The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Then in the mid-eighties, suddenly—or so it seemed to me—exhibitionistic beauty returned with a vengeance. Something was brewing: When I turned on the television the women reading the news were wearing sculpted jackets in brilliant primary colors; one day in 1985 I opened a fashion magazine and there was Donna Karan’s first collection, featuring a red cashmere bodysuit and wrap skirt, very sexy and very eye-catching. I reacted the way I had to the Rudi Gernreich fuschia and tangerine skirt and blouse I had spotted in a window twenty years earlier: I had to have it!

  The replacement of the harmless Dress for Success Suit with beauty power made me wonder, How are women going to deal with this new sexual look in the competitive workplace? Will they be aware of what they are setting in motion when they enter a room in a drop-dead exhibitionistic outfit? Will they know how to defuse envy? And when men stare at them, will they be wise enough to accept this as what their sexual look “naturally” does?

  I also wondered how men would react when women walked past them in those narrow, ass-hugging, short skirts, alerting testosterone. Some of these men and women were too young to remember sexual beauty the last time around. How would they handle work and sex simultaneously? Even we veterans hadn’t experienced such an erotic cocktail, not in the workplace.

  “In the modern workplace, men are drones, and women are queen bees,” writes Camille Paglia. “Men’s corporate costume, with its fore-and-aft jacket flaps, conceals their sexuality. Woman’s eroticized dress inescapably makes her the center of visual interest, whether people are conscious of it or not. Most women, as well as most men, straight or gay, instantly appraise whether a woman has ‘good legs’ or a big bosom, not because these attributes diminish her or reduce her to ‘meat’ (another feminist canard) but because they unjustifiably add to her power in ways that may destabilize the workplace. Woman’s sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity…. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.”

  Sexual beauty’s return was exciting, yes, even more so in the workplace, for surely now its power would demand feminism’s full focus on the issues of competition, envy, jealousy, which we had initially sidestepped. But no one mentioned competition. Instead, the sexual fashions accelerated, leaving competitors to push and shove for any mirroring eyes that weren’t already preoccupied in their own search for a mirror. Everyone wanted to be seen, and there were no safe rules.

  I felt a conflagration coming on, something historical that went back in time to when I had first arrived in New York. Having so recently left the writing room’s isolation, I couldn’t face another three or four years on a book. But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head; I compromised and telephoned various friends at the major fashion magazines.

  How about a photo story, I suggested, with pictures of curvy models strutting through corporate offices and captions asking all the questions this vision had prompted in my mind. A working woman who has spent half her salary on a suit, Manolo Blahnik heels, and half an hour applying her war paint has her work cut out for her: Other women’s grrr! must be defused: The stirring in the groin of the men whose papers are ruffled by her perfumed passing must be calmed. The room must be brought back to normal, as it was before she entered. It was a lot of responsibility, even for a trouper, much less a thirty-year-old who was new to the game, new to The Gaze. These younger women were raised on a feminism that had enjoined women to dump sexual beauty so as to embrace economic and political power. Well, Donna Karan’s bodysuits were flying out of the stores, and women were crying for more.

  “What do you mean ‘Beauty Power’? What does envy and competition have to do with fashion?” the magazine editors asked. Unwilling to write the full-length article they sought, I invented other ways of approaching this subject. I produced a ten-minute video, pitched a television series on the subject, set up symposia in three different cities, did some consulting for a major cosmetics firm, and, in partnership with DYG Inc., the market research firm headed by Dan Yankelovich and Madeline Hochstein, went to work on a series of focus groups that culminated in a national survey.

  I invited men and women—psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other academicians—to speak at these symposia. They were of an age to remember beauty’s role prior to the sexual and women’s revolutions. Wouldn’t it be useful to young women, I thought, to hear and see how their mothers had used beauty in the days when it was the ticket to survival?

