The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  “No catcalls?” I asked him.

  “The few times that happened, the men were so disapproved of by the rest of the audience, they were thrown out of the theater. The stripper/audience relationship is a love affair, maybe even more important than a sex affair.”

  No one gives permission to men in all areas pertaining to beauty and sex like a woman, being that sex that denied permission in the first place. Now give it back. If he believes we mean it, if we turn him on to his own beauty, he will be ours forever. Without that first woman’s permission to love his body, the threat of loss of love permeates a man’s life, a weakness that must be turned into a strength. When he touched his penis as a boy, he was risking his life, or so it felt; grown older, the man still confuses fear, pain, and anger with love and erotic desire. The prostitute knows his fantasies, but his wife is in the untenable position of naysayer, which is how life began. If only women understood the power of permission. Giving it to men, drawing them into our world to share the powers of parenting and of beauty too, is a gift that never stops paying back.

  Beauty may not precisely balance with economic wealth, but men’s growing investment in looks is already righting The Deal between men and women. Women are looking seriously at men, maybe seeing them for the first time. And with young men using their looks to get ahead, women can hardly continue to deny and demur that we do likewise. Not having our history with beauty, men don’t disclaim, “Oh, this old Armani suit?” Men aren’t better people, but they are seasoned competitors, and don’t live in the fear that the other guys will abandon them if they have more beauty.

  Watching men use their looks competitively may encourage women to examine our own problems with losing and winning. Finding out that their whole identity doesn’t hinge on economic power, perhaps men will learn from us that choosing a Good Provider in the form of a woman who loves the competitive workplace more than he is a far better life than what his father had. At the very least, the ameliorating rewards of looking good and winning admiration may take some of the edge off men’s pursuit unto death of economic power, as well as lessen men’s voyeuristic dependency on women.

  As more women learn to enjoy looking at men, will pleasure lead to wondering why we denigrated men for so long for their voyeurism? As more of us appraise the beautiful men who work out alongside us at the gym, who buy their clothes from our designers, who now create for men too, will we see men as our beauty partners? Some women will look at men as “a piece of meat,” our description of how they have always appraised us; other women, hopefully, will bring to voyeurism a natural talent, along with a memory, of how we always wished men would see us.

  If women do start choosing beautiful men, men will work harder to make themselves more attractive. However, if we are to believe the women’s magazines, there will be a testing period: “First, beauty is power, and men start off with enough of that,” wrote a woman in an article titled “What If He’s Cuter Than You?” “Second, physical perfection in a man always feels ominous to me. It’s the lull before the storm…. The temper tantrum of my envy that I wasn’t born perfect myself…. I saw Neil, as men so often see very beautiful women, as a fling, a plaything. In fact, it wasn’t fair to say I ‘saw’ Neil at all. He was my hand mirror. I didn’t care what lay beneath his surface. What I cared about was the reflected glory his beauty gave me: the picture of myself as the sort of woman who could attract that sort of man. And, eventually, the reflection that looked back at me came to seem predatory, and not at all pretty.”

  Will we ever get to that time when a hardworking, high-earning woman feels entitled to a great-looking guy and feels comfortable when people look at him and not at her? And will the division of power work for him too, when she is the one who brings home most of the bacon?

  Again, economics determines history. There are no more sabre-toothed tigers to wrestle, no more wars fought with brawn; men’s function has evolved. Some of us may still feel uncomfortable with the rituals of the new men’s movements, but they are the tip of the wedge. Remember how they laughed at early feminism? One day, we will look back and wonder at our skepticism over men’s early forays into beauty as well as women’s reluctance to give men equality in the nursery. By then, a generation of women will have grown up expecting to provide for themselves, perhaps providing for a man too, and they will take that accomplishment as just that, a sign of success as a person who happens to be female.

  Meanwhile, the man who approaches the beautiful woman still knows he is going to have to pay for her. He has learned this as part of his socialization, and he competes to do it, whereas a man who is focused on looks is anathema to a woman. Ambivalence. If he is too good-looking, the woman feels he may become dependent on his looks and expect her to support him. Women worry when a man’s narcissism reaches a certain point; for the man in the same position, it is not a turn-off. So long as a man continues to provide well, what does the woman care about his balding head and extra weight?

  “Women tend to like what they’ve got,” says Psychology Today, reporting on a national survey on men’s appearance, “whether he is bearded, uncircumcised, short, or otherwise ‘off’ the norm.” Women who are more financially secure, however, and who see themselves as attractive: “This new and vocal minority,” says the survey, “unabashedly declares a strong preference for better-looking men…. One of the most fascinating survey results was that women who rated themselves as more attractive tended to rank men’s facial appearance and sexual performance higher. These women were a little older on average (mean age 38), thinner… and better off financially (almost half earned over $30,000 annually).”

