The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique went to the core of what was wrong in The System that feminism attacked, a system that manipulated women to find their only role and identity as wives and mothers. Site never painted men as the enemy but instead saw them as victims of the same system, controlled by big business, advertising, the universities. If women shrunk themselves to fit the stereotypes presented by women’s magazines, men died at their desks of too early heart attacks in the race to live up to their side of the bargain.

  Among the women I knew in New York and London, where I was living in the early seventies, sexual freedom was very much what the new feminism was about. What woman would not assume that our new politics of freedom embraced the erotic, an enhanced union between the sexes to which we women would bring our newly awakened sexual desires, different from men’s, but not alien. Nothing had controlled our lives more rigidly than sex, an openness to which could ruin a woman’s life. Now everything around us—films, books, clothes, music, dance—encouraged women to grow, expand, to become that sexual person they had perhaps secretly dreamed of being. Surely, this was the core of the new feminism.

  Not precisely. Perhaps it was naive, but in the beginning some of us eagerly set out to be card-carrying feminists, fighting for economic and political equality, and loving men too. The new erotic horizon and feminism were commingled in our minds; I cannot exaggerate how heady a mix this was, feeling part of a world of women pushing the boundaries. For the first time in history, we controlled contraception. Publishers were frantic to sign women to contracts for books, poems, articles that elaborated how women felt; we were the new undiscovered continent. As our works were published, as more and more women joined the workforce, rebelled, dropped out, or “did their own thing,” there was a tacit understanding that no idea was so obscure, or “unladylike,” that it would not be acceptable to our sisters.

  I had never heard or read about other women’s sexual fantasies. Very well, I thought, if the world really wants to know what women think, what we are like sexually, why not a book on these secret erotic thoughts? It was 1969. My own fantasies, long suppressed, had only recently swum up from the preconscious in answer to the permission that was in the air and the blessing that the Pill had automatically given our sexuality.

  The first hint that I had entered territory more taboo than ever imagined was the wall of denial I ran into when interviewing some of the most sexually adventurous women I knew. “What is a sexual fantasy?” they would ask, looking at me blankly. They wanted to be part of anything sexual, wanted to contribute to my research, and were pained that there might be something they were missing. But women having sexual fantasies was something of which they had never heard.

  These were halcyon days in London, and sexual reality had never been livelier; I would try out the topic over drinks at the Aretusa or Annabelle’s, where the initial response was eager titillation. But when a married woman ventured to describe the images that ran through her head during sex, her husband’s stunned reaction silenced the table. Or another woman would stop her with, “Oh, I thought you were very happy in your real sexual life, sweetie. I didn’t realize you needed fantasies.”

  For some reason, the internal engine that stoked erotic fantasies aroused envy in women and anxiety in men, as if it were being suggested that having a fantasy diminished a woman’s real sexual life when, in fact, quite the opposite is true. Nothing is quite so sexually thrilling as the forbidden, erotic ideas, the earliest associations of which go back to the first years of life. Breaking those rules, which once would have lost us mother’s love—or so we feared—takes us over the moon. When men go to prostitutes, they don’t ask for “ordinary” sex, they want the forbidden. Now women too were swimming down into the preconscious to play in the same dark waters.

  But it took awhile. After four years of interviewing women, writing articles, placing ads in New York magazine and the Los Angeles Times, I discovered that the quickest method of putting women in touch with their fantasies was to tell them mine as well as other women’s. Permission. We were raised to be such Nice Girls that the idea of thinking of another man while in our lover’s arms was tantamount to out-and-out adultery. Once a woman read or heard other women’s fantasies, however, permission overcame denial, the unthinkable became acceptable. When I tell this story to young women today, they look at me in disbelief, so sewn into literature, film, advertising, even conversation, are women’s erotic dreams.

