by Nancy Friday
Since beginning this book I’ve thought often of his mother’s refusal to see him again, even to speak to him by phone. “I don’t think the reason she refuses to see you is because of your age,” I said to him last Mother’s Day when he was sitting, as usual, staring at the telephone he was forbidden by her to use. “I think it’s because of her fear of competing with you, and your winning again.”
“I’ve never thought of that,” he said. “She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. I only did it out of retaliation. She wouldn’t look at me.”
“Alas, you won the beauty contest.”
A woman’s genetic back goes up when a man nudges her aside in the mirror; his looks and behavior connote selfishness, not selflessness. Would he lay down his life for her? If he is gazing at his reflection, he won’t see the grizzly bear. And when she is pregnant, during those nine months that anthropologists build into “natural selection” of a more powerful mate, how will he provide and protect if he is at his tailor’s?
Never mind that she owns her own house, makes a better salary than he does, keeps a gun in the drawer of her bedside table to protect herself, and can now take out a breast and feed her baby in a restaurant where she is paying for dinner. (Now, that is breast power!) Her distrust of a narcissistic man is her maternal ancestors’ suspicion of males who dress up instead of provide. Men say nothing, no “Help!” audible beneath women’s layers of condemnation, not until it builds to a scream or a blow, so unpracticed are men in the emotional modulation of complaining.
“Women’s Liberation has to be terribly conscious about the danger of provoking men to kill women,” said Margaret Mead. “You have quite literally driven them mad.” Very well, boys/men seem to be saying today in their growing reliance on muscle, on brute force, We will employ those traits you women have not appropriated. Marina Warner points out that in modern myths, such as movies and video games, young boys today are taught that size, that muscle building typify a real man. Force has become “the wellspring of male authority, of power,” she writes.
One Matriarchal Feminist’s reaction to the growing violence among young men isn’t to question why but to write that men should be charged a “user’s fee” for the prisons and rehabilitation they monopolize. “Men are expensive,” psychologist June Stephenson writes. “We cannot expect men to police their own, to take responsibility for their contribution to the violence in this country…. Men are not their brothers’ keepers. Except in male-bonding groups, men are not connected to each other emotionally in the same way women are…. Men must pay for being men.”
Men must do something even more difficult than women entering the work world; and they must do it even as Matriarchal Feminism curses them for being innately violent and antipathetic to everything good and kind and feminine. When the man was a boy, these warm, soft feelings that belonged to mother, Ruler of the World, weren’t felt to be meager at all. But when he walked out the door to join Boys’ World, these powerful emotions had to be left behind. It was society that taught him that “masculine” emotions are superior. The other, “feminine” emotions, which are natural to us all, became suppressed.
Psychiatrist Willard Gaylin once told me, “If men don’t have close friendships early on—boyhood, high school, college—later they don’t have the talent or energy. The workplace drains them. They go through life with a sense of exclusion.” I’ve lived with men most of my life, had two marriages and many love affairs, and I have never known a grown man who formed a new, great friendship with another grown man.
My husband tells me about a car crash, what he calls “a near-death experience” that happened when he was nineteen. The car was demolished. When his injuries healed, his father gave him his own car, saying he would buy a new one and suggested that his son use the insurance money to take a trip. “Invite one of your friends,” he said. My husband asked his father to go with him. They had never spent time alone. His father was a successful, hardworking man, away days and often evenings too.
Together they went to half a dozen cities including Acapulco, Mexico City, and San Francisco, and they never talked. Oh, they discussed business, politics, news, but never anything to do with their personal lives, emotions, what was inside, invisible.
When I first met my husband, in our early intimate talks he often referred to his life before we met as “compartmentalized.” Then I saw his collection of antique Japanese chests from when he lived in Tokyo. They were beautiful, and all had many tiny little drawers in which I imagined my sweetheart’s emotions once secreted away.
Imagine a mother and daughter on such a trip as my husband and his father. Imagine them never discussing emotions, feelings. Impossible. It isn’t written in stone, nor is it genetic that men must shut down their emotional selves as boys; it isn’t women’s “fault” nor our job to change men. It is grown men’s job; compared to our fight to get into the workplace and political office—a struggle, but exciting, mature, even sexual in the energy and reward—this revolution is tougher still.
It is not easy for a grown man to dig into whatever he can find that is left of the emotional boy he once was so that he might talk his son into a different direction. For a grown man to use his own life as a template so that he might talk about what he might have done, could have done, to open up all these “unmanly” wounds and also include some understanding of women’s world, well, it isn’t something Freud or men’s magazines deal with. And what of his competition with his son, speaking of Freud? If the boy doesn’t learn from his father—who is the same sex and therefore the most trusted model—there will not be enough jails to contain the next generation, which would suit the Matriarchy just fine.
