The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  There was a certain writer I took to a tailor, whose magical threads would be sewn in such a way as to alter the way my lover saw himself, and me. We were in Rome, on vacation. In his one suitcase he had packed some extra jeans, shirts, and one blazer, but it was mostly filled with the yellow legal pads on which he wrote and with the books he was reading. I loved him madly and wanted to give him a charm that would bind him to me. One morning I announced I was taking him to Mastroianni’s tailor. “Think of it as an experience to write about,” I said by way of persuasion.

  Even after a long martini lunch in the Piazza Navona he was as nervous as a bridegroom, and so we walked to the Via Condotti until we were just a few doors short of the Spanish Steps. There we turned into a small courtyard, went up a narrow flight of stairs, and entered a shadowy suite of rooms, the shutters half closed against the afternoon sun. Bolts of fabric lay haphazardly unfurled on cutting tables and were stacked on high shelves, the only sound being the fountain in the courtyard below.

  “Buona sera,” purred the magician tailor, a study in the elegant unmade-bed school of masculine fashion. While his attendants took the measure of my man, the maestro spoke in the gentlest tones, sensing that he had a novice in his hands.

  My lover was an arrogant fellow, prone to masking any sign of discomfort, but his performance that day was like a virgin slowly, expertly, being seduced. The twist in the assignation was, of course, that he was falling in love with his own image. As with my grandfather, my pleasure came from being the voyeur, watching his defenses fall. It has struck me that most men tend to fix their faces in an almost pained, unnatural portrait when they look at themselves in the mirror, like little boys, which is not inappropriate given their lack of practice.

  “When a man looks into a mirror, he looks anywhere but straight ahead,” a mirror salesman is quoted in Esquire. “It’s as if he thinks it’s wrong to look at himself, as if he’s afraid of being caught.” My own early invisibility had made me sensitive to men’s need for praise of their physical selves. I understood the loneliness of feeling eyes pass over me.

  By the time the blazer and cavalry twill trousers were finished, the man in them was so at home with being fitted, pinned, admired in the tall, three-way mirror, well, he was as infatuated as any animal seeing its reflection in a still pond. His relationship with his tailor when they parted was such that they were trading jokes and cigars.

  It was a gift I would exchange with other men, but only after I recognized that they loved me in part for my exhibitionistic self, something they wanted to share. I didn’t want a man who wore me on his arm, getting his own exhibitionism fed secondhand. Better to be that powerful conduit opening him to his own healthy narcissism. Men who feed on their women’s looks in time begin to envy the woman’s power, or they tire of its flavor and look for new women, new tastes. No resentful escort for me; rather, a twin in the power of being seen. Returning a man to the beauty of his own reflection is a magic charm required by those of us who fear rejection.

  Only recently have the terms voyeurism and exhibitionism slipped into polite conversation. The experts caution me that the words are only properly used when referring to pathologies, where the looking or the exhibitionistic act are replacing sex. But the gurus also concede that we’ve not yet coined words to express what has been happening in recent years as more and more people walk around half naked. Today’s craze to draw attention to one’s body sums up where the world is voyeuristically/exhibitionistically; nothing has influenced this more than men’s reentering the beauty contest.

  “People use the words much more generally nowadays,” says Robertiello. “Men are definitely more voyeuristic and women infinitely more exhibitionistic in terms of their physical selves. Some men today are more into looking good, showing off their bodies, but it’s a relatively late development and still doesn’t apply to most men.” Twenty years ago, the behavioral gurus wagged their fingers at me, warning me that only men were voyeurs. Having stared at men all my life, I bit my tongue and bided my time.

  Today, wise women like Judith Seifer admit, “Of course women are voyeurs! What is it other than voyeurism, the way women look at other women and recall with elephantine memory precisely what each other wears? There are porn videos today made expressly for women.” While William H. Masters emphasizes that using the term exhibitionist in psychotherapeutic terms still means you’re talking about a male, most behaviorists agree that both words, exhibitionism and voyeurism, are slipping more and more into popular usage. There is a difference between the male “flasher” in the dirty raincoat and the woman who wears a transparent dress on a public street, but the shades of gray multiply.

