The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  When the handsomely turned-out guy outdoes us in the board-room, and it’s obvious that all eyes are on him and not on us, will we cry harassment? When he blatantly uses his looks to get a promotion that we had wanted from his woman boss, how then will we feel about our ancient fear of other women’s censoring our use of beauty? My money is on men accomplishing what we women could never do for ourselves: Their success with beauty—our area of expertise—will force us to learn how to compete or we will become the drab workhorses of industry.

  “Get Outa My Mirror!”

  After generations of grumbling that men undress us with their eyes, women are experiencing competition for which we are ill-prepared. The very people whom women used to chide are now our competitors. The contest for the admiring eyes of the world is no longer our exclusive turf. Women cannot acquire economic power without giving up something of our own.

  Like the foolish virgins whose lamps ran out of oil, women are not taking men’s return to the mirror seriously; so practiced are we in denial of competition between ourselves, we doggedly refuse to admit that we have new rivals in beauty, the very people who were once the prize. Did we honestly think men would let us take their jobs, the role that more than any other defined their masculinity, and not retaliate? And when he invests in the Calvin Klein suit, works out at the gym, and pays for a better barber, he will use the ammunition. No little dance of denial for him.

  Women are either going to push past The Nice Girl Rules and learn how to compete, or we will lose the mirror to men, who will employ it with a vigor that will leave us in the dust. This new attention men are paying to looks reflects an appetite that was already there. If feminism hadn’t carved out for women a piece of men’s economic terrain—power that had identified men since the Industrial Revolution—perhaps the brilliant scarves, long hair, and jewelry affected by men in the seventies would have come and gone. But we women did take men’s turf, and they are now seriously regaining that lost advantage.

  Peacocks in the past, men will take the praise and wear it proudly. Their inclination to dress up and show off has more historic weight than our own. For almost five hundred years, men’s form and face were the criteria of beauty. The pursuit of dressing up, owning great looks, is quickly relearned because its reward is so immediate. Exhilaration and a sense of well-being race through the blood when admiring eyes focus on us.

  Women don’t allow ourselves to get high on our beauty because of the instilled rules against competition, but men have no such fear. Soon enough women may find out what it was like to have been a man for the past two hundred years, wandering, invisible, in a cold climate, eyes searching hungrily for the nourishing sight of beauty.

  When men embraced fashion, they had none of our maidenly protestations regarding the stares of the opposite sex. They understood the power of beauty and its many uses. “The erotic clothing men wore was partly designed to appeal to women, to provoke an erotic awakening in them,” writes Lois Banner. “Europeans of these ages believed that love was a capricious passion, that it could strike at any moment. In this they believed that the eyes, and what the eyes saw, were crucial. What primarily provoked love was thought to be the quality of beauty, usually defined as the pleasing appearance of the person looked at.”

  For several hundred years now men have watched women’s envious entanglements, knowing that nothing they can do or say will affect the power women have over one another. It is not very flattering to the man, but within the Patriarchal Deal the intrawoman business that kept women unaware of their beauty power allowed the man to pursue economic wealth in the knowledge, conscious or not, that The Other Women would keep his wife “in her place.”

  “Hey, looking good is a way of getting ahead!” say today’s young men. A new kind of competition is at hand, one of which young women are still wary, but they nonetheless realize that men their age will steal beauty from them if they don’t recognize what they are losing: beauty’s power.

  Likewise, men had better be alert to the devious way in which we women operate where beauty is concerned. “He was just an empty suit,” a woman executive tells me about the beautifully dressed man she has fired. She is quite lovely, very blond, very successful at her work. We are having lunch to celebrate her having received the most prestigious award in her field, and though she didn’t have to use her looks to get ahead, they undoubtedly helped.

  In her tone of voice, there is an obvious dose of envy toward the handsome man who had intruded on her turf and was subsequently fired. As more women gain management status, will the men who work for them suffer the traditional woman’s fate in the workplace, a resentful assumption that too much good looks translates into lower intelligence, drive, and ambition?

  There is nothing like economics to force the most tenacious subject out of the closet. Good looks are no longer “just” an asset that women use to ensnare men. The kaleidoscopic happenings in men’s and women’s fashions, the meteoric rise of the model as cultural ideal, the spotlight on looks as never before in our lifetimes, all press the discussion forward.

  The beautiful woman who fired “the empty suit” is about to meet her match, a “suit” who fights back. Men assess the opponent, advance, retreat, jostle for the lead, maybe even take their competitor as ally, building on their networking experience, but they don’t telephone all the other guys and whisper to get the handsome dude excommunicated from The Group.

  Fashions change even before we know what is historically about to happen; it is as if our practiced inner eye has sized up the distant landscape and is equipping us physically for what lies ahead. “By the end of the seventies, men and women were beginning to exchange their effects in earnest,” says Anne Hollander. “We had women understanding how much they could use male costume—which was totally. Molloy’s Dress for Success said, ‘Do not dress as if you wanted the job. Dress as if you had the job.’ And now what are the men supposed to do? They are going to use female effects for the first time in the whole history of fashion. Now men have a wonderful new ability to deal with the masculine tailored scheme in a way that was not possible until the shakeup of feminism occurred.”

