The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Is it any wonder that without a man in the nursery, the power of the penis is exaggerated, sometimes even used as a weapon against women? Maybe the boy/man couldn’t stand up to the Giantess of the Nursery, couldn’t defend himself emotionally, verbally, and wouldn’t strike out at her. But he could and does at other women who often bear the brunt of the rage that began back then.

  Maybe father in the nursery wouldn’t eliminate men’s later brutality against women, but with a strong male image from the day he was born, a man who held, fed, and disciplined him, a boy would grow to manhood with a much richer picture of how to be a man. Just as women’s beauty is built into mother’s earliest role, father’s would be too, meaning both girls and boys would grow up seeing a male as well as a female beauty ideal. For this to happen, women must first acknowledge that caretaking is not just sacrifice but also the most powerful role in life. And they must be willing to share it.

  As it is, men never get over their fear of women’s power, which they believe in far more than we. They didn’t let us in the workplace out of a sense of fairness and rightness. They knew we could beat them. The money that had made them powerful was a Band-Aid on the emotional wounds inflicted by the Giantess of the Nursery; when massed female power reappeared in the form of angry feminism, men knuckled under enough for us to enter. Once The Witch gets her toe in the door, she is in.

  Despite everything we have won, women refuse to see ourselves as owning mother’s witchy power, preferring instead the very effective image of little, mistreated people at the mercy of the big, bad wolf. We blame the double standard of aging on men: Given a lineup of women they don’t know, most men would pick the young beauty. But so would we. When a man loves a fifty- or seventy-year-old woman, however, and desires her sexually, it isn’t he who turns away. We women take ourselves out of the running; even when our bodies were lush, we hated them. Now that the visible signs of the crepey-skinned witch are upon us, we turn from sex with self-disgust, seeing in men’s eyes our own revulsion.

  There is absolutely nothing we women could not accomplish—including the abolition of this double standard of aging—if we could get the deadwood out of our houses and encourage one another to take in the power of our sexual beauty, which lives beyond menopause, and which is not restricted to and defined by youth. Not to sound witchy, but we only have to believe it to make it so; men already do.

  Men in the nursery would turn around women’s view of sex and beauty as defined by youth like nothing else could. It is evolution at its best, men picking up the slack now that women have left the nursery door ajar so as to enter the workplace. When a loved man’s voice reads to his daughter the fairy tales from the Animal Groom Cycle, wherein the heroine conquers her fear of sex and thus becomes a whole person, his image and his words will be taken in by his daughter as a promise to grow on, an alternative opinion to mother’s. You and I are too old to receive this from Daddy, but we could give it to the next generation, a truly magnificent gift from good feminists to our children.

  Wearing Our Power Beautifully

  Under Patriarchy, a woman’s worth lessened as she aged, but while we may no longer be capable of reproduction, we are becoming better and better providers; this is how we must begin to weigh our value. In a culture in which success is god, we are free to be advertisements for ourselves. It is quite a coup, wearing our beauty on our own arm, so to speak.

  We are attracted to successful people and want to warm ourselves in their glow. If the successful one is also good-looking, the attraction is multiplied. When you put a woman’s beauty together with her accomplishment, you have a very attractive package indeed, inside and out. Women have only to wear their success self-confidently, and we will not be without friends and lovers, if that is what we desire. In the words of a male colleague of then fifty-year-old psychologist Judith Rodin, president of the University of Pennsylvania, “She’s the kind of person who became more glamorous and more charismatic as she got larger grants and more fame.” Rodin is stunning, a mother, and has been married three times. I like her colleague’s quote because it speaks of how beauty and achievement mesh, the one feeding the other, if that is what we choose.

  As we reap the rewards of modern feminism, we carry into our extended years everything won for women when we were younger. It is a moment to celebrate, not to lie down and die. Our new economics have won us a realignment of the sexes, ours to design and live. What comes to mind are the Olympic Games, a beautiful athlete running across the World, lighting the torches: Let the games begin! This beautiful running person is you and I, who in middle age have never looked better or worked so hard to win the privilege of being the first generation to break Patriarchal World’s double standard of aging.

  What is the point of owning economic power if it doesn’t buy us the privileges of aging that men have always enjoyed? Men cannot give us this; when we were twenty, we didn’t believe in their protestations of love or their adoration of our beauty. Now that we are forty-five or seventy we certainly wouldn’t believe them; all along, what was missing was our own admirable self-image. To evolve fully, women must reinforce one another, cease devaluing the other woman, and instead take her achievement as the new benchmark.

  We see men as through a lens called Daddy/wealth/money/power; even if he simply makes ends meet, we still give him the right to choose us, which power determines how we see ourselves. Our economics have given us the right to alter the Patriarchal Deal, meaning to the richest man went the most beautiful young woman. Men can still extract this prize, but we need no longer rely on his money or his evaluation of us. Let him choose youth; we have a new power; bewitchment lies not in the eye of the beholder but of she who owns it and believes in sexual beauty until she dies.