  In the seventies, Kate Millett described what Charlotte Brontë’s heroine in Villette feels when she looks at men: “Their beauty, for Brontë is perhaps the first woman who ever admitted in print that women find men beautiful, amazes and hurts her.” Can it be true, I wondered, that women have been so reluctant to speak and write of the power of male beauty over them? Is our reluctance to share with men the power of beauty any less determined than men’s to give up their economic and political power? Money power is so obvious that when it changes hands it demands discussion; beauty is no less powerful, but we have dismissed its reigning influence for several hundred years because the Patriarchal Deal, having denied it to men, couldn’t publicly afford to put women’s beauty on the scale.

  Women’s ownership of beauty, under Patriarchy, led to a lot of nasty behavior among those men who could not economically afford the beautiful women to whom they felt drawn, even entitled. It is the stuff of literature, the little boy who grows up adored by his mother, seeing himself in her eyes and identifying with her beauty. But he hasn’t the wealth for a beauty, or her family is looking for a better match. Now when he sees lovely women who will never be his, he hates them, tries to bring them down a peg or two, not unlike the more competent and thus disgruntled wife who hates her husband for being a failure in the marketplace.

  Even the wealthy man with a great beauty on his arm often isn’t satisfied; the beauty is hers, not his. And so men act with contempt toward women, who own all this power, though they would never consciously acknowledge why they stand on street corners and make rude remarks, their rage as nasty as some feminist’s fury at men.

  Imagine how women’s entry into the workplace and our providing for ourselves has altered the way in which men see themselves. Leave women’s entitlement to work out of the discussion, for the unconscious knows nothing of fairness. The not-so-merry-go-round of fashion images that men and women put on our backs reflects the dramatic change in how we define masculinity and femininity. We are all trying for a look that goes far deeper than mere clothes—not that clothes are ever “mere”—trying for an image of our lives with which we can sanely live. It is very disturbing to exist without the anchor of identity, which includes visual image.

  Burdensome, stultifying, and suffocating, the traditional roles of Good Provider and Caretaker accomplished more than we like to admit; without our social roles, men especially are left in a gray area of what it means to be a man. We spare no time or ink probing women’s roles, women’s problems, women’s lives. For men, not questioning manliness may be the only totally male thing left to them. This is excellent for women who hate men, and that number grows, I fear. Most men seem to plod along, perhaps in the belief that the past twenty-five years will go away, that right-wing Republicanism will restore the status quo.

  My sympathy for men may influence my optimistic belief that the original disparagement of such groups as the organizers of the Million Man March and The Promise Keepers will soften. You would think that the soaring rate of homes without fathers, along with the unprecedented rate of the imprisonment of young men for crime, drugs, abuse would make us ask, Why? Why have we lost so many men, so many fathers? Instead, Matriarchal Feminists berate men even more.

  Our uncontrollable rage, our ability to love, as well as our need to be seen, begins
at birth. Neither the abuser, nor the rude sidewalk gawker, nor even the near naked beauty he is verbally abusing wants to believe that our needs are rooted in the nursery. If there is an unconscious cry embedded in his catcall, it might be, “I hate you for being so beautiful, so powerful, and so blind to me who feels so small and needy opposite you: ‘I one my mother, I two my mother, I three my mother… I ate my mother.’” Which is exactly what angry men’s/boys’ eyes do: They devour us, some barbarically, some lovingly, a variable decided by the man’s earliest history: whether or not mother’s eyes lit up when she saw him. Need I add that the same is true of the woman’s reaction to men’s looking: She will be warmed by their eyes or hate them for what she thinks they see.

  “What Does She See in Him?”

