The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  In her book Female Perversions, psychiatrist Louise Kaplan offers such a fascinating, contemporary explanation of why some of us need to exhibit our selves. Let me quote her at length, for in these days of insufficient parenting, more and more young women are growing up without The Gaze and thus seek reassurance that they exist through exhibitionism. Here is Kaplan on “homeovestism,” a term coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst George Savitzianos. She begins by describing a fictional character:

  Emma Bovary, who acts or dresses exactly like some stereotyped notion of a woman, may be a female homeovestite, a woman who is unsure of her femininity, a woman who is afraid to openly acknowledge her masculine strivings…. The concept of homeovestism, with its implication of gender impersonation, may also be more faithful to what is going on when a woman dresses up to exhibit herself as a valuable sexual commodity than the term exhibitionism…. In an offhand way, the psychiatric profession and the public alike often speak of stripteasers and women who act in porn movies or who pose for pornographic magazines as exhibitionists. While the basic gratifications of exhibitionism… play some part in attracting women to these callings, ultimately the countless women who dress up in women’s underwear, veils, or other semi-exposing female garments to pose in sexually explicit or sexually suggestive postures do so to reassure themselves that they will not be abandoned or annihilated. Their very existence is at stake. The fetishized body of the porno actress is all that is left of a little girl who could never make any sense at all of why love had been taken away from her…. Women like… culture heroine Marilyn Monroe are prisoners in bodies that cannot come to life except through impersonations of femininity. These female female impersonators are as dominated by their rigid sexual scenarios as are the men they capture, captivate, and serve.

  What I like about Kaplan’s broader definition of exhibitionism is that it explains our grown-up need to be looked at in terms of The Gaze of earliest life. How much longer will it take us to understand that what happens in the nursery goes beyond feeding and caretaking, that the pattern of a lifetime is being laid down? Until we accept this, we will have young men and women hungrily roaming the streets of the world, greedy for the sight of themselves in the eyes of others, and furious unto violence when no one sees them. The small child’s fear of being “abandoned or annihilated,” of never making “any sense at all of why love has been taken away,” as Kaplan writes, has produced children from empty nurseries grown into young people whose exhibitionistic dress and talk have become not just a fashion trademark but a way of life: “Look at me! Look at me, damn it, or I’ll kill you!”

  In writing I came to see that The Nice Girl I’d so far presented to the world was very angry indeed and, yes, very much in need of being seen. It had everything to do with the absence of my father, not just his not being there to take up the slack in my mother’s visual regard and see me as The Adorable One, but also with his being such a damn mystery. Now, looking back, I can see why writing about forbidden subjects like sex and dressing to catch the eye had such a life-and-death urgency. I would like to say that being labeled a dirty writer by The Ladies of the media hurts less with time, but a Nice Girl never really gets over it. Nonetheless, I could no more stop writing about sex than a child could turn away from the spotlight of mother’s eyes.

  In her autobiography Fear of Fifty, Erica Jong painfully recalls, “It is hard even now to remember the hatred that came on the heels of Fear of Flying. Women journalists who confessed deep identification in private would attack in public, often using the very confidences they had extracted from me, citing their feminine identification. The sense of betrayal was extreme. I felt more silenced by these bitter personal attacks than I ever did by male critics.”

  Erica and I have known each other since our books on women’s sexuality, hers fiction, mine nonfiction, were published in the early seventies; I identify all too well with what she says. One of the rewards of growing older is that you care less about what others think: “What will the neighbors say?” I may not wear the scanty clothes in which I once showed off my body, but my mind is certainly less inhibited. When I was in my twenties and younger, the desire to show off and be sexual was at war with the fear of what the other girls would say. Like Erica, I was stunned by the reaction of women friends to My Secret Garden; women who were strangers were very much on my side. It was in spite of my friends’ disdain that I continued to write about sex.

  Writers are high on the charts when it comes to suicide, nervous breakdowns, pathological depression, and stomach ulcers. Years ago, I read a list of Nobel Prize–winning authors who died of alcoholism. Uncovering emotion so that the reader resonates demands a lot of digging on a writer’s part, the removal of memory blocks inscribed “Do Not Remove.” That so many of us stick with the solitary life, the unwrapping of insight that turns out to be fury, says to me that what we do is worth it. “I was afraid that if I let out my rage I would somehow destroy the world,” wrote Richard Rhodes, referring to his writer’s block. And from Virginia Woolf, “I feel certain that I am going mad.” Byron, Shelley, Melville, and Coleridge all suffered from various forms of manic depression and mood depression. Teutonic rage is usually that of an infant, which is why we call it infantile omnipotence. A wise person once told me that writer’s block was mother sitting in the unconscious with a blue pencil. I’ll buy that.

  Anger is expressed on the face by “the angry frown”: knit brows, a hard stare, and tight lips to cover the teeth, says Carl Izard, who studies nonverbal communication. When anger is repressed, he says, there is a “covering expression” that masks the face, a look I remember as that Nice Woman mask that women of my mother’s generation wore, a communal wall of repressed emotion that made them look old before their time. Women hate the ever-narrowing lips. Today we inject them with collagen, and New World dentistry replaces the teeth we angrily grind down at night. But the people most eager for collagen injections are in their twenties.