  Older women were once seen as witches because of their power; it was the older woman’s embodiment of sexual energy, not her dried-up old sex that frightened men and other women too, who were not so emboldened. Riding on a broomstick, indeed. Is not the broom handle the penis? According to Lois Banner, “the two derogatory names most commonly used by women against women in the medieval period were ‘whore’ and ‘witch.’ All women could be whores; all women could be witches.”

  The model we present from here on, the way we look, carry ourselves, see, and think of ourselves, will be remembered as the first wave of modern feminist power, an evolutionary change. Seeing us, young women will no longer fear that life ends with youth. If, however, we continue lamenting that eyes no longer fasten on us as they did when we were young, everything we have accomplished will be as dust. It is no good that older feminists today say beauty is not important; it is always important. It is the measure of beauty that changes. If youth’s monopoly is to alter, the Good Witch must be seen as she was originally drawn—creative, wise, going about her powerful business, and beautiful beyond the telling of it.

  Bemoaning the invisibility of older women makes a farce of the past twenty years; it says that sex objects are all we ever were and have remained. Today’s return to the tyranny of youthful beauty complicates our work; adolescent fashions from our own youth in the sixties and seventies mimic our inability to invent an image of lush, mature beauty.

  Who are we? It is not so much the clothes we wear but the way we carry, think of, and see ourselves. We need a look that celebrates Women’s New Middle Age. Enough of this business of squeezing into the hip huggers and shrunken T-shirts we wore twenty years ago; it says we are afraid of becoming big and beautiful. We are not our mother’s generation. The sooner we outgrow the fear of surpassing her, the closer we will be to achieving our new look.

  So far, the hungry eye is only used to one limited dish: youth. It will not taste this new, richer offering if we who live it do not believe in it. The eye’s search for youthful beauty is automatic and eternal, irrespective of the contents of the lush package. Reproduction is on the mind of the biological eye. But we are more than breeders, you and I. We are women of content, and it is our vision of ourselves as
more exciting and appealing as we age that makes it so; when other women see us, they will take our look to their own mirrors; we will be a lens through which they see themselves anew. It is all a matter of the eye getting used to seeing an older woman as admirable, once the mind has altered its opinion and informed the eye.

  Our ease will draw people to us, which will make us less dependent on youthful beauty. People today, more than ever, are drawn to those who have a certain serenity. Young beauty attracts a crowd, but there is seldom serenity; picked like a flower at its height of perfection by a man, the beauty can only borrow ease from him. Knowing her value is dictated by time, she fears the clock ticking.

  When you and I, twenty, thirty, forty years older than she, give ourselves over to envy of her youth, we are forgetting how perilous life felt back then. This is what nasty resentment does. As we believe in our new power, other women and men want to be around us; men always follow strong women who love them.

  Competing for the eye with a nineteen-year-old is doomed to failure. Measuring our success in visibility at age fifty with what it was when we were thirty is the action of a fool. We are no longer in the gene pool, competing with other females looking for a mate with whom to reproduce their line. We are older and wiser and do not want the indiscriminate eye; in fact, we do not want to be chosen, but to do the selecting ourselves. This is not dancing class. These are the years in which we may make the first move.

  The “old wives’ tales” regarding the loss of sexual desire with age are just that, tales told by old women to keep other women in their place, meaning that no one should get more of the pie than any other. “The woman’s capacity for orgasm is not impaired in any way by aging,” wrote Masters and Johnson in 1994. “In one study, the frequency of orgasm for sexually active women was actually found to increase in each decade of life, through the eighties.”

  When you read this quote, does something inside squirm at the thought of aging female flesh in the throes of ecstasy, witchlike? Remember that women in their thirties already see “old female flesh” and are convinced that men will see them as they see themselves. Our invisibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Most of my women friends are past the age of fifty, and they look as good as women in their thirties; not as young, but then, youth isn’t what they have to offer. The middle-aged woman isn’t what she used to be. Norma Desmond, heroine of the film and Broadway musical Sunset Boulevard, was originally written to be age fifty, a hag, an over-the-hill film star who could no longer show her face. That movie was produced in 1950. Today, we laugh at fifty as old; is it our eye that has changed, or women? I would say both, with heavy emphasis on the latter.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber, who composed the music for the stage version, quoted some Hollywood wives who chorused, “We’re all fifty, and we’re all beautiful!” Remember Swanson in the part, how old she looked? Or was it how young I was? And so I watched it again a few nights ago. She does look old. Supposedly, William Holden felt it was demeaning to play opposite such an old woman and had to be coerced into playing his role, ironically one of his best. “Today, fifty is nothing,” says Lloyd Webber, “but in those days, when they made the film, it was shocking.” Who made fifty an obsolete definition of old? You and I.

  A man of forty-five looks distinguished, but a woman of the same age is over the hill, Debby Then, a scholar at The Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, is reported as saying. As a woman who looks at men, I would answer that to me very few men look distinguished at forty-five until, perhaps, I learn who they are, what they have done, and read their accomplishment into their faces. “Women in their forties are feeling better than ever about themselves,” Debby Then continues, “but unfortunately, that’s when they become invisible to society.”

