The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  The more economic power a man has, the more readily he approaches a woman. He will be hurt if she rejects him, but it will not deter him from making another call. Money in the bank is meaningful to a man; he has grown up watching men use this power and seeing women react to it. But we women haven’t yet experienced decades of parlaying our own money into personal conquest. The only commodity we have seen women trade in is beauty.

  Though it is a fleeting, unstable commodity, being in the eyes of one beholder and not the next, we trust beauty more than money, and we grieve at its loss, ironically, today more than ever. In a recent survey, nearly 50 percent of American women ages eighteen to seventy said that they were dissatisfied with how they looked, compared to 30 percent who felt that way ten years ago. Our problem is that we gained some economic wherewithal before we got emotional separation, sort of the cart before the horse. Very well, we must work with what we’ve got, consciously investing money, spending it to further individuation.

  Even as we pressed for an equal wage twenty years ago, the feeling in the air was that in achieving economic freedom we would be different from men, that we would undergo some spiritual rebirth from which we would emerge autonomous, without having soiled ourselves with filthy lucre. Why do these Matriarchal Feminists think that when we are as economically and politically powerful as men, we will be better, kinder, more generous, and holier than they? We are people who happen to be of the female gender, and as regards goodness and kindness, no different from men, some of whom are kind and some not.

  “A girl should learn to type because you never know when it might come in handy” was as much encouragement toward economic independence as women used to receive growing up. Given the promise of a Prince who was going to make up for everything they had sacrificed—bravery, speech, initiative, their whole identity—the fallback position of a typing skill made no sense. Of course, no one learned to type. After all, there was a Prince coming!

  Dependency is sweet, but swallowed anger at having no anchor of one’s own destroys beauty; as children grew up and youthful good looks disappeared, our mothers knew the value of their half of the deal with their husbands was lessening. They couldn’t afford to know it consciously, but these truths were the stuff of novels, films, and as the smiling woman closed the book, left the movie theater, content in her good fortune that it could never happen to her, in her dreams at night it happened. It wasn’t just that our mothers didn’t go to a gym or diet that made them age less well than we; it was the unthinkable prospect of abandonment.

  Men didn’t set out to dupe their wives; they too had meant to love until death. But things happen. No amount of “I love yous” could assuage what women felt when their husbands looked at other women; the wife didn’t look at other men and no man had looked at her in that way for years. She denied its meaningfulness, but denial sucks up energy over time. So does protracted loss of identity as children grow up and leave.

  Divorce lawyers had, and still have, a hard time convincing the jilted wife that if she doesn’t take certain measures, the disappearing husband will leave her penniless. “Oh, no, he will still take care of me,” she tearfully insists; that is how totally she had believed in the Prince years ago when she abandoned all the life-enhancing talents she’d once possessed in order to be the pliant, submissive, dependent Princess. Money isn’t everything, but it isn’t without meaning. Knowing where your next meal is coming from, having money in your own name, does a lot for circulation, digestion, and a good night’s sleep.

  Since I was raised never to discuss money, I obeyed the feminine vow of silence regarding it and, telling no one, quietly saved my small change in the glass bank shaped like the world. The determination to leave home for a life of my own had at its heart the vow never again to feel left out or afraid. The full meaning of dependency wasn’t yet understood, but I certainly felt its emotional weight, my mother’s and my own, and the role of money was not lost on me. The freedom my grandfather enjoyed, the respect he engendered opposite the anxiety of women, educated me.

  Children absorb far more than parents imagine; I understood that she who could not pay her own way would have my mother’s anxious look, those deep sighs for which I felt responsible, wrongly so, but felt it nevertheless. Watching my grandfather come and go in our little world, always arriving from distant ports with beautiful gifts for my mother and aunt—silk scarves painted by Picasso from Paris, white leather luggage lined in red satin from Madrid—how could I not want to be him instead of these frightened women? It was his aura I wanted, his almost tangible sureness of self. That he was a man didn’t in the least complicate my preadolescent plan.

  My mother smiled quizzically at the glass bank on the bookcase next to my bed, and while it irked her that my sister often lost or misplaced her allowance, it bound the two of them more closely. Put another way, failing at independence was how women were.

  When I became a sexual woman, the riddle of love and money took a more sophisticated turn; the little girl bravado turned to a look of sexual independence. I wore it with the full knowledge that it attracted all kinds of men, and no man appealed less than one with money. What I didn’t like about them was that they saw their portraits in their bank accounts, meaning they never let a woman in, never let anyone in. Protected behind money’s padded walls was that very part of them I wanted to reach with my sex, my promise that there was nothing from their early emotional self that they could show me that I would not accept. I wanted a man I could awaken, as The Prince had awakened Sleeping Beauty, a man whose defenses had not been made impenetrable by the security of money, a false freedom anyway, given that it leaves that kind of man brain-dead, emotionally cut off, invisible to himself and useless to me.

