The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  As hard as it may seem to manifest, Jennifer ended up with the whole package. We discussed many times the uncompromising standards she had set for the man she wanted, but they were her rules based on exactly what she wanted and expected out of a long-term relationship that would lead to marriage. Compromise would come later, because it’s inevitable if you want a marriage to work.

  That’s quite different from taking guidelines put together from someone else and applying them. One honors who you are as a woman; the other sets up arbitrary rules predicated on how you must perform to attract someone who expects a certain behavior pattern, whether it’s who you are or not. There’s a big difference.

  It’s one thing to want a traditional relationship in the old-fashioned sense of the word. That type of traditional relationship often doesn’t make room for a woman who has her own life and career going for her, too. If you’re self-employed, you have a better chance of juggling everything, but if not, some careers are very competitive, and women have to sacrifice a lot to have them, including time with their children. It’s also not like the workplace is a friendly place for women who still have most of the responsibilities at home. This can often mean the man has to pick up the slack and be graceful while doing it. The woman still sacrifices a lot for her choice to have a marriage, children and a career, which some people describe as “having it all.”

  In the PBS documentary Makers: Women Who Make America, which aired in late February 2013, the network’s Judy Woodruff asked Gloria Steinem in an interview if women can have it all. Her answer was classic Steinem: “It’s a ridiculous question. …No, of course women can’t have it all, as long as we have to do it all, until — I mean, we have realized, and the majority of Americans fully agree — that women can do what men can do. But we haven’t yet realized that men can do what women do.”

  It should be noted before we go any further that men can’t have it all either; it just seems like they can because they run everything and get out of household chores. That’s a retort that women can rightly feel is apt. However, there is real heartbreak, guilt and loss on all sides when a man sacrifices himself to make money, while his kids speed through their lives without him being there to share their growth. Men never complain about it, because it’s an ingrained, primal responsibility. They’re unaccustomed to having the freedom to fight for their fatherhood role, their place as husbands in families that need them present, so they suck it up and pay the price, which has no relationship to having it all.

  Now, having my feminism forged in the age of Gloria, I never was told that it was about having it all, and I was certainly never promised that was what the pot at the end of the rainbow contained. In my world growing up in Missouri, I learned that I had a lot more options from which to choose, a galaxy compared to my mother’s, but that I needed to select what I wanted wisely and then take responsibility for what I’d decided, because no one was forcing me in a particular direction anymore. You could bitch about what you’d picked, but why anyone should listen was a mystery. At least I had choices, and women in the twenty-first century have even more. That’s progress, but it’s not the end of the story.

  So when Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly in August 2012 titled “Why Women Can’t Have It All,” it was understandable that all hell broke loose. Living in the Washington, D.C. area and covering national politics and women as I do, I considered Ms. Slaughter to be a well-known and respected woman in a privileged position she had earned. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had appointed her the first-ever woman Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.

  Ms. Slaughter’s husband is a willing participant in supporting her high-profile career, doing the parenting of two teenage boys, with Ms. Slaughter returning home on weekends to Princeton, New Jersey while she worked at the State Department. When her two-year leave from Princeton University was up, as her Atlantic Monthly article revealed, she “hurried home as fast as I could.” She’d once been talked out of writing in a column that women can’t have it all, but now, having safely parachuted out of the State Department and back at Princeton, she unloaded.

  Slaughter believes women can have it all and “have it all at the same time,” just not today. In an article in New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” published in December 2012, after following her lecture tour, Slaughter said she had wanted to title the Atlantic Monthly article “You Can’t Have It All Yet,” and the final title was about selling magazines. What “The Cut” also learned is “millennials love her.” Slaughter told “The Cut”: “Pretty much anybody under thirty-five is almost uniformly positive. They are grateful, they are positive, they want to have this debate.” She went on to say that women over thirty-five gave her a “very different response. …Their jaws tighten.”

  This is an important debate, one I gladly engage in, and I say that with a loose jaw.

  The American economy and corporations aren’t structured yet to make having it all easy for women or even possible, and neither are our relationships or American society in general. However, it also means defining what having it all means to you, as well as admitting this can change as you live your life.

  For Slaughter, having it all depended on what job she had, which turned out to have changed and was not the dream job she’d worked her entire life to earn and finally nabbed at the State Department. She also had to admit: “I am writing for my demographic — highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place…. But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home.” In April 2013, Slaughter became President of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute.

  Wealthy women have many options that middle-class women do not, so having it all is going to depend on who you are and the economic strata in which you live. Having it all can mean grabbing what you can while planning and dreaming about a better job, as you juggle marriage, family and career, at the same time you’re maintaining your sanity, which isn’t easy when you and your significant other are barely paying your bills.