  “Thinking of myself as an intellectual, I feel uncomfortable with the idea of discussing beauty,” said film critic Molly Haskell at that first symposium in 1989, which was titled “The Power of Beauty.” “A woman’s relationship to beauty—to the mirror—is one of the most personal, individual, even secret, mysterious, relationships there is.”

  I’d invited Haskell to speak because I admired her work and had always seen her as a woman who recognized her beauty. Yes, I saw her as an intellectual too, but I’ve remembered her words because they go directly to the heart of the discussion: Can a woman have beauty and any other power as well? Why should an intellectual not also be beautiful?

  Under the old laws of Patriarchy, a woman who was beautiful was not expected to possess other wealth. If she did, she should have the good grace to play it down. I wonder if Molly Haskell would still say those words today, years later, when there are so many beautiful women who are also brilliant thinkers and speakers. I have talked with many of them, and they know precisely what I am saying; it is as if, even today, the old limits are imposed; if you possess beauty and great success in your work too, you walk on eggshells.

  Because women are raised to deny beauty so as to ward off others’ envy, we never really learn its full power, its effect on people, how we might better use it. “Lying, of course, is a way of gaining power over other people through manipulating them in various ways, and this is something that children learn. They also learn to keep secrets,” says philosopher Sissela Bok. “I believe we almost have to unlearn that. If we are to mature, we have to unlearn any enjoyment of that power, any benefit from it…. On the whole, how can you try to lead your life so that you communicate with other people without trying to manipulate them?”

  The other warning I hear in Bok’s words is that Matriarchal Feminism must stop preaching to women that competition is evil, when it is evident to all that modern feminism survives on competition, that in the most obvious sense, it refuses to tolerate argument. The old-line feminists are mistresses of manipulation.

  The fact that women are now economically and politically entrenched in an international market built on competition even as feminism continues its old soundtrack, “We will not compete!”, would be laughable if it weren’t so destructive. It leaves women to compete with one hand tied behind our backs, not unlike the way we always handled beauty, using it while denying we even owned it: “What beauty? Haven’t you seen my awful nose, fat thighs, stringy hair?” By mannerisms and verbiage, working women smile the Nice Girl smile as they push ahead, blind to whoever is trammeled underfoot. “Hurt her? Oh, no, she’s our best friend!”

  Men push and stomp too, but they don’t deny their power. Some of the most belligerent people I know are women; they just don’t call it that. Some of the most caring people I know are men, but they still aren’t encouraged to embrace that description of themselves for fear it is not manly. We women are as much involved in discriminating against men at home, as caretakers, as they are in wanting to keep us from taking their jobs.

  The most competitive women I’ve met, and whose books I’ve read, are members of feminism’s old guard. When it comes to belligerence and rivalry, these women set a new benchmark. Nina Auerbach set off a media firestorm with her efforts to torpedo Christina Hoff Sommers’s book, Who Stole Feminism?, in the New York Times, so unprofessional and biased was her review. Sommers says that Gloria Steinem called Connie Chung personally to keep Sommers off the air—although Steinem would not agree to
be interviewed on camera with her criticism. These women are free to mount their rivalrous campaign; it is their duplicity with which I quarrel.

  What I find galling, especially from feminism’s earliest marchers, is the promise that love awaits those good girls who “kick the competition habit.” “Whether by virtue of full breasts (literally or figuratively) or a devastating hostess gown,” wrote the editor of Ms. magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “we women have long been engaged in the enervating game of going every other woman one better. While this invidious habit is more widespread than name-dropping or nail-biting, until recently it has been every woman’s dirty little secret. Now, the lid is off. Women are trading secrets with one another. And the real revelation is that our competitiveness is not a dirty act of treachery but the survival tactic of a second-class human being…. Once you kick the competition habit, prepare for a new high: liking women. Really liking women.”

  Feminism hasn’t budged from its Big Mother Knows Best position since it began: Be Nice, don’t argue, be a good little noncompetitive feminist and Big Momma will always love you. The No-Compete Clause of feminism is itself a direct steal from Patriarchal days, the very law that kept women in our place for so long. If we ever did “kick the competition habit” altogether, we would find ourselves ruled, dominated, and controlled by a Matriarchy so competitive in its absolutism as to leave Patriarchy in the dust.