  How did a woman thirty years ago see her man? Certainly not as a sex object or as a creature of beauty. When a woman’s existence depends on a man who works outside the home, an unknown place to which he goes in the morning and from which he doesn’t return until evening, her image of him is colored by absolute need, much as a child’s glorified image of mother is surrounded by a halo even when she is a bad mother. Onto the man was projected the woman’s own ambitions, everything she had ever wanted but was forbidden to pursue herself. A certain heroic shading was inevitable; he stood tall, probably taller than he was.

  His weight, the sagging jowl, the premature balding, the aging, didn’t occupy her image of him so much as did the prospect of his return to the home, her workplace, in which she took care of him, fed him, washed and ironed his clothes until the next day when he would leave again, taking with him everyone’s destiny. When the commuter train was late, when she found a matchbook in his pocket from the Bide-a-Wee Motel or the other women whispered of his extramarital affair, her desperation wasn’t the image of him as a sexual object—which she had lost sight of since the early days of marriage; instead, she prayed for the door to open, just to see him, solid and dependable, making her life whole again.

  Until the mid-fifties, married couples in films slept in single beds and husbands wore their suits buttoned up until bedtime; in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Leave It to Beaver, The Dick Van Dyke Show, even in The Honeymooners, husbands looked dependable and solid even around the house, emphasizing their role as provider. If a man did well by his family economically, no one asked, “What does she see in him?”

  His magazines talked of business and politics. Her magazines advised her to put a little mystery into their evenings, light the candles, make a special casserole; the worst thing that could befall a woman was to lose her man. To that end, she could not afford to “let herself go.” When women wanted to dream, escape, they read Harlequin romances. Since 1906, Harlequin and its subsidiaries have been fleshing out the look of women’s dream men. In the fifties, sixties, and most of the seventies, “the Alpha Man was the embodiment of what women wanted,” says Harlequin’s Katherine Orr. “He was big, strong, imposing, a brooding type whose thoughts she couldn’t read. He either owned an estate where she worked, or he was a doctor. There was a lot of nurse/doctor back then. The doctor was seen as an exciting, powerful figure. But here again, mysterious and quite brooding, because he was under a lot of pressure. And wealthy. Always wealthy.”

  Whether he was fat Jackie Gleason or a swarthy Alpha Man, he had to be a Good Provider. Otherwise, it made no sense; if a woman had no money of her own, what was the point of dreaming about handsome, sexual men, who were exciting but dangerous, given that sex outside marriage could rob a woman of everything. Another favorite image of 1940s movies was the story of a woman fallen prey to a man’s sexual glamour, movies such as Back Street. Women simply couldn’t afford to respond to anything in a man except his providership.

  The film and paperback novel industries fed women’s romantic fantasies, but there was no erotic industry for women, nothing specifically conceived to arouse them, make them think of masturbation or sex outside marriage. Romantic music filled a void, but since women didn’t think of themselves as sexual unto themselves, alone and without a man, the sexual feelings they were actually having were called “romance” by them and everyone else.

  Until twenty-five years ago, women didn’t think they had sexual fantasies, nor did the rest of the world. What, therefore, was the point in men thinking about their own image, trying to catch a woman’s eye if all women cared about was the man’s ability to provide? It was a given that women didn’t look. Men were the voyeurs and women the exhibitionists. The significance of men today getting into looking good extends beyond the obvious. It implies that women, now less economically dependent, are looking at them, judging them.

  In a 1994 University of Chicago study titled Sex in America, 30 percent of women ages eighteen to forty-four and 18 percent of women ages forty-five to fifty-nine said they found “Watching partner undress” to be “Very appealing”; not a bad percentage, given that Nice Girls didn’t look. As for men, 50 percent of the eighteen to forty-four age group and 40 percent of the forty-five to fifty-nine group found it “Very appealing” to watch a partner undress.

