by Taylor Marsh
When Dr. Scully returns home after a secret homosexual tryst in one scene, he finds Margaret reading Peyton Place in bed. Written by housewife Grace Metalious, who had her own frustrations in 1956, it was a loud cry against the hypocrisy of 1950s morality and dramatically written to shock. Seen as scandalous, it sold 100,000 copies in the first month and eventually sold 12 million, according to Vanity Fair, and it was turned into a big screen soap opera in 1957. Dr. Scully has no interest in seeing the film, so his wife decides to see it alone.
At the theatre, Mrs. Scully meets the dashing Dr. Austin Langham, played by Teddy Sears, who happens to be participating in the Masters and Johnson study, but has suddenly experienced what we know of today as erectile dysfunction. The minute the two meet after the movie the foreshadowing of what’s about to happen is as rich as what an odd couple these two make. But their sexual hunger, angst and awkwardness binds them and leads to an improbable and wholly liberating sexual adventure between a woman and a man desperate to find connection, touch and release with someone who understands what it’s like to be frustrated and marooned while married.
So long Freud, hello Kinsey, thank you Masters and Johnson. Women weren’t just daughters and mothers anymore. We were sexual and now there’s proof. Dr. Spock supposedly once said, “Everything is about sex.” After Masters and Johnson it was no longer just about cocksmen and the sexual prowess of males, but also about whether women got off, too.
This shouldn’t have been news after the roaring 1920s, when women were free and flaunted it. But believers in American puritanism tend to continually work to reassert themselves over our culture. It’s why, borrowing from Alicia Keys again, we’re not going to back down again — because we can’t afford to. We’ve seen the results when we relax. It’s called the 1950s.
The religious right is never more fearful than when independent, liberated females are exercising personal freedoms and women start expressing themselves in a way that challenges traditional norms. They will never grasp that they lost the argument, beginning in 1960, when biology began shifting to no longer being our destiny.
As Showtime’s Masters of Sex illustrates through Allison Janney’s character, during the era of the feminine mystique, committed relationships often left the women in them feeling nothing but frigid.
The Pill took the findings of Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson, personalizing them further for females. In the book The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, which was excerpted on Salon.com in November 2013, Chatterjee writes how neuroscience explains why sex feels so good, including that orgasm releases “beta-endorphins, prolactin, and oxytocin, …a hormone associated with trust and a sense of affiliation.”
I’m a lifelong devotee of film and TV, both of which became an escape for a midwestern girl intent on fleeing the traditional, moralistic Missouri confines that didn’t fit my independent nature. It’s a beautiful state to be from, but once I came of age, the lack of respect for modern women’s quest for equality was stifling.
The stuff coming at me as a girl was blinding, especially since I spent much of my childhood in front of the TV, though it’s nothing compared to the onslaught coming at girls today through social media and the web. The big box in front of me was my babysitter, and I was a passenger captivated by this dream machine. The ramp up to what became the reality for new generations of liberated women was amazing to watch once it blasted into American living rooms. There is nothing that impacted me more growing up than the images of women I saw on the screen, big and small.
I simply was That Girl, the character Ann Marie, in ABC’s epic television series, or at least I wanted to be. The show starred the indomitable Marlo Thomas as an aspiring actress who moved to New York City to make it big. From 1966 to 1971, girls like me watched the single-girl life play out on TV, dreaming, visualizing that we could be that girl, however we each defined her, because not everyone wanted to be an actress. I honestly don’t know what I would have done if Ann’s engagement at the end of the sitcom’s run would have manifested in marriage. It would have been a disaster, but it would not have been surprising, because TV was run by men, just as advertising was in the 1950s, so it would have been their version of what’s best for us. But Marlo Thomas and others on the show were ahead of the curve and knew things had already started changing.
