The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Many of those doors have already shut again, but that first heartfelt permission of the sixties and seventies aroused my exhibitionistic heart, along with the slumbering intellect that had been put to bed in adolescence when The Nice Girl Rules demanded silence and passivity. Don’t listen to the naysayers who would have you believe the seventies were the cause of today’s ills; there were excesses, yes, but overreach was inevitable in the struggle against the moral quicksand of McCarthyism and the bullyboy self-righteousness behind our involvement in Vietnam. Today’s feminism may be a semantic jungle, but in the seventies, the proud word stood absolutely for women’s freedom to think, speak, act, write. If you weren’t there, you cannot appreciate the drama of learning to trust our opinions, use our voices, and the dawning realization that there were chapters of a woman’s extended life waiting to be lived.

  Writing would be my salvation, a passage through the walls of memory into the unconscious, where I had stored my best self. Permission to think of myself as an initiator reminded me of the girl I’d buried at the onset of adolescence, she who dared to think and do anything. The sexually exhibitionistic fashions of the seventies had meaning, spoke of identity, an experimental effort on our part to find out who we were, including our sexuality. They look foolish today because they are vacuous imitations, a style without content.

  Back then, we were not Empty Packages. We had plans, we had a dream, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, and I do not quote him lightly, for the dream is gone. All we have now are the silly, derivative clothes, which we might well learn from. Remember what Anne Hollander says, that what we wear on our backs tells us where we are going even before we consciously know the destination.

  Men and women stand side by side in the mirror, putting on each other’s clothes, coming to terms with beauty power prompted by our shifting economics; in time, all these changes will decide the new meaning of femininity and masculinity. My sense of myself as a woman began to change when I became a writer, but, in fact, only my attitude and behavior had altered before the fire. The most important level of change, the unconscious, takes time; sometimes that is speeded up, as when your house burns down.

  When all the physical traces of my past had turned to ashes, I questioned everything, including my marriage. It wasn’t cognitive; others told me later that they thought I was having a nervous breakdown. In fact, I was sanely, intuitively, going back in time in search of myself. That marriage was the first obstacle, a hard nut to crack. I’ve said that I chose to marry my former husband because he never took his eyes off me, which is what I’d always wanted, not having had it as a baby. Ironically, when we met, I was at the height of sexual success, men waiting in line to dance with me, all my lifelong dreams-to-the-sound-of-romantic-music come true.

  But life plays tricks, and when too many eyes focused on me in my sea-green Pucci dress, and offers of love reversed the rejections of adolescence, up from the unconscious swam infantile grandiosity, the monster nursery emotion that ascends to absolute power on the eve of puberty. I was terrified that the telephone in my apartment would never stop ringing, would bring me so many suitors that I would soar too high and become some grotesque, out-of-control Queen of the Yacht Club Regatta. Then, when all eyes were on me, I would be unable to handle the adoration and would spot my dress, humiliating myself.

  And so I ran away from what I’d always wanted. I married my first husband, a handsome, intellectual writer from a loveless, lonely childhood with a neediness I sensed behind his cynical exterior. I seduced him, put fresh peaches in his morning champagne, and presented myself as totally independent, attaching no strings to the sex I offered. I thought I knew what men wanted and could do this act brilliantly, all jealous insecurities concealed. It was not a conscious plot, this seduction, more like the programmed movements of a wound-up toy. I was not in love with him when we married, not in that childlike, captive way I would be once I saw him as Mommy/Daddy.

  Just before our marriage, a last-ditch healthy instinct propelled me to Rome, where I suppose I hoped that in the arms of safe Italian lovers, safe because they offered no risk, I might rethink the marriage and avoid it. But he wrote me there, and in that letter was a line the unconscious snatched, kissed, and pressed to its heart: “I will spend my life seeing you. Not watching you.”

  My God, what an offer! All my life I’d been looking for the golden beam between the eye of the Madonna and Child, that pre-Renaissance motif that the baby watchers would later call The Gaze.

