4
Identity Embodied
In the room of mirrors, girls stand in front of each mirror and practice smiling, practice widening their eyes, practice cocking an eyebrow, practice walking, practice moving. They must practice until their movements achieve spon- taneity....They are invisible to each other, invisible to themselves.
--Gabrielle Burton
Heartbreak Hotel
Oedipus was blinded for the sin of looking with arrogance and entitlement. This is a look that seeks its own pleasure and affirmation, seeks to confirm its own central importance. lt is the eye of the beholder, in which women's appearance is reflected, evaluated, and given meaning.
For females, the realm ofthe physical is organized not just around being but, more precisely, around appearing-that is, around the stimulus value of their appearance, their manner of reacting and reflecting. Becoming a woman involves learning a part, complete with costumes, makeup, and lines. Learning to behave like a woman involves learning to sit, stand, and talk in the appropriate ways and to make them appear natural, to have them become natural or, more aptly, second nature (Kaschak I976). Certainly men also have embodied parts to learn within the gender hierarchy, but for them the physical is characteristically organized around the ability to act upon the environment in much less physically restricted ways. They can sit and move openly, make noises, and, in general, allow their presence to be felt directly by others and by themselves.
LEARNING TO LOOK THE PART
In our culture girls, especially white middle-class girls, are generally protected and expected to look pretty and soft, while their male counterparts are encouraged to be aggressive and to explore their surroundings. Aggressive play is considered masculine, while dressing up and looking in the mirror are considered appropriate play for females (Fagot I973). Little girls dress up in their mothers' clothes and use makeup to play at being grown up. Little boys can play at being little boys. If they do play at being grown up, it will typically involve an activity oran occupation-soldier, cowboy, astronaut- rather than appearances. Costumes or uniforms are in the service of signaling the legitimacy of the activity, not an end in themselves. Girls are more frequently admired for their appearance than are boys, especially when they are wearing dresses (Joffe I97I). Facial beauty is considered to characterize females and young people (Cross and Cross I97I). When adults, in or out of therapy, recall the childhood and adolescent trauma of not being chosen, for boys it generally involves not being good enough at a sport or an activity to be chosen for a team; for girls, not being chosen for a date or a dance because of their perceived lack of physical attractiveness.
I suggest that the crucial period for the development of women's appearance-based identity extends from the moment of birth, when it is physically based and preverbal, through adolescence, when it is taught and enforced by complex social forces including adults, peers, and society at large through books, magazines, the media, and even the responses of strangers in public. This development continues throughout life, but not with the same fluidity. As empirical research (for example, Ganong and Coleman I987) catches up with clinical information and nonclinical observation, it also is beginning to indicare that in adulthood, children often reciprocally serve this function for adults, just as adults do for children. In particular, daughters often begin to comment on and evaluare their mothers' appearance, as they do with their peers.
Developmentally, adolescence is the crucial stage for full emergence and crystallization of this constellation of gendered and embodied meaning. That is, while the foundation for identifying women with and by their physical appearance and attractiveness is laid from the first moments of life by parents and other significant adults, it is in adolescence that this truly becomes a difference that makes a difference. It is then that parents and peers exert the greatest pressure for gender role adherence (Unger I979). For females, the judgments of peers are clearly organized around physical Identity Embodied appearance (Allen and Eicher I973). Not only have adolescent girls been found to be more concerned with their appearance than· have adolescent males with theirs but they also consider themselves, in general, less attrac- tive than their male peers consider themselves (Simmons and Rosenberg I975). Study after study of adolescents and of females of all ages have highlighted their concern, and that of others, with female physical appearance (Henley I977; Rowbotham I973; Schulman and Hoskins I986).
Movements based on rebellion against social values emerge during the years of adolescence. These movements always include a particular code of dress for members- such as that of the hippies in the I960s or the punk look of the I980s-which defies the mainstream code, with its strict gender divisions. From early chíldhood through adolescence, hair and clothes are the most powerful cues used to discriminare gender (Kessler and McKenna I978; Thompson and Bentler I97I). The very defiance of the strict gender distinction in our culture is always a comment on the importance of appearance in maintaining or defying ít. By defying ít with yet another strict code of appearance, adolescents signa!that the importance of appearance does not change, only the particular code of dress changes.