  I didn’t want a lot of money, still don’t, just enough independence not to need men so desperately that I couldn’t see myself in them, them in me. It is exciting when a man borrows emotionally from me, when he takes courage, or extends his freedom, or plays with beauty’s power. These exchanges between a man and a woman are as thrilling as sex—well, they are sex. Eventually I would write about the extended influence of the first years of life, but when I was twenty-two I knew in a nonintellectual, sensory way that if I could awaken a man to believe that what I loved in him was not money but the core of him, what came before society’s kiss of wealth-as-character, he would know that I was not easily replaceable. It was love eternal, not a good provider, I was after. I was a good provider.

  I remember a panel discussion in the mid-seventies wherein four married couples, including my then husband and I, were asked to discuss something like “Marriage and Feminism.” When I suggested how earning my own way had served me as a feminist, there was an angry reaction from the audience. “Money is not what feminism is about!” someone shouted. But when women walked out of marriages wholesale in the seventies, leaving home and family behind in order “to find themselves,” they were responding to an inner conviction that they didn’t feel free even to think their own thoughts, much less act the way they wanted to within a structure—the married home—that was based on the same premise and run by the same rules as their parents home. There were some mistakes made in women’s revolutionary exodus from home and responsibility in those years, but the intuitive rush out the door was the hunger to get something back that hadn’t been delivered under Patriarchy’s Deal.

  If others take care of you economically, doling out funds from an account that is in their name alone, generous as they may be, you are in the role of the good child who does her work and gets an allowance. Money arguments are at the top of the list of where trouble starts within a marriage. What makes the reality of economic dependency painfully difficult to explain is that it feels good to many a woman. This kind of woman doesn’t want her own bank account, because to her it would be saying to her husband, “I don’t need you.” In her preconscious thinking it would be an inducement for him to leave her. The Governor Bushes of this world promote women’s dependency as famil
y values.

  It is a kind of Patriarchy that blindly refuses to accept the value of what has been accomplished in the past two decades, a level of independence for women that would evolve into a new and more real form of family values that is more than words, meaning a choice is made every day to remain together as a loving family because both husband and wife—not just the man—have the wherewithal to be independent. Instead, they choose to stay together, even after bitter arguments, because what would be lost is known absolutely, having often been reviewed and found too precious ever to lose.

  Because women who work at home provide a role as important as their husband’s salaried job, they too should be paid a salary, a portion of his. Deposited in an account in her name, it would automatically substantiate her separate self; the rewards might not be conscious, but the repeated transactions of paying for goods and services with one’s own funds, which have been earned, tells her, whether or not she wants to hear it, that she exists unto herself and that, lo and behold, people don’t love her less for having an identity of her own. On the contrary, they are more drawn to her given that the weight of dependency has been removed and that independence provides an attractive spark.

  Her children would grow up with a model of a woman who was both loving and independent within a caring marriage, giving her daughters a memory of the most important woman in their lives as someone whose self wasn’t lost in neediness, that “I’ll die if you leave me!” brand of femininity. And her sons would have a working knowledge of a mate, not just someone whose entire identity was in blindly serving husband and children but who chose each day to be a mother and a wife; because of her choice, there would be less burden felt by the son to repay her for giving up her life, and since she literally paid her own way, he would feel free to define manliness as something more than earning as much as possible.

  A woman who chooses to work at home may not like the idea of receiving payment that is kept in her own name in a bank, for it wasn’t how her own mother lived within marriage. Taking money from her husband somehow feels like it gives him license to leave her, that she is a form of hired help rather than his little wifey. That sounds ridiculous, yes, but I’ve been there, and while in my own life I was the breadwinner, I didn’t want to feel like the provider and eagerly, gratefully handed the money over to him, as if to say, “You are big and I am just a little girl.” Men too try to find with wives what they had with Mommy, but they don’t usually use money as the conduit; women’s confusion of love and money says, “If I earn a lot of money, then who will take care of me?” Money is the enemy of symbiosis—unless you disown it, give it away as I did.

  The money riddle is so much more complicated than any of us are ready to admit. Rewarding as it is to buy our own food, pay our rent, not enough time has yet gone by for women to take in what we have won. Our mothers’ bargains, under which we grew up, still haunt us, perhaps only in dreams at night, but it would be unnatural if they did not. It doesn’t help that feminism refuses to spell out the realities of cold, hard money in the bank; it would mean that those who had more money than the other girls would arouse the dreaded monster, competition.

  Because many women work outside the home today doesn’t automatically mean they are separate and independent. But without money with which to buy food and pay the rent, we are obviously tied, tied to mother/father, to husband, to welfare, to a more comfortable definition of a woman than the one we are now fashioning, sometimes, I think, against our will. In women’s world we still refuse to give “dirty money” its full credit; like sex, to which it is very much allied, there is that niggling, uncomfortable feeling that money somehow isn’t feminine, womanly. Lest my message get twisted in the feminist translation, let me repeat that it is not a question of how much money we make; the big earner isn’t automatically more separate. It is the emotional and psychological awareness of what our economic independence buys us that must be internalized.

  A good exercise in learning the liberating influence of money is to use it on a man, buy him dinner, give him pleasure, enjoy how good it feels to be the initiator. It is good practice to pick up the check; you’ve done something your mother never did. He will thank you for dinner, not a world-shaking event, but a rewarding step toward bursting that balloon over our heads in which we see ourselves being constantly observed by others.