  It is inevitable that as it grows, feminism should splinter over such issues as competition. A movement as large as ours must divide as special interest groups are born and our objectives separate us from one another. To break doesn’t have to be any more acrimonious than separation from mother. But there is an adolescent level of girlish spitefulness and cruelty in feminism. Leaders never do like to lose control, though some great leaders have understood how benevolence ensures the goodwill of the separating factions, that in allowing them to go their way, a bond is maintained through gratitude. The Good Mother learns this with her children. The Bad Mother, in binding her children to her, thinks she has kept her power, but the “love” felt for her is more angry dependency than gratitude. Our modern feminism, in its refusal to encourage and praise healthy competition, acts precisely like the Bad Mother.

  For those of you who missed the early years of modern feminism, I wish I could paint an emotional picture of how it felt before women began preaching to other women what they could and couldn’t do or say, who was a “real” feminist and who was not. Now feminism is buried in The Semantic Jungle. We have become as hard on one another as any Patriarchy; given that Women’s Rules are more Prohibitive, our punishments are more painful.

  My Mother/My Self had begun as an investigation into the source of women’s guilt about sex. It grew out of My Secret Garden, which had left me dumbfounded as to why women felt so guilty in just thinking about sex—not doing it, simply imagining, privately. Who was going to know what they were thinking? Two steps into the barbed wire surrounding what went on between mothers and daughters, I ran into competition.

  Unraveling that dark mystery in women’s lives involved tangling with mother. In fact, one of the most destructive and backward moves of recent Matriarchal Feminism has been the effort to restore the ancient idealization of the mother/daughter relationship. It fits neatly into the script that would pose women as morally superior to Big Bad Men. How ironic and cruel that at this moment in history, when women are most in need of practicing the healthy rules of competition—rules best learned in opposition to mother so that they are readily available in the workplace—we have a feminist clique of mothers who would undo Margaret Mahler’s work.

  Every seat a woman takes in the workplace means one less for a man or another woman; every seat a man takes is seen by both men and women as one that could have been theirs. It is a complicated, competitive war, one made all the more complex as men and women also compete for one another’s hearts. “One of the reasons we are so confused these days is that the workplace has changed so dramatically,” says psychologist and professor of management Lisa Mainero. “Beginning in the early eighties, corporate norms regarding dress, image, and appearance became more dynamic. One of the most influential changes is that the workplace has become the place to meet, date, and relate to the opposite sex. Among the women I surveyed, 76 percent said they had either been personally involved in or had known about an office romance that had occurred in their firm.”

  Mainero spoke at the third and last symposium I conducted, which was held in Chicago and titled “Beauty in the Workplace.” It was 1990, a year before DYG Inc. and I had completed two years of focus groups, culminating in our national survey on beauty among men and women. One of the most interesting findings was that women rated appearance as the top quality affecting their self-image; 76 percent ranked it in the top five of fourteen qualities and 34 percent ranked it number one, above intelligence, job performance, sexuality—even though more than three quarters of them were working women.

  Mainero’s research findings, that men and women both fear that attractive women have an unfair advantage in the workplace, would line up precisely with what we eventually found in the DYG survey. In the past five years, the many new studies on beauty/sex/appearance in the workplace have multiplied, and one particular change of attitude stands out: In studies such as Madeline Heilman’s in 1979, the finding was that being good-looking was a plus for men, but a plus for a woman only when the job was lower-level. The assumption was that attractive women in managerial positions seemed more feminine, thus victim to all the female stereotypes of passiveness, timidity, and so on.

