You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  No doubt my experience of the conference was filtered through a trifecta of inexperience, selective focus, and confirmation bias, but I was quickly struck by how hostile to inquiry (for an event cosponsored by a research center) the conference seemed to be. To be honest, I don’t recall attending any panels on Victorian pornography or Ancient Greek vases, and maybe if I had, my one-sided experience would have been mitigated somehow. What I do recall, however, is that over the next few days, I found myself absorbing one unrelenting, expertly media-trained “celebratory” paean to commodified sex-positivity after another, and feeling more and more depressed by the hour. The conference’s best-known, most vocal attendants seemed to respond to all but the most ingratiating questions by invalidating them and then swiftly shaming the interlocutor. The porn stars stuck to their talking points and stayed on message. “Liking sex” was the preferred euphemism for making or consuming porn. Conversely, harboring even the slightest ambivalence about porn meant that you categorically “hated sex” and were out to ruin it for everyone else.

  A dominant narrative soon emerged in which pornography—and not the Victorian kind with the bloomers and the spankings, but the kind with the record-breaking gang bangs—was presented as a bastion of orgiastic disinhibition; a filthy fun-time Arcadia from which sprang nothing but joy and empowerment and marriage and children and unicorns. Like all good stories, this one had a villain: the sex-hating, man-foiling “girlfriend” whose cruel, withholding ways sent armies of disconsolate men into the tender embrace of their “favorite” porn stars daily. I was the girlfriend! Was I that girlfriend? I didn’t feel like that person, but in this alternate universe I undoubtedly was. I’d had an upsetting encounter with a boyfriend’s porn stash recently, and I felt both upset and upset about being upset. In the late nineties, it was not cool to be upset about porn or sex work of any kind. In the shame hierarchy of the day, just as now, it felt much more shameful to feel bad about it in any way than to produce, distribute, or consume it. The more this version of reality was reiterated and reaffirmed throughout the event, the sadder, more isolated, and more diminished I felt. The worst thing about it was how totalizing the experience was, and how deviant it made me feel.

  About a decade and a half later, I was reminded of those strange few days while watching the Showtime series Masters of Sex. Ironically, what reminded me was the dogmatic and intolerant sexual milieu. Created by Michelle Ashford and based on the book by Thomas Maier, Masters of Sex followed the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose landmark 1966 book, Human Sexual Response, would eventually tear down barriers and help pave the way for the sexual revolution, through the early stages of their research and their relationship. The show “begins” in 1956, when Bill Masters (Michael Sheen), a hormone-replacement-therapy specialist, hires Gini Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), a thrice-divorced former nightclub singer and mother of two, as his secretary, and together they lead the charge to bring sex out of the Middle Ages. The characters go through seismic changes brought on by their own repressed, unexamined, and eventually uncontrollable urges.

  Whereas Mad Men took a fictional character, loosely based on a real person, and threw him against the cataclysmic events of his time, Masters of Sex cast historical figures, fictionally enhanced for dramatic effect, as agents of change working with clockwork precision on the most intimate level. Don Draper was a mind reader, a diviner of feelings, a mystic capable of imbuing simple products with magical, emotional qualities. Bill Masters and Gini Johnson, as imagined here, were clinicians intent on shining the hard light of science on a mysterious, transcendent thing. Still, both shows looked back from a distant future, trying to pinpoint the moment that everything changed. Masters of Sex was a contemporary show about a bygone time known for its retrograde attitudes, groping around blindly for the moment when the “old-fashioned” way of thinking about sex gave way to the “modern” way. Both shows exhibited signs of posttraumatic stress. Most interestingly, though, Mad Men was about a man whose job it was to replace reality with prejudicial stories—stories that take away agency, that dominate and control—whereas Masters of Sex was about what the stories do to people and their humanity, which they are forced to sublimate to the big lie.

  Advertising pervades our inner lives and dreams in ways that Don Draper (had he existed) could never have imagined. Still, the backward glances—did it all go right or wrong?—have the air of trying to work something out. In that metamagical way that zeitgeisty things sometimes have, the worlds of Mad Men and Masters of Sex merge and overlap in the present, where they’ve mutated into something big, strange, and intractable—a mutant octopus carcass galvanized by commerce lurching toward Tokyo.

  Masters of Sex was about how women’s sexuality and sexual identity were once constructed, more or less exclusively, by men, out of conjecture, projection, fear, and very little actual information, all of which is then irradiated and mutated into something monstrous by media and corporatism. Not only was research of the kind carried out by Masters and Johnson virtually unheard of, but also there were hardly any female scientists in the field. The character of Gini—however closely she hews to her real-life counterpart—is a galvanizing force herself, not to mention a lightning rod, who goes around upending people’s schemata and otherwise not fitting in. A mildly harried single working mother with limited resources—that is, a perennial poster girl for bad life choices—Gini is nonetheless portrayed as by far the happiest, most satisfied, least frustrated character on the show. She comes across as ambitious, curious, fulfilled, and free. There’s some guilt involved, but she’s not racked by it and she doesn’t punish herself. And the show’s writers aren’t in the least bit equivocal in this: she derives her happiness and satisfaction from asking nothing more and nothing less from sex than pleasure (unlinking it from money), and from being creatively engaged in her work. As often as she says she needs the job to support her kids, it’s obvious she needs it for herself, too.