  The desperation to be seen is no longer confined to any generation. Beauty’s rewards have lost much of the old moralistic preachiness attached to “scientifically” improving one’s appearance. “The appeal of the straightforward, clean-scrubbed look, unfalsified by ‘paint,’ is essentially moral,” writes Holly Brubach. “We admire a woman for the courage to show herself to the world as she is, and in the end it’s the courage we find attractive.” Certainly that idea is still with us, built into the backbone of our Protestant ethic. But as we extend youthful beauty with exercise, surgery, better health, and self-chosen work, my own vote for courage goes to the risk taker who flaunts the rules of morality and dares to wear paint, show leg, cleavage, and flesh, who goes for surgery so long as she carries it off with confidence.

  We admire Joan Collins’s looks because she has performed her exhibitionistic role with great aplomb; by putting us at ease, she allows us to take her in. I think the ease is what I admire most of all, since it flies against envy. I am suspicious of those who raise themselves to sainthood for eschewing cosmetic surgery even as they denigrate those who vote for it. Sneering at the woman who looks great after having her eyes done gives the envious have-nots a shot of moral superiority, when indeed they are no different from the busybodies who tattletaled about the first women who smoked in public.

  Barbara Bush, with her white hair and fake pearls, didn’t convince me that she was happy in her choice. She always struck me as an angry, envious woman. When the beauty industry today actually uses envy in their advertising, I rejoice; get it out there, tell it like it is. When it encapsulates the culture’s hidden agendas, advertising rises to an art form: “They say men get character lines as they get older and women just get wrinkles… oh, really?” says the woman in the Oil of Olay commercial. “I don’t plan to grow old gracefully, I intend to fight it every inch of the way.”

  What we want is to look better as we age and still be “good people” like our mothers. This is what the have-nots prey upon, the immorality of our daring to improv
e appearance beyond what is “natural.” The anxiety of the fifty-year-old woman who has surgically made herself beautiful is the fear of the adolescent girl whose sexual beauty won her the love of more than her share of boys: Afraid that the other girls will love her less, she lowers her erotic flame. We might choose to have liposuction and painted auburn hair if only we didn’t have to forfeit goodness, kindness, and the approval of others. What a ridiculous dilemma. Why do we give to others the verdict on our morality? Some resentment of beauty will never go away, especially when carried past youth into those years when women are expected to go quietly into invisible oblivion.

  We in The Third Act of our lives are the last generation to remember the inevitability of women growing into grandmothers with white hair and soft, big bosoms on which to pillow our heads, grandmothers notoriously bereft of envy, who once filled in for mothers who had no talent for seeing small children. The sadness on the streets speaks of how much we miss the look of people who looked at peace with themselves, meaning that we could relax with them and not try so hard, there being no competition. Grandmothers who smelled of lavender and had soft, wrinkled skin gave us that deep, loving gaze that said, “Go, my darling, discover your world, for I have seen you and I love what I see.” But there is a shortage of grandmothers, white hair and fat underarms being very much out of style.

  Other cultures seem to have less trouble than we do combining beauty with serious intent. They don’t see the pursuit of beauty, at whatever age, as the work of a fool. On the contrary, beauty’s role seems to be part of their culture; is it perhaps because they are also older than we? During World War II, when there were no pretty clothes available in Paris, only breadlines, the same woman who fought in the Resistance invented whatever style she could. Parisian women made hats out of old newspapers and chicken feathers, a wedding dress out of found parachute silk. Far from making others think less of them, their originality in serving beauty was esteemed.

  There is a famous photo from those war years, when electricity was rationed, of Frenchwomen sitting under hair dryers powered by several men on bicycles, visible in the room below. This was not vanity run amok but a symbol of survival, women’s beauty being as unquestionably worth fighting for as the Louvre or Chartres Cathedral.

  In the end, the deals we make between ourselves, which allow us to see one another as powerful and bewitching, or not, are solely women’s vision. Every attempt a woman makes to own sex and beauty is in opposition to attaining the love and acceptance of women’s world. Until the reassuring image of a new generation of women has made the journey into a world of sexual beauty, younger women will watch us cautiously, enviously, until the turf is truly won. Then there will be a stampede, not into old age, but into life ongoing. It is modern women’s journey, and the enemy is within.

  Solving the Riddle of Love and Money

  Money enables every woman I know to make the choices she does, to live alone or not, to continue working or not, to be as demanding and giving as she chooses. It allows her to make a love relationship with a man that doesn’t hinge on his promise of providership. Feminism has always pushed for economic parity, but we still don’t teach the relationship between economics and emotional independence, not just paying our bills but making our money work for us on the deepest, unconscious level, where autonomy lives, where in its own unique way it oils separation.

