The Beastly Side Of Beauty Author Claims That Our Values Are Only Skin Deep
Nancy Friday, born a plain child, learned early the painful lessons of beauty.
“I saw the power of it because I saw the cookies going to the other girls,” Friday says of her girlhood in the South.
She has grown up to write a series of provocative books, including “My Mother/My Self” on the mother-daughter relationship, “My Secret Garden” on women’s sexual fantasies, and now “The Power of Beauty” (HarperCollins, $27.50).
Like her previous books, it’s filled with plenty of autobiography, revealing anecdotes and sexual confessions, more, certainly, than most readers probably want to know.
But the book is true to Friday’s intent: to provoke her readers into something, whether it’s thinking, or arguing or flinging the book across the room in a flash of annoyance.
The point of the book, ostensibly, is to examine the power of women’s beauty, and its effect on women, men and hapless adolescents.
It’s a topic that could not have been addressed in the ‘50s, according to Friday. “To discuss the power of beauty when it was all we had, was to arouse issues of envy and competition, which were too loaded to be acknowledged,” she said in a recent telephone interview.
In those days, a woman’s economic and emotional well-being was dangerously hinged on her beauty, Friday said.
Only now, after the feminist era, can women dare to address the subject.
“Now we can afford to, because women have something else besides beauty, and in fact they can turn their backs on beauty if they want, because we can pay for our own home and our own food,” Friday said.
Friday’s book examines beauty’s uses and abuses, the ways in which it was ignored or denied by feminists, and how its importance has emerged more strongly than ever in the ‘90s.
Of course, the other goal of the book, which the author does not directly admit, must certainly be to expose Friday herself. Friday begins her book with this line, “I am a woman who needs to be seen.” She chronicles such details as the tight, white pants she wore dancing on the beach during her teen years, as well as the intimate details of numerous sexual experiences.
Her explanation: “By including so much of myself in what I write, I also give people a ledge to hold onto as they climb the mountain of self-discovery themselves.”
Here’s Friday on several other topics.
On Hillary Clinton: “Hillary, until she got into the White House, didn’t really look in the mirror at all. … Well, when you’re in front of the TV camera and you see the effect that your looks are having on other people, Hillary’s a smart woman and she began using her appearance.”
On the shallow life: “Nobody loves you for your kindness anymore. There are no grandmothers around, upon whose lovely soft bosom we can lay our wearied heads. Because grandmother’s at the gym!”
On children: The emphasis on beauty causes the invisible virtues, such as intelligence, compassion, kindness, goodness and generosity, to disappear. “It gives the young child the feeling that these virtues that used to hold our society together, the invisible qualities, don’t matter at all.”
On teens: “Adolescents, especially, who never knew another world, are confounded about how to get themselves seen. You see them in clubs, you see them on streets, you see them in restaurants. Nobody’s looking at another person and admiring. Everybody is instead desperate to be seen.”
On the effect of television: “Television has had an enormous influence on all of us. … The beauties of television today are exceedingly young, exceedingly beautiful. They set a standard that is unavoidable for everybody watching, no matter what their age.”
On the importance of being seen: “The gaze between the mother and the infant is the same gaze that goes on between lovers, or lovers to be, as it were. That intense stare is the beginning of courtship.”
On the mother-child relationship: “You separate better, you go off and investigate the world better if you initially had this, what I sometimes think of as a feeding tube, this golden gaze between mother and child that fills up the child. … Having that inside, a child is more eager to move into the next room, and then out into the world.”
On beauty at the grocery store: “Beauty matters. Beauty gets you noticed, beauty gets you attention. If you’re just going into the grocery store and you want some help, you’re more likely to get the salesperson’s eye than the plain person standing next to you.”
On beauty at the expensive restaurant: “OK, you and I are sitting in a restaurant and in comes this little bald guy, who’s not very attractive, and he has one of those beautiful women on his arm. And neither of us questions what’s going on here. We sort of expect he probably owns an airline or a country or something. … We know these are not love matches. These are deals. And in that sense, beauty is indeed power.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustrationby Charles Waltmire