The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Gloria Steinem provided what was needed; she was good for the cause, good for the ever hungry media. “We tangled a lot,” said Friedan in a 1992 interview, referring to her relationship with Steinem. “I was really opposed to the radical chic, anti-man politics she espoused: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’… I didn’t like it when she went to the League of Women Voters to support the ERA and, in her speech, said that all wives are prostitutes. I thought it was politically unwise, and I fought it within NOW and within the women’s movement generally. I fought attempts to push the women’s movement out of the mainstream, and that put me in opposition to Gloria.”

  In time Betty Friedan would be accused of being too soft on men. The organization she founded, NOW, would move ever more toward militancy, and by the early seventies, Gloria would be feminism’s leader. That she was articulate, charismatic, and a beauty, even with the dark glasses, the hair curtaining her face, made her even more of a standout figurehead: “Eat your hearts out, guys, she is ours!”

  As the more radical fringe groups began dying out in the early seventies, NOW (and other moderate organizations like the AAUW) began to absorb the radical women who had nowhere else to go. Thus, these organizations were pulled toward the matriarchal (anti-male) left; by the mid-seventies fully half of the nation’s NOW chapters were opposed to joint custody as a starting assumption in a divorce.

  In 1970 Kate Millett appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which excerpted her Sexual Politics, and in the same year Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was also published. A group of women writers and editors decided “that a glossy magazine that appeared every month on newsstands around the country might make feminists of thousands of women.” In 1971, New York magazine offered a preview of Ms. magazine, and in January 1972 the first issue hit the newsstand and sold out in eight weeks.

  Now media decision makers began to take the complaints of the women’s movement more seriously. “As they began to treat the movement with more respect,” writes Flora Davis, “they abandoned the more militant radical feminists…. By the mid-seventies, most of the radical feminists who had written the books and lit up the talk shows were no longer heard from.”

  No one has been more of a political savant regarding the ticklish feminist issue of beauty than Gloria herself. It is an interesting sidebar to modern feminism that its most recognizable leader has managed during the past twenty-five years to juggle beauty with “being taken seriously,” while simultaneously maintaining intimate relationships with various wealthy, powerful men.

  “Steinem’s expressed attitude toward her own loveliness is that she just wishes everyone would ignore it—with the implication that anyone who responds to it is simply treating her as a Sexual Object—but things are a little less clear-cut than that. ‘She doesn’t like this idea of being thought of as a sex symbol, yet she seems to ask for it in a way—perhaps without realizing it,’ says New York Times woman’s news editor Charlotte Curtis.”

  Steinem’s fondness for the mirror has been obvious throughout her career, and she has succeeded in making it seem that her being beautiful was inconsequential. Having put away her miniskirts in the early seventies, she chose to see her new feminist self as a woman in jeans, hair falling across her face, face hidden behind large shades. But what the rest of the world saw was a beautiful woman in tight jeans with wonderful hair and glamorous tinted glasses who also spoke persuasively and was followed worshipfully by an army. The packaging mattered all the more for being equaled by its content, a genius at leadership of women who publicly disdained men and other women’s pursuit of beauty. What a coup.

  I sat opposite Steinem in a videotaped interview we did in 1989, when I was beginning research for this book. She couldn’t have been more agreeable, nicer. I was constantly in jeopardy of falling under the spell of her line of reasoning, so contagious is her geniality, the—well, yes—motherly tone in which she seems to persuade you away from your own point of view. When I asked her bluntly about her beauty, how she used it, felt its power or hindrance, she answered with a story: “There was an assignment at Life magazine in the sixties that I was eager to get. I arrived with my portfolio to be greeted by a man who looked up at me and said, ‘We don’t want a pretty girl, we want a writer.’ I didn’t get the job.”

  The considerable heat Mort Zuckerman takes in Revolution from Within may be the price one pays for falling in love with a saint; Zuckerman used to tell her that it was harder living with a saint than being a saint. In the end, after quarreling with herself over the luxury of limousines, the big house in the Hamptons, the genuine pleasure of being the companion of one of the most powerful men in New York while simultaneously representing the feminist movement, Gloria voted in favor of The Sisterhood.