  Not only had Ms. Slaughter gotten everything she’d planned, translated by many women as having it all — a top spot in the most elite club in the world, the foreign policy establishment of the State Department — but she made history as she did it. She has two beautiful boys, and a supportive husband who helped make it possible. However, the demands she placed on herself, including her own judgments and feelings about what she should be required to give each aspect of her life, blew out all expectations of what was possible without blowing a gasket.

  Answering the question “What do you want?” is predicated on also coming to grips with what happens when you get it.

  Slaughter never anticipated the fury her column would unleash on the web when it landed. Twitter exploded, and the new-media world lit up, every website trying to take advantage of the latest feminist to declare that women still can’t have it all.

  Men can’t have it all either, just ask them, but that’s never up for discussion. We never talk about how they juggle life, or sacrifice time with their kids, because it’s always been a given. Of course, men don’t have to do the grocery shopping and many other chores around the house when their job is taking all their time, while women are still expected to pick up the slack no matter what their job demands. This is the unsettled conflict in middle-class life when a family needs two incomes.

  This debate is central to a woman’s life today, but it’s not just about having it all, because the choice to change your mind and go in a different direction and leave your job isn’t one many women even have, which Ms. Slaughter made clear she knows.

  However, the real issue is that having it all was never promised by the feminist revolution in the first place.

  Somewhere, at some point, women conjured this up out of whole cloth and heaped the promise onto feminism, which was always and simply about having options equal to what men have. What we’re seeing shake out and brought into th
e light now is the demand women have placed on themselves to be equally engaged in all the facets of their lives, in all areas at once, with the same attention and care to each. It’s nuts and impossible.

  Try doing this in the middle of a relationship, and you can bet it’s going to fall apart along with everything else in your life.

  Secretary Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Ayelet Waldman for Marie Claire which came out in October 2012 after Slaughter’s piece, addressed the issue of women and work/life balance, saying: “I can’t stand whining. I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they’re not happy with the choices they’ve made. You live in a time when there are endless choices. …Money certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes a long way, but you don’t even have to have money for it. But you have to work on yourself. …Do something! Some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs. …Other women don’t break a sweat. They have four or five, six kids. They’re highly organized, they have very supportive networks.”

  In Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sandberg quotes Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the first woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university, who was talking to a group of women the age of Sandberg, who is 43 today: “My generation fought so hard to give all of you choices. We believe in choices. But choosing to leave the workforce was not the choice we thought so many of you would make.”

  Believe it or not, this directly relates to the type of relationship you create, starting with the man you choose, especially if marriage is your goal. It’s never before been put as succinctly as is done in Sandberg’s book, and because it’s something my whole life has revolved around, I related to it in an intensely personal way, which I’ll talk about later.

  Having it all, when I began embracing feminism, never meant anything other than women having the same choices as men. We would have the same freedoms as men, including the important aspect of making the same money for the same job, which, unbelievably, is still being debated. Let’s all agree that until this is fixed, having it all is a mirage.

  We can have families and careers now. Being a mother is a tremendously important and fulfilling role, an aspect of womanhood that most women would never choose to live without, but for the same majority of women it isn’t all they want for themselves either. Many have no choice, because of the economic realities today. Being able to choose to have a family and a career never came with any guarantees that you could juggle it all easily, gracefully or without coming to the conclusion that the amount of discipline it required could very well drive you nuts. You had to learn to accept that you could only give a hundred percent of yourself to one thing at a time.

  If, after you get everything you want, you decide it’s no longer what you want, it doesn’t mean a thing for anyone else. It means you might have outgrown your choices, even that you are about to embark on a new adventure. It’s okay to change your mind, but it’s not some eternal message for the masses, especially if you’re the one privileged to be in the income bracket that allowed you to orchestrate having it all, and you’re unable to deal with that gift. Just say, I’ve got it all and it’s not what it’s cracked up to be, because I miss my kids, so I’m going to take advantage of what my lifestyle affords and bail from the rat race. Oh, and by the way, I feel for the women who wish they could make this choice but can’t.

  That was always the beauty of feminism as I saw it. There are as many examples of it as there are women, though bucking traditional gender expectations is essential, including equality in child-rearing, household duties and financial contribution. Each of us gets to decide what works for us, and we can even change our minds midstream. Unfortunately, feminism inevitably gets the blame, even if it’s what has made the multiple-choice lives women lead today possible.