It is also in adolescence that the physically based self-concept coalesces for both males and females. As Clara Thomson (I942) noted long ago, and Jean Baker Miller more recently, for boys, adolescence is a period of opening up, for girls one of closing down. This is a physical-psychological problem: "Freud believed that girls now had to learn for good that they were not to use actively all of themselves and all of their life forces from a base centered in their own bodies and in their own psychological constructions" (Miller I984, p. 8).
This is an important distinction from Freudian and object-relatíons theory, which locate significant development in the earliest years and in the relationship with the mother primarily and the father secondarily. I suggest instead that the development of both males and females is not narrowly sexually based, but is fully physically based as a function of the meaning that society in general and significant adults and peers in particular give to femaleness and maleness. It is not their appearance per se but the meanings that it holds for others and to each person in childhood, adolescence, and throughout life that shapes women and men.
While the importance of a child's mother in early development should not be underestimated, that of her father usually is. For females, the impact of the father, as a representative of men and the male perspective, in important ways exceeds that of the mother as an enforcer of patriarchal codes. For example, in a fashion typical of many fathers, albeit much more forthright, Harold Searles, a well-respected psychoanalyst, discusses the development of his daughter:
Towards my daughter, now eight years of age, Ihave experienced innumerable fantasies and feelings of a romantic-love kind, thoroughly complementary to the romantically adoring, seductive behaviour which she has shown towards her father oftentimes ever since she was about two or three years of age. I used at times to feel somewhat worried when she would play the supremely confident coquette with me and Iwould feel enthralled by her charms; but then I carne to the conviction, sorne time ago, that such moments of relatedness could only be nourishing for her developing personality as well as delightful to me. If a little girl cannot feel herself able to win the heart of her father, her own father who has known her so well and for so long, and who is tied to her by mutual blood-ties, I reasoned, then how can the young woman who comes later have any deep confidence in the power of her womanliness?
Of his wife and son he opines:
And I have had every impression, similarly, that the oedipal desires of my son, now eleven years of age, have found a similarly lively and wholehearted feeling- response in my wife; and I am equally convinced that their deeply fond, openly evidenced mutual attraction is good for my son as well as enriching to my wife. To me it makes sense that the more a woman !oves her husband, the more she willlove, similarly, the lad who is, to at least a considerable degree, the younger edition of the man she loved enough to marry. [I965, p. 296]
This example is instructive because it is not idiosyncratic but representative of the beliefs of many fathers and mothers, whether they are prívate citizens or acknowledged experts in human development. lt is also important because it is offered unquestioningly by a contemporary psychoanalytic pioneer whose work it is to question just such "natural"assumptions about the famíly drama. Note the asymmetry of the description, the father-daughter romance filled with "adoring, seductive" enthrallment, the mother-son a "deeply fond ...enriching" attraction, based upon his wife's love for him, her husband. There is nothing in the second description equivalent to the sexualized, romanticized flirtatiousness in the first, which reflects the father's unresolved oedipal complex, as outlined in the previous chapter. Searles, the father, is the central character and primary love object in both scenarios.
In another example, the May 22 I990, episode of "Nightline" covered the case of the president of American University, who was arrested for making obscene phone calls. Described as a very disturbed man, he was noted in the program as having had sorne successes in his life, prominent among them having raised "two attractive daughters." How successful would he have been considered had he raised "two attractive sons"? Did his wife, their mother, have any role at all in their raising? There is probably a more modern or enlightened version of this in which a parent is proud of a daughter who is both competent and pretty, intelligent and coquettish. That is, it may be possible for a girl to be competent as long as she looks good to her father or brothers and then to other males while she is doing so, thereby acknowledging their centrality, and as long as her mother and other girls help her do so. Girls' and women's magazines and advice columns aid in this socialization process. This is not so for boys, even in adolescence. If boys become concerned with their looks, which they do less frequently and to a lesser degree than do females, the primary reference group is likely to be their peers and certainly not their mothers. For a boy to be concerned about being attractive to his mother would be to demean or diminish himself. It might even feminize him.