  It is a fine decision. I genuinely believe that these will be Gloria Steinem’s happiest years, and her most powerful. She has declared herself free of the subversive temptation of beauty maintenance and of men. Her followers now have her all to themselves, though I always believed they never doubted that her heart was theirs and that they relished her ability to use her looks to gain them ground, perks, influence.

  While Gloria was pushing her politics and denying her beauty, Helen Gurley Brown was publishing her brand of feminism, which never wavered. Looking beautiful, getting laid, and making money never made the Cosmo Girl any less a feminist. From the day Brown took over as editor of that ailing magazine in 1965, she stuck to her formula, creating one of the great legends in publishing history. The Cosmo Girl—please note that she never became a Cosmo Woman—was created from Brown’s own rib.

  More the girlfriend of Playboy than a version of a Playboy for women, the Cosmo Girl invites the eye to pause, to peruse, to plunge the extra quarter inch toward the nipple, toward the pubic hair, but don’t look away, don’t not look at me as a sex object, she challenges. Does it bother Brown that her brand of feminism collides head-on with Ms. magazine? Let the near-naked Cosmo Girl reply from her typical full-page advertisement:

  Am I a feminist? Yes. Feminism means you want the best for both sexes, everyone gets the chance to be his or her most achieving self. Have there been inequities for women? You bet, but our sex is getting there… lawyers, doctors, scientists by the thousand and we’ve just begun. My favorite magazine says equality and achievement are crucial for women but you don’t have to stop loving men while you get there. That’s being feminine. I love that magazine. I guess you could say I’m That COSMOPOLITAN Girl.

  The only thing that worries Helen Gurley Brown, for whom I wrote my first published magazine article, is circulation, whether she is keeping up with the successive generations of women who buy her magazine. Circulation just climbs and climbs, edging toward 3,000,000, making Cosmopolitan “the largest-selling young woman’s magazine in the world.” It is more than five times the circulation of Ms. With great reluctance she has accepted a forced retirement in 1997 at the age of seventy-four, after thirty-two years at the helm.

  Gloria and Helen have sat crosstown at their respective magazines for years. According to my research, Ms. has never taken on the Cosmo philosophy. The silence probably irks Brown, a tough competitor. Gloria wisely doesn’t argue with America’s favorite women’s magazine: how to blame big-bad-men-the-brutes for forcing women to buy their monthly bible of sex, fashion, glamour, and advice?

  Locked into its narrow formula, Ms. magazine often struggles to survive. There is little humor and, of course, little regard for the human craving for beauty and sex. Describing women’s devotion to romance as a “displacement” was pretty much how Steinem would instruct her followers regarding women’s devotion to beauty; it has always been an open secret that Gloria loved the mirror, but political leaders are famous for their glaring inconsistencies.

  It is maddening that Gloria cannot enlarge her vision of her feminism to include other voices, dissension, healthy argument. She is a highly competitive leader, but alas, her brand of competition is filled with denial, a kind
of mother-knows-best refusal to let her children disagree, grow up, maybe usurp her throne. The new generation of feminists does not blindly accept her absolutism; but when they argue against such Steinem “truths” as the one below, their books and articles are shelled by the heavy hitters who still control the media:

  “It isn’t that women attracted to pornography cannot also be feminists,” Steinem wrote in “Erotica vs. Pornography,” “but that pornography itself must be recognized as an adversary of women’s safety and equality, and therefore, in the long run, of feminism.”

  Since beauty and sex are so intertwined, it is not surprising that Steinem is no less peremptory and absolutist regarding beauty’s role in feminism: “So women who ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ about clothes and make great fuss about them are playing into the image so many men like to have of us—of ‘fluffy little things.’ To play into that role is actually to help in the dehumanizing of women, and we should stop it.” How then to explain her own pursuit of beauty’s power?