  Gini’s charm and allure upset the absurdly brittle and buttoned-up Dr. DePaul (Julianne Nicholson), the hospital’s sole female doctor, who resents the way Gini is allowed to flaunt her beauty and allure and still be mistaken for a doctor, whereas she herself feels obligated to hide such aspects of herself if she wants to be taken seriously as a professional. Bill Masters’s wife, Libby, is a mother-in-waiting who spends her days making a home for nobody; Betty, the prostitute, is prepared to do anything for the chance to live the “normal” life of a wife. One of the things Masters of Sex keeps returning to is how out of control of their sexual identities women were in those days; how blithely sorted into slots; how casually they were idealized or debased, dehumanized, reduced to a single function within this system of total control. Of course, the in-joke is that every character on the show “deviates” in some way, or longs to, or feels stifled by the phantom expectations that hang over him or her like a toxic cloud. As Bill tells Gini at one point, 80 percent of the women who come into his office think they’re frigid, because Freud had issues in bed. Only Gini manages to be free of this, which is why there’s something about her that feels somehow modern, even anachronistic.

  Masters of Sex dwells in the moment just before control over women’s sexuality and reproduction shifted from men to women. Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it’s still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the “porn star” aesthetic and young girls’ behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. “Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,” the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. “They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.” The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, comb
ined with the underrepresentation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it’s especially insidious for girls’ self-concept, as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility. I’m not sure where the idea comes from that frank presentations of sexuality are somehow “daring” or “iconoclastic” or otherwise exist outside of a repressive norm. If anything, it’s the other way around.

  Would Gini have been out of the place in the fifties? I don’t know. All I know about it I learned from movies and TV shows. It’s easy to look back and cluck at the innocence of a time when sex was hidden behind closed doors, especially now that we take for granted that all the doors have been flung wide open. But the majority of female characters are still reduced to a single, salient trait (the mean one, the dumb one, the romantic, the slut), which makes Gini’s character seem all the more modern, and as out of place as ever. She’s complex and contradictory, a sympathetic homewrecker, a sexual woman who’s smart. She stands out even now.

  High-gloss cable shows are the house that frank depictions of sex built. You can’t sell a cable show today that doesn’t also function as a delivery system for hot, writhing, naked people. Part of what’s interesting about Masters of Sex is that it is a show about a reactionary, prudish time nestled like a pearl in a relentlessly, almost compulsorily lubricious media landscape. It’s interesting to look at this from the other side, from a time when “prude-shaming” is as common as “slut-shaming.” The idea that frank presentations of sex are somehow daring or iconoclastic is an enduring notion whose time has, perhaps, finally come and gone. As a symbol of a repressive norm, we may have simply replaced “fifties housewife” with “porn star.” Given the current environment, it’s clear that the biggest imaginative hurdle that viewers of Masters of Sex have to overcome is to imagine a time when sex, in any form, was even remotely taboo. Masters of Sex is the first such show to be expressly about sex itself—about how people respond to stimulation, what constitutes attraction, and how sex is used for purposes other than procreation or pleasure. Observing strangers having sex has become so pervasive and commonplace, not to mention such big, influential business, that the New York Times yawned at a new crop of celebrity-sex-tape “scandals,” calling them no more scandalous than a press release, and only marginally more effective. How do you make a show about sex in an era when it’s hard to find anything that isn’t, at least where women are involved, about sex? Masters of Sex demonstrated how. Just because we were always watching people have sex didn’t mean we couldn’t also be learning something.

  9

  * * *

  The Kick-Ass

  Just after the 2000 Florida election recount, my boyfriend and I flew to Vero Beach, Florida, to spend Christmas with his parents. They were elderly and Republican and, unlike many Floridians, had voted for George W. Bush on purpose. This could have made for some chad-related awkwardness at the dinner table, but we stuck to safe topics during our nightly excursions to Chili’s and Outback Steakhouse. By the end of the holiday, I was exhausted, depressed, and very bloated. All I wanted was to get back to California, where I could resume trashing Katherine Harris from a safe distance while eating at restaurants that didn’t require waiters to memorize lines. On our last day, on the way to the airport, we stopped in Orlando to visit my boyfriend’s brother and his tiny manicurist girlfriend. They suggested we eat lunch in the then newish fake town of Celebration. I perked up. I had just seen The Truman Show. I was dying to go.

