, Dr. Guttmacher

  The problem was, I fell in love too easily. The problem was, I didn’t know the difference between love and sex. Once my looks arrived, the opportunities for both multiplied, trouble just waiting to happen.

  I lived on oral sex and the teeniest, weeniest bit of penile entry during my first years in New York. I knew the risk and, when my period was late, would return again and again to the ladies’ room, praying for the spots of blood signaling that I had been spared the nightmare that, more than any other, terrified me. However, once out of the woods for another four weeks, I returned to my play with penises, orgasms, partial entry, until the man ejaculated. As Sally Belfrage said in her memoir of growing up, “No penetration, as they put it later, one in a million, but there you are: you’re pregnant.”

  I was a very intelligent young woman in everything but this, even though I had plans, wonderful dreams of a life that didn’t yet include marriage and children; I paid my rent on time, never wrote home for money, did my work professionally, but in this one thing I failed repeatedly. The promise of that Swept Away feeling in a man’s arms spit in the eye of intelligence; as for all the promises to God that I would never take the risk again if he would just save me this one last time, well, it is a puzzle of infinite magnitude, which we still refuse to discuss.

  Somehow, foolish as I was, I escaped pregnancy; perhaps it explains my dedication to preaching the educational benefits of masturbation in all my books. If someone had informed me early on that I could give myself an orgasm, that my sex was my own and not something The Prince awoke in me, I would not have succumbed to “his” magic so readily. Exploring the labyrinths of my genitals would have been a valuable geography lesson, a primer course in self-esteem that would have taught me that the sexual beauty I sought in my twenties began not with the seductive wrapping I bought in boutiques but with the mystery between my legs, not a sewer but a flower as erotically bewitching as any of Georgia O’Keeffe’s.

  My early professional routine was to take an exciting job requiring eight or nine months of intense work, jobs that had a beginning and an end. I wasn’t looking for a career or marriage, just enough money to pay the rent and allow me to travel abroad until the money ran out, at which point I would return to New York and meet someone, usually a man, who would offer me a new job. I met men on dance floors and at parties, and none ever asked for a favor in exchange for the job.

  I always traveled alone, my first European adventure having taught me that two women sitting side by side were a formidable prospect for any man to approach. I’d ended that first trip in a hotel near the Étoile in Paris, a tiny bordello frequented by prostitutes and their johns who fought at night in the narrow stairwell. It was very cheap. In my cramped room there was a washbasin and a metal bidet on a folding stool, a scene I drew in my sketchbook when I wasn’t reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. I ate peanut butter and waited for something to happen. That is what I wrote in my journal, “I am waiting for something to happen.”

  Each day I walked the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré collecting posters from the art galleries; since I had little money, only my ticket home, I told them I was an art critic for a small newspaper. At night I sat in bars with men who kissed me and whom I kissed back, some more passionately than others, but when the money was gone, I boarded a ship and sailed home, a virgin by centimeters, still “waiting for something to happen.”

  Getting that advantage I’d envied in others all my life, looks, should have been an unexpected inheritance, power to spend. But looks-arrived-late are thoroughly unreliable. When you were invisible as a little child and had to build a world wherein talents other than beauty were honed so that people beamed on you, and then you lost it all in adolescence, well, people’s admiring eyes become untrustworthy.

  I desperately wanted to believe. I smiled back at men, relishing the desire in their eyes, and became increasingly choosy as to whom I allowed to pay for my dinner. Finally, as the mirror convinced me that my new packaging was involving me in too many risky adventures—penile tips slipping deeper and deeper into the tunnel—I walked the two blocks one morning to Dr. Aronson’s office. Lying on the table, feet in stirrups, being fitted for a diaphragm had none of the thrill of trying on a new pair of shoes. What I should have felt was, “Oh, boy, now I can safely fuck a million men, live up to the promise of the Jax pants, the Gernreich tube of silk that forbade underwear when I twisted my ass off at Le Club. Afterward, in Dr. Aronson’s office, I held the ugly rubber disk, the blinds drawn in front of my eyeballs, as he traced on a plastic model with his pencil tip the various canals and caves of my reproductive organs.

  If our sexuality hadn’t been stigmatized as Bad, perhaps the diaphragm might have served women better. If we’d been raised to think well of ourselves as sexual, we would have taken our diaphragms with us as automatically as the keys to the apartment. Instead, a Nice Girl had to remind herself to carry the nasty-looking thing in her purse, “just in case,” like carrying an umbrella on a sunny day. If she came home and hadn’t used it, she felt like a failed Jezebel; if she did find herself in the throes of Eros and had to disengage herself from passion to retire to the bathroom, squat, and insert it in her now moist canal, she was reminded that it wasn’t foolproof; doubled over like a fortune cookie—Good luck!—and pushed up into the vagina, a woman still had to pray it would spring into proper formation around the ravenous cervix, always hungry for the intrepid do-or-die sperm fighting their way upstream like crazed salmon.

