CONFRONTING THE BEAUTY MYSTIQUE
By WENDY WASSERSTEIN
Reading Nancy Friday's The Power of Beauty (HarperCollins; 589 pages; $27.50) can make one very self-conscious. Provoked by the author's analysis of feminine self-loathing, the haunting doubts creep in. What do I look like perusing this book? Am I envious of younger women whose toned arms could lift this nearly 600-page opus in consecutive rotations while riding a mountain bike? Could it be that I am home alone with The Power of Beauty because I am frightened of expressing the full range of my repressed sexuality? Or have I come a long enough way--from my mother, from 1960s-brand feminism, from female competitiveness--that I am able to look myself in the eye, hold up Friday's book with pride and embrace the power and joy of my own, and every other woman's, beauty?
Friday, author of the best sellers My Secret Garden and My Mother/My Self, has produced a thorough exploration of the meaning of beauty. This is no "guide for girls," but rather a full-out search party seeking to understand how we arrived at a place where "whether we are 5 or 55 the number one predictor of self-esteem is self perception of our physical appearance." In pursuit of her answer, Friday ricochets among personal, sociological and psychological investigation. Ultimately, however, her goal is not so much to undermine the current ruling troika of "looks/beauty/appearance" as to confront the obsession head on.
Her quest begins with girlhood. "No one forgets adolescence. No one," she assures us. Certainly Friday has not forgotten hers. Apparently being tall in the South in the '50s was considered as gauche as being plump is in the supermodel '90s. Friday spent her teenage years in a height-eliminating, self-annihilating bended plie.
But the legs eventually straightened out, and sexual esteem blossomed when the author became a Manhattan career gal in the swinging '60s. The challenge became learning the difference between love and sex because, fortunately for Friday, "once my looks arrived the opportunities for both multiplied." She trippingly recounts happy sexcapades she experienced while wearing a foam-green Pucci dress, and genuinely seems to wish that all women would permit themselves similarly satisfying sensations, foam-green Pucci or not. The right to feminine satisfaction can extend well into midlife, as Friday proves by describing her romantic first date with and subsequent marriage to Norman Pearlstine, now editor-in-chief of Time Warner.
The problem, as detailed in The Power of Beauty, is that most women create insurmountable obstacles to their pursuit of another troika, "beauty/sex/men." For this, Friday clearly blames the feminist movement. As she sees it, the braless raised fisties of the mid-'60s separated women from their natural love of sex and men, and thus made women unnaturally dependent on one another.
Friday is still angry about the hostility she felt she encountered from other women when she wore suede pants at a feminist rally. She's equally put out by women who categorize Hillary Clinton or Barbra Streisand as "ball-breaking." Whether Friday's prescription for women to embrace their own sexuality--and men--would curb this kind of feminine competition is debatable. Furthermore, Friday hurls gossipy anecdotes as arbitrary and vindictive as any told about her suede pants.
Still, The Power of Beauty can be reinforcing. Friday quite intelligently suggests that women who compete with other women ought to regain the admiration they felt prior to their envy of one another. It's both a useful and a sadly inventive directive.
On the other hand, though Friday can be psychologically astute, she also suggests in describing a soleful fetishist that "sooner or later, the shoe, the vagina, and the penis are going to have to sit down together and have it out." It might work best as a musical number. Not since the cowboy and the farmer became friends in Oklahoma! has there been such potential for a square dance.
The Power of Beauty is a sprawling work, simultaneously a personal journey and a psychosocial examination of an accelerating phenomenon. Unlike Naomi Wolf, who in her 1992 book, The Beauty Myth, portrayed the elevation of beauty as manipulative and ultimately sadistic, Friday reaches older, muddier and much more happily self-satisfied conclusions. In the end, she isn't angry at the power of beauty, and she seems to have come to terms with her own. After all, it certainly is a positive wish that every woman, from stooping adolescent to middle-aged overachiever, have a chance to float in a foam-green Pucci. If it fits.
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein won a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles.