The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  I understand the black-and-white nature of Revolutionary zeal, but twenty-five years later women have sufficient power to address the shades of gray, which is really how we live. In this middle ground, can’t we see who is most assiduously keeping alive the belief that we women represent the dirtiness of sexuality? It is we who have been raised to recognize the filth of our sexual parts, learned from other women, meaning that only women can change the image.

  Men are not born hating women; it is learned. There are reasons for men abusing and raping women, reasons for the anger that fuels harassment. Is it not more important to know the reasons for men’s rage, even if it involves some understanding of how it must feel to men that we no longer need them, that we want their jobs, their balls, everything?

  One night during the Winter Olympics in 1994, my husband and I were lying in bed watching the women’s figure-skating finals, oohing and ahing at the skill and beauty of the athletes. Still awash with admiration at the spectacle’s conclusion, we switched channels to Saturday Night Live, where comedian Martin Lawrence was beginning his opening monologue.

  Is it possible that two jaded adults in this day can still be shocked? It wasn’t just by what was said but by the fact that it appeared on a network show. Well, as the title of the show says, it is “Live,” meaning that unless you were watching the original broadcast, you missed a lot of Lawrence’s monologue, which was quickly edited. Let me add that it wasn’t easy to obtain a video of the unedited show; even the NBC executive I telephoned, a friend, had difficulty getting this for me, so eager was the network to bury the evidence in response to the reaction of offended viewers.

  Lawrence and others customarily do similar routines on cable shows, but this was a network first. Men, especially young men, are angry with women and have found ample ammunition in the television commercials that advertise women’s humiliation. May I present Martin Lawrence:

  See, I’m single. I’m a single man. I don’t have nobody; I’m looking for somebody.

  But I’m meeting a lot of women out there—you got some beautiful women, but you got something out there, I gotta say something: some of you are not washing you ass properly…. Now, I don’t know what it is that a woman got to do to keep up the hygiene on the body. I know I’m watching douche commercials on television. And I’m wondering if some of you are reading the instructions. I don’t think so. ’Cause I’m getting with some of you ladies, smelling odors, going, “Wait a minute! Girl, smell this, this is you. Smell yourself, girl!” [Then, to the camera:] Smell yourself! I’ll tell a woman in a minute: “Douche! Douche!” Some women don’t like when you tell them that, when you’re straightforward with them. “Douche!”… I say, “I don’t give a damn what you do. Put a TicTac in you ass! Put a Cert in your ass! This looks like a good damn place for a Stick-Up up in your ass!”… You know, I’m a man; I like to kiss on women. You know, I like to kiss all over their bodies. But if you’re not clean in your proper areas, I can’t kiss all over the places I want to kiss. Some women lets you go down, knowing they’ve got a yeast infection. I’m sorry. Sorry! Come up with dough all on your damn lip! Got a bagel and a croissant on your lip! “Anybody got any butter? I like jelly on mine.”

  The comic delivery only heightened the anger behind the insult. Since that night I have heard or read enough rap lyrics to get the message: Young men aren’t going to take it any longer, our Woman Power, our disdain of them.

  The New War Between the Men and the Women builds; each sex reaches for its weapons. Fashion has become the theater in which we costume our anger. Last year’s models, dressed in the leather bustiers of the dominatrix, carried jeweled whips and knives as they strode down the runways in killer stiletto heels. Full-page fashion shots in the major women’s magazines featured naked models, male and female, presumably making love, or was it war? A threat of violence, danger, was emphasized, but also the sense of lassitude as though it all didn’t really matter. Smartly dressed models posed behind men standing at the urinal, the transvestite was everywhere, and it’s all become so ordinary no one discusses it.

  A recent Diet Sprite TV commercial Chows a “career” woman walking up to a bar, sitting next to a guy, and saying, “All men are liars. They say they love you, but they don’t. They say they love kids, but they forget to mention that they already have two. They tell you that the bandage on their ring finger’s from a fishing accident. Yeah.” Then she takes his glass, has a swig, and asks him what it is, to which he replies, “Diet Sprite.” She throws the drink in his face, calls him a liar, and stomps out. The Diet Sprite people tell Maureen Dowd of the New York Times the ad is aimed at “independent” women who “follow their instincts.”