  By the late eighties, however, two studies were showing that each additional attractiveness point translated into an additional $1,000 on a male’s starting salary, and while a good-looking woman gained no immediate advantage until on the job, once on board, each attractiveness point was worth more than $2,000. By 1993, people perceived as good-looking—men and women—were earning at least 5 percent more than those labeled average-looking. In a 1993 McCall’s/Yankelovich survey, the great majority of women, of all ages surveyed, agreed that “most people judge you on the basis of the way you look.”

  “We American women want to be loved for ourselves, for who we are,” says fashion writer Holly Brubach, “and if it so happens that we’re pretty, that’s a bonus. This attitude may have its origins in our Puritan heritage, but the feminist movement has recently given it a big boost by reinforcing our conviction that it’s wrong for a woman to trade on her appearance. Also, the worship of beauty doesn’t sit well with the tenet that good looks constitute an unfair advantage in a society in which all women are supposed to be created equal.”

  Our Puritan heritage may be responsible for our traditional admonition not to judge a book by its cover, but feminism’s warning that it’s wrong for a woman to trade on her appearance has far more to do with women’s taboo against the competitive itch, which, once scratched, would invite healthy debates disagreement, and the eventual unseating of feminism’s most powerful players.

  The fact is that young women today, freed of the tyranny of beauty as their only power under Patriarchy, recognize, nonetheless, the very real influence of looks over their lives. In our survey, 86 percent of the women and 76 percent of the men chose self-confidence as the reason for beauty being important to women. When feminists denounce furthering the healthy understanding of competition so that women might better use it as the potentially profitable tool that it is, they deprive women of self-confidence. Admitting to the importance of beauty in their lives, while having little practice in the known, safe rules that govern competition, leaves women vulnerable beyond measure.

  Beauty/sex/competition, all are entwined and play off one another; all are currently in high gear and are frowned upon by feminism. The more sexualized beauty becomes, the more envy is aroused, the more dangerous things grow, as everyone pretends that their exposed sexual parts have no effect on the status quo. Fashion cries out in its sexual extremes for comment. But the fu
nding for scientific research on everything related to sex has dried up.

  It is as if our envy of the power of women’s sexuality has silenced any analysis of what is happening. Opposite the classic beauty, women may feel rivalrous, but the heightened threat of a sexually liberated woman who is also beautiful arouses a growl of resentment that gnaws. Even if she is not beautiful, women know that men are drawn to the sexually accepting woman, for to be with a woman who loves her body, and by extension loves the man’s too, is to lie down with the Good Mother.

  When Streisand appeared at Clinton’s inaugural in 1993 wearing an elegant, dark, man-tailored skirt slit to the knee, the vest showing a bit of cleavage, Anne Taylor Fleming dashed off a bitchy column on the “Op-Ed” page of the New York Times. What infuriated the writer was that Streisand was “letting us know that underneath her peekaboo power suit, underneath all her bravado and accomplishments, she is still an accessible femme fatale.”

  If there had been no flesh, no slit skirt, no cleavage, the power suit would have been fine. It was the mixed message that made the writer so furious: “What the slit says is: We may imitate your wardrobe and ask to be let into your male-only chambers, but, rest assured, underneath we are still your centerfolds, your MTV dream girls…. [The suits] exemplify society’s effort to keep women off balance, to keep them beholden to the new sex-object imagery; male on top, seductress underneath.”

  Clearly, not only beauty, but sexual message too is in the eye of the beholder. I thought Streisand’s look terrific, in-charge, top-of-her-form, balancing beauty and brain. But Fleming’s fantasy as she watched Streisand was very different; could it be envy? To the critic who couldn’t resist venting her resentment in ink, Streisand’s costume sent “a disturbing signal to—and about—American woman.” Oh? I don’t think so. In fact, it did quite the opposite. It said to women and men, “Recognize your suit, guys? I’ll borrow it and give it something you never could, a woman’s legs and breasts.” It is why so many women love to wear the real thing, a man’s tuxedo, and why men and other women love to look at the power of the exhibitionist who can pull it off. That Streisand can amass her various powers and present them in an elegant, sexual manner says to me, Here is a model to be admired.