by Nancy Friday
Until now, society dumped its vitriol and scorn on older women, the woman living alone, the old maid, the witch, she with spotted hands and lines incised on her upper lip. All the resentment of women’s power that goes back to the nursery found an ugly repository in the hag, who recognized well why she was singled out, having felt it herself for older women when she was younger. And so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, not just men’s punishment of women but ours too, we who shortened our own lives by not applauding those of our sex who tried to climb higher, reach for more.
From the beginning of life, nothing arouses competition among females as does beauty, and nothing is more forbidden than open rivalry over it. How long will it take for women to accept what Men must, that competitive feelings just happen and that there are rules to make rivalry safe, even pleasurable? I hammer away at rivalry and competition because they are beauty’s constant companions. If women are going to carry beauty into middle and older age, though it is late to learn how to compete safely, it must be practiced nonetheless.
Today the other woman may have professional success as well as beauty; with no practice in taking her as a model to imitate, we fall victim to our usual self-destructive handling of envy; when we race to share our venom with other women, telephoning, whispering, conspiring to bring her down, we destroy someone who was taking the beachhead for us. Look at the popular shows on television where young, beautiful career women destroy each other. It is a popular plot device because it appeals so mightily to viewers who find more consolation than disdain in the conspiratorial smiles and wiles that eventually destroy the envied one; though I should add that today women viewers are just as gleeful if the envied one turns into a bitch from hell. This too is satisfying. Models of healthy competition, alas, are at a premium.
The sad truth is that women can’t sleep quietly with the notion that other women are out there enjoying benefits that they, the envious, do not have. We knock off our best role models, the heroines of our age. Instead of their exciting images giving us a leg up the ladder, we punish them, give them “the treatment” just as we did in school. When Marie Claire published an article on such successful notables as Barbra Streisand, Mary Matalin, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Linda Wachner, and Leslie Abramson, the piece was titled “Ballbusters, Success Secrets of Six Pushy Women.” The editors and journalists alike seemed unsure as to whether to portray these wealthy, powerful, highly visible women as heroines or as victims of their own rapacious greed.
Of Streisand they say, “Whether based on sexism, jealousy, or the truth, her reputation casts her as domineering and self-absorbed.” Of Wachner, president of Warnaco Group (read Wonderbra), they quote her chiding her male executives, “‘You’re eunuchs!’ she screamed. ‘How can your wives stand you? You’ve got nothing between your legs!’” and later, “‘I would really love a child, I wouldn’t adopt one, I could adopt a husband, and he could have a child.’” They quote Matalin: “‘I don’t really like, in my work life or my play life, people who aren’t aggressive and assertive,’” and of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, writer/producer of Designing Women, they say, “She claimed to be surprised and delighted to be thought of as a tough woman…. ‘Actually I’m thrilled.’”
It is not as though we have a multitude of women as successful as these, yet the chance to demean them was obviously irresistible. The bitchiness in the delivery of these profiles is palpable. Who would want to emulate such dragons? By all means include their reputations for being rude and overbearing, but put them in perspective opposite their achievements. To get where they are, they had to fend off something worse than Big Bad Men, namely, envious and resentful other women. Young women need to see themselves in living, breathing women with whose success they can identify; that opportunity is deftly eliminated.
I’m sick of women journalists ripping apart Streisand, Jane Fonda, and Hillary Rodham Clinton because of what they wear or choose to have done to their bodies. Look at the whole package, everything they have accomplished, instead of searching out Hillary’s ill-fated inaugural suit or Streisand’s supposed swelled head for daring to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy Center, where only important men pontificate.
A few nights ago they replayed the 1994 Streisand special on television and for the first time I saw the opening in Los Angeles, the crowd’s thundering adulation, and when she came onstage and sang “It Feels as If We Never Were Apart,” the electricity that went through that auditorium reached out and included me. Several years ago her manager, Marty Erlichman, reminisced about Streisand’s early days in New York when she couldn’t get a gig, when nobody wanted “that voice.” Because she had no money and no place to sleep, she carried a folding bed with her; one person or another would offer her an empty studio or rehearsal hall in which to sleep. More and more it seems to me that “we never are apart” from those days in the sixties when I first heard her, when I was still “waiting for something to happen.”
Thirty years later, a woman’s magazine cites her for being a “ballbuster,” which she may be, but oh, my God, all the other things she is, a whole lifetime that brings people thundering to their feet in appreciation for having given us a living talismn of our own lives in the form of this incredible woman.
If women don’t treat our heroines as we have treated our heroes, emulating the good, shrugging off the bad, their bravery and goodness will not live on in us. We will never have the heroic female models we so desperately need. Enviously, resentfully, we disparage the whole person, citing their dark side as the reason when, indeed, what we can’t stand about them is their enormous success.
We would rather take to lunch the woman who has been jilted by her husband than celebrate she who manages to juggle a brilliant career and a sensual adventure simultaneously. We may not want the latter’s life, but her daring says that she has taken a more powerful step against The Old Deal than have The Matriarchal Sisters.
