The Power of Beauty: A Cultural Memoir of Beauty and Desire

By Nancy Friday

Book Overview

Using her own life story as a springboard, Nancy Friday traces the past 25 years of changes in women's attitudes about self-esteem, appearance, and sexuality. Enormously fun to read.--New York Times... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060171405
• ISBN13: 9780060171407
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 589 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Beauty: Understanding it

Nancy Friday explores all facets of being beautiful. Especially helpful is admitting the effect beauty has on people. She then goes on with advice on how to accept being beautiful without alienating others.

Fascinating

I found The Power of Beauty to be fascinating, thorough and for me, depressingly accurate.

Ohhh ... Beware the Curse of Beauty

If you ever wonder why some people are addicted to plastic surgery and all sorts of aesthetic enhancements ... this is a clue into and answer.

I liked it

I liked it. Maybe because I am hung up on my looks and because guys' heads do turn when I walk down the street, but I have never gotten emotionally attached to a guy and I really see what she's saying and stuff, and I liked it.

Celebrate What You Have

While this book is an autobiography of Nancy Friday, about her ambivalence between her desire to be seen, and her desire to not be seen, the bigger message is that she is using her life experiences to communicate that all women live with this ambivalence, throughout our entire lives.And I am grateful for her willingness to be so visible, in hopes that we all will face our authentic selves.My favorite messages from this book are:· "If I can persuade you how beauty inspires envy and then how resentment sucks all the joy out of beauty, I will have accomplished something that is not easy for me, for I have envied nothing more in life than beauty, envied it in others and never believed in a bit of what I might have owned; to have enjoyed my own would have invited the spiteful envy of others, or so I feared."· "The irony is that women feel easier about entering the workplace, providing for ourselves, challenging and acting like men than we do in confronting one another over the uses of beauty. We still practice the denial of beauty's power out of fear of reprisals from other women. At times it is as if men don't even exist."· "Before women can enjoy the rewards that come with the beauty we now work so hard to purchase, we must learn to see our beauty as power."· "Young women sacrifice so much at the advent of adolescence and then hate men for not rewarding us adequately for everything we gave up for them. But boys did not ask it of us. We did it, drank the KoolAid and then hated boys for not raising us from the dead with a power they never possessed in the first place.To those who gave such strongly "negative" reviews about this book, could it be that it is not easy for many people to admit how envious most people are, over the beauty that they recognize in others?