The Power of Beauty

by Nancy Friday

Overview

Reflections on how physical appearance, and beliefs about it, affect women’s lives from a #1 bestselling author who’s “enormously fun to read” (The New York Times).
 
Beauty and appearance play a pervasive role in our culture. Here, the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of the groundbreaking, controversial bestseller My Secret Garden delves into beauty's influence on popular media and the psyche of modern women.
 
Combining in-depth cultural analysis with personal anecdotes, sexology, and individual case studies, Nancy Friday explores the dissatisfaction women feel about their bodies—and how it affects their sexual freedom. Her analysis is broad-reaching, examining how popular culture, advertising, stereotypes of women in the workplace, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, and the dynamics of family relationships put pressure on women to live up to an impossible feminine ideal.
 
Also published under the title Our Looks, Our Lives

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780795335198
Publisher:	RosettaBooks
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	589
File size:	935 KB

About the Author

Nancy Friday is a New York Times–bestselling author and journalist who established her early career writing for high-profile publications in England, France, and the US. Her first book, My Secret Garden, was an iconic bestseller, offering an honest and illuminating look at the landscape of female sexuality. It was published in 1973, and since then, Nancy Friday has continued to write on themes including female sexuality, mother-daughter relationships, beauty, fetishism, and romantic relationships. She has been featured as a guest on Oprah, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, Politically Incorrect, and NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Editorial Reviews

Fascinating...recommended highly.

New York Observer

A thorough explanation of the meaning of beauty.

Time Magazine

A pull-yourself-up -by-your-pumps manifesto.

Boston Globe

Readers expecting this volume to contain Friday's usual mix of pop psychology and erotic letters will find only the psychology. The book's purpose is ostensibly to examine the role beauty plays in society and, in particular, to focus on the juxtaposition of beauty and power. Ironically, "unfocused" is the operative word here. The interminably long book is an odd jumble of Friday's personal history, a survey of modern feminism, and a rehash of what the author has written in previous books about males, mothers, and, of course, sex. Free-flowing might be a charitable way to describe the prose. Quotes from Freud and from the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails sit uncomfortably on the page alongside what appears to be Friday's random thoughts on just about anything. Someone along the way should have pointed out that Friday had some interesting ideas here--enough for a magazine article. Unfortunately, when a magazine piece balloons into a more than 400-page book, the results are rarely pretty. Expect the author's name recognition and an attendant media blitz to generate requests, but don't expect satisfied readers, especially those who opened the book anticipating an up-market version of the "Penthouse" letters column.

Ilene Cooper

Friday (Women on Top, 1991, etc.) describes women's self-image from infancy through old age, with lots of tiresome editorializing about the state of the women's movement today.

Friday's defense of men against the tyranny of feminism may cause some controversy, but the interest in this disorganized ramble is the clutter of anecdotes, gossip, sex education, and digression, like toiletries piled on the vanity table of a woman who has spent several decades dressing up to face the world. How "we women" feel about ourselves and our beauty, Friday theorizes, begins in the nursery with the "Giantess" (a.k.a. mother). "Woman born of woman is not a good teacher, especially in that area where she has been taught to deodorize, to treat as an offensive necessity." Since most women spend a lifetime hating the way they look, Friday advocates bringing fathers into the child- rearing process. It would be especially good, says Friday, if fathers were in charge of toilet training, because men do not hate their genitals the way "antisex" mothers do. Unlike Matriarchal Feminists and Victim Feminists, who blame their problems on "Bad Men" and disparage the attainment of power through beauty, Friday encourages women to compete with all the ammunition at their command, as Gloria Steinum supposedly has. Men, from John Kenneth Galbraith to Mort Zuckerman, "as well as women would . . . assist Steinem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was and is that she is lovely to look at." Writing of her girlhood in the Charleston of the 1940s and '50s, Friday's mother and sister, she remembers, drank gin to get them through the pains of menstruation. So, on the first day of her first period, Friday imitated her role models and broke through a neighbor's window to get to the gin bottle.

Friday keeps hammering home her message, but peeking through the psychobabble and harangue is a tantalizing memoir.

Kirkus Reviews