  As the bottom line—always the true indicator—informed the male beauty industry that men were buying more clothes and grooming products, advertisers and manufacturers grew alert. They knew before the average man did where things were heading. Advertising in men’s magazines informed the greater male population, activating men’s imaginations to see themselves in a new way, in that double-breasted suit, thinner, more muscular, younger.

  When prestigious Bergdorf Goodman built an expensive addition for male customers across from their women’s store on Fifth Avenue, the manager told me that he had to conduct classes to educate his salesmen in how to get men to pay $1,000 for a suit. There was money to be made in the new world of men’s fashions, but would men be willing to ante up the considerable sums that women are used to paying? The answer seems to be yes. Five years later, the Bergdorf ads read, “Without style, ambition is merely aggressive.” Actually, I had hoped that such advantages as the traditional free alterations that men have always enjoyed would filter into woman’s fashion world; instead, men seem willing to pay whatever it takes to acquire that degree of looks they desire.

  Unlike women, men see beauty as something they can choose to pursue or not, realizing that if they are overlooked in the beauty contest, so be it. We women are not yet so independent. We may choose intellectually to be free of beauty’s demands, a fine choice, but the time has not yet come when a woman does not have that memory of childhood in which female beauty played a considerable role; most of us do not yet believe in the alternative sources of power. If we did, women would not be so enviously damning of the beauty. No, not until we’ve learned to handle competition, recognize the feeling before it sours us, will we honestly choose to decline the pursuit of beauty. Attorney Susan Thomases, known as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “enforcer,” may live easily with the nickname “old floppy-sh
oes” as she flip-flops in Washington power circles, hair unkempt, “suits often rumpled,” and caring little for makeup, but she is sufficiently exceptional for the Wall Street Journal to have cited her for her lack of attention to beauty rituals.

  Men have become as eye-catching as women. When we drive down the boulevard, do we stare at the billboard of the man with his near erection in his Calvin Klein underwear or at the block-long blowup of Cindy Crawford? When we arrive at our destination, whether we are man or woman, are our eyes drawn to the beautiful woman’s cleavage or to one of the elegantly dressed, handsome young men who expect to be admired, who dressed in front of the mirror with the full conscious intention of being valued for their looks in a way that father never dreamed of?

  Twenty, even ten years ago, men who spent too much time in front of the mirror were suspect. When I ask the most classically beautiful man I know—meaning that his features are so perfect he must always have been beautiful—what it was like to have such natural beauty and also be at the top of his field professionally, he answers, “It becomes very hard to be taken seriously.” Today he is fifty. It is odd to hear a man say this, and I suppose it accounts for his reputation as a killer opponent, an aggressive intellectual. In the past, on those rare occasions when an article was written about very good-looking men, he was invariably interviewed. One of his closest friends says of him that any man as good-looking as he has always elicited the suspicion that he couldn’t possibly be a man of any great intellect or business acumen. Clearly, he has worked very hard indeed to be taken seriously, for he was a star athlete in college, graduated summa cum laude, and went on to become a captain of industry. But his sons won’t have that leftover baggage from strict Patriarchal World.

  Most men proceed deeper into the mirror with caution, taking their cue from other men and from a constantly tested assurance that newly acquired beauty won’t interfere with financial success. “Men never admit to what I’m about to say,” writes a contributing editor to Mademoiselle magazine, “because it makes them feel a little weird—one of the great fears in a heterosexual man’s life is saying the slightest thing that might give someone the reason to question his sexual orientation—but the truth is we men study the male hunk as intensely as women do…. We devour these stories only because we want to know why this guy is worshiped and we are not, why fame and money and women naturally fall down around him…. It seems to us as if he doesn’t really need a purpose in life, that he doesn’t need to do anything at all but wait—and great opportunities will soon present themselves.”

  He has a point; most of the straight male world is still edgy at the suspicion of seeming effeminate in dress. But it was the gay world that expanded and visibly enjoyed the fashion window that opened for men beginning in the late sixties. No gay man needs to be convinced of the power of beauty, visual signaling to one another being part of the gay courting ritual.

  But all men today are indebted to the flamboyant, creative male look from thirty years ago that grew and diversified into the pastel-colored cashmere sweaters that are a staple in the wardrobes of most men today, regardless of with whom they sleep. The straight male culture no longer sucks in its breath nervously when they meander through Ralph Lauren’s magnificent mansion of a store, where experimentation with fashion and color is the trademark of a style that men not only wear but with which they decorate their houses and offices.

  Having criticized them for seeing us as “sexual objects” and argued them down in their workplace, we women have opened men’s horizons. Do not be surprised if men not only make themselves more attractive but also wander into formerly forbidden pastures to find additional rewards for their hard work. We are accustomed to men leaving their wives for younger women, but today it could be a younger man.

