The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Another part of alternative ads when they first began was an introduction into lifestyles that were always around, but not out in the open in the personals. These included threesomes, couples looking for a partner, women looking for a couple, swingers who enjoyed partying with other couples. Some of this was explored on Sex and the City, when Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon, started doubting her attractiveness. Miranda answered a couples ad, with the female in the couple wanting to give her boyfriend a birthday present. Miranda was simply exploring and seeking validation that she could be wanted in that way by a couple. So, when she found out she could be, she bailed. However, some people enjoy the threesome lifestyle.

  Threesomes can be tricky things, however. Jealousy can flare up between people in a monogamous relationship, where none previously existed, if the exploration being sought isn’t fully discussed and the partners aren’t totally honest with one another about how they feel, their doubts and their trepidations.

  Alternative ads landing at the LA Weekly also finally acknowledged the sexual smorgasbord that exists in life. Transgender ads were available, acknowledging individuals who are constantly battling sexual inequality and harassment. Transgender people are born one sex, but identify in every way that’s important with the opposite gender. It may seem like something small — after all, it’s only personal ads, but sexual equality matters. Inclusion matters, too. It’s not easy to find love, no matter who you are, but especially when basic services open to others are out of bounds.

  One person who put transgender individuals in the headlines and in the news is Chaz Bono, the son of Cher and the late Sonny Bono, who rocketed into the American consciousness through his heroic performances on Dancing With the Stars. Jenna Talackova, who competed for Miss Universe Canada in 2012, was the first transgender contestant ever to be in the pageant. Jenna was born a boy but always self-identified as a girl. Chaz and Jenna want to live lives as they choose, without being discriminated against, just like anyone else.

  It’s also why Amanda Simpson was so important. Ms. Simpson became the first-ever openly transgender person and political appointee, President Barack Obama giving her the nod as special assistant to the secretary of the United States Army for acquisition, logistics and technology. Legitimization matters, and in the structure of our society is critical, even if you never heard of Ms. Simpson before. If her inclusion, as with Chaz Bono and Jenna Talackova, creates even a tiny ripple of acceptance, it’s important.

  It’s not just about surgery, looking beautiful and personal acceptance, because we all live in a connected society. It’s also about discrimination laws in employment, housing and all sorts of avenues remaining closed because of bigotry and belief that a trans person doesn’t deserve the same respect as anyone else. It’s another moment when the personal becomes political. You don’t have to understand it. It’s about basic civil rights for any individual, which shouldn’t be predicated on sexuality.

  Alternative ads were our one small step in favor of sexual inclusiveness. It was exciting to open it up and let everyone in. It was also a never-ending sexual education class for me.

  Then there were the dominatrixes I talked to. We gradually got to know one another, because they placed ads every week on the phone and preferred dealing with me, once I arrived. The details of their lives were fascinating, and I realized quickly that this was another avenue for alternatives. It wasn’t that it was new to me, because I’d done enough reading to know the landscape, but being able to have a dialogue was important. The doms I talked to all said they made from high five- to six-figure incomes and had a diverse clientele, from businessmen to lawyers to the TV and movie industries to truck drivers.

  One of the things I learned over the years was that high-powered men enjoy being submissive with the doms they pay to treat them in humiliating fashion. Crawling on the floor, getting whipped is how some bad-boy executives get off, while the dom made out like any thriving entrepreneur.

  I felt like a voyeur being led through a world I could only imagine in my head. What I knew about dominatrixes and spanking men now went beyond my Kinsey, Masters and Johnson and Playboy research. It would be continued with men during my stint as one of the first female online editors-in-chief in the soft-core adult industry, which we’ll talk about later, and was an education like no other. It taught me how men think and what they say about women when we’re not around, including what sex means to them in real terms.

  Human sexuality is a fascinating subject, and the technological era provided me with a roadmap to learn all about it through an education I couldn’t get in any school. I didn’t label myself an investigative journalist, but that’s part of the role I played, as I dipped in and out of industries that mined the secrets of dating, relationship, sex and love, also learning the pitfalls and prurient traps that lay embedded in the new technologies. For any unsuspecting or trusting soul, there would be a world of hurt waiting.

  Judgment and my feminist notions were put on a shelf. Perhaps my strait-laced life and Missouri sensibilities were also seduced by hearing wild stories and living vicariously through them. Human sexuality has always fascinated me, and over a ten-year period, from around 1992-2001, I learned more talking to all sorts of people hundreds of men and women — than I could ever have learned anywhere else. It was a lot more fun than school, with the phone, email and online conversations offering people anonymity that provided a shield and gave me a broad canvas on which to view the American appetite. I had to then decide if I was hearing fakery or honesty. People talking in extraordinary candor about the one thing that makes us feel more alive than anything else in human grasp, a loving relationship and sexual communion with another person.

  The job of Relationship Consultant at the LA Weekly was one of the best jobs I have ever had. I once had a large box of thank-you notes from people, all of whom found love and even marriage through the work we did together. There was nothing better than working with women and men, helping them craft personal and later online ads to attract someone to date that could become the lasting relationship of their life.

