The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Professional studies notwithstanding, I hold to my optimism that beautiful, lively, self-providing women may stop selecting men twenty, thirty, forty years older than they and instead pick someone more in their own range of looks, interests, energy. To put it bluntly, when they lie down with these old men with their wrinkled flesh, aren’t their fantasies of men whose erections last a little longer, at the very least? Beauty in a man has never topped my own list, but even when I had little money of my own, old men with potbellies, low libidos, and no hair were never on my horizon. As women’s new economics digs deeper into our unconscious and women grow to feel a stronger sense of entitlement to someone who shares their energy and background, things may change. Certainly men’s steady march into the mirror will affect how women look at men and choose a mate. Women’s choice may never approximate the age difference between wealthy men and their adolescent brides, but it will change by the laws of economics, which have always shaped history.

  Not since the Industrial Revolution has an historical event matched feminism’s influence on every aspect of society. The repercussions roll on. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, for instance, there is an article on today’s twenty-something generation of daughters of feminists, who grew up with mothers who were overworked, tired, and absent. These young women say they don’t crave the kind of economic independence that drove their mothers but instead see something in between women’s role under Patriarchy and what feminism created. If enough of them feel this way, they will certainly reshape feminism, as will their children’s generation and the one after that.

  If the little bald men introduced their wives to higher finance, their women brought them into the mirror. Already proficient in all aspects of high fashion, the wives in the Power Couple understood the meaning of an Hermès tie, a Charvet shirt, the tailor-made suit, Hunstman or Church custom shoes. Very quickly, the husbands learned to clock each other, noting shirt, tie, watch, shoes, brand names and prices toted up so quickly that the eyes barely moved.

  I recall a certain short tycoon who, in his naiveté, was kind of endearing. Whenever I ran into him, he would scrutinize me from head to toe, starting at the top: “Who does your hair?” “Yves.” “I love that jumpsuit. Who designed it?” “Geoffrey Beene.” “Whose bag is that?” “Prada.” “I bet those shoes are Ferragamo.” “Right.” One day when we met on the street, he asked me where I was going. I answered that I was on my way to see Yves, to get my hair cut. “Can I come?” he asked, and fell into step with me, taking big strides alongside me as his chauffeured Mercedes purred slowly behind us, not exactly like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreet, but it did come to mind. “How tall are you?” “Five feet, ten inches,” I said.

  It was clear that he was practicing getting the labels, prices, and look down pat. Here he was, fiftyish and finally going through adolescence, looking at women to whom he’d never felt entitled, and being seen by them, appraised, flirted with. He’d amassed his fortune in a smaller town well south of Manhattan, with a traditional wife.

  He had bought a string of high-profile companies advertised by very tall, beautiful models whom he collected the way tycoons before him collected racehorses. Today, of course, models are the thoroughbreds of the age. What was likable about him back then, before the tall wife did him over, was his unabashed curiosity, his big-eyed wonder at the world into which he had dropped at a moment in history when the only asset he had—money—was the entity that mattered. Whenever I see his photo in the paper, that little round face, his latest racehorse on his arm, I wonder if he is still enjoying it, if the accessories of beauty ever make up for the anonymity of his adolescence.

  In time, he would leave his second wife for an even more powerful, taller trophy, this one with political aspirations. It is one of the latest versions of The New Power Deal between the sexes, played in the tabloids by the Arianna Huffingtons: ambitious, tall, elegant women who need wealthy men to economically flesh out their own aspirations for power.

  Other New Deals in which both partners work and have economic power mean that either can walk away at any time. This couple may never have children, may be of the same sex, but economic independence allows each of them to manipulate power—in the name of love—as a way of staying together in what psychologist Michael Vincent Miller calls “Intimate Terrorism.”

  Write sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, “New marriages where the wife is ambitious are less stable. It is not that an ambitious wife necessarily grows dissatisfied with her marriage or seeks greener pastures. Rather, it is her husband who does not want to live with such an ambitious or successful woman. Among married couples who have broken up, we find that the more ambitious the wife, the more likely that the husband wanted the relationship to end.”

