The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  I would go further than Heilbrun; Steinem’s beauty wasn’t just “reassurance” to women; in choosing her as feminism’s figurehead, all feminists, ugly or beautiful, agreed, consciously or not, that women’s sexual beauty was important. We may have turned away from beauty in the seventies in order to make a political point, but in selecting Steinem, we silently held on to our claim to beauty’s power. When we eventually reclaimed it with a vengeance in the eighties, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth attempted to pin beauty’s renewed tyranny on Bad Men. But it didn’t stick. How could it? Was not one of the most beautiful women in the world the leader of feminism? Was she not chosen by other women, and isn’t the continuation of her beauty to this day also of her choosing?

  No one is in a better position to talk straight to the troops than Gloria. She is a woman of bona fide accomplishments who has extraordinary access to airtime. It doesn’t require much research for her to know how crucial the issues of aging, sex, and beauty are to women. By all means, let her go her own way personally but, like a good general, she owes it to all of us to explain clearly, unambiguously, her desire for disenfranchising herself. She is noticeably one of those fortunate people who remains lovely and sexual well into the last third of her life, a power that could continue until… well, who knows?

  For Gloria to say that she is through with sexual beauty is confusing. Especially since shortly after the Sheehy interview a beautiful Steinem, age sixty-one, sat for her portrait, which appeared in People magazine’s annual issue, read by twenty million women, chronicling the world’s fifty most beautiful people. It is not the swan song of a heroine but the asexual promise of a powerful mother who leaves her children believing that sex will always be in opposition to mother’s love. Never having managed to publicly consolidate sex with her feminism, Steinem’s legacy is of a heroine who never conquered what Bettelheim called the “fear of sex as something dangerous and beastly.”

  As the first wave of feminist scientists takes on the subject of women’s health, the research shows that we are living longer and better than any generation before us. It is nothing less than breathtaking.

  More than 43 million women had reached menopause by 1992, and the numbers could increase by another 6 million by 2002. These women are economically independent and look and act younger than our mothers, raising the question: How should we think about ourselves as sexual people?

  “From their mid-forties to their sixties,” writes Gail Sheehy in The Silent Passage, “women tend to become more aggressive and goal-oriented, while men show a tender and vulnerable side that may have been formerly suppressed. Women whose ovaries have stopped putting out the female sex hormone estrogen still produce in the cortex of their ovaries a small but consistent amount of the male hormone, testosterone. The relatively high level of testosterone in about 50 percent of postmenopausal females could partially explain the take-charge behavior so often exhibited by middle-aged women. Meanwhile, men’s testosterone levels are gradually decreasing with age.”

  “Sexuality, before and after menopause, is complex and individual, having far less to do with estrogen levels than with the way each woman feels about herself and her circumstances,” emphasizes Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health. “Biologically, while estrogen has a clear effect on the functioning of a woman’s vaginal secretions and sexual organs and may play a role in ardor, it’s testosterone that pretty much dominates the libido. So, if anything, as the ratio of testosterone to estrogen rises during and after menopause, a woman’s sex drive could increase…. What is perfectly clear to me as a doctor and as a woman is that sexuality—especially at menopause—is an intricate mix of mind, body, and circumstances.”

  This research flies in the face of Steinem’s belief that “turning 50 was the end of an era, the era in which a woman is still a sexual, reproductive commodity….” It isn’t even true. Freedom from reproductive worries doesn’t mean we cease to be sexual at fifty or sixty or beyond. It could mean the beginning of sexual adventure, a new state of mind, which is exactly where good sex begins, between the ears.

  It would seem we are independent in doing everything but bringing the image of our sexuality into the twenty-first century. Because beauty is so enmeshed with sex, women in their twenties and thirties hear Gloria’s message and see their own beauty already slipping away; if feminism’s beautiful leader could not slay the dragon or instruct them in how they might, what chance have they? In time, there will be enough middle-aged women who will become ongoing models of sexual beauty. But a great opportunity will have been lost.

  “I couldn’t care less. And that is so wonderful,” Steinem answered an interviewer who asked her on her sixtieth birthday, “What about sex?” And when that interviewer responded to her answer, “Our readers will be disappointed,” Steinem replied, “but they shouldn’t be. You’re free. Your brain is free to think about other things. You’re free from jealousy or competitiveness.”

  It is interesting that as Steinem withdraws from the sexual arena, she has taken on with a new vigor the subject of competition. With her announcement that she has outgrown sex, she signals to her troops that other women need no longer envy her or feel rivalrous with those men who once carried her off into the night. But how is Steinem herself going to feel when other women—especially those her age—continue to pursue sex, to smile bewitchingly into the mirror and lie down with men? Nothing arouses competition between women like sexual beauty. And Steinem is not without her own spontaneous bursts of rivalry when such brilliant and, yes, sexual people as Paglia speak a feminism that does not agree with hers.