Is it surprising that few successful women allow themselves to believe in what they have accomplished? They smell other women’s envy; they fear that other women will hate them for their success, and so they play it down just as they did when they were adolescents. They continue to work hard, but do not reward themselves for fear of arousing envy. Small wonder we have so few admirable older women to emulate, women who have coupled success at their chosen work with beauty and a vibrant sexuality.
Men can’t keep us from assuming the privileges that we have won. Only other women’s power over us can deter us from becoming big, bigger than they. One of the privileges of growing older is freedom to say and do and look precisely as we feel. We say that Patriarchy limited our lives, that once youthful beauty was gone, Bad Men relegated us to the ash pile. That so many accomplished women today still say that they feel invisible cannot be blamed on men.
We look at ourselves in our smart clothes, sitting in our offices, people respecting our achievements, and we assume that we are independent. Why then do we wither when women’s eyes narrow in critical appraisal, their mean lips witchily conspiring to bring us down, or so we fear? Why can we not brush them off, turn back to our work and laugh at their envy? If we were emotionally independent, this is precisely what we would do. It may feel demeaning to a fifty-year-old woman to be told that she is still too tied to mother/other women in a way that should have been outgrown in the first years of life. But the vast majority of us never did.
We practice separation all our lives; ideally it is completed in the nursery, but if that opportunity was lost then, or lost in adolescence or when we married and set up a symbiotic union with our husband, it is still not too late. If we don’t do it now, whatever our age, other women’s censure of our still trying to be beautiful and sexual will undermine our taking pleasure in whatever success we achieve. In their eyes or in our own inner eye, we will question our judgment in buying the eye-catching suit; we shouldn’t have had the surgical tuck, shouldn’t be dating more than one man, or a younger man, any man, not if the other girls don’t.
Whether we choose to pursue The Hungry Eye “out there” past forty, or give ourselves instead to the rewards of invisibility, we have a gift our grandparents didn’t. In 1995, Americans over fifty represented nearly a quarter of the population, and by the year 2000 there will be more than 75 million of them; many women will live to be eighty, as opposed to forty-seven, the average life span a century ago. By sheer numbers, we will have invented this New Middle Age, and given our energy and independence, we will have the opportunity to recapture whatever we surrendered to fit the stereotype of adolescence.
We have less to lose when we are older. With children grown, we no longer have to play the part of The Good Mother; we can be bad, meaning sexual, meaning laughing out loud, wearing whatever we choose. Why diet, work out at the gym three days a week, and not show off that body?
It is other women who see the witch all women fear becoming, the over-the-top spectacle we fear we were last night when we had a wonderful time, though this morning we worry that we drank too much, danced too late, and made fools of ourselves. Maybe we were too sexually bewitching, that crime witches were burned for. When other women go too far and are sexually witchy, we throw them out of the club, which is a way of burning them.
“Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful,” de Beauvoir wrote, and on some level we understand, having “burned” a few of our friends in the past and restricted our own lives sexually out of fear of our being burned. We never forget the men we didn’t fuck, the ones we desired more than any others but ran from out of fear… of what? Fear of the censure of mother/other women; obligingly, we keep our lives small so that they will still love us.
Cosmetic companies make billions of dollars on the unseparated woman’s fear of becoming the Bad Mother of nursery days. Especially in these later years when mother is old or has died, there is the unconscious desire to keep her alive in ourselves, especially to keep alive The Witch, the scolding, antisex mommy whom we feel guilty for hating. When we awake in the morning from our dream sleep in which she rode around on a broom, we stumble to the mirror to see what havoc was done while we slept.
That cream we religiously put on our face before going to bed used to be called Vanishing Cream; we say we put it on to forestall wrinkles, but the unconscious knows we apply it as a magic ritual against nightmares of the Giantess whom we are becoming. You and I are aging better than our mothers, not because the creams have improved; we look better longer because the kind of lives we lead drum into us the message of our independence.
It is one thing to forsake the mirror—“Thank God, that’s through, now I can relax and let my hair go gray!”—but happiness in the decision demands we not live with the grrrr of envy when friends continue to parade. We are used to beauty envy among twenty-year-olds, but we are the first generation to extend beauty into middle age. Until now, unless one was a film star or very, very wealthy, there was an unspoken agreement among women of “a certain age” that the beauty contest was over. Great self-righteousness was attached to wearing comfortable shoes and no makeup. Here we are, advancing beauty into a new time period, and we are no more practiced in handling competition with other women than we were in adolescence.
Age is inevitable, but death grows more distant as our longevity grows. We are going to have a lot of postmenopausal time, which could be the best in life if we begin to search out admirable women to emulate. Toss aside what does not appeal. Spit in the eye of envy if these women have more than you; heroines are meant to have more. And watch yourself the next time you see an “older woman” wearing something you think is too young for her, including the man on her arm. She is your future.
Think of her as getting out the kinks so that you will have a better time when you are she. Here you are, only twenty-nine, and you already see your dear mother’s witchy anxiety in your face, and you hear her nagging voice when you talk to your children. Well, the way life too often works is we become not the mother we loved, which would be an easy tribute, but the mother we hated.