Still, I got sucked up in the whole engagement-ring ritual so many college females fell into in the 1970s. It was an escape from struggles at home and from working too hard, though I was a statistic just as quickly as I said “I do,” because I really never wanted to. That I thought marriage would be an escape shows you just how naive I was, though I was hardly alone. We’ve all learned a lot since the 1970s, but That Girl had it right all along, earlier than American society.
In 1970, the Mary Tyler Moore Show picked up the slack and then some, with Mary Tyler Moore playing TV’s first never-married career girl, Mary Richards, who was paying her own way without money from a husband or ex-husband, and without a steady boyfriend. By the time the show was off the air, I was well on my way to being long gone from Missouri.
These two TV shows validated my existence and the fact that being different wasn’t weird. I rarely saw women outside these shows I could relate to, which is why That Girl and Mary Tyler Moore mattered so much. Everything else started with finding a husband, marrying said man, having children, then never wanting for more or even considering there was more. In fact, thinking differently about dating and men got you classified as less — not feminine, not sufficiently womanly. To say I was in mortal conflict with myself is an understatement.
When Sex and the City hit, created for HBO by Darren Star, and based on the book by Candace Bushnell, nobody had ever excavated the gritty intimacy terrain this show tread. Sure, it was about fashion, glamour and how the girls all made it happen for themselves in New York City, but this show went where That Girl and Mary Tyler Moore never did. The episode “Evolution,” in Season Two, when Carrie Bradshaw, portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker, dropped the news that for the first time she “did a #2” at Mr. Big’s place, what can go through a girl’s mind when she’s in close quarters with a man and one bathroom was still a very private hassle. As Charlotte howled it was “the end of romance,” Miranda confessed she’d gone an entire relationship “never doing that,” including during a trip to Bermuda where she traipsed down to the lobby the whole weekend, rather than let him know she “did a #2.” The logistics alone of hiding a basic bodily function boggles the mind! Samantha’s answer was dating only rich men where money meant there was enough space to “distance yourself from the #2.” There was nothing in a girl’s life that was off limits to Carrie, Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), with women the better for their often-profane frankness.
In Season Three, the episode “Attack of the Five-Foot-Ten Woman,” the show took on a current topic in 2000, long before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. The woman in the title is Natasha, played by Bridget Moynahan, the new wife of Mr. Big, made famous by Chris Noth. As Charlotte reads from the Weddings/Celebrations section of the Sunday New York Times, referred to by Carrie as the “single woman’s sports pages,” which includes her ex in this particular issue, it seems that every caption starts with “Until recently, the bride….” What comes after is the career or job “the bride” had “until recently,” implying that once a woman gets engaged and decides to marry, whatever she was once interested in suddenly vanishes. This passage sets Miranda off and mocking this notion, with Samantha joining in, saying, “Until recently, the bride had a life of her own.” Women continue to struggle for marriage not to change their initial dreams and hijack their life that began centered on what makes them tick.
Hopscotching across Hollywood filmland, because I could never name all of the films that mattered and cemented the politics of sex in American culture, let’s go back to Garbo’s Flesh and the Devil in pre-censorship 1927. Some films grabbed me stronger than others, even when I unearthed
them years after they were made, because of how Hollywood manipulated women through them.
The Chapman Report was a minor blip in 1962, the subject it tackled taking it off the map of what was considered appropriate at the time. George Cukor was the king of directors for females, but not even he could survive the Hollywood censors once they got a hold of this film. The movie is based on Irving Wallace’s novel, which is based on Kinsey’s research on women’s sexuality. The quote at the beginning of this book, “Analysis is no substitute for guts,” comes from The Chapman Report and registered immediately with me when I finally saw the film on TCM, Turner Classic Movies. Anyone who has ever been in therapy, and I have, no matter how valuable it is, recognizes this truth.