  Even with six-figure incomes women can pass as independent, but in the way they handle money, they show themselves to be as tied to Mommy as an adolescent. That is why money is so tricky; little girls pass as powerful adults just by being big spenders. They even fool themselves. Money can’t make us emotionally independent, but it can pave the way, freeing us from Mommy’s promise that if we stayed close, she would always love us. Today mother would deny she ever said it, as strongly as we would deny that we still live by her rules, but when we have the funds to pay for an apartment and a diaphragm but leave the door to the former unlocked and the latter unused, whose little dependent girl are we?

  Women didn’t discuss money when I was growing up. It simply wasn’t done. I celebrate wholeheartedly women’s economic independence, appreciating that it buys responsibility. This is why I cheered former governor of Texas Ann Richards when she spoke at Texas Girls High School, a speech that may have contributed to her not gaining reelection. Her opponent, George W. Bush Jr., recognized ammunition when he heard it, accusing her of being un-American for urging young women to learn to take care of themselves economically.

  “The important question you have to ask yourself,” said Richards, “is not ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ It is ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ And you cannot count on Prince Charming to make you feel better about yourself and take care of you…. In the real world, half of all marriages end in divorce. And over 70 percent of divorced women find themselves slipping toward poverty…. The only person you can count on to be there when you need help is you. And almost everything worth having requires a great deal of work, work that does not always pay off right away…. If there is one single thing that holds [women] back… it is our reluctance to face the reality of money…. You’ve got to be willing to take charge of your life and responsibility for yourself.” (The emphasis is mine.)

  “This is not the message Texans want their leaders to give our daughters or sons,” George Bush roundly countered, accusing Richards of being antifamily. “Our leaders should be building up the family, not tearing it down.” The heart sinks when such a twisted opinion can win a man an election. But Bush knew that he was playing into a deep longing that we all have, a security we dreamed we had as children; maybe some of us did have it, but if you hold it out to schoolgirls today, it is a lie. We won’t bring back the family as we dream of it by raising girls to be as totally dependent on a man as a baby is on a mother.

  I recognized my mother’s economic dependence and took it as the model of how I did not want to be when I grew up. I am deeply grateful that I can provide for myself today, but I would not wish my earliest lessons in getting here on to another child. Instead, I would have mothers and fathers go out of their way to teach daughters to respect what self-sufficiency gives an individual. The Bushes of the world play on a nostalgia for a world that never really existed, and I would imagine that George Bush Jr. is also opposed to our best hope for the future, which is fathers as caretakers alongside mothers who share in the work of providing.

  It is possible to be a feminist and have others pay for your food and clothing. But it is harder, much harder than when you are able to care for yourself economically. Money comes with strings attached, even when given with love, perhaps more so. Economic dependency on others gives them the right to critique us, or so they may think. When we are dependent on others for the roof over our head, behind conscious thought is the fear, What if they take it all away tomorrow?

  A woman in a traditional marriage would vehemently deny that she resents her husband’s power over her; at the root of her faith in their marriage deal—wherein he provides economically and she is the caretaker—is her training at mother’s knee: If she was good and obeyed The Rules (meaning, didn’t separate from mother), she would be rewarded by a Prince. For fifteen, twenty years, the daughter held to the bargain; she sacrificed independence, initiative, powers of speech, the urge to lead instead of being led until one day faith paid off in the form of The Prince. For her even to consider the possibility of losing her identity, which is invested in him, is unthinkable, even when she finds the bill from a local hotel in his coat pocket.

  This is a picture of traditional woman, someone who believes in our mothers’ and grandmothers’ way of life, much of which I miss sorely; but that is what happens in revolutions: In the upheaval, more is destroyed than was intended. Giving women the opportunity to choose to pay their own way and be economically independent is a great achievement. The operative word is choice; feminism’s denigration of the role of women who choose to work at home is a disg
race.

  My friends who also went through the sixties and seventies agree with me that these years today are the best in our lives. Being able to pay the rent has a lot to do with it. More than chronological age, emotional gravity made our mothers old before their time. When husbands wandered, other wives gathered round as at a death, and the dirge began: “This is how men are.” Their faces were shaped by resignation, the lines at the corners of their mouths grew longer, deeper; submission to the inevitable tightened their communal biting of the bullet. Inside, each woman gathered her rage into a knot that tightened until the migraines began, the alcohol was drunk, the cancer cells multiplied, and the symbolic death loomed, literal.

  As successive generations of women enter the workplace—and they will—and the average wage for women rises—as it will—I see the double standard of aging continuing to level out. As women take more security in knowing that we can provide for ourselves, hopefully, we will be less critical of the mirror, less inclined to see our value decreasing with age. With a better economic cushion, we should begin to take on a sense of ease in our skins that men have enjoyed, an ease that will be terribly attractive to men, especially younger men who have grown up in a world where they are accustomed to women economically as well as maternally powerful.

  Men begin life taking in the beauty of woman power; add economic power to the never forgotten radiance of she who runs the nursery and you make the double standard of aging obsolete, or at least optional. All that remains is for the woman to believe it, to see her self as men see her, to look at her image, not the imperceptible tiny lines at the corners of the mouth, but the whole image that extends beyond the mirror, beyond the house, to include everything she does and is.