The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  If only women believed in the extended appeal of our looks and accomplishments, as many men do. Young men, grown up in this feminist age, are especially vulnerable to the awesome spectacle of a woman who excites admiration for her whole self, meaning professional as well as sexual. It is we women more than anyone who prolong this patriarchal view of ourselves as “over the hill.” We may not be as wealthy as the little, bald tycoons, but we are rich enough to share in that same allure, but only if we wear our power as they do.

  Eventually, the carpenter and I parted, but I have never lost sight of what I discovered that summer. Had the planets not aligned, the fire leaving my house bare, my professional life suddenly on an economic level I’d never before enjoyed, I might have continued living as a girl in a doll’s house instead of building a grown woman’s new home. Though what I am telling is not a “nice” story in the sense that nice girls don’t focus on money as a motivating force, I can assure you that economic recognition pushed me through the glass mirror in which I had been reflected as the wife/child of a man without whom I thought I could not live.

  I am not setting up my life as exemplary during the six years between the fire and my divorce from my ex-husband; but I did finish that book on jealousy, paid my own way, as well as provided for my ex-husband. The book completed, I filed for divorce. What rankled was the animosity of former friends, both male and female. “You already have a perfectly good husband,” a man scolded on spying me in a restaurant with another man prior to the divorce; that this finger-wagging fellow was himself a well-known philanderer didn’t lessen my spontaneous blush of shame. I was furious at myself for reacting like a bad girl. But that is how deep The Nice Girl Rules run. Until enough of us make our own decisions regarding sex and beauty and stand by them as we enter The Third Act of our lives, we will be dictated by the rules of sameness that govern women’s world: “No one woman must have any more than any other.”

  “With words, with nonverbal acuity, with networking and negotiating skills—and also with unleashed testosterone—women will probably become increasingly visible in modern national and international business life,” wrote anthropologist Helen Fisher. To which I would add, we will become “increasingly visible” more quickly if we celebrate other women who carry beauty and sex, as well as professional skills, into later life as men always have. Our ancient envy of sex and beauty in others will make women hesitate and choose one or the other when they might have it all, as older men have.

  I do not mean to minimize the power of the double standard of aging. What I would stress is that this opinion begins in women’s world, where we see deterioration, meaning loss of value, before it has even begun. We see wrinkles on flesh that is still flawless and draw our imagined imperfections to others’ attention. We are incurably catty about our contemporaries; Three Big Girls Can’t Play Together in front of the mirror at the office any more than they could in the sandbox. Men watch us tear one another’s beauty apart and learn to use it to their advantage. But to insist today that men only want to be with, live with, and sleep with young women is to say that men are impervious to the glamour of intelligence, sophistication, economic power, and, yes, sexual initiative in the hands of a woman who knows what she owns.

  Feminism is far enough along for us to abandon the old marching line, “We will not be like men,” and accept that there is much in men worthy of imitation. Insisting that women must learn everything from other women limits our lives. As more girl children are raised from the cradle in the arms of a man, we will see women’s imitation of men’s qualities found so irresistible as to have to be internalized for life’s journey.

  Becoming the Girl We Left Behind: To Hell with Other Women’s Envy!

  Women wait. The clock ticks, and we feel time doing us in. Eventually, the waiting look of anxiety, fear, anger becomes a mask. When we were little, we watched eyes hungrily fasten on beauty, hands reach out to her, invitations being whispered in her ear. We assume that in the eyes of others, our waiting look is filled with rejection; no one wants us. If we were more beautiful, we too would not wait.

  I am always punctual, no, I am early, a lifelong habit that I am sure was born out of the fear that if I were late, others would not wait, would leave without me. To this day, I am dressed before my husband, waiting for him. Doesn’t anything ever go away?

  Fear of time passing and our aging begins so ridiculously young; that fact alone should tell us how irrational it is, how much we are still like our mothers, who waited and waited until one day their husbands didn’t come home; or they saw an old woman in the mirror and asked, “Is this all there is?” Why, this waiting picture is totally out of sync with everything we have accomplished in the past twenty years. When we wanted an equal wage, we said, “Men get this amount, therefore I want the same.” We don’t yet have it, but we’ve moved the bottom line further in our favor than we’ve changed the tyranny of beauty, the ticking of the clock.

  What good is money in the bank if we are less because we are older? What good is the house, the fur coat, the trip to Europe that we pay for if we think of ourselves in that house, that coat, on that trip as waiting for something to happen? Why don’t we also say, “Men are seen, wanted, desired until they die, why not us?” and then pursue the answer as energetically as we pursued getting into the workplace?

