The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  About four months after our launch a power struggle erupted over leadership, not an openly aired and argued competition but something far more insidious, like a whisper campaign in school against a sacrificial lamb. There were midnight telephone calls, secret meetings of the so-called Steering Committee, the objective of which was to blackball this one assertive woman, to exclude her in the style of Three Little Girls Can’t Play Together.

  I do not mean to portray myself as innocent, for when asked to attend these clandestine powwows, I went. But I would return home shaking; I was writing My Mother/My Self at the time, and women’s cruelty to other women was precisely what was filling my waking and dreaming hours. I suppose I was flattered to be included, but to this day I am not sure exactly what crime The Accused One had committed, the pretty blond one whose head was on the guillotine. Certainly, the real argument was over power, something we couldn’t say out loud, being women raised by women. Because we had not been taught to compete in a healthy way, these meetings were not about open, honest argument.

  Here we were, seasoned, card-carrying feminists, and rather than hold together a group that would aid us all professionally, we were going to disembowel it. One woman had the audacity to question the group’s leaders. And she was very pretty, and tough, and had genuine leadership ability herself. The most cardinal of her sins: She had broken the no-compete rule. In a final letter she wrote:

  A few years ago Nora Ephron wrote an essay about vaginal sprays. One reason they sell is: you can always make people believe something is wrong with them. Hit them where they hurt—in their sense of fear, their sense of being ugly, their sense of smelling bad. You can always make people feel that if they are assertive, they smell…. Raising one’s voice… good anger, and confrontation are not my problem. They are the problem of many on the Steering Committee. Instead of being complimented on aggressiveness, I was told I needed vaginal sprays.

  It was a nasty piece of business, that campaign to spray her, an ugly little war waged by grown women. There was no enemy “out there,” no evil men upon whom we could dump our badness. The enemy was within, a cruelty that each of us had felt at one time or another, seething inside, just waiting for a victim. And here she was: Spray her!

  The linkage between women’s ink and women’s blood might sound obtuse, but it is integral to this book. What we women allow ourselves to say, to write, is constrained by our deepest feelings about our bodies. The constant need to appear clean, to not humiliate ourselves, censors even what we allow ourselves to think.

  Men don’t spray women. Other women have the art down pat. Time magazine’s review of my book on women’s sexual fantasies, Women on Top, is an example of one woman’s spray job of another. The article was titled “Batteries Not Included.” The line that most revealed the reviewer’s insecurities was “Gone are the appealing men, comfortable settings, clean sheets and room service of prefeminist fantasies.” “Clean sheets”? Pray, madam, how do you have sex and keep the sheets clean? In meek response to Time magazine’s denunciation, my publishers hastily removed the Simon & Schuster logo on the next printing of the book.

  It’s been almost twenty-five years since Nora Ephron wrote that essay, practically the life span of the women’s movement. You would think that as women grew professionally and economically we would become impervious to The Spray Job, that our self-image would have moved beyond the niggling fear that the taint of our genitals had once again fouled the environment. I regret to report that the genital spray industry has never been more profitable.

  Ephron’s article, titled “Dealing with the, Uh, Problem,” was published in Esquire in 1973. Since the “problem” is key to women’s self-image, let me reprint Ephron’s quote of psychoanalyst Natalie Shainess: “These [feminine hygiene] products further paranoid feelings in women and in men about women—and the way they’re advertised presents a horrendous image, of women being inherently smelly creatures. It undermines the sense of self and ego even as it’s supposed to do something about it.”

  The quote above is as applicable today as when first printed. We will put a woman on the moon and in the Oval Office before we will address the unspeakable issue of how we women feel about our genitals. The only thing that has changed since 1972 is that the market for all feminine hygiene products has flourished, and nothing has contributed more to sales than the very knowing supervision of women who now run the focus groups and write the advertisements.

  There is nothing harder than convincing women that this subject pertains directly to self-perception, image, how we feel about and see ourselves in the mirror. So much is suppressed, denied, “forgotten,” a whole lifetime, beginning at birth, in which our hands, eyes, and thoughts have been directed away from that area that is the heartbeat of our gender. We compete with men in the workplace, live with or without them by choice, but at any moment of any day we are vulnerable. As the persecuted woman in my Women’s Ink group said, “We can always be made to feel that there is something wrong with us, that we are ugly, too assertive, too loud, that we smell bad.”

  All the success and power in the world are as dust opposite the fear of unexpected humiliations, bad odors, the sense of failure as a woman. We buy our own clothes, care deeply about our looks, but what chance has the pretty new dress, the lovely hair, the shapely legs against yeast infections, odors, menstrual blood, an entire zoo of microscopic germs threatening to overtake our vaginas and expose us publicly: “What’s that smell?”