  Warren Farrell adds, “The difference between men and women who feel objectified as beauty objects is that the beautiful woman has been accustomed to celebrity status all her life, to men desiring her for her beauty. While the very handsome man may have grown up being admired for his beauty, other things were expected of him too, namely that he be economically successful. When the successful woman rejects him for failing economically, this is where he begins to feel like a sex object. It is a big difference between beautiful men and women, devastating for both, but dramatically different.”

  There is a new category of beautiful women today who are intimidating to a man, to the point of nonapproachability: These are the women who are both beautiful and successful. Successful women think men are put off by them, but Farrell’s research disagrees: “Contrary to popular belief,” he says, “the more successful a woman is, the more attractive she is to a man. But the man knows that a successful beautiful woman is much more likely to reject him than an unsuccessful beautiful woman is. She doesn’t need him. She will Jane Fonda him. He will have to be her movie producer, presidential candidate, or a multibillionaire. Women say, ‘Oh, men aren’t attracted to successful women.’ But that is simply not true. He wouldn’t be intimidated at being rejected by her if he wasn’t already attracted to her.”

  None of us wants to be rejected. Traditionally, we chose mates to make up for what we didn’t have. Men had money and houses, which women didn’t, but we had beauty, which men got by wearing us. Now that men are pursuing beauty to make up for what they have lost, they are more frequently showing up in doctors’ offices. “I’m seeing more and more males who have body image disturbances,” says Dr. Stephen Romano, director of the Outpatient Eating Disorders Clinic in New York. “They are compulsive exercisers, and there are a number of steroid abusers.” Since 1987, the number of men exercising frequently has grown by more than 30 percent.

  A lovely woman is a pleasure to look at, but so is a beautiful male body, once women, and other men, get used to looking at it. Today, among younger men especially, the hunger in their eyes when they gawk at women isn’t just desire for the woman; men want some of women’s pumped-up exhibitionism, that strut, that éclat for themselves. In a 1994 survey, 6,000 men ages eighteen to fifty-five were asked how they would like to see themselves. Three of men’s top six answers had to do with appearance
: attractive to women, sexy, good-looking. The stereotypical male traits—decisive, assertive—came in at numbers eight and nine. The same survey reported that 56 percent of the men agreed with the comment, “I’m pleased when people notice and comment on my appearance” (69 percent of men in their twenties agreed); six years prior, only 48 percent of all men had agreed.

  Women haven’t yet realized what we are losing; still focused on men as perverted voyeurs, the Matriarchal Feminist press won’t acknowledge that women’s beauty is an investment, a joy to own, even a weapon. The only obstacle that stands between us and our learning to use beauty profitably is the political jargon from women-without-men who still live in a world where they cannot bear the idea of a beautiful young woman enjoying what they never had. Long before we women have solved the competition between us, men may have found a way to recapture the beauty crown.

  What do men born in the past thirty years care about the feminist attitudes regarding beauty, male or female? The sight of themselves in the mirror has deep historical roots; the pleasure of being admired is inherited from their ancestors, who played, not as bit players, but as stars. Some of these men move more deeply into the mirror in response to their genetic roots, a disposition, a natural inclination acquired or learned from parents. The display, the enthusiasm of being the beauty subject, runs in the blood.

  History tends to repeat itself; until the late eighteenth century, the dressing-room mirror belonged to men. When the beauty of fashion was men’s domain, they didn’t employ women’s denials of the past two hundred years. Nor did the uses of beauty, when men owned it, stop with courtship and sex. Men used their looks, flaunted them, competed with them to win whatever prize and power was to be had.

  Anne Hollander describes a sixteenth-century summit meeting between Francis I and Henry VIII, in which “the descriptions of what everybody wore are unbearable! Everybody who was involved wore silver covered with diamonds, except when they were in cloth of gold and covered with rubies! Everything was lined in ermine and everything was 20 yards long, and there were plumes on everybody and so on. That’s why that meeting was called the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Just as the poetry is filled with symbolic material and allegory, the clothing itself had that kind of material embedded in it. So the pattern woven on your sleeve in gold or in pearls had to have a certain strong effect. And if it didn’t, you were less exciting than the fellow whose did, so to speak. They were in direct competition with one another, and so were their households, and the cohorts and entourage and everything else. They had to look more gorgeous than the others.”

  According to a recent study titled “Women: The New Providers,” 55 percent of women contribute half or more to their household’s income. This study has been called the most comprehensive look in fourteen years at women’s views about work, family, and society. Women still average 73 cents for every dollar men make, but from 1974 to 1994 the number of households solely supported by a female earner increased by 114 percent. An interesting finding was that 48 percent of the women surveyed said that they would choose to work full-time or part-time even if money were not a consideration.

  What remains to be seen today as women gain more of men’s economic turf is how convincingly women also pursue men who are successful and/or attractive. This is what Warren Farrell means when he states that the future of male beauty is largely in the hands of women.