  The answer is that we are loath to challenge our own, meaning other women. Taking the initiative would get us closer to our goal, but in acting alone we step outside The Group. With more than one lover, with sexual beauty that refuses to die, and with our economic success that surpasses theirs, will they take us back? Would mother? The most enduring strength of the old-line feminists is their ability to foist onto men the responsibility for all that is wrong in women’s lives. When a woman, by acting on her own, makes the other women aware that the serpent is within, she is a pariah.

  “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself,” writes art critic John Berger. “Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually…. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman…. How she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”

  Though Berger wrote these words almost twenty-five years ago, their description of the balloon over our heads in which we see ourselves perceived by others is chilling in its relevance to our lives today. It is the energy-sapping distraction of always having to watch ourselves that eats away at life, at what we might otherwise have done with that energy, that life.

  Men don’t live with this constant image of themselves as being perceived. Men weren’t raised to wait but, instead, to take the initiative. That springboard that propels even the shy boy into action keeps his eye focused on a more distant goal than preoccupation with how others see him. In preadolescence, when he left mother’s car to run into the birthday party, her hand didn’t reach out for one last tug at his clothes, one last brush of his hair; he didn’t grow up with that feeling that he was never finished, never good enough. When the dance of adolescence arrived, boys raced to win the beauty for the dance, to carry her off into the night before one of the less motivated had selected her.

  What girls learn at the dance is what we learned in the nursery, that the first gaze, the first cookie, smile, and outstretched arms went to the fairest; the girl waits, the boy initiates. Prior to adolescence, we girls had also learned some powers of invention. But only the boy was allowed to carry leadership, speed, humor, and initiative into the sexual dance opposite girls. Behind the boy’s privilege to initiate sexual conta
ct is the full backing and encouragement of fellowship. Everything we once owned as girls is now embodied in males, and the gift we have to offer in exchange for his initiating a move toward us is our beauty.

  We may want a boy with the wit and strength we once owned, but we must watch and wait as the lovelier girl’s beauty pulls the boy of our dreams to her. The face that hides anger and impatience begins to incise these emotions into our youthful countenance. Small wonder that these are the looks we hate most in our reflection and those we want to have removed with surgery.

  Men will tell you that women are oblivious to the etiquette of rejection. From where we have sat and waited for the prince since adolescence, when the wrong fellow calls, we are the ones who feel rejected. The right fellow can call another female, anyone he chooses, but we must continue to wait. Given the quashing of our bravery and speech, we are impatient with men who bungle their invitations, fumble through sexual advances like clods. We would have done it better; the ten- and eleven-year-old version of ourselves was a smooth operator, the very model of an initiator of intimacy. What a waste. We turned ourselves into Sleeping Beauty just when we had perfected the role of prince.

  Here, now, at the age of wisdom, it is time to take life in hand and bend it, shape it, make it what we will. We are what? Thirty? Forty? Sixty? Whatever the age, no more waiting for the phone to ring, for a man to call, for things to happen. We have nothing to lose but fear. Don’t we reach for a phone to make a business call? But when we invite a man to dinner and he rejects us, it cuts to the fiber of our womanliness. In trying to get more than the other girls, we have broken Women’s Rules. In pursuing him instead of waiting, we have flashed the sexual card.

  What made the passivity of adolescence bearable were the rules regulating sameness; we cannot remember them being spoken out loud, but they were duly taken in, being the same as mother’s warning rules that we not outstrip her. Now our shame is in that image of ourselves being surveyed and having failed. Rejected by the man on the phone, we slump in our executive chair, chagrined, red-faced, punished: “We told you so,” the surveyors chorus. We hate the man, but more than the loss of him, what festers is the failure in our effort to act instead of wait, to live beyond the inhibiting boundaries of women’s world.

  Referring to the catalyst that motivated us twenty-five years ago, Gloria Steinem recently said, “The sisterhood we had in mind was shared experience…. Shared themes became the source of political insight.” To which I would add that the only shared themes are those allowed by modern feminism; it was difficult enough when we were younger to remain in step with everyone else, to not be too big or seem to have more, so as to avoid competition.

  But when a middle-aged woman monitors her share of life so that she doesn’t arouse envy by seeming bigger than her sisters, it is as if nothing has changed since adolescence, when “shared themes” ruled the lives of all the girls. The rewards of our New Middle Age—the first such age for us women of the twenty-first century—thus become “an anchor to memory.” We have been here before. We are richer, have never looked better, feel more sexual and more sure of ourselves, but the anchor to memory reminds us that if we live life on a bigger stage than the other girls, we will be without friends.