  In a mere twenty-five years, feminism has reinvented the plot line of the universal story of a woman’s life. It didn’t use to matter what the man looked like or if he was old or mean. The objective was to find a provider, to not live alone, despised, rejected. Beautiful women seldom were Old Maids. No one uses that expression anymore. Nor do we look aghast at the lovely unmarried woman who has visited the Sperm Bank and who wears her fashionable maternity clothes without fear of censure. But when she went to buy her sperm, you can be sure she requested fluid with certain hereditary traits. “We don’t get requests for short men,” said the spokesperson for the bank my researcher called. No potential donor under five feet six need apply. Why do I think that if my short billionaire with the wretched adolescence offered some sperm, women would get down on their knees, so to speak, for a shot of that mogul medicine?

  Nothing summed up the bad taste of the mid-eighties Power Couples gone berserk quite so brilliantly as the ballyhooed arrival in New York of designer Christian Lacroix, who came across the great ocean in November 1987 to dress The Trophy Wives. No one described the advent more richly, in all its misbegotten grotesquerie, than Julie Baumgold in New York magazine, where she wrote that Lacroix’s fashions represented the same kind of ostentatious denial historically seen in dying aristocracies. “Clothes of such brilliant luxury and defiance probably haven’t been seen since eighteenth-century French aristocrats rattled in carts over the cobblestones on their way to the guillotine.”

  There is something so like the fairy tale’s lesson in humiliation and disaster learned from The Lacroix Experience, which followed the 1987 stock market crash; the clothes he brought to the new society women were ludicrous, some hilarious in their over-the-top extravagance. But the women who fought to buy them were blind to hilarity. A Lacroix concoction could cost $15,000, but women like Nan Kempner, Lee Radziwill, Blaine Trump, and Diandra Douglas vied and pleaded for the privilege of wearing these costumes, which were made of the most sumptuous fabrics, yes, but when worn made caricatures of the women wearing them.

  Lacroix was, as Baumgold wrote, “the man who makes clothes of such extravagant, gorgeous excess as to divide the classes once and for all. The man who revived the mini, created the pouf…. The man who brought back tight bodices and bare flesh and who put across his love for weird, obsolete, rather bad-taste staples like cabbage roses, petticoats, bustles, fichus, panniers, and platter hats in clothes that are magnificent and visionary. His peculiar vision was flat out of his time, but he made it modern and daring. Especially daring, fit to dance on the lip of the volcano.”

  When The Dress for Success Suit began to itch, women wanted something to buy with our new money that looked like The New Woman. But who is she? Who she is can’t be explained until we know who he is. Neither sex evolves alone. That our designers re-create instead of inventing originals doesn’t mean that they have totally failed us. They are not psychiatrists. Until we get the present straight and discover where we left our hearts, we will continue putting on reincarnations from the past.

  Fashion designers, alas, are not as wily as the magician tailors of fairy tales; they too are caught up in the past and recognize in the old photos that we looked more subst
antial. The right-wing extremists would have us believe that we lost our souls in the sixties and seventies. In fact, it was a time in which we were trying to strip away postwar materialism to find our selves. Today, our children put on the clothes from those years unwittingly, intuitively, and dance to our music.

  Did the men who paid for the $15,000 Lacroix pouf dresses stop and reflect on what in hell their wives were doing with birdcages on their heads and hoops under their cabbage roses? They probably said nothing, assuming that their wives understood the social scene into which they had dropped like people from another planet. The little tycoons of the eighties were masters of the portfolio and little else; no one had taught them to samba. They relied on the trophy wife to navigate the tricky terrain of The New Society. They relied on her to teach them how to dress, or they hired an image consultant, a profession that boomed in the eighties and continues still as the internationalization of business spreads across the globe.

  Today, getting ahead has put the businessman in the mirror opposite his European competitors, men who dress very well indeed; matching the competitor’s look, maybe topping it, has reinforced men’s return to looking good.

