The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Streisand’s a good example of the underground minefield women must walk in feminist land, especially if they have accomplished something and are beautiful too. Are we to believe this once ugly duckling doesn’t know firsthand the killer fire of envy? She turns it all around to become not simply a jolie laide, but someone whose body of work so moves us that we have come to see her as beloved.

  When asked in an interview whether women pursue beauty for men, Norman Mailer, who has spent a lifetime in the company of and writing about beautiful women, said:

  No. Women dress for other women; women do their hair for other women. It’s competitive as hell. Reminds me of the way jazzmen used to be in the early sixties, when the musicians stopped paying attention to the audience and started playing for each other, getting into more and more elaborate riffs each night just to show each other how far out they could get. That’s what goes on now with women’s fashions. Among every hundred women, there will be a few who set the trends. The rest follow like slaves, and all complain that the men are getting superficial. We men go for beauty because we have no option. All the women pointed us toward it. It’s not easy for a man to say, I’d like to get out of this rat race and settle down with one woman who has virtues.

  There is nothing virtuous in abandoning the pursuit of beauty, and I cannot imagine worse advice to give women today than to promote the false concept that “good women” will not compete like “bad men”; for the first time, we are all in the workplace and in the mirror too; healthy competition must be practiced in order to make it safe. Some of us, women and men, are by nature, genes, temperament, background more competitive than others. Those women who preach the philosophy of women as superior by virtue of being noncompetitive do their sisters a terrible disservice.

  In Revolution from Within Steinem urges women to abandon competition and to think instead of a noncompetitive union with other women as akin to quilt-making. “Rather than finding a source in competition, self-esteem and excellence both come from the excitement of learning and pressing individual boundaries; a satisfaction in the task itself; pleasure in cooperating with, appreciating, and being appreciated by others—and as much joy in the process as in the result,” she says. “As each person completes herself or himself and contributes what is authentic, a new paradigm emerges: circularity…. If we think of ourselves as circles, our goal is completion—not defeating others…. If we think of work structures as circles, excellence and cooperation are the goal—not competition.”

  To support her view, Steinem embraces author Alfie Kohn’s eccentric view of competition, quoting at length his assertion that “superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence…. We compete to overcome fundamental doubts about our capabilities and, finally, to compensate for low self-esteem.”

  Making quilts and hoping for a tie in competitive games and situations is an escape from real life. Here we are, desperately in need of instruction in how to compete, and feminism offers us “circularity.” It isn’t necessary to preach competition, the feeling exists from the earliest days of our lives. When we feel we are about to lose something or someone vital to us, the anxiety, the fear, the anger that grip us are, in part, competition; the person who would take away what we love and need is our competitor. Even before the Oedipal triangle, a child feels competitive with anything or anyone who takes away mother’s eye. The child’s goal is to win mother’s attention back from father, from a sibling, or from her work.

  These intrusions are inevitable, and how we fared in them back then sets the stage for how we respond to competitive threats in the Oedipal years and, subsequently, how we feel when competition arises today. You might say that pre-Oedipally we learn to fight back. When sex enters the competition in the Oedipal years, bringing guilt and the fear of retaliation, this is when we learn how to inhibit competition. Integration is the goal: to compete but to do it within safe limits.

  In replacing the healthy competitive spirit with Steinem’s “circularity,” in which “progress becomes mutual support and connectedness,” these feminists draw kindergarten smiles on women’s faces, pushing us back into the nursery, where mother’s law was, “Everybody loves everybody equally.” We didn’t believe it then, and we certainly don’t now that we’ve had twenty-five years in the real world. Most of our mothers didn’t know how to teach healthy competition; no one had taught them.

  But life, in particular the workplace, has taught us that human nature comes in shades of gray, not black and white. We are all a little good, a little bad, sometimes. Competition is not something only men do, nor is it an imposed male conceit that we superior women can remove. There is one job, one contract; quite a few of us want it and only one will get it. Destroying other people, lying, cheating, is not the answer, nor is circularity. Doing superior work, proving one is better suited for the job, winning the job, the contract, that is safe, healthy competition. Women must learn how to use it in a nondestructive way, bringing to the contest genetic skills from women’s work, which improve competition as practiced by men, making it a better game, but competitive nonetheless.

  The obstacles that have confined women to second-class status have been talked to death; now it’s time to admit to problems among ourselves, the issues of envy and competition, which have silently kept women afraid of outstripping our mothers, our friends, all other women.

  When my husband was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, he set a precedent for hiring women, promoting them to the top levels. Some performed better than others, but all had a problem with criticism, competition, the eventual one-on-ones in his office, which often ended in tears. These women would fight for their objective, compete like gladiators, but when criticized, they would sit opposite him teary-eyed. It wasn’t that he questioned their competition but that criticism itself was felt to be punishment.