  Can you see why my former husband’s promise was irresistible, coupled as it was with my own fear of grandiosity? His vow to spend his life “seeing” me, not “watching” me, was as warm and nourishing as mother’s milk. And he would never wander. Not for me a man with a wandering eye, a man like my father. I knew this about my husband, that I filled his life as well as his eyes. “The way you look satisfies me,” he said, words that put so many demons to sleep, though at the time I merely smiled, so impenetrable were my defenses. I’d not thought it through until this book, though I often wondered why I married him, why I didn’t continue my erotic adventures. What did I consciously know of the terror of flying too high, soaring on success after years of envying beauty in others, of being invisible in a house of beautiful women?

  The words “I love you” paled besides the promise of “The way you look satisfies me,” meaning that he would look no further, would be blind to other women. After marriage I would test his eyes, would flirt with other men who sought me out, for the need to be seen and wanted was still there. Oddly, given the security he offered, my hunger for The Gaze grew. Still, his eye never did wander, and in time I took it in, the all-loving parental eye allowing me to be sexual with other men. Of course I stayed with him too long. I was getting everything I’d longed for and missed in the first years of life.

  I slipped into the promise of his fidelity as trustingly as a child curls into mother’s arms. My women friends were envious and flirted with him, but to no avail. I fed on his Gaze; fortified, I sat down to write. He treated me like his little wifey, and I looked up to him as the great intellectual who also took care of me, not financially as a Good Provider, but as the adoring mother whose gaze never left me. Except when I abandoned his sight to be with other, forbidden men who had nothing to do with smothering, mothering love.

  It was I who had become the Good Provider, a role I enjoyed and was used to, having provided for myself since I’d left home (offers of money, I had noticed, always came with strings attached). Safe in my parent/husband’s beam of adoration, and excited by good sex beyond the cocoon, I wrote. When checks arrived from publishers, I endorsed them and gave them to him. It was extremely satisfying, this arrangement, and if I had not eventually grown up, I might still be in it today. Is it really all that different from what men set up in traditional marriages, providing for a good wife who is happy working at home and who chooses not to know about his infidelities, given how well he provides, given that he loves her, which is what she wants more than sex?

  My adultery is not something of which I am proud, but it was a product of the marriage; I went elsewhere for sex because there was nothing erotic between us. There was love, attachment, closeness, yes, but for great sex there must be two individuals, the exciting distance of separation for the sexual spark to jump and ignite. He and I were too symbiotically fused, mother and child, mom and dad, two peas in a pod. A part of me was blissfully happy at getting what I’d always wanted, but the more he held me at night as we watched television, the less of a candidate he was for sex. Why should I want to soil this blissful, childlike Doll’s House with dirty sex?

  We are not tolerant of adultery in women. By “we” I mean both men and women, though I believe no one despises the adulteress more than those women who have abandoned sex altogether. Nonetheless, the statistics on women’s adultery climb, spurred by our new economics. There is a sense of entitlement that comes with financial independence; when we were beholden to men for the roofs over our he
ads, women thought twice before committing adultery. Most women never even considered it, nor were they approached by potential lovers, given that they had extinguished the sexual flame soon after the wedding, more so after motherhood.

  The replication of their mothers’ lives was often encouraged by the husband, who wanted to find on his return to his castle after a hard day in the immoral, dirty marketplace not a sex goddess but The Good Mother. Up she went onto the pedestal, an idealized re-creation of his own Madonna mother.

  If women turned a blind eye to their husband’s adultery, it was because the “other woman” provided him with something his wife no longer enjoyed. Those wives who “allowed” their husbands to satisfy their sexual appetites elsewhere often won even greater love from their men; these marriages not only endured but often flourished under the double standard. Though the roles were reversed in my own marriage, I still wanted the world to perceive my husband as the big, powerful paterfamilias; if friends were aware of my secret life, they never let on. Nor did I ever boast of my providership.

