THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230245
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ELIZA WILLIAMS HOOVER
LENGTH: 77 lines
THE POWER OF BEAUTY
NANCY FRIDAY
HarperCollins. 589 pp. $27.50.
In The Power of Beauty, Nancy Friday (My Mother/Myself) demands that we acknowledge the influence of beauty in our culture. She points out that we confuse our children with denials of beauty's power, while spending much of our energy and billions of dollars in its pursuit.
Unfortunately, Friday buries sharp cultural insights and positive energy under mountains of poorly organized material and then spews anger and blame over the whole mess. Where was an editor to cut away her excesses and recurrent negativity?
For those readers with perseverance and a willingness to overlook petty ranting and flamboyant extremes, however, there are truths to be found here.
Our problems with beauty begin in the nursery, according to Friday, where we are either ``seen'' by the omnipotent mother or condemned to search for her recognition the rest of our lives. ``The sureness of our beauty comes with the package of unconditional love internalized in the first years of life,'' she writes, a gift Friday makes clear she did not receive.
Friday denounces both ``mother blaming'' and angry feminists who ``blame all their problems on men.'' But she then perpetuates the cycle by angrily blaming women, particularly feminists, for society's ills.
Mothers, she argues, are at fault for not teaching daughters healthy separation and for creating hungry young women who search for unhealthy symbiotic love the rest of their lives.
Mothers' negative attitudes toward sex also encourage their daughters to deny responsibility for sexuality. A daughter becomes all too willing to defer to a prince who will ``take care of her.''
When Friday argues convincingly, if idealistically, for the presence of a father in the nursery, she reveals the source of her own rage: ``Nothing has changed my own life more than the absence of my father . . . Would that a loving man in that first precious year of life, which never gets a rewrite, had communicated to me men's far more liberal healthy attitude toward genitals less angry with women.''
Friday is most positive when she writes of her pre-adolescent girlhood in Charleston, S.C. She exuberantly describes her adventurous 9- and 10-year-old self, as she leaves the female-dominated home and rushes to meet life on her bicycle.
She also relives for every woman the painful loss of that confident girl-child who goes underground in adolescence to play the passive woman-in-waiting: ``What did I know of gender lines, the stereotypical roles that lay ahead, where everything that made me feel alive - initiative, bravery, competition - would be denied me? How could I anticipate how the love of boys, the desperate need to have them see me, would make the surrender of my 12-year-old self . . . overnight?''
Extracting the truth from Friday's angry voice has its rewards. She insists that fathers must share in child-raising and points to a study showing that fathers involved in physical care of children are less likely to be child sexual abusers. She also encourages both men and women to enjoy and understand beauty, including its dark sides, such as envy.
She underlines the importance of equipping young women to take responsibility for their sexuality. She insists that women rid themselves of a negative view of their genitalia and their bodies in general.
And she exhorts older women to ``wear our power beautifully,'' rejecting the double standard that labels women as unattractive after childbearing years.
As Friday says: ``The more books I write, the more I clean out the nursery and discard old anger and baby fears. . . .'' Perhaps, as she continues her writing career, she will rid herself of her anger, intolerance and extremist positions.
Then she might use her powerful voice to speak out on the critical topics of sex, relationships, economics and beauty and create a powerful, positive dialogue. MEMO: Eliza Williams Hoover is an attorney, mediator and writer who
lives on the Eastern Shore. by CNB