  If competition, aggressive behavior, were permitted forms of female behavior, they would have been sanctioned by mother; because they are usually not part of our loving relationship with her, every subsequent “boss” who scolds us awakens the terrible reprisals we felt would be our due as children had we broken the rules. Thirty, forty years old, we burst into tears when criticized because we feel like bad little girls who are no longer loved. Male bosses sit opposite weeping women who ten minutes earlier were fully in control and wonder what they did to bring about this transformation. They did nothing. It had all been done years ago and was merely reawakened.

  We enter rooms convinced that eyes are judging us. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but this is who women are, judges and the judged. It is what we did as little girls and has become what we expect, to be appraised, accepted, or rejected. Even women who love us, judge us, perhaps they more than others, for if we surpassed them, their fear is that we would leave them for a more elite circle of friends.

  How can we admit to our own competitiveness when our first love, our model, our first competitor never admitted to hers, nor had her mother, or hers? If we were raised to feel that our accomplishments, achievements, including our beauty, amused something in mother too evil to be named, we learned to distrust outdistancing her, and other women too. Nothing encourages us like praise, first from mother, to go beyond our presumed limits, exercise intellectual curiosity, or take genuine pleasure in the reflection we see in the mirror. She does not have to speak for us to know what she is feeling; we know her inside and out. Pressed to put a name to what she feels when people praise and admire our beauty, we would call it anything but the dreaded word competition.

  “How does a daughter deal with her mother’s competitiveness with her or jealousy of her accomplishments?” asks psychologist Paula Caplan. “Often, she does one of two things (or tries both at different times): She reduces her efforts to achieve (or at least begins to conceal them from her mother), and she puts emotional or physical distance between herself and her mother.”

  Perhaps this is why I couldn’t wait to get away from
home, couldn’t wait to travel, put distance between myself and the unacknowledged competition in that house where I grew up. I’d always thought it was my rivalry with my sister, the pretty one. But I am certain now that even more than this I hated and feared the complicated, mysterious intensity of what my sister aroused in my mother.

  I have come to understand why no amount of success and certainty of my beloved’s love for me can eliminate the competitive fires fanned when another woman tries to capture his eye. It isn’t just the rearoused sibling rivalry, but what I witnessed between them, usually at the dinner table during those years of my sister’s ripe adolescence, when the air was alive with unspeakable emotions, so unacceptable to my lovely mother, so blocked and unutterable, there was nothing for her to do but leave the table in tears, followed by my sister, also in tears. I considered myself well out of it, but I see now that that too was a defense; in truth, I was as lonely as a cloud, for I didn’t figure in their drama, being of so little beauty, was ineligible.

  I encourage you to understand today’s problems with competition by coming to terms with what happened in your earliest years. Does it help today knowing the root of an a priori sense of defeat when a rival looms? Yes, absolutely and certainly. Just knowing that it isn’t the proud, exhibitionistic woman that I am who is feeling defeated before any battle has even begun, but a child, the child that I once was, this puts the situation in perspective. I feel the sickness rise, and I grab it by the throat, wrestle it down, and speak, for there is nothing like hearing one’s own strong voice to restore reality. I will wrestle with it till I die, but power is knowledge.

  Women share this sense of a priori defeat, when the mere hint of loss is in the air, unless they had mothers who taught them the safe rules of competition, who aired the poisonous feeling so that the word didn’t have that slanderous, unfeminine sound. It is all right for a mother to feel competitive with a daughter, and nothing makes it safer than admission, discussion, the good humor, the hug, the sense of winning and losing and life going on, love intact.

  What disappointed me in Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth was the lost opportunity for a beautiful young woman to discuss the forbidden subject of competition. Instead, she used trumped-up statistics to lay women’s pursuit unto death of beauty at the feet of Evil Men. The women-as-victims mentality that pervades her book galvanized another generation to see men as the root of a problem that, more than any other, can only be solved within women’s world. Perhaps the decision to omit from the dust jacket a photo of the very pretty author was made on the corporate level, but clearly someone, somewhere decided that intellectual credibility and book sales among feminists would be at risk.

  Men see no inconsistency between competition and networking, since they believe both expand opportunity. Women, unskilled at and wary of competition, also struggle with networking in the workplace. We hesitate to bring one another along as we advance up the ladder, fearing our assist may open the possibility of the other woman becoming our equal, even outstripping us. Our anxiety is based on the belief that, unlike men, we have limited resources and limited opportunity.

  Mother raised us to believe that without her approval and love, we would die. We must never compete with her. When you are raised to fear competition and to believe that there is only so much love, only so many jobs, only so much beauty, then every grain a rival gets is that much less for you.

  Men don’t bring along the guy under them because they are good and generous people; they do it because in networking, they hope, lies loyalty and gratitude. The debt will be remembered, paid back in various ways, something we women don’t believe in because it hasn’t been sufficiently practiced and proven. As the coach of the Connecticut Women’s Basketball Team said, women haven’t yet learned to leave their competition/anger behind when the game is over, they carry it with them, still hating the other person who beat them.

