My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #37, April 25, 1997

BEAUTY AND THE...REST OF US

"Everyone's your friend in New York City
And everything is beautiful when you're young and pretty"
They Might Be Giants

"Beauty does what beauty does best--
It's beautiful."
An Emotional Fish

Women on our campus were recently invited to participate in panel discussions about the experiences we share as women--childbirth and childrearing, empty nest syndrome, juggling multiple roles as wives, mothers and employed women. And to speak about beauty and aging. There were a lot of women ready to talk about the first three, but none of us were all that eager to take on the issue of beauty.

That may be because beauty is the issue that hits us hardest in the gut, cutting deeply into insecurities we manage to not think about most of the time. Being grownups, we know perfectly well that it's what's inside the package that matters, not the way it's gift-wrapped. Nonetheless, in any survey of American women on this topic, you will find that almost all of us are unhappy with our faces and bodies.

I wonder if this would have been true before mass media, when women mostly compared themselves only to the women in their own town, which is to say, to a lot of ordinarily pleasant-looking women and a very few beauties. That is, before movies and television and magazines made unattainably high standards of youth and beauty seem the norm.

Perhaps we would have felt bad about ourselves anyway, because we form our sense of our physical acceptability during adolescence, where, for every homecoming queen who floats through high school on a wave of male adoration, there are far more girls whose faces and bodies are rejected. Was there ever anything more scarring than the junior high school "mixer," where the guys stood on one side of the room, and the girls clung to their friends nervously on the other side, waiting for some boy to ask them to dance? The few boys who made the first daring moves across that chasm invariably headed toward the prettiest girls.

Now, of course, this WAS bravery, because they were risking devastating public rejection by girls who had the power, and maybe the casual ruthlessness, that beauty can bring. But to those of us whose looks guaranteed that we would always stay on the sidelines with our girlfriends, well, we saw ourselves as hopeless ungainly rejects.

I remember, too, the hallways in junior high school. The boys would line up against the walls and make rude remarks about the physical appearance of the girls walking past. And if the remarks were tasteless and insulting, we blushed and ran away and hid. We didn't, mostly, fight back. We didn't, mostly, question their right to determine who was pretty and who was not. We accepted their valuations. (To this day I cannot walk past a bunch of teenage boys without mentally cringing.)

Plainness, even homeliness, and rejection, left many of us with very complicated feelings about beauty. It wasn't as if we could claim any high moral ground, because we were looking at men in much the same way, at least on first acquaintance. If men were assigning 10's to Bo Derek, we were assigning 10's to gorgeous hunks, like Tom Cruise and Robert Redford and Mel Gibson and Christopher Reeve. (Ah, yes, Christopher Reeve--a healthy reminder that beauty and strength cannot be counted on to endure.)

On the other hand, much as we appreciated good looks, we were equally interested in what the boys DID. After all, we dated class clowns who made us laugh, strong guys who made us feel fragile, men who were simply interesting. We fell for guys who seemed to know exactly where they were going and how they were going to get there. Self-assurance, brains, talent, were all perfectly adequate substitutes for gorgeousness.

That's one of the things I most envy in men--they have no social obligation to be beautiful. They need only present to the world the faces God gave them . Oh, they need to be neat and clean and well-groomed and reasonably well-dressed, and it certainly doesn't hurt if they're good-looking, but the faces they were born with will do, because they will be judged primarily for what they accomplish.

But whatever we do in life, we are expected to work at being attractive too. If God didn't make us that way, well, there's always dieting, and girdles and push-up bras, and make-up, and hair stylists, and, in a pinch, plastic surgery. And clearly, many men expect us to go to that effort. I have heard some men say, with a straight face, that women who don't wear make-up don't like men. As one who doesn't wear the stuff, I assure you, what it means is that we don't like makeup.

Women have two choices, really, in regard to the beauty game, and either can be used against us. We can agree to go along with it, and use it to advance ourselves. In which case, any success may be compromised by the assumption that we are "gold-diggers," or "sluts," or "brainless bimbos," who may be sleeping our way to the top.

Or we can decide that beauty is irrelevant. We can proceed about our careers and lives in the same way men do, using our brains and talents to advance. In which case we may be denied advancement because we are "graceless and unfeminine" (like the female lawyer who took her denial of partnership to the Supreme Court). Or be fired, like newscaster Christine Craft, for being "too old, too ugly, and not deferential to men."

We may even inspire powerless men to start foaming at the mouth, like the men who call in to talk radio shows to complain about Janet Reno. Her offenses include burning babies at Waco and being homely--and it's extremely difficult to tell which offends these callers more. When Sarah Brady was mounting her effective public campaign in favor of gun control, gun lobbyists who had a hard time fighting her on the merits of the case condemned her for being "horse-faced."

It is not surpising that for ordinary looking women beauty is something we distrust, in the same way we distrust extreme wealth: as something that gives its owner far too much power. One of the moral hazards of beauty after all, is that so many people are eager to be of service to the beautiful--a proposition any plain woman with a flat tire can attest to. A lot of things seem to come easily to the pretty people. "Everything IS beautiful when you're young and pretty."

But this is a power that can be damaging to those who wield it. For if everything comes easily, you are not being forced to learn to cope and fend for yourself. If beauty need only do "what beauty does best--[be] beautiful," where is the motivation to become something more inside yourself? This puts you at serious risk of losing your entire self when you lose your beauty--there may no longer be any "there" there.

Many of us suspect that the absence of beauty made us deeper, wiser people, with more inner resources to shore us up against the wounds and conflicts of life. We have had to spend time with ourselves, finding out what was there to admire, and cultivating it. Because no men were offering to rescue us, we learned to rescue ourselves, to make things happen for ourselves.

We also have the comfort of knowing that the people who care for us love our real selves. The other problem with beauty, after all, is the deep insecurity that can come from knowing that some people love your face and body without having a clue about who the person inside is. That's not a love you can trust.

But while the rational part of our brain tells us all these comforting truths, the lizard part of the brain has not forgotten a single slight we ever suffered. The issue of beauty lets the lizard loose to rip at the scar tissue, bringing out buried resentments and envy, making us feel petty.

Which may be an excellent reason to drag the topic out in public and talk about it.

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For anyone who wants to pursue this whole complicated issue farther, I do recommend Naomi Wolf's book, The Beauty Myth.

I doubt that I speak for all women here, and I know that men react very differently to this issue. All I can truly say, ever, is what things look like from inside my skin.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.