  More than twenty years ago, in a book called Sexual Suicide, conservative George Gilder warned that if women didn’t go back into the home, leave the workplace, all hell would break loose, pretty much as it has. Given the scope of the revolution, which is still ongoing, how could we expect less? Having freed woman from the constraints of Patriarchy we see that she is in many ways “just like a man.” The Dark Heroine, the bitch, the leather-clad dominatrix, the rage, was always there. What happens next will depend upon women as we zero in on the target of our rage; sooner or later women have to face one another. But at least it’s out there, the rage, not swallowed like it used to be, until it made us ill.

  Last week’s Sunday New York Times was a revelation. I had not realized the extent of the new women’s “underground comic universe,” there in living color on the front page of the “Arts and Leisure” section. According to journalist Roberta Smith, “The female underground began to approach critical mass in 1990…. Their work may constitute one of the 20th century’s most accessible, most psychologically detailed portraits of the many forms of female life and life style…. Everything from artistic crises to bodily functions is fair game…. Taken to extremes, and usually with a drawing style to match, the comics can be a wonderful outlet for the emotions. Nearly every woman cartoonist has used the medium for venting some form of female rage…. In one memorable Di Massa strip, a heavyset man sits next to Hothead on a park bench, carelessly letting his leg touch hers, an experience known to most women who ride subways. Fulfilling an untold number of rush-hour fantasies, Hothead simply whips out an ax and chops off the offending limb…. [Women cartoonists] offer evidence that women are subject to the same feelings, torments and desires, and capable of the same unspeakable acts and fantasies as men… their work removes women from either doormat… or pedestal status and seeks to put them on an equal footing with men.”

  This may not be politically correct, but in a new medium for women it reflects another portrait of The New Feminism. The Sisterhood prefers to gain its ground by projecting men as brutes and women as good, and there is very little humor. But comedy, along with fashion, has always been a form of expression of social upheaval. The look of the new generation of comediennes who appear regularly on the Comedy Channel is another exciting indication of today’s fractured feminism.

  Twenty years ago, I was searching for examples of women who dared to risk the humiliation that every comic must face. Only Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers qualified. To put oneself on the line publicly, to gamble with the possibility of shame instead of adulation, which is what a comedienne must do, is tapping into that wellspring of embarrassment that surrounds the menstruating female body. What if she stood on that stage and “stained” herself, made an outrageous, dirty joke that fell flat? The new generation of comediennes doesn’t just make fun of sex and violence, they also get into menstruation and abortion. Unlike Martin Lawrence, they are making fun of themselves.

  “Traditionally, women who make people laugh are not feminine,” says Gail Singer, the director of a documentary on women in stand-up comedy called Wisecracks. Stand-up comedy is “not the proper place for women to have that kind of strength and wit.” Comedienne Robin Tyler explains, “All of a sudden she’s got the center stage—and she’s not a ballet dancer being caught by a man,
and she’s not an opera singer waiting for the guy….” As veteran comedienne Phyllis Diller put it, “Look, comedy is an aggressive, hostile act, and men are brought up to be aggressive and hostile. Women are brought up to be gracious and self-effacing.” When male comics finish their acts, says Singer, there are groupies, women fans, waiting for them at the stage door, but “there is no parallel for the powerful, effective, successful woman comic.”

  When I watch two comediennes tell the following jokes about menstruation—in front of an audience—I see history in the making. If you don’t find them amusing, take heart in the knowledge that enough airing of the “unmentionable” will contribute to less tension on women’s faces. Remarking on the new menstrual pad with wings that actually flap in the TV commercial, as if they are about to take off into the sky, one comedienne swings a leg up over an imaginary pad and pretends to ride it as if it were Pegasus. Or this one: “‘With Kotex towels, no one will ever know you’re having your period,’” Jenny Lecoat quotes from an advertisement. “Oh sure! Until you sit down in front of the class and you’re three inches higher than everybody else!… Do you remember the new ones they brought out that were toilet flushable? We all fell for that one, didn’t we? Flush a sanitary towel down the toilet—like you might flush a television down the toilet!”