Furthermore, I want to suggest that the same sense of entitlement is at work in both the accusation and the attribution of this former university president. That is, raising daughters to be attractive to oneself and using strange women for one's sexual needs are both within the realm of masculine entitlement to women's minds and bodies. They are based upon the lack of ability or interest in distinguishing women's needs from a man's own, in ascertaining where he ends and bis daughters or victims begin. It is rooted in a masculine problem with boundary definition and a grandiosely defined self, which I am naming oedipal. (The issue of boundaríes will be developed in detail in chapter 6.)
Whíle mothers also train their daughters to be pleasing to fathers and men through manipulation of their appearance and demeanor, it has been found that girls' preference for feminine behaviors is less related to the femininicy of their mothers than to the masculinicy of their fathers and to the extent to which those same fathers encouraged sex-typed behaviors (Mussen and Rutherford I963; Fling and Manosevitz I972).
Karen Hilde Brandt (I980) found that fathers interacted more frequently and positively with attractive infants, mothers more with less attractive ones.
Soon enough female peers, trained by their own fathers and mothers, join the chorus, focusing on clothing, dress, hairstyles, and makeup, all designed to make the developing girl attractive to boys and roen. Females are the keepers of the details of the body, which early on they are trained and encouraged in a myriad of ways to tend, feed, clean, and clothe. While it is roen who make the final judgment concerning whether a woman's general appearance is pleasing, desirable, or arousing to them, it is girls and women who monitor the details, much as Antigone used her eyes in Oedi- pus' service. In fact, roen are not expected to show interest in the details of appearance and how the illusion is created. A roan or hoy would, indeed, be considered suspiciously feminine if he concerned himself with, for example, the color of eye shadow, the length of earrings, the fabric of which a dress is made. Such attention to detail would destroy the erotic impact.
Females, then, help one another create these effects and evaluate one another's effectiveness. Unless women are paying the bills and consider the money spent to be their money, it is also women rather than roen who evaluate the success of the feminine hunt, shopping. lt is they who will admire a bargain or a fine purchase. Ironically, for females the multiple meanings in this appearance management include not only helping one another succeed in attracting roen for relationships-which mean success, survival, and affirmation of identity-but competing in this quest and giving affirmation when roen don't (which is generally when they are not or no longer erotically aroused). This is a forro of female bonding, though an ambivalent one. It supersedes male-female relationships, which are less stable and more dependent on erotic visual desirability.
Yet embedded in these activities is a well-learned judgment from an externa!perspective that women also learn to apply to themselves.
A study of children aged eight or nine noted gestures of intimacy among young girls rarely seen among young boys: stroking and combing each other's hair, noticing and commenting upon each other's appearance, including hairstyles and clothing. By the fourth or fifth grade, young girls have been observed discussing who is prettiest and confessing to feelings of being ugly (Thorne and Luria I986). Schofield (I982) has reported that for a group of children in middle school, boys' status with other boys did not depend on their relationships with girls, while girls' status with other girls depended on their popularity with boys.
Roberta's mother often took her shopping for clothes, and the two of them would carefully match outfits and accessories to develop a particular "look."Once they had returned home, she would tell Roberta to show her father what they had chosen for her, and he would then express approval or disapproval. Roberta felt pretty when her father approved, and he felt proud of her when she looked pretty. This was a loving transaction among three family members,but what wasRoberta learningabout how to receive love and approval from men and about the role of other women in that process?
Carol's eleven-year-old daughter often criticizes her appearance and asks her todressinawaythatis more "'wíth it"and"cool." Thisattitude tends to undermine Carol's physical self..concept and to make her feelless suc- cessful as a woman. Both she and her daughter agree that the daughter is prettíer, íf for no other reason than that she is younger and thinner. This ís a readíly recognizable form of assessment and competition among females,andan accuraterellectioninanoedipalsociety,whereyounger and smaller women are preferred. It is also a denial by the daughter of her connection with her mother and of the thought that a similar late awaits her.
Girls cannot identify unambivalently with mothers who are already derogated and diminished. This ambivalence often plays itself out through a daughter's or mother's criticisms of the mother's appearance, clothing, or age-that is, all the qualities that make her vulnerable as a woman. Thís is the daughter's attempt to overcome these restrictíons and evaluations by meeting them "more correctly" than did her mother. In this way, daughters are pressed to disidentify with their mothers in order to develop their own self-esteem. Each loses the other as the path toward men and heterosexuality is taken. Thus, women's connectedness to other women is often not direct, but one person or persons removed, and maintained symbolically.