  When an executive from Topeka flies to Turin, Italy, for a conference, he is advised that in the European business world a man’s appearance is factored into the deal. The Association of Image Consultants International thrives not just on re-suiting the business person but on picking his shoes, cuff links, and ties, and also teaching him how to use the panoply of crystal and cutlery at dinner.

  “When men meet around a conference table today,” says consultant Camille Lavington, “they appraise one another as carefully as the prospectus on the table. Men want to do business with other men who understand the value of manners and appearance.”

  It is interesting that men’s boredom with “the button-down look” began about the same time in the eighties as women’s weariness with the blue Dress for Success Suit. “American men were suddenly earning lots of money to spend on clothes that would advertise their new wealth and enable them to compete with European and Japanese fine tailoring,” says Lavington.

  Along with the internationalization of business, sharp dressers like Don Johnson, in the top-rated television series Miami Vice, gave young men permission to move ahead on all fashion fronts: business, weekend, summer, winter. Men’s wardrobes have come to demand the same dimensions of closet space that women’s clothes occupy. Today, Hollywood and athletic stars, along with business moguls, set the male fashion standards, duly photographed and published, that the masses of men follow, either in the original high-priced line or in knockoffs.

  Lavington’s makeover instructions actually begin with eye contact, handshake, stance, posture. “The first thing you do is look somebody right in the eye; you can determine the quality of the person you are going to deal with. The second thing you do is to see if they are well groomed. In order, it goes haircut, clean shaven/beard, collar, necktie, the appearance of the clothes and suitability (in other words, whether they’re well tailored), and then down to the shoes.

  “How a man dresses says something of a man’s power. In the international market, where you get off the Concorde and deal with the French and the Italians, if you are wearing short hose that show the skin on your leg instead of the long executive hose, these things are noticed. The decision makers, the people responsible for large amounts of money, conform to a certain recognized pattern of clothing and behavior.”

  Men’s return to the mirror has not stopped with clothes. Nationwide, men made up 24 percent of plastic surgery procedures in 1993, up from 10 percent in 1980, reports the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery. Men’s pursuit of beauty now goes beyond face-lifts, nose jobs, and liposuction. From pectoral implants, which pump up the chest, to phalloplasty, which pumps up the penis, more men are now looking to improve more areas of their bodies. “Nationally, the procedures most often performed on men,” says Jeffrey Knezovich, executive director of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, “are hair replacement, rhinoplasty (nose job), blepharoplasty (eye-lift), liposuction and body sculpting, face-lift, dermabrasion, and pectoral implants.”

  My own feeling is that men’s pursuit of looks won’t be as compulsive as women’s; our need of beauty was based on survival. Nor do I think that men are going to stop with beauty in their assumption of women’s traditional privileges. Men’s move into the nursery is going to take longer, but it is as inevitable, not so much because men want it—the role scares many men—but because the need exists. The New Father role will influence men’s looks in a different way than image makeovers, plastic surgery, and bodybuilding, but in the end it will be a more profound and lasting transformation; a child will want to emulate the look of the good father because it was one of the most powerful looks in his life. How fascinating that all these changes in men’s lives happen simultaneously and in response to one revolution: feminism.

  “The Future of Men’s Beauty Is Largely in Women’s Hands”

  When I was twenty, a lawyer telephoned to inform me of my modest inheritance. “From whom?” I asked. “From your father,” he said, which is how I learned of his life and death.

  Years later when my aunt Dot was visiting Key West, she said, “Your father was the handsomest man in Pittsburgh. He had a presence. People turned and looked when he entered a room.” More recently, my mother told me on a visit that he was a bounder, a womanizer. After a lifetime of refusing to discuss him, she talked into a tape recorder that I had placed on the coffee table. Having waited so long for this—it happened two years ago—I still cannot bring myself to replay that tape. I want to finish this book without him, the way life always was.