It was said in the film by Naomi Shields, played by Claire Bloom, whose nymphomaniac character ends up getting gang-raped, which you never see, though you do get the picture, when after a night out with the boys, she’s dumped on the curb. Of course, she ends up committing suicide. Unbridled female sexuality is a killer. She’s one of four women featured in The Chapman Report. Jane Fonda plays a frigid, pent-up wife; Shelley Winters portrays the perfect, hopeless, idiot female, who falls for a married man who delights in serial infidelity at her expense. A married, flighty Glynis Johns runs around after a hunky, athletic jock.
The characters and storyline were butchered through censorship, the depictions of the women in the film coming out weirdly contorted. Virtue and sexuality collided in this film, as they did in other releases at the beginning of the modern sexual and feminist revolutions. A mass-marketed movie industry just wasn’t allowed to cover what was going on with women honestly.
Treating women in a way that could be absorbed by the movie masses wasn’t the goal of The Chapman Report, because it dealt with what was considered taboo, as if the very notion of women’s sexual power was dangerous if not properly contained and compartmentalized. Cukor had chosen a subject considered cultural dynamite, and it seemed as if Hollywood ruined his movie to get even and send a message. The director of the 1939 all-female cast of The Women couldn’t get any respect for his 1962 film on female sexuality as liberation was hitting.
The Chapman Report made the Production Code Administration files, with wardrobe photographs only part of what passed through that office. The Supreme Court case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, which was a unanimous decision, said that films weren’t the press so weren’t protected under the First Amendment. This is obvious, but the unintended results were a disaster for women. The images girls would see on the screen of women were male-approved and sanitized. The rest is history, and for women that meant our sexuality on screen would be monitored, shaped and contorted by the men who ran the entertainment industry. It was a long way from the pre-censored days of the movies, when girls were as free as men.
Women couldn’t pay their own bills at the time. Ah, but female actors and performers could, so is it any wonder they have always been considered a little dangerous? A woman paying her own way, especially if she’s not married, is just a little suspect, and so is the role she’s portraying on the screen for all of America to see.
It already had been decided that men’s sexuality was dangerous, which was shrugged off as men being men. Through the pages of Playboy that came paper-wrapped to your doorstep to protect the wife, men’s visual expressions of sex have always been seen as pornographic, something too risqué for women. Smut is banished from sight whenever possible, kept secret. It now hides behind passwords and subscription memberships, where only the lost are seen to traverse. Sexual curiosity through visual gratification is a sin by itself for many, even if it’s harmless voyeurism in the privacy of your own home. We must all be protected, especially women, as if we don’t lust equally to men. This is the American setup that has led to the alienation of affections and the segregation of sexual romping, as well as the myth that women aren’t carnally inclined to “kinky fuckery” too, to quote E.L. James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey.
When I think about all those Kindles or iPads being read and women privately enjoying Fifty Shades of Grey and keeping it to themselves, I wonder. How in the world can a long-term relationship or marriage survive without individual privacy? I don’t think it can. I’m not talking about illicit secrets that create a separate life outside your relationship which, given oxygen, can take your attention and focus away from your partnership, even harm it. But there’s been an effort to suggest that we have to spill everything to our mates. It’s preposterous. Of course a man engaging a woman not his wife is wrong. But there’s got to be privacy, so men and women can have a little breathing room to discover their own curiosities without having to share that we’re looking at men’s penises, because we like hot, naked hunks, just like men do with women.
Also in 1962 was Lolita, which was directed by the audacious Stanley Kubrick. Based on the classic novel by Vladimir Nabokov, it unpacks the forbidden, illegal attraction of middle-aged men to young girls, making any fantasy in porn magazines like Barely Legal come to life on screen or at least in your mind. Imagination was the guide in Kubrick’s Lolita, which starred James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon as the adolescent nymphet. Censorship neutered Nabokov’s classic novel, with Kubrick forced to change Lolita’s age from twelve in Nabokov’s book to about fifteen on screen (the character’s precise age is never mentioned in the film). The maverick director was later rumored to have said that if he’d known what was going to happen to his film he likely wouldn’t have made it, but that couldn’t eradicate the truth it depicted. When the remake with Jeremy Irons as Humbert was filming, the Child Pornography Act was signed by President Bill Clinton, which rightly banned computer-generated child pornography. It provoked discussions that the film should be banned as well, even if you can’t ban the perversion itself. Just don’t discuss.