  My own experience in writing the text for My Secret Garden was no less daunting. I might as well have been violating everything I’d learned in Sunday school. So tense did I get at the typewriter, I’d have to leave the room where I was working, go to another part of the house, and lie on the sofa until my heartbeat returned to normal. I’d thought of myself as fully liberated; had I not invented the idea of this book, despite what analysts and therapists had told me, including Cosmopolitan magazine’s house psychiatrist—“Women do not have sexual fantasies”?

  When I sent the galleys of My Secret Garden to an editor at Ms. magazine, a woman with whom I’d partied in the halcyon days of the sixties, I assumed that she would find the material, at the very least, interesting. Her own unabashed sexual exhibitionism in those days was legend. What I received back was a one-sentence, terse reprimand stating, “Ms. magazine will decide what women’s sexual fantasies are.”

  That was my first taste of feminism’s antisex stance. A few months after publication, a review of MSG appeared in Ms., where I was accused not only of making up the entire book of “subterranean sadism,” but also, and let me quote, “Anybody who could write those thoroughly reprehensible sentences isn’t a feminist, of course; and that’s one of the troubles with this book.”

  Twenty years later I can smile at this rough scolding, but at the time it took my breath away and, I regret to say, humiliated me, which, of course, was the intent. But it taught me a lesson about The Sisterhood that I have never forgotten: You play by their rules or not at all. Until a few years ago, I proudly called myself a feminist, refusing to abandon allegiance to a movement in which I’d always played a part. But recently the victim, anti-men, anti-sex Matriarchal Feminists have so misappropriated the word feminism that I, along with other women, many much younger, have hesitated to use the word, though we have no other. It is absolutely intolerable to the Ms./Dworkin/McKinnon camp that other women enjoy the forbidden fruit while they, for reasons of their own, abstain.

  One of the early slogans of feminism was “Women’s freedom will be men’s freedom too.” During the seventies, when I lectured on college campuses, I often quoted this slogan, elaborating on how the changes in women’s lives would also liberate men. But the anti-men sentiment had already heated up, as some feminist leaders realized they needed a scapegoat not only for society’s injustices against women, but for women’s against one another. Dump it all on Bad Men was what it came down to. It wasn’t unusual at those college lectures for angry young women in the audience to stand and shake their fists at me for being sympathetic to men. “We don’t give a damn about men!” they would yell. “Why are you talking about their freedom?”

  The other dead giveaway that one’s heart was not true to The Sisterhood in the seventies was the pursuit of a kind of beauty that advertised a sexual interest in men. “How can you say the feminist things you’re saying and dress that way?” a confused student yelled at me at a small university in Indiana. My words of political equality excited her but my gray flannel pants and cashmere sweater cried, “Mirror, Mirror!”

  One of my earliest memories of the rigidity of feminism is of something that happened at a party where my friend the late actress Joan Hackett and I had wandered into a room apart from the rest of the group. Hackett, as she liked to be called, was a brilliant conversationalist, and we were in the thick of it when several men entered the room. When they left, she turned to me and said, “You change when a man comes in the room.” Though I loved her dearly and admired her courage as
much as any woman’s I’ve known, that night I felt that the lack of understanding lay with her. It was criticism of me as a feminist: I had been engaged in talk with a woman and had altered my expression, or my speech, when men approached.

  How many times have I gone over this incident; surely, just as we “change” when an older person or a child enters the room, we reflect the arrival of a person of the opposite sex. Not to change when a man enters the room—not to do whatever is natural and spontaneous—doesn’t make you a better feminist, it desensitizes you, robs you of the genuine reaction.

  We’ve needed more than the one word feminism to define us for a long time. The argument over sex and beauty has for twenty years not just divided the ranks but has deepened within each of us individually the Good Girl/Bad Girl split. As with our relationship to mother, we fear we can’t be our selves, sexual and separate from her, and retain her love too.