  What a stupid virgin I had been, waiting too long to get fitted for a diaphragm and, once owning it, never taking pride in it, still letting myself get “swept away” by passion. Like many young women then and now I was a total contradiction, part independent explorer eager to see the world and fuck any man, but reduced to being a baby whenever I fell in love, meaning whenever I had sex.

  Here was the good doctor teaching me how to protect myself, as a drill sergeant might instruct a recruit in how to save his life. Didn’t I fear pregnancy as death itself, and wasn’t marriage a distant possibility only after I’d finished my Odyssean adventures? The new reflection in the mirror was the power I’d always yearned to enjoy. And this rubber disk, wasn’t it my ticket to travel, a bulletproof vest that promised I could lie with any man I desired, be the seductress I’d been dreaming of becoming? Well, your honor, I would argue that the sexual gift of being able to seduce a man doesn’t automatically empower a girl to stand up, postorgasm, and walk independently away.

  I often chose to go to parties alone, all the better to practice the effectiveness of my new looks, to leave with a man of my choosing. Automatically my eye went to the most unattainable man in the room, he with the sexual self-sufficiency and unapologetic stare; Malcolm, the inaccessible, the distant, emotionally cut-off
dream of my thirteenth year. Now, however, I was not only ready to lie down with a man but had learned the appeal to a man like this of a woman who wanted sex for sex’s sake, not his heart, not his soul. I understood that the offer of sex without strings is catnip to men.

  I was playing a game for which I was ill-equipped. It was exhausting, and it was a lie. I haven’t a doubt in the world that the allure of the unattainable man was born in the fathomless mystery of my father.

  The games we play. Power was only mine until a man’s penis, mouth, lips, inquisitive tongue and hands brought me to orgasm again and again; I gave as much as I took, but men are not raised like we women to respond to symbiotic oneness. Before the night was over, I’d lost myself in him, floated into him. Houdini couldn’t have done it better.

  It must have been perplexing for a man to be seduced by a young woman in a sexy dress, whose assertive body said that she, being so independent, would never hold him down, only to wake in the morning and hear her ask, “When will I see you?” He would do a better day’s work, feeling stronger, more powerful, while I lay bankrupt, the sight on the floor of my former armor—the little Jax dress and high heels a puddle of powerlessness—now that love, oh, desperate love had taken me over.

  This post-sex enslavement scared me far more than it worried the men. It infuriated me that I could not control this witchy transformation. What good was beauty and sexual power if the union I had initiated destroyed my good opinion of myself, made me feel like a beggar while he, lucky Prince, had become such a potent addiction that I would remain glued to the telephone, waiting, praying, not even daring to go down to the store for peanut butter. What if he called when I wasn’t there? Better to starve. As for intellect, giving myself a rational talking-to, well, nobody ever put it better than Dorothy Parker: “Please, God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won’t ask anything else of You, truly I won’t. It isn’t very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing.”

  Damn it, this business of women’s addiction to symbiotic oneness, especially post-sex, should have been one of feminism’s first pieces of business, teaching women the difference between love and sex. Lesson number one should have spelled out the origin of our neediness in the lack of healthy separation from mother in the first years of life, a dependency reawakened by adult intimacy. What good is equal opportunity in the workplace if we still lose our identity in sex?

  Instead of teaching us that we could have love, work, and sex, some of which are nice together but each of which is separate, feminism chose to keep women ignorant, leaving real safety only in ties to other women. Feminism distances itself from sex, knowing that if women were sexually free to genuinely love men, their total allegiance to Women’s World would be lost.

  How to describe the drama of going from a girl with a diaphragm to a woman on the Pill? It wasn’t just the fear of pregnancy the Pill removed, making each day without bleeding like water torture, given how untrustworthy that little devil, the diaphragm, was. No, what the Pill accomplished was to question the Nice Girl’s role in sex, or to put it another way, what was not nice about sex? The Pill erased that frozen Nice Girl smile from my face and with it the iron barriers through which I had to blast each time I approached orgasm. That my fascination with women’s sexual fantasies began just a few years after the Pill entered my life is not without meaning. With its freedom came my first awareness that I even had sexual fantasies.

  How could a little pill, taken daily, extend the perimeters of life, altering how I thought about myself? For many of us, the Pill was what the first Ford automobile had been for men fifty years earlier. It was our ticket, our wheels, our way out of a restricted life: This was when we women began to initiate sex, to approach a man, to seduce him, a feeling unlike any other.