  No wonder I was never attracted to beautiful men. Not for me a man whom others would be tempted to steal away, whose looks signaled even a whiff of infidelity. Early deprivation had schooled me to seek out men who saw me as more than they had ever dreamed of winning. In turn, I gratefully became their good mirror, the eyes in which they would see themselves as the adored one. I love to watch my man dress and undress, and in this book I’ve come to understand why: Relegated to the role of voyeur—where he is often denigrated—man comes late to the mirror. I’ve known men who dressed without any mirror at all.

  When I first met my husband in the early eighties, he was attracted to my display, my pleasure in dressing to be seen. When we walked down the street, he was aware when people looked at me and I was aware of his clocking this. I invited him into the mirror, took him to Bergdorf’s, sat in a little gold chair, as I had for my grandfather at Sulka’s, and watched him watching himself in the mirror as the tailor fitted his suit.

  It was as if he’d never seen that man in the mirror. When we met, he owned six identical blue suits made in Korea. Buying him clothes is an investment in my own happiness. In the morning, he walks out of his dressing room and stands before me, awaiting my verdict. It is my eye that he craves, my judgment of a look he only allowed himself when we met. He wouldn’t trust another woman’s eye. Introducing him to his vanity has cooled my jealous nature. I am his best mirror.

  I am not concerned that he will grow overly vain, so deeply planted in him is The Good Provider role. But when we walk down the street, no matter how splendid his own new threads, he is still more interested in how men look at me, which says something of the depth of value men feel in wearing a woman.

  Other men tell me it is difficult to catch a woman’s eye. “I’ll be walking down Fifth Avenue with Nan,” says author Gay Talese of his wife, “and I watch the women walking by and they don’t even look at me, they look at her.” What is it like to be the invisible sex? It can’t be healthy and obviously contributes to the hunger in men’s eyes when they stare at us. My friend Gay is a handsome man, an impeccable dresser, but women don’t look at him. Women are not raised to look at men.

  But young women are beginning to give men the eye, though it is unpracticed and will require time before voyeurism becomes natural. “One of
the early analytic ideas about voyeurism has to do with the eyes being used as a mouth to take in something good,” says Robertiello. “The experience of looking at a beautiful woman, savoring her body, taking it in and being nourished by the image is analogous to the feeding process.”

  No doubt this accounts, in part, for why women too like to look at women. In my DYG survey, the great majority of women listed men fifth in response to the question, “Why is beauty important to women?” Men, of course, put women as the number one reason they pursued good looks.

  Will men’s getting into the nursery bring to their children a sensory memory of the sight, smell, and texture of a man’s body so that we are involuntarily drawn to it throughout life, just as we are to the luscious female body? Is the idea any more improbable than sperm banks once were or the egg and sperm of a couple deposited in another woman’s body? True, a man cannot carry a fetus or nurse a baby, yet getting men in the nursery is the best tonic for the man/woman relationship.

  As it is, we all stare at women’s bodies. Women, as well as men, look with nostalgia at centerfolds of naked female bodies; we envy our friends’ large breasts. We want to lay our heads there, and in women’s erotic fantasies, this is precisely what we do. As maternal constancy grows scarcer, women grow up hating their own bodies more than ever, the flabby underarms that awaken breast envy and rage, the fleshy female buttocks and bellies that arouse nursery angers of deprivation.

  A handsome salary cannot warm us in the cold recesses of the unconscious. Had a father shared caretaking with mother, then his skin, texture, smell, and touch might also be remembered; who knows what it might do for voyeurism in both sexes, but we would certainly be less angry with women.

  Seeing only degradation in the eyes of men who masturbate while looking at women’s bare breasts and genitals, angry feminists miss the point altogether. “The uninitiated think that men look at naked ladies to disparage them, or that the women hate the men and only do it to make a buck,” says Robertiello, who used to frequent burlesque theaters. “But it’s a love fest. We men worship. These women see the adoration in the guys’ eyes. The men think the women are goddesses for letting them look. Their wives don’t care enough to show them their bodies. These women live out the guy’s suppressed dreams of exhibitionism.”