  I prefer Carolyn Heilbrun’s approach to women, beauty, and age. “It is perhaps only in old age, certainly past fifty, that women can stop being female impersonators, can grasp the opportunity to reverse their most cherished principles of femininity.” As an admirable model of an older woman, Heilbrun chose Margaret Mead. “I remember having lunch with my aunt,” she says, “who was asking me, ‘Why don’t you do something with yourself?’ I looked over at Margaret Mead, who… was about 5 feet tall and weighed 180 pounds… and was surrounded by people, including young men. I figured I’d settle for that.”

  Mead is often cited by other women as a grand example of the older woman spitting in the eye of invisibility. In her autobiography, from which I’ve briefly quoted, Mead celebrates the menopausal years, the freedom from childbearing, as a time in life when something “very special” is available to women: “Suddenly, their whole creativity is released—they paint or write as never before or they throw themselves into academic work with enthusiasm.” As for her looks and sexuality, Mead’s daughter wrote of her that “she seemed to become prettier, she bought a couple of designer dresses for the first time, from Fabiani, and I think she started a new romantic relationship. Without question, she went through a complete professional renaissance.”

  “When I look at the advertisements that are coming out of the beauty industry, I’m struck by how very much the woman is suggested to be making herself beautiful for others,” said psychologist Georgia Witkin, who participated in my 1989 Power of Beauty Symposium. “I spoke to 1,500 women for a book I wrote called The Female Stress Syndrome, and I found out that we look at ourselves in a reflection or a mirror on the average of seventeen times a day. That’s everything from storefront reflections to makeups and makeovers. During those seventeen times, what women told me they were looking for was not how they looked to others but to themselves. And if they seemed to have pink cheeks and if their lips seemed red and their eyes bright, they said to themselves, ‘Well, then, I must be feeling well. I must be young, I look it.’ We want beauty not just for others; we want to look the way we feel, which is quite young, quite strong, and quite beautiful, although we are maturing.”

  At that same symposium, where television journalist Nancy Collins asked a roomful of mostly male executives from a major cosmetic house why they still used twenty-year-old women to advertise their antiaging creams, the answer was that it was what consumers wanted. Since that symposium, the number of beautiful models over the age of forty in advertisements of women’s beauty products has multiplied; models such as Lauren Hutton, Patti Hansen, Carmen, and Isabella Rossellini are the vanguard. Men who run large cosmetics houses are out to earn bigger bucks; if older women can be proven to sell antiaging cream better than younger women, they will go with the former. But the decision as to how much and for how long we want to draw the sight lines to ourselves is ours.

  We say we hate being beauty objects when what we really hate is being invisible and without power. Menopause might be a pleasant respite for those who hate the stares. When a generation of women grow up taking into adolescence their big, brave eyes with which they looked at the world, along with all the other talents prized prior to their first bleeding, then when that bleeding is done, they would have inside them all the skills and abilities practiced since birth.

  Invisibility would not be so feared because our value would be internalized. We would remember the benefits from our years prior to adolescent sexual beauty when people responded more to our voices, charm, athletic and scholastic ability. Not being on stage all the time meant freedom then. I realize that this is what my dreams of lost suitcases and clothes closets are about, and why I began this book unsure of whether I wanted to continue being seen or not.

  I never expected to be seen as lovely prior to adolescence, but to be loved by others simply because I’d walked in the door, bringing a breath of life to the people who wanted to be around someone so easy in her skin. Our generation won’t change the double standard of aging in our lifetime, but we’ve begun to acquire power we once thought became women’s only when we married. It never did. Nor did a man have access to our power. Now we each have a portion of what once belonged exclusively to the opposite sex, and we can
share it with one another or we can live alone.

  We will be more actively involved in becoming the kind of people we want to be. This is what people will read into our faces, no longer young as they were but no more creased than the faces of men: youthful beauty fades, but intellect, energy, leadership, all the lifelong qualities that men have, including sexual energy, these will be women’s characteristics too.

  I do not approach old age with glee, but I hate waste. I choose to believe that young women are now growing up taking admirable women as models; as young girls they see respect paid to women of all ages, as it is to men; economic success will always be admired because our god is economics. But so will achievement in other fields. As children see their parents genuflecting in front of seventy-year-old women like Pamela Harriman, our wealthy ambassador to France, they will note that it is not because of a pretty face. And they will see gifted women such as Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Dole, Sandra Day O’Connor receiving deference, as well as thousands of other admirable women now in the making.

  In ten years, you will still hear women complaining about invisibility, but hopefully there will be less desperation and more humor in their voices, for they will have taken in their full value. Who wants to lose one’s looks? Not I. Not men either. But what sustains me is a belief that these will be the best years.

  What Should the Good Witch Wear?

  Today’s tailors have their work cut out for them; every year millions of women are passing age fifty, and we have never looked better. We are also richer than our age group has ever been, and our wealth is not inherited from dead husbands whom we’ve outlived. Having made our own money, we feel freer to spend it on ourselves. We want to look the way we feel: vital, sexual, more in charge of our lives than ever.