Sexual education is worth the scandal if it informs.
Breakfast at Tiffanys in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, is a film adaptation of Truman Capote’s short story that has no resemblance to it. The character of society girl Holly Golightly is vapid and ridiculous, though Hepburn is spellbinding, which is why she earned the Oscar. But the Hollywood Holly shares nothing with Capote’s darker, deeply sexual and profane, post-WWII vamp. At least Hepburn’s Holly found love, though Capote’s Fred is hardly a love interest who would be into her, because it’s implied he’s homosexual. The signature cigarette holder and her little black dress cemented Hepburn’s image, Hollywood contorting the real, live character from Capote’s imagination, which was in no way suitable to show on screen at the time. The theme song sung by Andy Williams, “Moon River,” talked about “two drifters off to see the world. There’s such a lot of world to see. We’re after the same rainbow’s end. Waiting ’round the bend…” It’s surreal compared to Capote’s vision, which was a lot more honest and is likely why it scared Hollywood into sanitizing it.
Hepburn’s Holly was a long way from the 1940s, when the Howard Hughes western The Outlaw was unleashed, with a movie poster that made Jane Russell a star and sent the Hays Office, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s censorship office, to DefCon1. Breaking “decency” codes, the poster in 1946 allegedly revealed part of Russell’s nipple. It’s quintessentially American that Hughes kept fighting, and when the film was released, it was a blockbuster hit, making Russell a household name that later got her paired with Marilyn Monroe, both on film and with their handprints immortalized together in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
In pre-Code, Depression-era Hollywood, women were free, very strong and, unapologetically, scantily clad. Ruth Chatteron, whom I bet most have never heard of, played Alison Drake, the title character in Female, a CEO “who’s used to buying love…,” says AltFG.com, a blog about alternative films. Norma Shearer was the title character in 1930s The Divorcee. In 1932, Jean Harlow was The Red Headed Woman, sleeping her way to the top.
The Roman Catholic Church had a fit
and launched a campaign that finally brought Hollywood to heel, bringing the Hays Code to life and creating a monster at the same time. Before the Coding, which began in earnest around 1934, films were mostly governed by local laws. Men who rule organized religion have been at the heart of corralling women since the dawn of time. Today they can only succeed when women help them.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho landed in 1960 and was an obvious must-see when I came of age, but it haunted me for days and still does when I see it. After watching HBO’s The Girl, the story of how Hitchcock terrorized, raped and ruined the career of Tippi Hedren because she wouldn’t reward his tortured obsession, it’s no wonder Psycho freaked me out. It was meant to. Subliminally terrorizing and questioning women’s sanity through the camera lens was a Hitchcock trademark, as he targeted women — even Mother — in spectacular films, creating masterpiece after masterpiece. But look at the female characters he created in his films. More importantly, look at the relationships they have with the men.
The foreshadowing of women’s PR troubles in the modern visual era is Academy Award-winning actress Ingrid Bergman, who was also a Tony-and Emmy-winner. She went from playing a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s to being called out on the Senate floor by Senator Edwin C. Johnson for being a “free-love cultist…, a horrible example of womanhood and a powerful influence for evil.” While married to one man, she had the child of another. It was sacrilege.
An online story by the National Enquirer keeps alive Bergman’s exile by chronicling and highlighting the gory details from the 1950s, a time which some people actually glorify today. Gossip mean-girls of the era, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, were only too happy to dissect Bergman’s dissent into wanton womanhood, which resulted in her films being banned for several years, as fans turned on the former screen-nun, now that she was seen as libidinous, sexual and, even worse, an adulterer. Men would be men and take a mistress, but for a woman to make a man a cuckold? For American society, Bergman had committed the worst societal sin.