  Over the years, feminism has lost hundreds of thousands of members because women in Middle America didn’t see themselves as part of the movement. Ordinary women wanted equality but balked at the man-hating look and speech of a feminism that would have separated them from their husbands, sons, and lovers. It is a major reason for our having lost the ERA in 1982. We lost it for other reasons too, but for me, the sad nonsense of it was the inability of feminism to relate to women who choose the traditional style of living. Feminism was not the look of a life that they wanted; many of them didn’t so much agree with Phyllis Schlafly as disagree with the bossy arrogance of the toughs who dictated feminism, Big Girls who, just like nine-year-olds, weren’t going to let you play unless you played by their rules.

  As novelist Anne Tyler said in 1982, “A lot of the failures of the movement are built into the people who are speaking for women…. Basically I agree with everything they say, but I find myself wanting to disagree because of the way they say it. If people like me, who are pro-women, are put off by it, imagine other people.”

  In 1980, women like Raquel Welch were rejected by Feminist Headquarters when they offered to lend their considerable support to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Was the fear that the loyalist membership would be undermined by a subversive interest in beauty maintenance? Feminism’s concern with the illegitimacy of beauty continues for no other reason than the fact that beauty arouses competition, that emotion that cannot be discussed.

  Absolutism has soured feminism since the late sixties, not healthy argument, but imperious women’s voices, each claiming ownership of the word feminist. In the April 1992 pro-choice rally in Washington, in which 500,000 people marched for choice, Betty Friedan, mother of the Women’s Movement, wasn’t even asked to speak.

  Says Friedan, “I’m not going to lie. I’m very hurt when I feel trashed by the leaders of the organizations that I helped to start. But I’m not going to indulge in the media’s delight at exacerbating the divisions between us. I do admit that I was really hurt that I wasn’t asked to speak at the rally…. It’s sort of a de-Stalinization of the women’s movement—their attempt to write me out of history, though I don’t think that will happen.”

  The “banishment” of Friedan was tawdry and vindictive. Can’t these women see how it makes “their” feminism look when they exclude the woman who pioneered modern feminism? When a Susan Faludi charges Friedan with “stomping on a movement that she did so much to create and lead,” and consequently becomes Steinem’s new acolyte, one must look more closely: Faludi is meek in self-presentation and possesses a tiny voice, close to a whisper. She is no challenge to the queen; but Friedan—well, she may not be a beauty, but she believes in its power, is an honest lover of men, and has a strong voice.

  Why did a book like Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth rally women from college campuses across the country? It offered the standard panacea for all of women’s ills: Big Bad Men made me pursue beauty, starve my body. As much media coverage as the book received, it didn’t detract women from the heated pursuit of beauty that had started up again in the mid-eighties. Nor did it deter the author from fondly including men in her next book, who turn out to be beloved, wanted, needed.

  Beauty/sex/men will be that route by which we exit the old feminism. It is a good road; well argued, written about, and practiced, it is already taking us into a more modern feminism. Writers like Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Nadine Strossen, to name a few, have already put their published voices on the line; puff-balls of smoke from the old feminist headquarters label them “pseudo” feminists, post-feminists, “faux” feminists, silly girlish names that betray the weaknesses of the old guard. However, one great victory may come out of this name-calling: It will eventually get us out of the Semantic Jungle.

  Gloria, “America’s best-loved feminist,” sounds no less girlish when she excommunicates Camille Paglia from The Group. Because another woman does not agree with her, and because she is brilliant and much in favor of beauty, power, and sex, Steinem banishes Paglia in print from “her” feminism. “What’s important is that we have progressed enough that being a feminist is no longer seen as some fringe activity,” says Steinem. “It is mainstream enough for anti-feminists like Camille Paglia to need to say that they are feminists.” It is a damning remark, but filled with vanity and arrogance too in its sweeping power of random banishment.