  A long-ago lover used to enjoy drinking at bars, as did I. I would sit and he would stand beside me, elbow on the bar, and we would talk for hours in that special way lovers do in saloons. He would toss some bills on the bar when we arrived, and as we drank, the bartender would simply take cash out of the bills and make change; he never interrupted us, and my lover never looked at the money, nor did he count it when we left. “A fool with his money…” you might say, but I took it quite differently, admiring his and the bartender’s ease. Ease, as you may have noticed, is very big with me; I want to be easier.

  Women are not at ease, and few things make a group of us more unattractively uneasy than settling the check at lunch. Me, I would like to stand at the bar and put a big bill out there and talk to my man without thinking about money.

  Twenty-five years ago, we said we didn’t want men paying for our dinners, opening doors for us, lighting our cigarettes. Doing everything ourselves was one of the ways in which we were “demolishing forever the myth of male superiority.” Frankly, I like having my chair pulled out for me, but I also like paying for a man’s meal and taking his hand in mine, nor do I mind picking up his dry cleaning or cooking his dinner, which is satisfying when chosen to be performed.

  Wasn’t this the reasoning behind opening our own doors back then, to eventually turn the tables and earn the right to initiate, make the first move, as men always had? Did we snarl at men who flicked their Bic when we took cigarette in hand, just to be mean, just for the pleasure of being sufficiently free to beat up on them? What a dead end.

  Good feminism, as I see it, isn’t just about an equal wage, but about the equal opportunity to reinvent our self-image, to somehow let our economic independence seep into our pores so that we wear it comfortably, thus allowing it to massage the tensions that our mothers had, constantly seeing themselves being observed in that balloon. That exercise is what ages us. When we take the initiative that our new economics offer, we are less preoccupied with the balloon.

  When a woman pays for a man’s dinner, does it upset the Darwinian applecart? Should they then go to his apartment, is she expected to make the first move, or if he does, without her spoken agreement, can she accuse him of date rape? I can remember various attendant emotions in paying for men’s meals in restaurants and, according to anthropologist Helen Fisher, the rite of feeding within courtship is not without significance. While she notes that some female mammals do feed their lovers, courting women feed men with nowhere near the regularity that men feed women: “‘Courtship feeding,’ as this custom is called,” she says, “probably predates the dinosaurs, because it has an important reproductive function. By providing food to females, males show their abilities as hunters, providers, and worthy procreative partners.”

  As more women become good providers, thus throwing all attendant roles into play, doesn’t it require that we women alter our self-image? The person who pays the bill isn’t expected to have a passive, demure, irresponsible look or feel about her. She is saying something in her economic provider role, perhaps not that she wants to have sex after dinner, but if she does follow the man to his apartment, how is the man to read her actions? Does he wait for her to make the first move, as she did for the bill at dinner? Certainly, going to his apartment after having paid for his dinner says she is an active participant in the evening. What happens next is in part her responsibility. Rape is a crime, but the fuzziness of “date rape” at a time when women pay for themselves, pay for the man, hold down responsible jobs, and wear near-naked clothes puts into question what the roles of economics and beauty are, how they interact and influence all relationships.


  Fifteen years ago on NBC’s The Tomorrow Show, Tom Snyder used to interrupt me with, “Yeah, yeah, Nancy, but why do we guys always have to take you women to dinner first? Why can’t we just have sex?” Maybe Helen Fisher’s explanation of the “courtship ritual” wouldn’t mollify Tom, being a male keenly aware that women were earning amounts increasingly close to what he made. That was 1981, and while feminists were demanding to pay their own way, still others were hanging on to their traditional privilege of being fed by a man, thus making sure he would provide not just for tonight’s meal but for the nine months of her pregnancy too.

  Our new economics gives us the chance to offer the world more than beauty, in fact, to offer ourselves something other than good looks by which to know our value. When we approach a man and take responsibility for his happiness, if only for an evening, we learn something we have always envied in men: Instead of waiting and relying on beauty to reward us, by telephoning him, paying for his dinner, and initiating whatever else we may want out of the evening, we have actively gambled with rejection and not died.

  Money isn’t everything, but it takes the killer edge off survival, physical and emotional. In this knowledge is born the relaxed way a man stands, his big laugh, the freedom to say whatever comes into his head, as stupid as it may be. Why, he doesn’t even realize that the hem is coming out of his jacket, that his hair needs combing! But that is exactly what appeals: that he doesn’t give that big a damn what the mirror projects. In the end, men’s ease has always been theirs because the anxiety over appearance was ours.

  The Prince, the Minstrel, the Tailor, the Wedding: A Musical! Produced by the Girl I Left Behind

  Two years after the fire, I met the man I would marry and with whom I’ve been spending the best third of my life. Had the fire not burned up everything, our meeting and marriage would not have happened. I get a chill thinking what might not have been. I would never have recognized The Prince, so cleverly disguised that night I opened the door, would certainly never have seduced him had the fire not awakened me to the girl I’d left behind, my best self.