  At this moment, we have no idea whether the sexes will share beauty, as we have begun to share economic power, or whether the younger male generations will pick up speed and outstrip women. Young men may be so fed up with feminism’s anger, the Take Back the Night Marches, that they will simply look out for themselves, as women have been doing for the past twenty years. They will pursue a woman, want her, but will refuse to kowtow to her demands. If male beauty power continues to be effective in the workplace, this especially will bolster men’s pursuit of it, making all other considerations inconsequential.

  A man will compete with the woman for the job and not wait for her approval of his new tailor-made suit. If she rejects him because he is too pretty and thus steals her thunder, he will simply find another woman, one who sees him differently, genuinely loves his looks, his share of providership, and is not so centered on the mirror herself. A young man is now free to imagine a world in which his princess beams on his reflected beauty. She is out there, this woman who is not so envious, and it is his quest to find her.

  Before long we will become accustomed to seeing handsome men with less beautiful women and seeing a beautiful woman with a man who is comfortable in her economically powerful shadow; of course, the old standby, the short, bald, wealthy men with towering princesses, will always be there. The mixes of economic wealth and beauty will be endlessly variable. This parlaying of men’s beauty, now that it has started, is simply not going to go away. Like women’s new economics, it will be factored into the New Deal.

  “Men want to be powerful,” says John Molloy. “Convince them that looks can gain them power, get people to do what they want them to do, then looks are great.” The reverse of that is also true: Men will shun whatever reduces power. It was in 1675, when French seamstresses petitioned Louis XIV to allow them to make women’s dresses, that men’s interest in fashion began to wane. Instead of experimenting with the fundamental design of garments, as men’s tailors were doing, female clothing makers’ designs became studies in superficial excess. Fashion became foolish and ceased to be powerful; men’s clothing gradually became more simple.

  In her book Sex and Suits, Anne Hollander explains that near the turn of the eighteenth century, when tailors discovered Greek sculpture and the universal proportions of the human body, the Neo-classic movement and the male costume “made a radical leap in fashion.”

  The narrow-shouldered, big-bellied clothes we associate with portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were replaced by simpler designs that made the male wearers resemble the heroic figures of antiquity, with their shoulders broadened with padding, and legs now lengthened in appearance by full-length trousers. “The modern business suit [as we know it] stems from the late 1850s lounge coat, a loose, boxy jacket lacking the waist seam that defined the frock coat.”

  With the invention of power-spinning machines, power looms, and the development of the tape measure, clothes made on the Eastern seaboard of America in the mid-nineteenth century were available across the country by catalogue, creating a common national style of dress. Beginning in the 1880s, the influx of immigrants from Europe provided the cheap labor that spawned mass production in the garment industry. Before World War I, the ubiquitous three-piece blue serge suit had become men’s uniform, so that the view of men pouring from their places of business seemed to make one class and profession of man indistinguishable from the next. By the end of World War II, The Deal was in place, and Girls in Their Summer Dresses hung on the arms of Men in Their Grey Flannel Suits.

  Women haven’t a clue as to the genius men will bring to the art of looking good. After two hundred years of owning beauty and demurring as to its power, we are about to see real peacocks on parade. We assume that men can’t put two garments together. Think again. “Men came of age in the eighties in terms of using clothes as a form of communication,” says menswear designer Alan Flusser, who has written several books on male fashion. “Women use fashion to communicate, but men use it in their own way. You had the emergence of the $1,000-plus suit, which became a regular phenomenon in stores. Until the eighties they hadn’t sold that kind of expensive clothing to men. Men began buying more expensive clothing to represent the level of success they had attained, and for some men, the level of success they wanted to attain. There was an enthusiasm and encouragement toward men opening up their idea about what they can and cannot wear.”

  I agree with Flusser but would not diminish the impetus that came from feminism, when women’s focus on economics left a vacuum in the mirror. The eye was hungry, and men were a natural. “It’s clear that the fas
test and sexiest advances in Western costume history were made in male fashion,” writes Hollander, “including the initial leap into fashion itself in the late twelfth century, the shift into modernity which threw down the challenge to all succeeding generations.”

  As women have taken on more and more of men’s work, we’ve assumed their fashions as well. Women put on men’s trousers in World War II and never took them off. We now wear trousers into the workplace and the finest restaurants too. I remember a pants suit Italian designer Patrick de Berentzen made for me in 1963. It was the day after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I was in Rome weeping in the Piazza del Popolo, and when he saw me he said, “Let me make you a gift. I’ve never designed one of these suits for women.” As he measured me and selected the pale green embroidered fabric and diamanté buttons, he too wept. We all wept.

  That New Year’s Eve in New York I was taken to the 21 Club in my extraordinary evening suit; the maître d’ debated whether I could enter. They had never served a woman in pants. But the suit was so beautiful they waved us in. The entire staff came from the kitchen to see a woman in a double-breasted “men’s” evening suit.

  Throughout the feminist years, we women have progressively put on more and more of men’s fashions, which somehow have made men look less hard-edged. “It’s clear that during the second half of this century,” writes Hollander, “women finally took over the total male scheme of dress, modified it to suit themselves, and have handed it back to men charged with immense new possibilities.”