  Such acolytes as Susan Faludi keep Steinem’s flame alive by writing disparagingly—and very competitively—of the new, young feminists such as Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Sommers, who have a sharp sexual edge. Their goals, Faludi claims, are their own fame, not social change. Bad girls! “Theirs will always be a stillborn form of feminism,” she resentfully writes, “because it is an ideology that will not and does not want to generate political, social, or economic change…. [They] do not look forward to creating a better future, only inward to the further adulation of self.” Her envy of their brand of feminism, especially as it embraces sex and puts it on the new feminist agenda, fairly burns up the page.

  Nothing, but nothing, infuriates women more than other women enjoying sex. Ironically, the sight and smell of it make Steinem and Faludi’s other archenemies—Right Wing Patriarchs—equally furious, thus bringing their two armies uncomfortably close together. Sex, fear of it, creates strange bedfellows.

  Twenty-five years ago that other glamorous feminist, Germaine Greer, wrote: “Revolutionary woman may join Women’s Liberation Groups and curse and scream and fight the cops, but did you ever hear of one of them marching the public street with her skirt high, crying ‘Can you dig it? Cunt is beautiful!’ The walled garden of Eden was CUNT. The mandorla of the beautiful saints was CUNT. The mystical rose is CUNT. The Ark of Gold, the Gate of Heaven. Cunt is a channel drawing all towards it. Cunt is knowledge. Knowledge is receptivity, which is activity. Cunt is the symbol of erotic science…. It is time to dig CUNT and women must dig it first.”

  Greer was in her twenties when she wrote this. She was a glorious sight to behold and to hear, an exhibitionistic celebrity. Her sexual vitality gave heart to all of us. Along with the unflinching speaking voice, Greer clearly enjoyed using all her ammunition, by which I mean that the beautiful long hair was tossed, the breasts thrust forward, the ass twitched, and the long legs flashed. She was, and still is, sensational, though this is not always how she presents herself in her book on menopause, The Change, where she is decidedly ambivalent.

  The change hurts. Like a person newly released from leg-irons, the freed woman staggers at first. Though her excessive visibility was anguish, her present invisibility is disorienting. She had not realized how much she depended upon her physical presence, at shop counters, at the garage, on the bus. For the first time in her life
she finds that she has to raise her voice or wait endlessly while other people push in front of her.

  She describes a scene in a restaurant in France where a woman friend rails that the two of them dine alone and invisible while at an adjoining table two men their age ogle young women half their age.

  Yes, that can happen, but youthful beauty was never something we allowed ourselves to enjoy; we often felt too conspicuous and accused ogling men of objectifying us. We hadn’t yet grown into our full identity, which is interior, a state of mind, value, self-acceptance, worth, courage… all of it invisible. Ours is a riper sexuality, if we believe it, feel it. As Greer herself said in that article on Cunt twenty-five years earlier, “Women must dig it first.”

  When The Change was published, Harper’s Bazaar ran an article on Greer along with a photo of her sitting naked, slouched, long, graying hair half covering her face, droopy-breasted and holding her cat, yes, very witchy. It was confounding, for in her book she doesn’t so much celebrate the sexual power of the witch as the witch’s aggressiveness that inhibits men. For a woman who had once advertised in her look a bewitching come-hither to men, her book held a disquieting embrace of a witchiness that leaves out men, leaves out the heightened mature beauty and power that women might grow into if we believed it were possible, saw it in ourselves or in a heroine such as Greer, who appeared quite beautiful and vibrant when she signed copies of The Change in my local bookstore.

  Her rhetoric that day was totally at odds with the way she looked; she spoke as The Bad Witch, powerful, angry, an almost whining note in her voice. I wanted to shake her, hold up the mirror before her, and ask, Why? Is it not good enough, this older beauty? Does she turn against men because they do not look at her with the same instantaneous voyeuristic desire they once showed her? Once you’ve been an exhibitionistic celebrity in many areas, including intellect and youthful, erotic beauty, it’s not good enough being “just” brilliant.

  Maybe I have Greer all wrong, but I won’t give up on her. She is too important. When my assistant read her book, she groaned, “Oh, God, now they’ve found something new to whine about.” By “they” she means those who started this business years ago, who have achieved so much, who are heroines, but who paint their present years as Grimm. “Greer looked fantastic,” said my friend Moira, who has just turned forty-five and was at the book signing with me, “but I was furious at what she had to say. How can someone who has accomplished so much talk such drivel? I just hope to God I don’t feel as she does in seven years.”

  If we are not more trustworthy models, younger women will look at our tired, angry faces, and plunge themselves deeper into the pursuit of youthful beauty, denying that they will ever be like us. Here are the heroines, lamenting the fact that no one looks at them and salivates as they once did. Well, not all heroines. Consider Faye Wattleton, the fifty-two-year-old former head of Planned Parenthood. I videotaped an interview with her ten years ago, in which she said she had been raised by the women in her family to respect and prolong beauty’s power. When I mention her name to women, whether they know her personally or not, they voice admiration of her beauty, her professional success, and her commitment to feminism, all of which she preserves as might a person who has inherited great wealth.

  I wish Greer would read again her own paragraph from The Female Eunuch: “Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people, which cannot be accomplished by denial of heterosexual contact.”