  “Men more often find themselves in the position of sex objects today than in the past,” says Warren Farrell, “but what is still true is that they are first and foremost seen as ‘success objects’ by women.” As some women become disenchanted with the workplace, they have the option to leave, return to a husband and let him provide, to marry, or to work at home themselves. It is not an option most men have. Men realize that the same woman who competes with him at the office, who may even be his economic equal or superior, still grades him on his wage earning.

  Yes, there are marriages in which women earn more than their men, but studies on family arguments, the breakdowns of marriages and relationships often point to “the money argument” as the beginning of the end. Even if the woman puts his lack of providing aside, the man cannot. The younger the man, the more likely he is to accept the investment in a beauty product, a new suit; these men are the tip of the wedge, and the male fashion/beauty industries are holding their breath. Will women buy it, buy him, the new beautiful man? Will women’s eyes be amenable to sharing the mirror?

  Meanwhile, from out of the west comes the new male hero at Harlequin books, never to be underestimated as a predictor of the future of the sexes. Enter the Western Cowboy, today’s favorite fantasy hero, whose image is emblazoned on the covers of millions of books worldwide. Forty-six percent of the entire mass market paperback sales are romance novels. Worldwide, there are fifty million romance readers, and each of them reads more than one book a week. Barnes & Noble figures that the average reader spends $1,200 a year on her paperback fix. What kind of hunger is this feeding?

  “His look says to the woman that he is strong, that he can take care of her,” says Katherine Orr. Sounds suspiciously like The Good Provider; according to Orr, the Cowboy is no ordinary ranch hand, but owns hundreds of acres. “This immediately tells the woman, married or single—her average age is forty-two—that he can rescue her from the confinement of today’s world,” says Orr. “But while he is wealthy and strong, it is his focus on her, his attention to her that is most important. He talks to her. Women always want to communicate, men don’t. Romance readers want dialogue. Because he has a lot of employees, he can walk away from his ranch and focus totally on her.”

  A Good Provider who talks. Still every woman’s dream. After sex in real life, the man rolls over, having spiraled down from orgasm more quickly than the woman. He is ready to disconnect and sleep. She wants to maintain the intimacy, is still coming down, psychologically and chemically; she wants to be held, to talk. Pre- and post-coital conversation is high on women’s list; even in fantasy, women emphasize the importance of words, the extended talk that builds trust, literally opening women up. How clever of Harlequin to hit upon a talking cowboy who is also rich.

  Women accuse men of seeing us as an assemblage of parts, tits and ass. Is The Prince of Parts in women’s romantic imagery all that different? Th
ere is a paperback hero “look” for every type of woman. Are these bits of pieces of men not like the naked women at whom men stare, first this part, then the other? True, men’s photographs are on paper, and ours fleshed out in our minds; but even this is changing as more women can allow themselves—can literally afford—to see men, pecs to buns.

  We are slowly training our eyes to take in the naked man in X-rated films, allowing ourselves to feel the electric charge that begins with the eye and courses down through our sexual circuitry to become the moisture between our legs. There was a great stir in the literary world and beyond, several years ago, when an esteemed woman writer, Sallie Tisdale, wrote an article in the equally esteemed Harper’s Magazine titled “Talk Dirty to Me,” relating her adventures in the X-rated video stores that she frequented. Imagine: an intellectual woman liking porn! So eye-catching was the idea that Tisdale extended the article into a book.

  We women are learning as we look. The men in the first sexual fantasies I collected from women in the seventies had no identity; “I don’t know who he is,” the women would say: “I can’t see his face.” Being anonymous meant that “the faceless stranger” would not judge her, would disappear after the fuck, which he usually “forced” (her words) upon her. Therefore, she could show him her hidden, wild, erotic self, and since it was “rape” (again, her words, though there was no pain, no humiliation), she would emerge, her Nice Girl reputation intact. Today we can afford to see him, we want to look, and men, feeling our eyes on them, pump up their biceps, mousse their hair.