SURPLUS OF MEANING IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN'S SELF- CONCEPT
Women are identified with their bodies in a more material and inseparable sense than are men, but not because women, as many male philosophers have argued, are more tied to nature.* After all, men have bodies and hormones, too. Their relationship to mood or behavior has been seriously underplayed by the scientific and lay communities, as the surplus of meaning about bodies, hormones, and sexuality is attributed to women.
Every aspect of the female body is considered to say something about a woman's value as a person and as a woman. She is her body and her face. But it is her appearance that is judged, not her strength, health, or ability to act effectively, not her body's speed or agility but its size and shape, its pleasingness and conformity to masculine standards of the feminine. If her appearance is deemed desirable, then so is she and she is treated accordingly. If not, then she is worth less. She may then be ridiculed or attacked; after all, by her very appearance she is asking for it. lt is assumed that she has chosen to be unattractive and deserves to be treated badly for it. Her appearance is not just something about her, as it is for men: she is her appearance. Virtually every aspect of it is interpreted to have meaning about her-who she is, how she is to be viewed and treated. This association has been shown to begin as early as among preschoolers, who show no differential treatment of boys related to attractiveness (Smith I985), but a clear difference in the treatment of girls. This relationship continues throughout life for women and for men.
For example, the comedienne Roseanne Barr is ridiculed, the equally obese actor playing her husband in the weekly sitcom is not. Jackie Mason is romantically paired with the beautiful (courtesy of perpetua!dieting, of course) Lynn Redgrave. Could Roseanne Barr be paired in a romantic intrigue with Paul Newman or Robert Redford? A popular model reported that, more than once, when she had disagreed with a man and he had wanted to insult her, he would tell her that she really was not that beautiful.
On the "Today" show every morning, Willard the weatherman wishes older folks happy birthday and consistently and gallantly comments that hllndred-year-old women are still pretty ladies. This behavior is gallant precisely because women this age are not considered to be pretty anymore, yet, as women, they should be. In a newspaper article I read of a new fad called the Granny Fanny, which is showing up instead of the traditional flamingo on front lawns: "The Granny Fanny is a piece of plywood cut and painted to resemble the back end of a plump, old woman.... Most Granny Fannies show the lower half of a polka-dot dress, bare pink legs and socks. Sometimes you see a frill of lace....Granny's better half is Grampy Fanny.
This notion has also appeared recently in the writing of feminist scholars, such as Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman (I976) and Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade (I988), who have also accepted this dichotomy and, as with the concept of relatedness, simply reversed society's traditional evaluation. Grampy does not expose bis legs in Bermuda shorts. He's decently dad in · overalls, with a real red bandanna flapping out his back pocket" (Viets I989, p. 3D).
We must consider carefully just whose perspective or point of view defines female (and male) physicality, for we are concerned here with how powerful, desirable, acceptable, feminine, or attractive women's bodies are in the oedipal eyes of men, both individually and collectively. This, of course, compounds the already apparent difficulty of being defined and evaluated on the basis of appearance. In losing control of the meanings of their own bodies, of the bodies themselves, women lose even more–the opportunity to develop a well-integrated sense of self that is more internally than externally defined, that is relatively stable rather than subject to redefinition based on changes in appearance or evaluations thereof, and that is grounded in an accurate testing of abilities and skills rather than passive evaluation.
A particular aspect of this sense of self is reflected in one's sense of personal control over life events. Indeed, psychological research has demonstrated that women and girls in our society do teqd to develop a more externa!than internallocus of control, probably understanding all too well how much theír appearance and identity matter in the eyes of men. White males in our society, as a group, are characterized by an interna!locus of control, a sense that they control their own fate (Rotter I966). Despite certain changes, this difference in outlook between males and females has remained consistent (Cellini and Kantorowski I982.
The female's body, face, and demeanor are expected to be a certain way, and that way is notas healthy, as challenged, as fully used as possible. That way is not defined by the parameters of her abilities, of her physical apparatus, but by masculine vision, by how pleasing her appearance is judged to be within masculine values of feminine appeal. The more her appearance conform