  I hear these jokes and The Nice Girl of my adolescence confronts the ten-year-old exhibitionist on her high walls, and I feel made whole. Comedienne Joy Behar points out that there are, however, certain jokes men can get away with that women cannot. “There is a male comedian working today who is absolutely filthy and absolutely graphic,” she says. “He starts things with, ‘So she’s sucking my dick,’ or ‘So I had my tongue up her ass.’ …If a woman ever said that, she’d be driven out of town.”

  Perhaps there will come a time when women will tell jokes as filthy as the ones men tell, but that should be the woman’s choice, and ours to listen to her or not. We aren’t there yet; the Nice Girl Rules still punish sisters for not doing things they should, and doing things they should not.

  In the last twenty years’ effort to show that we could do the job as well as any man, we have lost sight of our gender differences that make women mysteriously powerful, and men too, in their variation from us. The knee-jerk reaction to women who preach the holy mysteries of the fertility cycle is that they are California Earth Mothers. One advertisement for washable cloth menstrual pads reads, “Many women share that [after washing their menstrual pads] they spontaneously return this rich soaking water to their plants and gardens for amazing results.” A little extreme? But isn’t it somehow more positive than Madison Avenue’s pretty young woman on television who recounts her humiliation when her sanitary pad failed and she had to tie her jacket around her waist?

  Are women going to continue to bury our self-esteem in humiliation and disgust regarding our bleeding? A Victory Garden fertilized with menstrual blood isn’t everyone’s choice, but the heart sinks at the prospect of yet another generation of women raised on advertising that plays to their disgust at having to touch their genitals during menstruation.

  What does it say when the Women’s Tennis Association recently turned down a $10 million offer from Tambrands (makers of Tampax) to replace Virginia Slims as its sponsor? It seems that women can live with cigarettes that kill but not with a reminder that we bleed once a month, and oh, how humiliating if one of the women on the court stained her lily-whites!

  Once upon a time women’s bodies were worshiped. “The great annual festival of Aphrodite in Argos was called Hysteria, ‘womb,’” writes Barbara Walker. “Megalithic tombs and barrow-mounds were designed as ‘wombs’ to give rebirth to the dead. Their vaginal entrance passages show that Neolithic folk went to considerable trouble to devise imitations of female anatomy in earth and stone.”

  Back in the seventies Betty Dodson got a name for herself by painting large canvases of vaginas and teaching classes in masturbation for women. Never officially accepted at feminist headquarters, she still teaches masturbation, a vocation that grew out of her own silent coming to terms with her body as a child when a nonverbal message from her mother was communicated that her genitals were ugly and ill-formed. Dodson was convinced that masturbation had stretched the inner lips of her vulva, disfigured it. Until she was thirty-five and divorced, she was too humiliated to let a man see her disfigurement; then, a lover, “a connoisseur of cunts” as she called him, persuaded her to let him look, up close and with the lights on, and pronounced her beautiful. “He got a stack of girlie magazines and showed me pictures of women who had genitals just like mine!” she says. “It was an enormous transformation for me to realize that I was normal. I still have workshops where women have never looked at their genitals!”

  It is all of a piece, this business of bleeding, masturbation, sexual intercourse, and contraception. When one is dirty, all are dirty. Because the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution were simultaneous, and because some of us marched for both, we think they were one and the same. The truth is that feminism turned its back on the physical, on sex, on men and beauty too. It is time to move on.

  Dressing for Success

  “I haven’t a thing to wear!” Women’s ubiquitous lament since Eve left the Garden took on new significance when armies of women began entering the workplace in the 1970s. It was no longer a joke, a despairing woman standing at her overcrowded closet.