  A few years ago I was lecturing at the YMHA in New York and happened to mention women who lived out their exhibitionistic fantasies, one of which was to “flash,” to ride the bus with knees apart and no panties. A group of self-proclaimed feminists in the front row yelled, “Yeah, a woman can do that and no man has the right to lay a finger on her!” I commented that I felt this particular fantasy might be one of those best left safely in the mind. All hell broke loose in the front row, the women angrily insisting that women can do anything they want and vile men can’t touch them.

  This is what feminism has come to, not safety in an unsafe world, but omnipotent thinking that allows women, in the guise of rightness, to do whatever they choose, and should Bad Men attack, well, that too is a victory, for it only goes to show how really evil men are as opposed to us poor little victims. Feminists have it backward; the lesson to be learned isn’t that All Men Are Brutes, but that women must take responsibility for our selves. The columnist William Raspberry caught this behavior precisely, writing of “feminist leaders who find it impossible to acknowledge serious progress toward gender fairness—not because there has been no progress but because their power derives from their ability to keep portraying women as victims.”

  Herein lies my argument with The Sisterhood: If my face gets warm, my eyes light up, my pulse quickens when men enter a room, why should I have to prove my feminism by reacting to men as though they were women? As the differences between the sexes diminish, I celebrate everything that is opposite in us. My dear friend Hackett was an angry woman; over the years she had told me about her childhood, her mother whom she loved but toward whom there had clearly been a great deal of rage. Like many of us who cannot easily accept anger at mother/women, she found it Iess painful to hang it all on men.

  Separation of sex and sisterhood continues to grow. In the eyes of certain feminists, you cannot have your primary union with men and be a feminist too. It is as if The Rules of adolescence never went away, wherein any one girl who had more sex than the others was ostracized. This exclusionary clause is a direct outgrowth of the childish adage, Three Little Girls Can’t Play Together, because two always gang up on one and leave her out. Men/sex/beauty amuse competition and thus destroy The Group.

  How many millions of potential members has feminism lost, women who would eagerly have joined an organization that celebrated women’s rights, including the right to love men, to work at home, and, yes, to pursue beauty too? “It is often falsely assumed… that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality (like initiative and ambition),” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, “and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women.” Pretty soon The Rules get to be what the revolution is all about. The Rule Makers get so proficient at patrolling to be sure no one person steps outside the limiting boundaries that they become dictators.

  Almost twenty-five years ago Ms. magazine declared in its first issue, “The Sexual Revolution and The Women’s Movement are polar opposites in philosophy, goals and spirit… the so-called Sexual Revolution is merely a link in the chain of abuse laid on women throughout patriarchal history.” In separating itself from The Sexual Revolution—no, let me correct that—in separating itself from sex and men, feminism won the battle and lost the war.

  Had feminism embraced sexuality, it would have become the great educating force in sexual responsibility, teaching women to love our bodies so that we automatically taught our daughters the beauty of the female form and, in particular, our genitals. What more obvious piece of business could there be for feminism than to celebrate the beauty of sexuality, our greatest power, the ability to give life? Had the slogan for women been, “We will protect our bodies, respect our genitals, so that we may be responsible for our sex, and enjoy it,” women would be less susceptible to unintended pregnancies.

  Chastity would also have value; preserving one’s virginity out of regard for one’s whole self, mental and physical, until that time when a woman was ready for sex, would be thought of as a spiritual act.

  And if feminism had kept to the original promise that “Women’s freedom will be men’s freedom,” then men would have felt kinship with our revolution, seen what was in it for them. It would have allowed both sexes to adjust to the awareness that the Patriarchal Deal, set in place generations ago, was a dead end for men as well as women. Men would have recognized that, while there would be competition with women in the workplace, they would have less of the onerous job of constantly providing.

  If that had happened, more women would have embraced feminism, bringing their men along with them. We would have family feminism. Without the rigid definitions of what was men’s and what was women’s work, each of us would more naturally choose that area of work we felt better suited for—home or workplace, or both.