  The hardest thing I had to sell the single women on, as they looked for lasting love in the personals, was that putting their sensuality up first was the key to getting the attention of the most eligible bachelors. At first, no one believed what I was telling them. In a personal ad, the best way for a good-looking single woman with a great job to attract the man she wanted was to first sell herself as a hot commodity physically, then seal it with her smarts, education and what made her unique.

  Remember Melanie Griffith in Working Girl? “I have a head for business and a bod for sin,” is what she said to Harrison Ford, which left his jaw on the floor and his mind reeling at the possibilities. But she said it in a dress worth thousands of dollars and her hair perfectly coiffed, never mind that she was parading around as someone she wasn’t, at a high-profile investment event. The point is that the foundation of her statement was absolutely true and delivered by the woman she was in person. The trick in an online ad is to get this combination in their mind.

  Everyone knows that men are visual, so that’s what you had to serve up first in personal ads, before the social media era. You may not even be able to relate to personal ads in newspapers now, but it’s exactly what works today online only better, because a picture is out there somewhere, likely on Facebook, for someone curious about you to find. I bring personals up for context to show you how we’ve fast-forwarded, but that fundamentals stay the same.

  For a guy’s profile, the biggest thing in early 2013 was a picture showing him holding a guitar. For a woman, there’s nothing that beats a sexy shot where you can tell the girl’s eyes are saying something; she’s thinking something, but you can’t tell what. Mystery sells the sexy, confident woman you are, because in the new-media speed dating era, people know way too much about each other way too soon, which isn’t conducive to the slow burn that builds feelings and emotional ties with one another.

  A
sexy shot on Facebook or in your online dating profile is the visual version of what you would have described in your personal ad, before online dating. We’re now into an era that requires a completely different type of game plan. It’s your choice, but slowing the pace down is a coveted thing today, because dating and finding a long-term relationship requires simmering.

  We’re in a completely different era from the ’90s, when personal ads blasted onto the scene and turned the dating world upside down yet again, just like the era of the sexual revolution did in the ’60s. But someone else’s rules are still dogging women, offering a fake foundation on which girls can plan the perfect move, including nonsense like “don’t talk to a man first,” which is on the back of the paperback version of The Rules.

  When chemistry between two people collides, nothing can stop what evolves,except the fear of falling in love and getting exactly what you want, provided that you know what that is.

  What is very different now is the freedom women have and the perception of who we are as sexual creatures, coupled with the work lives we’ve created for ourselves, which often demand equal time.

  The culture in which we live and what’s seen in our mainstream media, online communication, Facebook and other social media, including Twitter, Tumblr, texting and sexting, instantly viral photographs, Instagram and videos, but also the movies, broadcast and cable TV, and even advertising, all make up a gigantic mirror in which to see women’s lives, forcing pressure down on us all. Once we got the opportunity to unleash our individual sexuality that we now safely control, and the real-life economic choices that came with it, the stress became even more intense for women.

  It’s now all on display for everyone to witness.

  Our lives in the rapidly churning modern era now include being bombarded by social media and cultural expectations that heap pressure on women at younger ages. These pressures often reemerge when we’re older in second-chance relationships. We’re taking it all on, crafting lives of once-unimaginable possibilities, no matter our ages.

  Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire” comes to mind. When she was interviewed in the New York Times Sunday magazine in September 2012, the award-winning singer explained what she was saying in the song. “A girl on fire is loud and obnoxious and destructive and… free,” and she’s not backing down.

  2

  Hollywood to Sexy Baby and Girls

  The door broke wide open for modern women on what came to be known as K-Day, August 20, 1953. More than sixty reports in publications such as Life, Time, News-week, Modern Bride, Collier’s, Reader’s Digest, Redbook and U.S. News & World Report, according to the Kinsey Institute website, teased Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s upcoming landmark book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, offering excerpts of Kinsey’s research. The revelations would change the conversation about sex forever. It was Kinsey who revealed through meticulous research that women were sexual beings, capable of orgasm and all sorts of libidinous thoughts, which started a lot younger than anyone wanted to think about. Seven years before the Pill, his book primed the public consciousness for the inevitable overturning of American social norms.

  Kinsey had published a preceding report on the human male in 1948, but nothing compared to the response from critics on daring to mine and report the sexual proclivities of women. Coming after Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” moralistic paternalism and ridiculous “penis envy,” Kinsey landed like a crashing wave in the post-Freud era, when women were waking up in very tight cultural corsets. Rev. Billy Graham, the evangelical preacher to presidents, was quoted as saying Alfred Kinsey “certainly could not have interviewed any of the millions of born-again Christian women in this country, who put the highest price on virtue, decency and modesty.”

  The Kinsey Reports rocked traditionally religious America to its core, freaking out the faithful over the thought that women’s sexuality was even being discussed out in the open. “It’s impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” Rev. Graham opined. Kinsey was unlikely surprised. His own hyper-religious upbringing was an oversized influence in the shakeup he unleashed, when he dared to challenge America’s notion of female sexuality during the manufactured suburban bliss of the 1950s.