  After generations of dressing to get men’s attention, women were faced with what to wear when we wanted to be seen as equals, fellow workers. How not to be seen as a sexual woman, but instead, to be taken seriously? For starters, how were we to look in the mirror and imagine a New Self, an image, up until this moment, totally different from the look of the women in our families and among our friends? It wasn’t just men’s eyes that we had to train not to look for breast and leg, we had to train our own. And we had to cease comparing ourselves to other women, pitting our looks against theirs. Enter John T. Molloy and “The Dress for Success Look.”

  We’ve been so deeply into fashion madness in recent years that Molloy has slipped into oblivion when, in fact, his Dress Code for women, while not beautiful, was a godsend nonetheless. There we were in the mid-seventies in jeans, minis, short shorts, maxi skirts, costumes invented in reaction to the high glamour of previous decades, when suddenly the feminist rhetoric, all the marching and banging on the doors of industry, paid off: The doors opened. Well, perhaps it wasn’t that sudden, but women were keenly aware of being improperly garbed, of not having anticipated that while we didn’t want to be seen as sex objects, we did have to wear something.

  Molloy’s Dress for Success Suit will be remembered as the look of women entering the workplace, armies clad in sensible shoes, briefcases clutched at our sides, all wearing the dark blue power suit, white shirt, and, as Lily Tomlin put it, “wearing something around your neck that looks sort of like a scarf and sort of like a tie and sort of like a ruffle and doesn’t threaten anyone because you don’t look good in it.” Ours was obviously the female version of a man’s business suit, and the alacrity with which women bought it demonstrated the desperate need it filled, the dilemma at wanting to be seen as a serious business person, not the sexy woman in tight pants and cropped sweater, not the Courrèges Girl in white boots, not the Halston Glamour-puss, no, no, no, not any woman ever seen before, but a New Woman, equal to any man at getting the job done. You couldn’t be on an airplane in the mid-seventies and not notice that half the women aboard were studying Molloy’s book.

  Today we resurrect all those pre-Molloy looks, as if in once again putting on the bell-bottoms and the whole Courrèges bit we can explain how we got here, why we feel incomplete, angry; something is missing, was left back there in the sixties and seventies, and we don’t know what it is. Which is not to say that Molloy was wrong. He was a genius. His suit got us in the door comfortably, and it still works well for many women.

  But the sexes have the occasional itch to flash one ano
ther. Animals can show off their genitals, raise their tails, curl their lips, expand their bodies, swagger, send a scent. We wear clothes, use their language to telegraph messages; in wearing today’s stiletto-heeled, lamé boots and leather bras we are trying, in a simple way, to say that men and women would like to work out a New Deal. That we dress in the styles of the past, repeating it in every possible variation, might suggest that to find our way again men and women have returned to the looks we were wearing when the mating game stalled, when women went to war.

  Molloy’s uniform for that war conveyed a state of mind: Don’t look at me as a woman or a sex object but as a working person; take me seriously. At a glance, it was meant to undo generations of visual appraisal. Women as well as men judged and valued women by what we wore, imagining the size and shape of the bodies beneath. We women were as voyeuristic as the men, and though we’ve just begun to appraise men unabashedly, we’ve always critiqued one another shamelessly. Feminist literature would have you believe that The Dress for Success Suit was solely aimed at men, but the competition over dress that it eliminated among women was equally important.

  John Molloy had begun his research on the influence of wardrobe when studying the careers of men and women in academia, where he discovered that what a teacher wore had a lot to do with how much respect and attention she/he received from students. When he broadened his thesis to include the workplace, he found that high-level female executives had difficulty in getting respect, leading him to deduce that to have authority, one must look authoritative.

  What Molloy preached to his readers was that when a man wore a suit, it was as if he were wearing a sign that read, “I am a businessman worthy of respect.” In the 1970s, women had no such easy solution in their closets; Molloy’s uniform for women promised to do for them what Brooks Brothers and the gray flannel suit had done for men.