Such men’s groups as Robert Bly’s and The Promise Keepers are a beginning. Ms. magazine sent a female reporter “undercover,” dressed as a male teenager, to one of The Promise Keepers conventions; while the author ended up applauding many of the organization’s aims—“I don’t see how society can change in the ways we want it to if men have no support to start acting less like ‘men’ and more like caring, loving, ethical, and nondominating human beings”—she obviously felt that her readers needed a mocking preamble: “Radiant, swishy men wave bright Promise Keepers flags as though they were batons,” and, “Am I walking like someone with the signifier of power between my legs?”
It is an eye exercise to imagine how men’s looks will change when boys grow up remaining open to emotion rather than moving through life with impassive faces, shutters closed, feelings compartmentalized.
“If you take the breeding power that you [women] have, the reproductive strength that you have, child rearing… and you try to get what’s left of us,” says television star Tim Allen, “you’re going to get very angry men who will do very angry things to protect what little is left of their territory….” What is it to be a man in an increasingly genteel, middle-class world where women have not only won power but have redefined the rules of engagement in their own terms? Allen continues:
The birth of a child—my wife’s going, “Ohh”—I see them in love in a room, and my eyes are like I’m looking in Macy’s at toys I’ll never own. I’ll never have that! And the two of them: “Ah”—these little coos…. And I was like, “Whooo!” I shrank down to this little man. So what I have to do is somehow—I have to get some reason for them to need me…. “I have very little left, I have this little corner left. I have to be careful of your feelings; I gotta make sure that you’re okay in the job market. And I’m not allowed to be an aggressive prick!” A warrior—my wife and I used to say, that’s what I’m built to be. I’m a warrior… you [women] really don’t want me to exist. Well, fuck you—I exist. And not only that… I will build an army, and I will crush you! I mean, if you get me that way, I’ll do it. If that’s what you really want—to have a war with me…. “You have picked the wrong mother-fucker to fuck with!” Because I know how to fight better than you.
The Short, Bald Takeover Tycoons and Their Towering Trophy Wives
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My friend and I are sitting in the restaurant at the Bel Air in Los Angeles when she nudges me, alerting me to the entry of a little bald man in a dark blue suit who has just bought an airline, a country. He is indistinguishable from other men, but he stands tall, for he knows we are seeing his portfolio, his houses, his private plane and that they make him equal to and deserving of the most beautiful woman in the room, who happens to be on his arm. She carries an elegant Hermès briefcase and wears on her head a crown of beautifully coifed hair, which catches so much sunlight we are momentarily blinded. We don’t ask, What does she see in him?
“He must have had a terrible adolescence,” I say to my friend. It is written all over him: rejected by girls in adolescence. In that strange second half of the eighties, it was a line I used profitably when seated next to a scion of industry: “Tell me about your adolescence.” The game isn’t meant unkindly, for I throw in my own plight and fully appreciate why he worked so hard to get out of those years, to never repeat them again. Short, bald tycoons had a fiercer goal than the football heroes of their youth. They may have spent their Saturdays at their fathers’ offices reading balance sheets when all the popular kids were at The Big Game, but invisibility and envy toughened them. In the end, they won.
At no time did The Short, Bald Men with Wretched Adolescences win more ostentatiously than in the mid-eighties. They were on the covers of magazines, or their beautiful wives were, their trademark Big Hair fanning out across the page. Even if they weren’t beautiful, the hair made them seem so. “Hair is all,” a friend of mine used to say, and these women had the budget to afford daily grooming from hair stylists who, along with the fashion designers, were the top beauty agents of the day.
It was an aging Debutante Ball, this self-outing of enormously successful men of no great beauty themselves, whose wives were more than trophies, for they too worked, ran their own companies, or devoted their lives to charity balls, which ran nonstop. The extravagance of the parade, such million-dollar parties as Malcolm Forbes’s birthday party in Tangiers and Saul Steinberg’s in the Hamptons, along with the gaudy, outlandish fashions, were Fellini-esque, a nervous high-wire act on the edge of implosion. Nothing caught it better than Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.
A telling but tacky offshoot of the era was the avid, public discussion of money. Dinner table conversation focused on prices, dollar amounts spent on possessions. No one thought twice about asking how much was paid for an apartment, a dress, a summer house. If someone didn’t ask, people felt compelled to tell what they had paid, as if you wouldn’t see them without vast numbers attached. In my memory, the bad manners of talking prices got its start in the late seventies, when all the rules of childhood regarding polite invisibility of wealth flew out the window.
Was it Watergate on top of Vietnam, a communal shame leading to invisibility, which had made the goodness and kindness on which we’d been raised inadequate? Was this what drained us into hollow people, a society of The Empty Package, craving ever new fashions to cover the embarrassment? I am no priss, but the silence regarding prices was so firmly laid down so early in life that I never gave it a thought until dollar amounts were out there, zinging around the dinner table.
Beautiful women have traditionally been worn by men as signals to the outside world that they have arrived. But by the mid-eighties, the beautiful women—at least in Manhattan and other large cities—wanted their own portfolios. Feminism had made working chic, and wives of the richest men wanted to be In. Not just a job, but great success too was wanted by these competitive wives of the Very Rich, meaning that a Georgette Mosbacher wanted to carry her own briefcase and be interviewed by the press, not for her beauty routine, but for her business acumen. It would have been unthinkable to turn up for lunch at The Four Seasons or Le Cirque without their own clients. The Babe Paleys of the fifties who had lunched and dressed, and were worn by their husbands, were gone with the wind.