  When the film Kinsey debuted, starring Liam Neeson in the title role and Laura Linney as his wife, conservative groups reacted much the same way they did in the 1950s. “Instead of being lionized, Kinsey’s proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist,” was the overwrought reaction of Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America’s Culture & Family Institute, as the Associated Press reported. It was a rehashing of the old characterization of Kinsey as the “American Mengele,” which he was commonly called when his findings on women were first released.

  Perhaps the real grudge conservatives groups, including Focus on the Family, had against Alfred Kinsey was that he opened the gateway to sexual education in public schools, taking the teaching of biology and the science of reproduction out of the hands of parents, but more importantly, away from the church. So powerful was Kinsey’s reach thought to be by the American right, that blame for abortion, high divorce rates, pornography and even AIDS was laid at his feet. It was the same beef cited by conservative outlets like Morality and Media, which Newsmax reported when the film Kinsey hit the big screen.

  Whatever Alfred Kinsey was in people’s minds, or whether people agree with his studies or methods, the impact of his work is unquestionable. Once the subject of female sexuality could be discussed not only openly, but seriously, the change in American culture worked like a contagion. That’s what mattered.

  Masters and Johnson took what Kinsey unleashed and quantified it. The audacious research and historic scientific witness to women’s sexuality provided through the work of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson would finally and thoroughly question and then silence the misogynistic presumptions of Dr. Sigmund Freud. Burying the purely ideological notion that a woman’s orgasm came in legitimate and illegitimate forms that depended on a man, instead of her own personal needs and physiological experiences.

  Virginia Johnson’s ability to talk with women and easily engage them in the most private conversations resulted in convincing them to take part. Through his medical reputation and scientific expertise, Masters legitimized the risks to the work they were doing. Virginia Johnson offering the human touch, because Masters was too standoffish to have ever convinced women to reveal themselves sexually.

  At St. Louis, Missouri’s Washington University’s Maternity Hospital, Masters and Johnson turned the science of human sexuality into liquid gold by chronicling an estimated 14,000 orgasms, from 1956 until their book Human Sexual Response was released in 1966, as reported in Newsweek. Their story is chronicled by Thomas Maier in his book, Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love, which is the basis for the Showtime series and was updated for the show. Masters of Sex has turned the St. Louis team’s liberating sexual cry into a deliciously satisfying and emotionally grounding romp, starring Michael Sheen as Dr. Masters, Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson and Caitlin Fitzgerald as Libby Masters.

  Sigmund Freud’s ridiculous ruminations on female pleasure included the notion that a clitoral orgasm was a sign of emotional immaturity, but also that pleasure is best found through the more “mature” experience of vaginal intercourse. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson reduced Freud’s psychological babble to a footnote on the way to providing facts through witnessing women’s sexual satisfaction in a lab setting.

  As someone who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, it’s astounding that such breakthrough sexuality studies on women could have come from the same state that still produces politicians like Republican Representative Todd Akin, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, no less, who in 2012 ran a failed Senate campaign claiming a women’s body can protect her from pregnancy after a “legit
imate” rape.

  Not only did Masters and Johnson prove Freud wrong, but through the wonders of using a giant dildo, their sexual studies proved that women don’t need men to climax. Not to mention that if a man ignores a woman’s clitoris he may even prevent her from enjoying an orgasm altogether. A whopping 75% of women require clitoral stimulation to climax, the figure most often cited, though I’d suggest it could be even higher. Masters and Johnson also discovering that women can have multiple orgasms, with the second and even third sometimes being more powerful than the first.

  To punctuate the hold Freud had on human sexuality in the 1950s, the sequence of Masters of Sex scenes with Allison Janney, who plays Margaret Scully, the wife of Dr. Masters’ boss, is painfully illustrative. Janney and her husband, Barton Scully, played by Beau Bridges, don’t sleep together. Bridges’ character is a closet homosexual who has been exposed to Dr. Masters by one of his male prostitute subjects, allowing Masters to blackmail his boss into financially backing his research.

  In what launches a contagion of evocative scenes, Janney is playing bridge with her girlfriends, when one of them reveals she has signed up for Dr. Masters’ study, which she tells the girls revolves around sex. That gets Margaret Scully’s attention, whose marriage is lacking any deeply physical sexual enjoyment. It leads Janney to seek out Virginia Johnson. But when Janney meets with both Masters and Johnson together so they can compile data before she’s hooked up to the machinery and the dials start evaluating her physical reactions to pleasure, in answers to questions about her own sexual experiences, the very married Margaret Scully is led to admit she has never had an orgasm, a prerequisite for being part of their sexual research. Janney talks about feeling “pressure” during sex, but never the “release,” as Virginia Masters describes it to her. The shock of her own admission seems to stun and deeply embarrass Mrs. Scully, and is felt by both Virginia Johnson and Dr. Masters. How could a married woman of thirty years never have experienced an orgasm?