  “Put our fingers in there, put something deep into ourselves when we’re bleeding and then remove it when it’s full of blood? Absolutely not!” said a focus group researching a new product that would allow women to enjoy sex—“without a mess”—during their menstrual periods. “They simply didn’t want a product that involved them having to understand where to put something inside themselves,” said the market researcher. “They didn’t want to have to reach in and remove it, come in contact with the menstrual flow.” Nor were the added days for sexual activity seen as a bonus. “I’m used to getting ten days a month off from sex,” was a common comment. “I don’t want those days for sex, thanks very much.”

  Most men have no clue as to the extent of our genital anxiety. Even we are distanced consciously from how that sensitivity affects everything else in our lives. The next time you read the cautionary text of a feminine hygiene ad, consider what buttons are being pushed; in reminding other women of the communal Cloaca we all share, the sameness of our lives is being emphasized. In their way, these ads and commercials, which now enter our living rooms via television in living color, are warning us that any woman who thinks she is smarter, faster, prettier than any other had better think again. In the reminder that we are all alike in this one unfortunate matter, the competitive woman is tripped up. A woman needn’t be warned in so many words that she has soiled her skirt; all women need do is leave another woman out, give her the treatment as in my Women’s Ink group, to let her know she smells bad.

  How easily we are deceived by the New Women’s looks, the wrappings on the seductive exhibitionists who stride the city streets, hems up to the crotch, nipples discernible beneath the cropped, tight sweaters prescribed by this season’s fashion dictators. Not just men taken in, but we women too, convinced that a woman who can dress that authoritatively, broadcast that domineering look, is absolutely sure of herself, down to the bone. Anyone with that kind of attitude obviously has her life under control. Oh?

  I sometimes think the hard-earned money women invest in looks nowadays is a last-ditch denial of how we really see the most intimate area of our bodies. We are left to wonder which vision of womanhood is today’s Real Woman, the constant reminders of our vulnerability or the new Bitch Heroine?

  It is all of a package, The In-Charge New Woman is inseparable from the insecure child, is still slave to her genitals. If we are ever to get the look right, interior and exterior lined up, it will be the most important missing chapter in feminism: We will learn to protect ourse
lves contraceptively. Among thirty- to thirty-four-year-olds, 41 percent of pregnancies are unplanned. And this age group is the fruit of our labors of the past twenty-five years. Nothing will change until we explore our deepest, unconscious feelings about our genitals.

  As sexually voracious as books, films, and television may portray the new Dark Heroine, the beautiful bitch who kills and fucks “like a man,” the lie is at her center, as evidenced by the gigantic, female, genital cleansing industry. She is more technological product than an organic New Woman who has created herself from the inside out, meaning on the unconscious level, which is where real change occurs. She is a media event, born of our new economics. Her look was inevitable when our recent accomplishments could no longer be contained within the Dark Blue Dress for Success Suit. We women wanted something to show for our hard work. So there she/we stand in our Armani suit, self-confident, a dash of arrogance. But we bleed once a month, emit an odor in crowded elevators, fear we have a dark spot on our skirt.

  The new heroines may fuck men to death on the screen, push their naked breasts in men’s faces, and leave their panties at home, but what women honestly think about our bodies is hammered at again and again in television commercials for vaginal sprays, douches, disinfectants, anti-yeast creams, all of which promise to make a garden of the sewer. The new Bitch Heroine is long overdue; she represents the very real dark side of women denied in our earlier idealization. “Shoot the women first,” Interpol instructs its antiterrorist squads, because female terrorists are considered more dangerous than male terrorists. Is anyone really surprised?

  Audiences accept Linda Fiorentino killing men without losing a lift on her stiletto heels. It is real life that is scary, real women acting out their venomous resentment and bitchy rivalry, all the while smiling and saying, “Oh, no, we love one another!” Women’s rage is in the air, the Harpies are everywhere; screenwriters give us Killer Mommy movies and killer adolescent movies too, such as Heavenly Creatures, the story of two girls who bludgeon to death one of their mothers. The real event took place in 1952, when there wasn’t an appetite for such films; today, people want to see it like it really is.

  Notice that the beautiful Bitch Heroine is almost always without child. She is more weapon than woman and probably doesn’t bleed at all, couldn’t/wouldn’t conceive. Her loathing is gathered into a ball aimed at men who have created all the evil in the world. There are many reasons she despises men, not the least of which is their failure to convince her of her beauty, an accusation she would never level against other women.

  Men are such easy scapegoats; we blame them for the brevity of our functional lives, hemmed in by the onset of youthful beauty, our reproductive ability, and the cessation of both, and we blame them for not listening to our voices. And yet, I haven’t a doubt that our primary contention over power lies not with men but with one another. Nowhere is this more obviously played out than in the beauty arena.

  Today we have alternative powers, but we have returned to beauty with unparalleled intensity; beauty is where the answers are, the reasons we do not feel like the powerful women we have become. Women have important business to settle among ourselves. Until we accomplish it, we cannot take up seriously with men.

  The word lesbian doesn’t quite describe the sexual curiosity women today have about one another. They are like each other’s archeological dig, in which the excavation of genitals, breasts, the taste of skin is where they look to find what is missing in their lives, something men cannot give them. Having inherited the rights of feminism, they wonder why they do not feel equal, not so much equal to men, but to other women.