  Celebration was a master-planned community built by the Walt Disney Company. I don’t know what the master plan was, exactly, but it looked truly diabolical. The town was built according to Walt Disney’s original vision for what he called an experimental prototype community of tomorrow, or EPCOT, which turned out to be more of an experimental prototype community of yesteryear—a themed, sanitized version of a small American town from a time before never. The strangest thing about it was that it felt scrubbed free of all branding and advertising, with the exception, of course, of constant allusions to Disney—the brand residents were literally inhabiting. Celebration wasn’t a place so much as an idea made manifest: the idea of transferring your entire existence into a controlled, frictionless fantasy where time could be denied and the world remade to conform to the brand’s values. Celebration was a celebration of fear sublimated into nostalgia, of longing for a time that never existed, when nothing was confusing. It was all super-scary totalizing-ideology speculative fiction, except it was nonfiction. After lunch at a bright, colorful Cuban restaurant, where in short order I consumed a mojito the size of a watering can, we stepped outside into the dazzling Florida sunshine, and we were suddenly caught in a regularly scheduled fake snowfall, accompanied by piped-in Christmas music. Oh, sure, nobody blinks an eye now. Sure, now I’ll meet my friends for dinner and fake snowfalls at the Grove, an outdoor mall in Los Angeles, around Christmas because the kids like it. But at the time, probably because I was buzzed and really excited to get on that plane, something shifted, and I felt myself yield like butter to the frictionless, engineered, pathologically dishonest pleasure of the experience.

  *

  Maybe I expected too much from life. Maybe a fake approximation of winter, of snow, of a town, of a Cuban restaurant, of an election, of a democracy, and of a president should have been enough. Maybe I should have counted my blessings and shoved down the bad feelings, but things took a very dark turn for me after we went back to my boyfriend’s brother’s house to pick up some guns, and I sat slumped in the backseat of the SUV like a sullen teenager, listening to Rush Limbaugh fulminate at top volume as the euphoric effects of the cocktail wore off. Suddenly, I had no idea who I was or how I’d arrived in this curious place—not just Florida, all of it. What was I doing here? Could I be here and still be myself? Who was I? By the time we reached the shooting range, I was in the grip of a full-blown identity crisis, and within seconds of stepping inside I burst into tears, bolted for the door, and spent the rest of the afternoon alone in the backseat of the car, reading Jane Austen.

  Later, on the plane ride home, I found myself wondering: If this story had been a scene in a movie and I had been the heroine, would I have qualified as a “strong female character”? And if not, then what was I? What would an ass-kicking heroine do in a situation such as this? Toss off an epigram while shooting up the satellite radio in the Escalade? Reveal a hidden talent for martial arts by jumping over the rifle-range counter and beating the gun guy to a pulp? What would she be wearing, flats or stilettos? How about flip-flops?

  I did not feel strong. I was in my early thirties, and I had no idea where my life was headed. Everything felt fake, somehow, arbitrary, like the life next to the life I wanted to be living but had not managed to have. I was writing a lot of reality-show recaps at work—early chronicles of Big Brother, Temptation Island, Chains of Love, stuff like that. I recapped a one-time reality FOX special called Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, a pageant in which a group of women competed for a rich husband they’d never met, and the winner, in this case an emergency-room nurse, married him on the air. The rich husband turned out to be not so rich and not so nice, or insufficiently vetted by the producers, and the marriage was swiftly annulled. I assume the nurse went back to work—rescued again, only this time from an actual villain, not from her perfectly good life.

  Charlie’s Angels: The Movie came out later that year. It was a fun, fun, fun pastiche of one of my favorite childhood shows. It was also a corrective to the “strong female characters” of the eighties and nineties. Throughout my tweens, teens, and twenties, female action heroes (with the notable, and notably glorious exception of Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin) had been portrayed as damaged women in the mold of Demi Moore’s G.I. Jane—all sublimated rage channeled into upper-arm strength. It felt like they all had no kid, a dead kid, or
something terrible happened to their kid—they were sad. Their strength had to be explained in this way: robbed of their maternal fulfillment, they became lady-dudes. Because you couldn’t just have them running around fighting crime or exploring space or whatever without explaining where the hell their kids were. You couldn’t show them having fun. You couldn’t show them running around in bathing suits with no muscle definition, like Wonder Woman or Charlie’s Angels in the seventies—at least not with a straight face—and get away with it. So, Charlie’s Angels: The Movie did it as a joke. It gave us the postfeminist kick-ass, the pastiche heroine.

  Like Celebration, Charlie’s Angels: The Movie made it safe to be nostalgic about problematic old times by stripping them of their context. Reframed as pastiche in a social and political vacuum, Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu allowed us to enjoy the problematic action heroines of their/our childhood ironically and therefore unproblematically. It was commentary and commentary on commentary, a dizzying hall-of-mirrors representation of the cultural cloning that was peaking around that time. Remakes have a lot more in common with cloning than just copying. Like cloning, a remake involves tricking an idea into thinking it has been fertilized. But the idea is not fresh, the idea is old. It has been reproduced many times. Its telomeres have degraded over the years. The new movie is not the identical twin of the original, which sprang from a temporal context that is now gone forever. It is a product of the present moment, with all the experience that entails. It is genetically grown-up. It can’t unknow what it knows. That it pretends not to know makes it suspect.