  It was 1963, and I’d never even heard of the Pill until my lover groaned one morning, referring to my diaphragm as “fucking uncomfortable.” I trusted this man, especially in matters sexual, where he had opened doors and encouraged my entry “Read this,” he said, handing me an article about Dr. Alan Guttmacher and the new contraceptive pill. Having no great love myself of that little rubber disk, its feel, its smell, not to mention the messy creams and the ongoing uncertainty regarding pregnancy, I made an appointment to see the venerable Dr. Guttmacher, was examined by the great man himself, and given a prescription for a new life. I owe a great deal to that lover of mine.

  Uncertain as to just where I would be at the appointed hour when I took my daily pill, I carried them in a gold bracelet from which hung a tiny hinged globe of the world. Feeling in charge of my sexuality changed how I walked down the street. I wore higher heels, not just to be seen but to look, to catch a man’s eye, or try, discovering in the process that this was how a man felt. If you are the active one, prepared at all times, and not the passive person waiting to be chosen like a lottery ticket, then you get to take the initiative.

  “What women responded to in the Pill was that it distanced the act of contraception from the sexual act itself,” says Jeannie Rossoff, president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. “We know from experience that the more remote a method of birth control is from the act of intercourse, the more likely it is to be effective.” To this I would add that the Pill’s influence went beyond contraception; in hindsight, it allowed me to feel like a sexual person all the time, not just when I was with a man. My sex belonged to me instead of being something a man ignited. The magic was mine and, by extension, mine to apply to intellectual and social growth too.

  It wasn’t the chemical makeup of the Pill but the fact that one’s preparedness at all times for sex removed the antisex rigidity inculcated into women from an early age, an anxiety we carried with us physically, emotionally, and intellectually. It was a remarkable transformation, not visible or precisely understood at that time, but I believe I had always known that the sexual feeling was energy. I certainly was happier for having it to spend.

  There was nothing reckless in my new exhibitionism, the exhilaration of walking along on a summer evening in a sea-green Pucci dress, a wisp of a garment you could hold on the tip of a pinkie nail and under which I wore only stockings and a garter belt. If men hadn’t looked, I would have been disappointed. Choosing to be visually appraised, drawing eyes to my body, and by my choice, gave me a surge of control. I knew exactly what I had put on and why; I accepted that it was my job to be responsible for the waves I had set in motion.

  Walking east on Forty-eighth Street to the bar where we gathered after work was a march and farewell to that poor young thing at the Yacht Club who’d stood the entire night with her shoulder blades pressed into the wall, watching her friends dance by. Every day between five and six, no matter where I was, opposite whatever man, I would open the globe on my responsible little wrist and swallow my pill. Feeling safe, the captain of my ship, I stopped waiting to be asked and approached men who caught my eye. It was an exhilarating experience the Pill gave, perhaps the most liberating in my life, and I never missed a day.

  You had to have been there to appreciate how much the Pill felt a part of our times, a natural extension of the music, the clothes, the dances, the revolutionary feeling in the air that extended to Civil Rights and the antiwar marches. The Pill was our defense system. That we looked so different from previous generations wasn’t just attributable to fashions. You couldn’t expect the virgin Breck Girl to be part of this, she who had smiled passively from the pages of magazines all my life, so squeaky clean, so pure, so asexual. The Breck Girl epitomized the Good Girl/Bad Girl split, a depletion of energy, a confusion of identity we could no longer afford.

  The Pill set us apart from our mothers in a way that was almost tangible. I couldn’t imagine my mother on the Pill. Before the Pill, women were divided into Jane Russells and Grace Kellys, meaning that sex was so recognizable you could spot it a mile away. That was the past. We may not have used all our new freedoms as responsibly as we might, but it wasn’t the f
ault of the Pill. We were, on some level, and still are, our mothers’ daughters, and fathers’ too, for all of society is at fault for not applauding sexual responsibility in women.

  Society had never before given women a prescription for sexual freedom. Along with the IUD and other new contraceptives, the Pill offered women permission to think beyond patriarchy and matriarchy too. No more “waiting for something to happen”; now the only thing that kept women from “making something happen” was fear of other women’s judgment. The Nice Girl Rules had been set up not by men to control women, but by women to control one another at a time of limited resources; only one man to a woman, only so much sex, no more to one woman than another. Well, the resources weren’t and aren’t so limited today. All women ever needed was the support of one another, the raising of the tyranny of banishment from Women’s World. Neither the Pill nor any other form of contraception will ever be perfect until women want and approve of other women enjoying sexual freedom.

  For a while, maybe a decade, it felt like, looked like, we were getting there. I sometimes think that is what the fashion designers have been trying to recapture in today’s revivals of the clothes we used to wear: our optimism, the promise of sexual relationships evolving into a future where women and men thought of themselves as equals, partners in a dance that either could initiate and in which each is responsible. If the Pill wasn’t perfect, it was the optimism we had back then that we were achieving not just economic, but sexual independence too that gave us that look: on top, chest out, proud, sexual. If subsequent economic achievements feel hollow, it is because Matriarchal Feminism has eliminated both the love of, and sex with, men.