  “Why don’t you enjoy your success more?” friends from my single years would ask. But if I didn’t demur, didn’t allow him to strut, the golden beam he focused onto me would be weakened. I wanted him as powerful as the maternal mother I’d never had. That he, in turn, “allowed” me my sexual excursions and never gave me reason to believe he knew of them made him all the more essential.

  Being a Good Provider had everything in the world to do with my adultery. It wasn’t consciously thought through, but surely I knew, as every adulterous man knows, that if the worst happened and I was found out, I would not starve. Nonetheless, I chose a lover carefully. When I returned home and found my husband waiting, smiling, loving, I adored him all the more.

  Sometimes he did not greet me with adoration but was instead locked in his room drinking. He was a heavy drinker when we met, but what did I or anyone else know about heavy drinking back then? In those days it seemed that everyone drank. I assumed that on any day he chose, he could stop. Because he loved me, he would stop. But he didn’t. I needed the illusion that everything was perfect in our marriage. He was my husband and my mother; I felt I literally couldn’t live without him. When he would retreat into his room, drinking by himself, I would weep inconsolably. Eventually he did stop drinking, but even then he often stayed in his room for days at a time. Still, I did pay the rent and, yes, I did play the adulteress.

  I pressed my royalty checks into his hand. Please, play the Big Banker, my gesture said, for I am too small and naive to deal with money. When eventually I became the breadwinner, I grew smaller and smaller within the marriage and elevated him to Proustian proportions, as the artist of “real” literature while I scribbled what he called “your little books that keep us alive.” Ah, my, the deals we make.

  Perhaps you see why I have come to feel some black gratitude for that blaze that burned up everything. “When you have a fire like yours,” a psychiatrist friend said to me, “you often lose your memory.” I regained mine. I needed that apocalypse that destroyed the past, every shred of it, to make me start over. “Enough playing little girl!” said the ashes swimming in the puddles of water left by the firemen’s hoses. “Get to work, woman, put your life in order!” Sitting here today, in a marriage so different from the first, I fear it might never have happened without that need to rebuild.

  After the fire, we moved into a hotel while I took charge of the cleanup, the removal of charred furniture, my mother’s wedding china, hundreds of sodden books, old manuscripts, and my grandmother’s paintings. Contractors, architects, and oh, God, yes, the insurance people filled my days along with my editor, with whom I was planning a promotion tour for my new book. I remember addressing the sales force, whipping up enthusiasm, and the rank smell of smoke and condensation from the dress I was wearing, an old Zoran I’d rescued. A few mornings later I got out of bed and fell to the floor; it had to do with my inner ear, my center of balance. “Try not to be emotional,” the doctor said.

  Unemotionally, I set a high price for my next book; we needed the money. (Who takes out enough insurance to cover the loss of everything? “It’s the worst fire I’ve ever seen in an apartment,” the insurance agent told me, adding that she shows the postfire photos to prospective clients.) But more than anything, a part of me hoped that my publisher wouldn’t meet my price. I was very tired. They met the price, which numbed me. The prospect of writing a book about jealousy and envy would, in the best of times, have left me exhilarated, but terrified. These were not the best of times.

  I went into high gear like a veteran, revved up by the reemergence of survival talents I’d once owned, long before I’d made myself into a caricature of a child wife stealing sexual solace in the arms of forbidden men. Once upon a time, before adolescence, I’d been all of a piece, the bravest, most dependable girl in town. I needed those tools now, an arsenal of optimism, the emotional equipment to survive. Scientists say we have two memory systems, one for ordinary information and one for emotionally charged information. Maybe the emotional memory system evolved for its survival value, making sure animals remembered the events and circumstances most threatening to them. Mine was certainly a case of fight or flight.

  Here is what I remembered when my home burned down: When I was a little girl, I’d made myself into a scholar, an athlete, a singer, a dancer, a wall walker who would take any dare, lead any group, confront the coldest adults and extract whatever love was in them. Now that the fire had eaten up everything and the cupboard was bare, I called on that girl. I began the two-month promotion tour of my just published book, wrote page one of the new book, supervised the rebuilding of my house, signed a two-year contract with NBC, and asked my husband to live in Key West, apart from me.