  I want the freedom that comes with ripe age, the chance to be fully myself that Greer celebrates, but I refuse to accept that this freedom only arrives when we are supposedly of no sexual interest to men. If feminism isn’t sexually open to men, not just the penis in the vagina but warm, embracing, erotic in that deep, hot, unconsummated way that is often the most searing sex, then we will have failed. I do not consider Matriarchy a sign of feminism’s success. Drooping breasts and gray hair will come to all of us, but I do not want to shove them in men’s craws as does that witchily ugly picture of the naked Greer with her cat.

  What a Difference a Father Would Have Made in This Third Act Had He Been a Lead Character in the First

  I see two major social changes occurring in tandem: our view of the man as a caretaker and our view of the post-fifty woman as powerful.

  Without a man involved in the earliest modeling of our lives, when the clay was still damp, we grow up expecting men to change our minds about beauty, sex, everything. How can they? Who can alter the course of the wind, moon, and stars, the celestial road map laid down in a nursery controlled by an angel who was also The Witch? The Prince was expected to be the payoff. We knew little about The Prince, given he was male, which made for much dreaming and idealization beyond anything a mere male mortal could deliver.

  Father may be male, but he entered late, not having been in the nursery. The Oedipal years arrive after years of concession, loss, and surrender, by which I mean women seldom get back what was sacrificed to keep mother love when we were dependent and she our only source of life. How could father have any idea of the quantity of approval and encouragement his daughter requires to undo mother’s omnipotent judgments, especially where sex and beauty are concerned?

  And so the job is passed on to The Prince, who is no better at making women feel beautiful and sexual. We never forgive men. When we get to age forty-five or fifty and still have never believed a man’s opinion of our sexual beauty, we concede to mother: We see the Witch creeping up on big cat’s paws and we say, “I’m old,” before we are. What a waste.

  Imagine how our extended lives might evolve if father had raised us from the start, either alongside mother or on his own, had she chosen to work outside the home. It is imagery worth pursuing given its inevitability unless, of course, the Feminist Matriarchy takes over. (Goddess forbid.) One of the reasons we are looking better these days is that we already “act like men,” meaning that we are good providers with strong voices. When a woman was accused of “acting like a man” in the olden days, you can be sure it wasn’t meant as a compliment; nor did you expect that woman to be beautiful.

  Today we look better than our mothers at our age precisely because the way we live animates our features, stirs the blood, and relieves the anxiety, depression, and anger that aged our mothers before their time. If having entered men’s world and acquired some of their privileges has done this, why don’t we put an expert at life enhancement in the nursery, where our children can literally take in fine “male” qualities, if not with father’s milk then from his strong arms, tender hands, his different kind of love, and his far less critical eyes that beam a man’s approval and encouragement? Men aren’t angels, but they tend to be more independent, assertive, and sexual than women.

  Might it not follow that as more women gain economic power, men would not have to measure their manliness by how much money they made? They would be open to alternative definitions of masculinity, just as we women have extended the meaning of who and what a woman is. Loving children as he does, he might relish an equal role in the nursery, perhaps take it on as his full-time work.

  What I count on is that when the man in the nursery does his job as well as the woman in the workplace does hers, we will eventually see the “naturalness” of the deal. It comes down to a bargain: If women are to prolong sexual beauty, we must cede men a power of comparable value. These bargains between the sexes aren’t written down at summit meetings, but if men felt that we were on their side, then they would be on ours. As it stands, girls raised solely by women in the Matriarchal Nursery grow up afraid to enjoy sexual beauty because it would lose them the only source of love they were raised to trust. Had father also been a caretaker, this fear of exclusion from women’s world would be lessened. Should women turn against us, we would always believe in another source of love.

  Without our unhealthy symbiotic attachment to mother, we woul
d be less likely to split her into Good and Bad Witch so as to keep her love intact. We would see mother whole; we would not question men’s love so quickly; we would accept our sexual beauty, feeling no threat of loss.

  All the money in the world cannot buy sufficient surgery to keep aging women from questioning our mirrors and despising ourselves for trying to look younger when the inner voice says, “Your time is past.” That inner voice is the double standard of aging: so long as a man maintains the power to provide, his visual worth doesn’t diminish with age.

  When people do not look at a man, he is not threatened by invisibility; he knows he exists irrespective of others’ eyes on him because this is how he grew up. A man begins life needing mother’s eye, feeling lost without it, but he moves away with less fear and more approval; he gains his own internal eye. A man enjoys being looked at but doesn’t, as Berger writes, walk around with a balloon constantly over his head in which he imagines how others are seeing him.

  When a man arrives at age fifty, sixty, eighty, his skin may be wrinkled, his hair gone, but he doesn’t feel less a man because of it. His concerns come primarily from economic success. Should a woman desire him for his money or his seed, he would not question why she sees him as a Prince. But even financially independent women who have no desire for a man question their value as they age. What is so different in women that we cannot walk past the hall of mirrors as convincingly as men?

  My answer would be that mother doesn’t see herself in her son; men grow up with a physical difference that boosts their separation from her. His penis reinforces society’s pressure on her to let him go his own way. Its erections and secretions will not obey her. His identity will be very much influenced by mother’s opinion of his maleness, but in the end it usually remains his.