  The most important thing about feminism for me is that it doesn’t stop with my own life. It’s why I laughed out loud at the notion of “post-feminism.” The feminist revolution that lit up my life might have begun as a movement meant to advance American women one step up the ladder. But after it took hold in my heart and mind, it became clear the core of the feminist revolution had the potential to affect women everywhere. The hopes for my life, your life and other generations of American women isn’t all it was about, at least not for me. Feminism had at its core a universal call for women everywhere, and that was long before we knew women and girls in Afghanistan were getting acid thrown in their faces just for wanting to be educated. Long before we learned about so-called honor killings. Feminism in the twenty-first century is a collective, global cry for female equality, even as we each work to manifest the life we personally want.

  How we go about getting what it is we want is as individual as we are, though that’s not how it’s seen by some who insist on a universal roadmap.

  Two other columns I wrote back in the ’90s that were featured online were titled “Debating The Rules” and “The Rules Strikes Again.” The Rules, written by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, became the hottest-selling publishing phenomenon in decades and the most disastrous list of dos and don’ts for women since the 1950s. First published by Warner Books in 1995, it exploded and became a best seller and all the rage, taking the oxygen out of the relationship-equality discussion and packing old-school rules from a girl’s grandmother in 1917 into a nice, sweet list of what women should do to snare a man.

  The Rules starts off like this: “The purpose of The Rules is to make Mr. Right obsessed with having you as his by making yourself seem unattainable.” Oh, but it gets worse. “Remember that you’re dressing for men, not other women, so always strive to look feminine,” page 17. It was followed by The Rules II, The Rules for Marriage, The Rules for Online Dating and All the Rules.

  Unfortunately for Ellen Fein, her own rules didn’t work in her first marriage, which ended after sixteen years in 2000, and just as the sequel to the first book, titled The Rules for Marriage: Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work, was hitting bookstores. Writing online at the time, I watched as the media went wild over the irony. Nobody is immune to heartbreak, including experts. Covered in the New York Times, Fein claimed abandonment and then tried to sue her cosmetic dentist for, as the Times put it, “accusing him of ruining her teeth and her marriage.”

  See, in the land of The Rules, it’s never the woman’s fault, even when she loads the courtship up with all sorts of fakery and pretense, hiding behind a bundle of nerves that actually foreshadows the trouble to come once the man strips away the facade, or the woman explodes in anger and blames the man for causing it all when he didn’t know what was happening in the first place.

  When Fein met her new husband, Lance — good for her, by the way — he offered her his business card, which she refused to take. “I wasn’t going to call him! I knew I liked him but if he didn’t call me, I was perfectly capable of losing interest in him,” she was quoted saying in the Times, in August 2008. He asked her out two days later, the Times reported, but she was ready with a plan. “He asked me out for the next Saturday night. And I counted to four — it doesn’t look so desperate — before I said yes.”

  Just in case you’re wondering, it’s unlikely Lance even noticed whether she counted to four or not. It’s hard to imagine this type of tape playing in your head, cuing you to wait — three…two…one…time to answer now. It’s the perfect example of the unnatural woman. This type of game-playing would be exhausting even if it “worked.”

  In January 2013, as ridiculous as this nonsense is and after all the progress women have made, Anderson Cooper featured Fein and Schneider on his ABC daytime show Anderson Live. The authors have now updated The Rules for the cyber era in Not Your Mother’s Rules: The Secrets for Dating, which has thirty-one new rules for women. Unsurprisingly, Fein and Schneider “run a dating and consultation service,” according to their Amazon profile at the time
of the book’s release. Cooper picked out a couple of Not Your Mother’s Rules to talk about.

  Rule number six: “Wait at least four hours to answer a guy’s first text and a minimum of thirty minutes thereafter.” Another “new” rule is to stay away from the guy’s Facebook page. If that’s not groundbreaking enough for you, try this one: “Don’t sext.”

  Fein claims women “begged us for the updated version.” Because, obviously, women don’t know what to do in the twenty-first century with all the new ways to interact with men.

  The New York Daily News covered the publishing news of Not Your Mother’s Rules, too. “There’s no app for love,” ladies, went the report, and that’s true. Just in case you don’t get what’s going on here, there are also different rules depending on your age, your tribe and your culture. Fein and Schneider have dedicated an entire chapter, “complete with text-back time chart,” which is predicated on age. Whereas young women should wait thirty minutes before texting a guy back, older women need to wait “at least four hours — longer if possible.”

  Let’s unpack what they’re selling.

  Fein and Schneider are perpetuating the nonsense that a woman’s love life depends on what the man expects out of her, not what she wants. What will drive the man off? Their answer: It’s going to be something you do the first time you meet, so you better choreograph everything down to waiting four hours to respond to a text. The entire scenario is predicated on arbitrary rules that won’t do any good at all, if all the woman is thinking about is how to act to get the guy’s approval. It also perpetuates the notion that when a guy doesn’t call you or isn’t interested, it’s automatically something you did.