  Susan Cheever wrote that when women work outside the home, a problem for their men can be that when “women are operating in a rational situation professionally… that may make them question an irrational situation at home.” In a sense, it wasn’t his fault; he was still the same person. I was the one who had changed.

  I went to no pains to hide my next affair. I didn’t flaunt it or deny it, but still, I suppose I expected that sooner or later my husband would have to respond. The man who became my lover was someone I’d admired for months, whose beauty and seriousness about his work had filled my fantasies since he’d begun the carpentry on my new apartment. A carpenter, yes, the top of the list of many women’s favorite fantasy lovers. Unplanned, as unexpected for me as it was for him, it simply happened, as sex so often did in those years. I suppose I was acting like a man who, feeling entitled because of good work just accomplished, turns and sees a beautiful woman.

  Just returned from a week of cross-country book promotion, I had been talking with the architect, who’d stepped out of the room to make a phone call. I looked up, and there he was, my carpenter, so beautiful, so serious, and I walked across the room, put my arms around him, and kissed him. It was a moment of gratitude, admiration, and, yes, entitlement.

  He accompanied me on weekends for the rest of the tour. On our flights to San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, I thought, watching my lover’s pleasure, This is what men feel when they take a woman on a wonderful trip, when they have the power to give a gift and share the riches. This is how it feels to be the pleasure giver.

  One Sunday we drove to Cape Cod and lay on the beach listening to the romantic music of the summer of 1980: “She’s Out of My Life,” “Lost in Love,” “You’re the Biggest Part of Me.” Oh, yes, I remember the music. I remember it more than anything, for it infused that love affair with all the romance of my adolescent summers. But there was an essential difference: This time around, I was the initiator, not drifting mindlessly into a sexual romance, but giving as much pleasure as I took.

  It was precarious, nonetheless, for he was younger than I, and his youth, along with the romantic music, pulled me back into the fantasy world of adolescence from which I would have to extricate myself, min
dful that I paid his wages, that there must be envy on his part, and that it was my responsibility to be sure we both came out of this idyll intact. What a sinkhole this adolescent business was, this sighing and dying, the eager giving over of the self!

  I thought of where the passion for romantic music had begun, the nine-year-old girl on the bicycle pedaling to school, the love ballads sung at the top of my lungs when I didn’t know what the lyrics meant, only that they echoed the lonely, unloved feelings inside. I couldn’t allow myself to surrender to this man in whose arms I wanted to stay one minute, and the next, to open yet another door for him into a world he’d never entered. Until the fire, until the carpenter, I’d not thought it through, that I might have taken into adolescence both the love of romance and the thrill of the initiative. I might have asked Malcolm to dance. That summer with the carpenter, I was like a ghost returning to the place where I’d died, adolescence.

  I didn’t choose the carpenter for his youth, but for the unique combination of a look, a sweetness, and an almost abstract devotion to work. A man’s wealth and power had never swayed me, never has, never will. We women who are good providers, and our numbers grow by the hour, we don’t need an old, hoary millionaire. If I was going to risk rejection, it would be for someone I desired, someone whose look went with the music. Also, I had felt his eyes on me and knew that there would be no rejection.

  Life had taught me that women have alternative powers to youthful beauty, that we have more to offer than our wombs, and that our looks last longer than our mothers’ generation’s had. Youth’s monopoly on beauty was drummed into us by a society that wanted to keep women “in our place,” meaning keep our value confined to the childbearing years between adolescence and menopause. Well, “our place” was changing; we were going everywhere, doing everything, and our excellence at what we did was altering how we felt about ourselves and how others saw us. I knew that when a man looks at a successful, satisfied woman, he may notice her age, but he feels her energy—life—and he wants some of it for himself, just as women traditionally wanted the economic power men offered.