  Forget men’s protestations of their beauty; it is her voice they trust and her beautiful body with which they want to identify. Any day, any month, any year, they may choose to enter into heterosexual love and sex—which is women’s privilege—but first they need to hear this lovely other woman tell them in her womanly voice that she finds their genitals delicious, sweet to the taste, perfection in design. Given that she too bleeds once a month, her voice is credible.

  In Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize—winning novel The Color Purple, two women become lovers, Celie and Shug, after Shug introduces Celie to the beauty of her own genitals:

  She say, Here, take this mirror and go look at yourself down there, I bet you never seen it, have you?

  Naw.

  And I bet you never seen Albert [Celie’s husband] down there either.

  I felt him, I say.

  I stand there with the mirror.

  She say, What, too shame even to go off and look at yourself? And you look so cute too, she say, laughing. All dressed up for Harpo’s, smelling good and everything, but scared to look at your own pussy.

  You come with me while I look, I say.

  And us run off to my room like two little prankish girls.

  You guard the door, I say.

  She giggle. Okay, she say. Nobody coming. Coast clear.

  I lie back on the bed and haul up my dress. Yank down my bloomers. Stick the looking glass tween my legs. Ugh. All that hair. Then my pussy lips be black. Then inside look like a wet rose.

  It a lot prettier than you thought, ain’t it? she say from the door.

  It mine, I say. Where the button?

  Right up near the top, she say. The part that stick out a little.

  I look at her and touch it with my finger. A little shiver go through me. Nothing much. But just enough to tell me this the right button to mash….

  Albert and Harpo coming, she say. And I yank up my drawers and yank down my dress. I feel like us been doing something wrong.

  In women’s sexual fantasies of other women, the woman may call herself lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual. Women these days express little guilt or ambivalence in either thinking about or being with another woman. Erotic interest in one another permeates the fashion shots in major women’s magazines, in film, and in clubs such as The Clit Club and Lesbo-A-Go-Go: When Lesbo-A-Go-Go opened several years ago, groups of older feminists marched in to lecture their younger sisters that they were demeaning themselves. A near-naked beauty yelled back, as quoted in the Washington Post, “I’m very much a feminist and it’s not degrading…. I like to get the crowd excited, to see their mouths” gape.

  “A lot of what women don’t like about their bodies is an area they never look at,” says psychologist Lonnie Barbach. “Because they think it’s ugly, it grows out of proportion in their minds until it develops a kind of largeness. The ugliness of their genitals becomes the heaviness of their thighs, too small breasts or too large, whatever they’re criticizing in their body.”

  There were few erotic thoughts of sex with other women in My Secret Garden, published in 1973, but somewhere in the eighties, women changed their minds about oral sex and their partner of choice, in real life and in fantasy. Even women who have no actual desire for lesbian sex dream of having another women’s mouth explore that part of the body that more than any other disqualifies them from the beauty contest. As expert as a man’s mouth may be, the fact that he is male and therefore can’t grasp what is wanted in this exercise—to be made to feel that we are beautiful and delicious enough to eat—makes him second-best. Mother was our first Permission Giver; only someone who has a vagina and a clitoris can alter mother’s opinion.

  The sensations many women describe during oral sex come close to loss of consciousness, and the cry of orgasm is near tears, as at a long journey’s end. That time to which oral orgasm returns us was when the bargain was first made to give up love of our body in exchange for the love of the person upon whom we were dependent for everything. The goal of the fantasy is to push past her “No,” deny it. The scene of the fantasies during oral sex often go back to adolescence, when the rigid antisex rules were first tested; we are in parked cars, on beaches, in public rooms where discovery is imminent and the thrill of the forbidden so intense that it carries us over the top. For women, sex is breaking mother’s rules, which is why the mirro
ring effect of another women’s genitals, another woman’s mouth, has so much power. She has known The Sewer at its worst, when it bleeds and the stench is unbearable.

  Most of us learned silence at our menarche. This business of bleeding flows alongside the lost reverence for women’s voices. It must be very dark indeed, this blood, if no one speaks of its mystery. Silently, we too learn to count the days so that the unspeakable bleeding doesn’t catch us unawares. In our cautionary muteness we swallow the spontaneous outburst that used to be our custom. What if we made ourselves the center of attention at the very moment our body betrayed us?

  Time’s 1970 Kate Millett cover story referred to her as “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” In her book Sexual Politics, Millett elaborates on how the Patriarchal System confers on to women the dark, evil, unclean aspects of sexuality while keeping for itself the higher attributes of sex as symbolized by fertility through the Phallus:

  Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most effective agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her alone of the dangers and evils it imputes to sexuality. The Greek example is interesting here: when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility through the phallus; when it wishes to denigrate sexuality, it cites Pandora. Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump the female and sex together as if the whole burden of the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one.