Financial need had nothing to do with the grueling daily routines of these women, their backbreaking schedules duly reported in Vogue, Town and Country, and Harper’s Bazaar. That they raced from 6:00 A.M. workouts with their private trainers to their hairdressers and then to the office by chauffeured limousines was reported without tongue in cheek. For some crazy reason, they were, and still are, taken very seriously. Feminist headquarters has never touched them, either to praise or deprecate, though their competitive work-cum-play schedules were born in feminism’s influence. It had become infuriatingly uncomfortable for a woman to appear at a social gathering and have nothing with which to answer the question, “And what do you do?” meaning, In what interesting work outside the home are you engaged?
Thus, The Power Couple was born, wherein a man, usually divorced, now chose a much younger, beautiful woman. Certainly, they were not the majority, but they were the darlings of the media. Where the first wife had stayed home and raised his children, this new young lovely bent herself to enlarge his image in other ways. Usually more socially adept than he, she taught him what clubs to join, what charities to enrich, what parties to attend and how to host them, as well, and, of course, she taught him how to dress.
She often spoke on his behalf; being more beautiful than he, she lent her lovely face to the cameras until her image alone invoked his name. The crux of The Deal was that she not make him look small, which would be untenable; instead, the public summation must be that he was quite a man to be able to take her on. On January first, they would sit together, filling in their Power Couple agendas to be sure their separate business schedules and combined social engagements jibed.
What an interesting alternative to invisibility feminism had provided them with: a working wife whose wealth certainly didn’t match his own Fortune 500 status, but whose looks and, equally important, social savoir faire signaled to people that he was someone to be reckoned with. So fixated had their lives been on creating great wealth, these men were oblivious to the function of fish forks, reminder cards, and the blinding significance of being on the board of the Metropolitan Museum; eventually, some of them would have to wait in line for that prestigious museum to accept their ten-million-dollar donation, which bought entry to its board of directors.
We meet a little bald man in a dark blue suit, tailor-made but nonetheless indistinguishable from other suits, and we turn away until someone informs us of who he is, meaning what he owns. We turn back, see him anew, not as short but as princely and with a golden nimbus around his head, for now we remember how often we’ve seen that name, not just on the business pages of the paper, but the society pages of every periodical. Ah, now we understand the beautiful tall blonde crossing the room to glue herself to him. Everything falls into place, click, click, click, The Deal, the exchange of goods and services.
Many of these female thoroughbreds need never have married; they could have bought their own duplex apartments on Park Avenue. They could have afforded younger, better-looking mates, not necessarily gigolos but men who were closer to their age and interests, who did their dance and listened to their music. There are, however, persistent findings from studies conducted prior to and since modern feminism that indicate that women, regardless of the size of their own private economic resources, still prefer men with greater resources than their own.
“Evidence from dozens of studies documents that modern American women indeed value economic resources in mates substantially more than men do,” writes psychologist David M. Buss. Going as far back as 1939, Buss’s findings in 1956 and again in 1967 showed little variance. Nor did the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies alter women’s preference. Again, in the eighties, Buss went on to survey both men and women who “rated eighteen personal characteristics for their value in a marriage partner. As in the previous decades, women still value good financial prospects in a mate roughly twice as much as men do.” A later study Buss conducted in 1994 and 1995, using “personal ads in newspapers and magazines confirm[ed] that women who are actually in the m
arriage market desire financial resources…. Female advertisers seek financial resources roughly eleven times as often as male advertisers do.”
Buss and his colleagues proceeded to survey thirty-seven cultures on six continents and five islands, and once again found that “women across all continents, all political systems (including socialism and communism), all racial groups, all religious groups, and all systems of mating (from intense polygamy to presumptive monogamy) place more value than men on good financial prospects. Overall, women value financial resources about 100 percent more than men do.”
Personally, I am disappointed in Buss’s findings; while my anthropologist colleagues would shrug an “I told you so,” I had hoped that women’s dramatically increased earning ability since modern feminism would have freed us to look for characteristics that led to more intimate compatibility, a process of selection that outdistanced whatever genetic inclinations determine a woman’s need for a mate who can protect and provide during her child-bearing years. Perversely, Buss’s surveys seem to show that the most successful, educated women “express an even stronger preference for high-earning men than do women who are less financially successful.”
A woman sees the rich man’s balding head and potbelly in a different way than she sees the identical flaws in a poor man. Yes, it is his economic clout that transforms him, but if we trace the influence of power back far enough, isn’t the man’s bank account irresistible to a woman in the same way as mother’s power? Mother, who had all the power in the world, was “beautiful” because we would die without her. Isn’t this what is carried forward when the beautiful young woman with wealth of her own marries a short, bald tycoon who overpowers her economically? It is her implicit memory of being taken care of by the most powerful person in the world that draws her to power twenty, thirty, forty years later.