  This is precisely what I would encourage you to do: to live life on as big a stage as you choose, to take the risk, open the door, and enter the third act of life as fully as possible, knowing our fear is nothing more than the threat of excommunication from The Group of our adolescence, the fear of losing mother when we couldn’t live without her. We are no longer needy in that life-and-death way we once were; more important, there are many women out there who will applaud us.

  The theme of “shared experience” is comforting in some instances, but when felt as a negative pull that keeps us mired in the basic common denominator of sameness in women’s world, it is a rope around the neck. Only we pioneers in this new last third of life that we have won can change what has always been felt about women aging. We are younger women’s model of a new future.

  The beauty in her twenties, whose cup is full to overflowing, knows well the feeling of envy and competition, but if she sees women twice her age and more who have moved past youthful beauty into something else, something exciting that only comes with age, she will see a woman’s life as an adventure that extends beyond the childbearing years; and so will all the other young women around her, who will envy her less. To believe that women’s beauty is neither limited to youth nor to the roles that traditional women lived requires models who are the living, breathing proof. It is no good just promising it in a vacuum, we must live it.

  We, the newly middle-aged, are the fastest-growing major market, a culture of moneyed, educated men and women who expect to work, play, and have sex as long as possible. According to today’s paper, “not only are Americans living longer, but they are developing less chronic disease and disability…. The number of diseases afflicting people over 65 declined by more than 11 percent over the last decade.” Such a population has never before existed. Synthetic estrogen, testosterone, amazing beauty creams, revolutionary bodybuilding machinery, cosmetic surgery, none is going to disappear. In fact, they will flourish and multiply. There is already less of the moralistic condemnation of “looking good,” even if it involves surgery, and there will be even less tomorrow. Healthy good looks’ time has come, and they are not so much about eternal youth as about extended life.

  No one will influence women’s chance to live happily with those choices except other women, who have always ruled one another. If you feel the criticism of your women friends at your trying for a bigger life, then find a new group of women friends. Don’t let the sight of someone older than you, who looks better than you, and whose life is more fulfilled than yours leave you grinding your teeth at night. Try to regain the admiration you felt prior to envy; take her as a model.

  “There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a postmenopausal woman,” said Margaret Mead. As more women discover this, I choose to think that we will refuse to suffer other women’s critical intolerance. We will find resources in ourselves we’d forgotten we had, talents abandoned as young girls so as to fit the stereotype.

  In a recent interview Dominique Aury, the eighty-six-year-old French journalist who wrote The Story of O, said that she had conceived the idea for the book as a love poem to a man she loved and whom she feared she was losing. She was almost fifty when she called on the memory of her erotic fantasies of early adolescence as inspiration for O. “What could I do?” said the eminent journalist and editor, “I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write poetry. What could I do to make him sit up? …I wasn’t young, I wasn’t pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons. The physical side wasn’t enough. The weapons, alas, were in the head.” When she told her lover of her intentions, he replied, “I’m sure you can’t do that sort of thing.” “You think not?” she said. “Well, I can try.”

  The Story of O was first published in 1954 and has never been out of print. But what is most appropriate here is that the then middle-aged Aury discovered her magical ability to keep her lover by returning to the erotic fantasies of adolescence, “those slow musings just before falling asleep… in which the purest and wildest love always sanctioned, or rather always demanded, the most frightful surrender, in which childish images of chains and whips added to constraint the symbols of constraint.”

  One of the blessings of being part of that enormous wave of women moving past age fifty today is that we are more authoritative, assertive, and self-assured than any generation of menopausal women before us. And we have more economic power. There are more than 40 million of us, and that number of better-educated, better-informed, economically powerful women grows steadily.

  What did we leave back there on the shores of adolescence? As yet, we had little idea of what mature life held for us, but we had more tools than we would ever have again, and they are still there. Today, whether it is a lover we want to keep,
or a piece of work we dream of accomplishing if only we had the nerve, we might find our best resources where we left them years ago.

  When I was ten and fast becoming more prince than passive princess, my beanstalk was the towering tree outside my bedroom window, my competitive excellence at school was my duel, my ogre’s cave the freight trains down by the waterfront that I entered, trembling, to prove my bravery. These may have been male roles, but they fit me, inspired by the fairy tales read to me a few years previous from that big blue book with its raised lettering—the same book that had once been read to my mother. I was my best self then, the girl of my tenth year.

  “The passionate, idealistic, energetic young individual who existed before menstruation can come on earth again if we let her,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Change, her book on menopause. “We might develop better strategies for the management of the difficult transition if we think of what we are doing not as denial of the change or postponement of the change, but as acceleration of the change, the change back into the self you were before you became a tool of your sexual and reproductive destiny. You were strong then, and well, and happy, until adolescence turned you into something more problematical, and you shall be well and strong and happy again.”