  Until recently nothing destroyed a man’s life like the hint of homosexuality. Just a dream or fantasy of himself with another man, just thinking about it was enough to drive him to the analyst’s couch. But a man’s memory of childhood is likely to contain scenes of group masturbation, the erotic adoration of the older, beautifully formed boy athlete, dreams he was told to banish when the rigid laws of the male heterosexual world were learned. How do you banish a dream, turn off the unconscious?

  I remember the morning last year when the phone call came with the breathless news that multimillionaire publisher Jann Wenner—he who had started Rolling Stone magazine—had left his wife and family and was ensconced in a suite at a posh East Side hotel with a male fashion model. It was indeed high gossip, but the world did not tremble as it might have twenty years earlier. Hesitations as to whether to print the story arose over concerns about the “outing” of homosexuals. By the time the story did eventually air, public reaction was mild, amused but tolerant. After all, some of the most powerful, wealthy men in publishing, in the film and music industry are gay. Wenner could as likely as not return to his wife and family tomorrow, appear once again with her in public, and there would be no scandal. We are a different culture where beauty is concerned, and beauty is linked to male homosexuality; as the power of beauty has shifted increasingly into men’s lives, the star of homosexuality rises.

  The world of fashion design has always been prominently gay; when we looked at beautiful women in gorgeous clothes we didn’t automatically think, “Oh, no, a gay man must have designed that!” Instead, we thought, “Oh, isn’t she breathtaking!” We still don’t acknowledge our debt to the homosexual eye for having made our lives so beautiful; but we have allowed our men, all men, once again to draw attention to themselves.

  Nothing speaks louder in our culture than money. Some may privately disparage Barry Diller and David Geffen, but the potent scent of their major bucks goes before them, turning big-mouthed homophobes into whimpering, envious pups. The spreading awareness of these powerful gay men infiltrates society’s attitudes in all areas, as does the ascendancy of beauty, a world controlled almost exclusively by the gay sensibility. Suddenly, it seems we are less disparaging of a man, any man, who dresses in such a way as to command the eye; we no longer automatically label him gay any more than we would exclude Diller or Geffen or Jann Wenner from our dinner party, if only they would grace us with their presence.

  More than work, more than marriage and a family, we need to have a sexual identity. In the privacy of erotic fantasies, men have always played with images of women arousing one another and in the women’s coupling have found exciting permission for themselves; as forbidden, and therefore thrilling, as these fantasies were, the idea of imagining themselves with another man was not thrilling, meaning a limp cock.

  Today, as evidenced in film, literature, erotic fantasies, and real life, the theme of gayness still triggers the forbidden thrill, but it is less daunting, the cock less limp, harder, as the thrill of the forbidden swims up from men’s unconscious. In seeing the other man, the man looks at himself, stares as he once stared at other boys masturbating along with him when he was ten and needed a view of male power to stand up to his mother’s, a time in life before looking at other men became tantamount to losing his manhood.

  In last night’s movie, Heat, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are so intensely rivalrous and competitive in their game of cops and robbers that there is no room, no feeling or passion left over for the women in their lives; ultimately, they face each other down, and Pacino shoots De Niro, who holds out his hand in his last breath to the only person with whom he can identify. Pacino stands in the dark, flat space of an open field, holding the Bad Guy’s hand until he dies, at which point we know that in winning, Pacino is now lonelier than ever without another man in whom he sees himself. Need I add that both men are swell dressers?

  As economic competition with women increases, how will a man see himself in bed with that sex who wants to control him even more, wants his job, wants to police how he talks and acts, wants everything? Until now women were the prize for whom men competed. How well men performed sexually with women had its roots in the earliest years of life,
opposite father, siblings, and that first great champion competitor, mother. This hasn’t changed.

  Patriarchal man ran from awareness of mother’s influence in all areas. But the gay man, whose beauty is his meal ticket, is more cognizant of women’s influence over him. Ten years ago my friend Dick’s story, which follows, would have been strictly relegated to the homosexual world. I find it today a very modern parable for all men.

  Dick’s mother, you may remember, was a great beauty who was so rivalrous with her eye-riveting, four-year-old son that she couldn’t bear to look at him. She walked out on him and his father, but on her infrequent returns for money and his brief visits with her, Dick became her student in beauty power. “I might as well have been invisible to her,” he says. “I’d always been told I looked like her, and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t love me. But I watched how she used her beauty, and it was from her that I learned how to use my own looks. Very well, if I could not get her attention, I would beat her at her own game.”

  In a very beguiling, charming, and winning manner, Dick is one of the most competitive people I know. When Dick was thirteen, he was sent off for one of his formal, short stays with his mother. “She and her lover were just returning from Mexico,” he says, “and they were wearing identical white outfits with red sashes. At one point, my mother left the sitting room. I flirted with him, was very aware of what I was doing, teasing him, touching his shoulder, his hand, and he put his arms around me. We were on the sofa and he was on top of me, kissing me, commanding me, ‘No, no, open your mouth!’ She walked in.

  “I had never seen her so enraged. She sent me home, told my grandmother, who warned her that if she told my father she would never receive another penny. She rejected me and kept the lover. But I had competed with her and had won. I am sure she thought that. I was terrified at what her reprisals would be. Our visits became fewer and fewer, until they stopped altogether.”