  The man who doesn’t learn to shake hands and buy a round of drinks in the spirit that tomorrow the victory may be his is considered “unclubbable,” meaning that he hasn’t learned the rules of competition. This is precisely what competition and networking teach, that in time a chain of people learn to rely on the others for the vote, cooperation, teamwork. Men make better networkers than we because most of them are more at ease with competition; the past has taught them more about circularity—returning favors—than quilt-making ever could.

  The handshake takes the sting out of losing, opens the door for a communal reunion, allows for a decent night’s sleep. The other guy’s victory becomes fuel for winning the next bout. Men’s lips don’t get mean and narrow, as ours do from sucking in all the swallowed venom. Men make war, but so do we. Thatcher and Golda Meir are the tip of the wedge. Women may live longer, but if we continue to swallow our bile, heart attacks, ulcers, not to mention the loss of beautiful hair, will be on the rise among women.

  Give me women’s strong voices raised in argument any day over quilt-making. What we need is more dialogue, the freedom to disagree, open, healthy competition between as many of us as choose to enter the fray. Women must experience in the workplace that it is possible to argue, to get a new contract that another woman also wants and still have lunch together; unlike traditional women’s world, the competitive workplace demands that hatchets be buried and the wheel of commerce be kept constantly in play. Networking is always a gamble; the person helped up the ladder may or may not be loyal, but the risk must be taken. That’s business. As a recent cover of Fortune magazine put it: “So you fail. So what?”

  Imperious as a Camille Paglia may be, she is the new wave of feminism. So are the antiliberty forces like McKinnon and Dworkin, not my favorite people, but any woman’s strong voice is good to hear in a competitive society. It forces us to think more exactly about our own beliefs. Steinem’s old guard may still get the sound bites, but as younger, equally poised, articulate, and, yes, beautiful women continue to speak up, we will have a more contemporary sound and look, which is a feminism that has many competitive voices and faces.

  7

  Men in the Mirror

  My Grandfather’s Closet

  In my childhood there was nothing so mysterious as my grandfather’s dressing room. He was my hero and my model. In studying this elegant chamber, so intimately his, everything in it made to his measurements, perhaps I thought I would associate myself more personally with him. I was a girl and interested neither in clothes nor in being male, but I knew this sartorial room was at the heart of the man I adored, whom everyone in my extended family feared and loved, and whose eye I was determined to catch. Some deep, personal communion went on in here amidst the smell of fine shoe leather and cologne, something that he enjoyed and that made him even more powerful.

  I knew every inch of my mother’s closet, had rummaged through it almost daily searching for small change with which to buy ice cream or stamps from the old man on Broad Street. That tiny store was filled with the miniature pictures of faraway places that I pasted into the stamp album my grandfather gave me on my ninth birthday.

  I had climbed up onto his bed that morning—a rare treat—and propped myself beside him against the mountains of pillows, where he read his Wall Street Journal; together we leafed through the big leather-bound volume he’d already decorated with stamps from his own international voyages. (And I wonder where my “wanderlust” originated!) But there was no mystery to my mother’s closet, not a drop. While I loved my mother, I had no intention of ever growing up to be like her, a lady in a nice house with nice children and a nice life. I wanted to be like my grandfather, a self-made man who had built his fortune in the steel-alloy business in Pittsburgh, lost everything in the Depression, and then gotten it all back.

  During the summers when we were in residence at his estate on the banks of the Niagara River, I would slip into his bedroom on hot August afternoons and quietly open the door-that-made-no-noise into the paneled room designed for the presentation of his wardrobe. The concealed lights would go up
, as on a stage, and there would be his splendid, regimented suits hung shoulder to shoulder like an army, shirts of the loveliest soft fabric laid in mahogany drawers as if on display, rows of hats, dressing gowns, and in tiny velvet-lined drawers, rings and cuff links, every imaginable accessory to enhance male splendor.

  Up to a certain height the walls were mirrored, and then above hung photos of my grandfather’s possessions, his horses, houses, boats, and family. To this day I have a navy pea coat designed at Dunhill, along with gray flannel trousers and Top-Siders, clothes he had ordered for his five children when he purchased his last boat, The Duchess. How his children hated to put on their uniforms for summer cruises on Lake Ontario; how eagerly I longed to grow big enough to wear them; “hand-me-downs” from my grandfather were precious ties to him.

  Portraits of him by my grandmother, his first wife, now hang in my house. In them he is still young and handsome, with red hair, and he bears a striking resemblance to the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. I remember him older, grown portly, a John Huston arriving in our quiet town with an entourage of secretaries, business associates, all encamped in a suite of rooms at The Fort Sumpter Hotel. In his white linen suit, Panama hat, cigar clamped in his teeth, he was like no man I’d ever seen.

  What magnified him even more was the deferential respect shown him not just by us grandchildren but by his adult children as well. My mother and her sisters grew meek in his presence, and a harsh word wounded them visibly, yet they adored him and craved his respect. Critical of everything they accomplished, from the role of my uncle, the admiral, in the Bay of Pigs to my mother’s posture—“Shoulders back!”—he was also uncommonly proud of the beauty of The Clan arriving at the country club, scrubbed and dressed to the nines, no one standing less than five feet eight.