  Today’s twenty- and thirty-year-olds, benefactors of our various revolutions, play with issues of sex, competition, and beauty. That both sexes will remain in the workplace is a given; but they are handicapped by our reluctance to address the years we know best, having been there, been the ones who changed the status quo, turned the world on its head thirty years ago. It’s all of a piece, then and now. Here, today, are the fashions we wore, back in the stores again. When a new generation of young women puts on bell-bottoms and stumbles down the street in platform wedgies, it is more than fashion reinventing itself.

  Last night I went to a book party for a young woman’s first novel. The story, set in the seventies, is about a woman whose life has been overshadowed by her older sister’s, a flower child of the sixties who died mysteriously in Europe. “Why have the sixties been such an inspiration and a burden to generations since?” read the copy on the front flap. “Only by dispelling the ghosts of a romanticized past does (the heroine] come into full possession of her world… a journey essential to all of us.”

  It is precisely what the clothes, the look, the revivals from that era are about, an effort to understand what happened then, so as to understand today. Was there really a Sexual Revolution, and if so; why is there so little love between the sexes now? Why do the feminists from those years, who were there, attack men so angrily? What happened to Peace and Love? Young women today are confused by feminism’s ongoing tirade against men and sex.

  The loss of sexual joy is separate from the plague of AIDS and venereal diseases. The latter have blighted sex in their own way. But women control sex; without our consent there will be none. If the sex that we do have is irresponsible, accompanied by accusations of abuse and harassment, along with a dramatic increase in women choosing to have sex with other women instead of with men, feminism has something to do with it.

  Think of The Dress, the one in fairy tales, which has magical properties. Only in fairy tales does the power of beauty win out over the envy of the evil sisters/bad women. In reality, we see ourselves in the magical dress, but we do not buy it out of fear of other women’s disapproval. Wasn’t freedom the goal of feminism? When men were our meal tickets, and women our whole emotional w
orld, the rivalry between women that sex and beauty aroused was a very real problem.

  Now we pay our own way and can have as many men as we want; even with the scourge of sex-related diseases, we could practice safe sex. But we don’t. Venereal diseases today are as epidemic as unintended pregnancies. Clearly, sex isn’t what women really want. If so, they would be responsible and have more of it. The fact is, in divorcing feminism from the joy of sex, the old-line feminists maintain their control over women’s world by making men the enemy and keeping women under the censorious control of other women.

  Never in my lifetime have clothes had the burning significance that they have today. The sexual look has replaced the sexual act; as in Vogueing, the goal of being seen, looked at, is the crowning achievement. A new look must be created every five minutes, a fashion world gone haywire, ultimately tearing the clothes apart, exposing the seams as in an act of search and discovery, as exemplified by the deconstructed look that was hot for a season, only to be trashed and replaced by bras, corsets, underwear sewn onto the outside of the garment. What are we looking for?

  In bad old Patriarchal days we wore the same clothes for years, took care of them. What we had on our backs was not as important as who we were inside. We have not yet found a substitute for The Patriarchal Deal. Feminism would have us believe that their antisex, anti-men formula is the Final Solution. But the young generation is not buying it, which leaves them with a problem of identity.

  In a 1992 Time/CNN poll, 50 percent of women surveyed said that they did not believe the Women’s Movement reflected the views of most women. In an Atlantic Monthly article that interviewed the editors of the top women’s magazines, the issue of readers’ identification with the word feminist was decidedly mixed.

  We read a book, listen to the babble at a cocktail party or on television, memorize the latest revolutionary rhetoric, even act on it, and think we have become new people, moved light-years beyond our parents. But the deep, unconscious feelings we took in from our parents, the sense of right and wrong that they got from their parents—which is our conscience—these feelings change slowly, if they change at all. Neither men nor women realized thirty years ago how long it would take to begin to change a way of life in which each sex had found its identity for hundreds of years.