  Paglia can be difficult, dictatorial, and egocentric too, but if she is not a luminous feminist, a warrior consistently sharpened by her own brand of fierce intellectual debate, then I do not understand feminism. She certainly lacks Steinem’s ability to please, but that is precisely what makes her a powerful contender; she belongs to that generation of feminism that speaks its mind without apology, without smiling The Nice Girl smile. Isn’t this what we fought for, a feminism that encourages debate so strong it can swell and contract like a heartbeat, even on disagreement from its members?

  If Steinem were not so narrowly focused on controlling her leadership of a small band of feminists but instead reached out to the millions of women eager to be part of feminism, she could still win the day. But she doesn’t know how to lose, a prerequisite for a healthy competitor. The fear of loss strangles hear, pushing her to an ever more rigid position. It is not competition that she hates so much as the inability to handle defeat gracefully.

  She often quotes Alfie Kolm’s book No Contest: The Case Against Competition; Kohn would eradicate the competitive ethic altogether. But, as one reviewer wrote of the book, “Kohn is describing competition in its pathologically excessive form. For many of us, the pleasure of the contest makes the outcome unimportant. It is meeting the challenge, not beating the other guy, that lifts the spirit. Games do not just socialize for the lust to win, they also teach the idea of impartial rules and fair play…. Implicit in [Kohn’s] analysis is the idea that if we could get rid of competition, we could enter paradise…. The more likely alternative to the right to compete seems to be the loss of rights altogether.”

  On her side, Paglia loves the competitive debate. Intellectually, she is a wizard at the powerful workings of beauty throughout history, having written often about it, and clearly recognizes Gloria’s conflict over beauty and competition. From a stage in Manhattan, in front of the 60 Minutes cameras, Paglia delivers her challenge to Gloria: “I hate victimology. I despise a victim-centered view of the universe which, you know, is symptomatic of current feminism.” She goes on to accuse Steinem of “keeping down dissident female voices over the last twenty years.”

  When the 60 Minutes camera crew turns up at Steinem’s own panel discussion crosstown, they are barred at the door. “No, you’re not going to ask a question for your show about an antifeminist woman,” yells Gloria from the dais. “We are not going to contribute to the dissension. This is our night…. Turn the cameras off. We don’t give a shit about what she thinks.” It was the only time I have ever heard Steinem lose her cool. Her often denied com
petitive spirit was on fire. She is not going to give up “her” feminism gracefully.

  An exhibitionist at heart, Paglia fairly loses control when a camera focuses on her, a public demonstration with which I sympathize, knowing too well the invisibility the writer feels, alone for years in a room, leading some of our profession to an over-the-top desire for applause. But Camille Paglia is doing an impressive job of being in her own words, “the Paglia cigarette boat that goes POW, POW, POW. I put so many torpedoes into those… big heavy, lazy battleships [of feminism]… they’re slowly sinking and they don’t even know it.”

  Women’s Ink/Women’s Blood

  There was a group of women writers to which I belonged in the mid-seventies, which in its small way reflected the best and worst of feminism, unspeakable contradictions that in the end dismembered our club as cruelly as a bomb planted at its center. We called ourselves Women’s Ink and met informally at a different member’s apartment each month to socialize and to exchange professional ideas.

  Not only do writers live inside their heads, but most spend the day alone in a room, dealing with thoughts that in one form or another also end up in our dreams at night. Professionally, we have a naive attachment (no doubt growing out of this isolation) to our agents and editors, whom we choose to believe have our interests foremost in their parental minds. While they may like our work and even us, the agent/editor/publisher alliance comes first to each of them. You can see how many voids a group like Women’s Ink might fill, giving us a setting in which to gossip, find consolation, and discuss the convoluted workings of contracts, royalty statements, and book tours.

  There was from the start, however, a rivalrous electricity in those big West Side apartments where we gathered, which sent many of us home feeling as though we’d just been through a sorority rush. It was hard to put your finger on it, but in hindsight I’d say it was the cliquish Girl Grouping of the eighth grade; there were the “stars,” the much published women, and we lesser mortals, or so we felt.