“The overwhelming evidence in research studies and in my own interviews strongly indicates that, in vital age, women as well as men become more and more themselves,” writes Betty Friedan in her book on aging, which I admire for its optimism. When I read this I thought, Yes, since my mid-forties I’ve become keenly aware of myself as I was prior to adolescence. “Can age itself be… an adventure?” Friedan asks. “We can set about risking, as we have never been able to before, new adventures, living our own age… this third age we’re entering now, that lovely, liberating lightness may be a serious sign—a signpost for survival, a signpost of evolution.”
I like that: evolution.
Conquering Fear of Sex
How ironic that we should gain economic power before having conquered our fear of sex. That we didn’t put sex at the top of the list alongside economic parity twenty years ago speaks of our fear at facing female power, our own and other women’s. To do so would have demanded that we question our ambivalence, the argument within. And we would have had to question our envy of other women’s sexual beauty, which arouses far more rancor than their bettering us economically.
We would rather submit to becoming the witch, the crone with crepey skin, straggly gray hair, and yellow teeth, she who personified evil in our nursery days, where our fear of sex began. It was there in mother’s arms that we first learned that our sexual parts stood in opposition to her love; touching ourselves turned our beautiful good mother into an angry, ugly harpy.
Terrified of losing her, we split mother in half, keeping The Good Mommy away from The Bad Mother. As Bettelheim says, splitting “is not only a means of preserving an integral all-good mother when the real mother is not all-good, but it also permits anger at this bad ‘step-mother’ without endangering the goodwill of the true mother, who is viewed as a different person.” It is our job, as we grow up, to fuse the good and bad mother, in her and in ourselves, and in so doing to conquer our fear of sex. That we fail so miserably, that feminism still refuses to address issues of sexuality, leaves us split, good girl versus bad, a divided self whose exhaustion at keeping the beloved mommy safe from the mother we hate is etched in the lines of our face.
We are born taking pleasure from our bodies and only give it up when it is placed in opposition to the loving gaze of she who sustains life. Adolescent beauty may get its lushness from our reproductive power, but we come into this world sexual and will remain so until we die, if that is what we want. When we were nursery small and saw the drawings of old witches in Grimm, we recognized the Bad Mother who punished us. Watching her, learning from her, we put two and two together and understood that nothing put us in danger of losing her love more than sex; she liked nothing less about our bodies and her own than the sexual parts. When we played doctor with our brother, pulled down our pants and peed with our friends under the porch, we knew it was bad, the height of danger. But we did it anyway, just as we would persevere in adolescence, seeking the forbidden sexual feeling with boys, though we knew the consequences if mother found out.
So internalized was mother’s disapproving look, it felt as though her eyes were present in the parked car, and we guiltily half expected her to be standing there, waiting to punish us when we got home. But of course she didn’t know, which softened our guilt and made her more dear to us than ever. Just as we had split mother into good and bad to preserve her love, we separate our own bad sex from the rest of us: The good girl is mother’s girl, the bad our unacceptable sexual self, the part that Bettelheim says we must heroically rescue by conquering our fear.
So long as we were young, we handed over to boys responsibility for our naughty sex. In a devilish way, holding on to our ties of goodness to mother made the forbidden sex with men more exciting; breaking mother’s rules promised a life ahead that would move us forward in time, loving dear mother, but surely being more sexual than she. Had someone accused us of still being little girls symbiotically tied to mother, we woul
d have haughtily given as evidence of our individual identity our sexual adventures and the display of our erotic wardrobes. We were the new generation, not at all like dear old asexual Mom. We would never end up like that.
But we do. There is no test for autonomy that carries as much fear of losing mother/other women’s love as that of conquering fear of sex. Every time we touch ourselves, lie down with a man, wear the erotic dress that pulls eyes to us, the excitement is in challenging mother/women; what cuts the moment short and keeps us from ownership of sex is that in winning sex, we would have lost our ties to women. The Oedipal drama still unresolved, the sexual competition with The Other Girls never challenged and won, we return to the company of women, where sameness rules. Men are exciting; sex with them offers a unique glimpse of autonomy. But men cannot give us the symbiotic oneness we should have outgrown but still crave. Only other unseparated women know what we need, needing it themselves, a breast to lie on. The penis can’t hold a candle to the breast.
We grow up expecting men to change our opinion of The Sewer, to make us sexual—“Give me an orgasm!”—and essentially to lead us on the journey that Bettelheim mentions, the one in which we overcome fear of sex. This is not his job. Nonetheless, we hate a man for failing. We may also love him—we are used to ambivalence—even marry him, but the rage at him for failing to ignite us sexually, along with our envy of his lack of sexual self-consciousness, finds expression when we turn away from him erotically; we invest our entire selves in the children, excluding him. Or we take a lover out of what we perceive to be sexual independence. But if our adultery is inspired by recapturing the thrill of adolescent sex, forbidden by mother, our infidelity is not so much Bettelheim’s heroic quest to conquer fear of sex as a child’s desire for erotic thrills on the only terms that make sex exciting: when it reunites us with mother’s wagging finger.
