The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  In 1942, Errol Flynn was tried for statutory rape of two girls. Not only did he get off, but he enjoyed widespread support, with the likes of William F. Buckley, a conservative icon, reportedly joining the American Boys Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF).

  The 2013 Enquirer piece on Bergman quotes her daughter, Pia Lindstrom, telling Larry King that Bergman was forbidden to enter the country: “There was a vote in Congress, where she was made persona non grata.”

  Bergman herself was quoted as saying, “I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.”

  A lot can be said for having guts.

  When I discovered Bette Davis, it was a revelation. Ms. Davis chewed up plots that featured brazen females and spit them out in the audience’s eye, daring us to disapprove. Her imprint stuck. In life, she took on Warner Bros. and demanded better roles and more money. When asked about her life and marriages, she said she “loved being a wife,” but that if she had married “much, much, much later and maybe found the right person,” it might have worked. In a 1981 Good Morning America interview, Davis said, “The big romance of my life was this work I do.”

  There’s real evidence today that getting married later matters even more, and it goes beyond the importance of finding the right person to make sure it lasts. The Knot Yet Report in 2013, sponsored by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the Relate Institute, and the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, reveals why waiting matters to modern women: “Women enjoy an annual income premium if they wait until thirty or later to marry. For college-educated women in their mid-thirties, this premium amounts to $18,152. Delayed marriage has helped to bring down the divorce rate in the U.S. since the early 1980s, because couples who marry in their early twenties and especially their teens are more likely to divorce than couples who marry later.”

  Like Ms. Davis, Joan Crawford had four marriages. Her image in “Mildred Pierce” is seared into film lovers’ memories but was shattered by the horror story in Mommie Dearest, told by her daughter. That she ended up Mrs. Pepsi-Cola seems weirdly incongruent, but I’ll never forget the image of her as Mildred Pierce, the mother doing everything for a daughter who is determined to ruin her life. It’s the ultimate warning for any parent who thinks they can control how a child turns out.

  In 1971, Jane Fonda landed in Klute, the bookend to her role in The Chapman Report. Ten years after Butterfield 8, but also Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fonda’s Bree Daniels is stalked, but escapes. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn, Fonda, too, won the Oscar for best actress. Over a decade of time, Hollywood still marveled at a woman playing the role of hooker, but to my eyes, it seemed like a message that a sexual woman was always doomed.

  Katharine Hepburn was one of the strongest female actresses on screen. But she was the opposite in the one relationship that threaded throughout her life, the one with Spencer Tracy. By all reports, she chose obedience and subservience to Tracy, a married alcoholic and religiously chained man who refused to acknowledge their relationship. Ms. Hepburn acknowledged as much, with Scott Berg being one of those recounting the incident. “She did admit to falling asleep one night in the hallway outside the Beverly Hills Hotel room in which he had passed out and from which he had thrown her out,” Berg wrote in his biography of Hepburn, Kate Remembered.

  When James Bond hit in 1962 with Dr. No, 007 didn’t come alone. Ursula An-dress as Honey Ryder introduced the Bond girl and exposed the cinema sex symbol as something well beyond the fragile sensuality that Marilyn Monroe created. All I knew is that I couldn’t relate to Ursula or Marilyn. I envisioned myself the opposite of the sexy bombshell, relating more to the stuff of the girl next door that most guys knew was a virgin.

  I culled through the screen characters, taking stock of each woman, each character’s persona, wondering where I fit in, because no one in my immediate vicinity represented anything to which I could relate.

  It was Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara and her romantic drama that really hooked me, grabbed my attention and fixated my imagination on her reckless fearlessness. Scarlett lived a tortured existence inside an impossible infatuation with Ashley Wilkes that was capable of destroying her own happiness with a man who worshipped her (Rhett Butler) though she didn’t deserve it. Oh, and she didn’t find out she wanted Rhett until he left. It was all so volatile, so exciting, so romantic; but actually, it was the ultimate soap opera.

  If ever there was a synopsis that encapsulated the person I was fighting not to be but was hopelessly drawn to, it was the Scarlett-Rhett scenario. I was spellbound watching Scarlett refuse to surrender to the virile Rhett, whom she obviously feared might be everything Ashley Wilkes wasn’t. Scarlett embodied the age-old story of chasing what you can’t have, while convincing yourself that this emotional and physical feeling of torment was actually the ultimate romantic swoon. It’s Shakespearean to love a man who denies you. The drama, the notion that love hurts, is a narcotic that girls and women have been feeding off of for centuries. What else did women have to do? Yet even when we became serious people, we still succumbed to this torture.

  Scarlett taunts Rhett, the man she could have but who would expect her to deliver on the physical passion she pretends to feel toward Ashley, who allows her to play only safe, romantic head-games instead. Ashley is unattainable and way too cool to ever make her happy.

  It’s what makes the brief alignment and calm surrounding Rhett and Scarlett’s ultimate consummation so satiating. We know it’s only a matter of time before the emotional brawls resume and the physical tug of power escalates again inside a marriage where it’s always a test of wills.

  The drama, lust and friction, the stuff of pure passion, was all ambrosia for a girl who wouldn’t permit herself to let go and experience anything sexual without overarching angst and guilt. Mentally, I was consumed by an overwrought sense of self-possession and self-importance that were choking the life out of any personal happiness meant to be enjoyed in what I was being told were my carefree years.

  But I was never carefree. I was possessed by the fear, anxiety and danger of never finding a way to live that didn’t depend on what women were supposed to do. Somewhere along the line, I knew I’d step off the discipline merry-go-round I’d gladly chosen when I was a kid and earn the right to explain that there were women out there who were determined to experience things outside what was considered normal and traditional — women who wanted to organize their lives as the mood struck them, which had nothing to do with biology, let alone the setup American culture ordained.

  Inside the beauty-queen persona lived an emotional volcano.

  While sunbathing at my boyfriend Brian’s elite country club, along with his mother and several other mothers of the next generation of pampered pricks, I rebelled at these women railing against the Equal Rights Amendment. Still in high school at the time, Brian was the man with whom I’d have a fly-by marriage and one of the many men I tortured who put up with my mood swings of on-again, off-again courtship.

  After listening to these women pitch first-class fits over feminism and how the ERA would ruin everything, I got so annoyed, I walked off the sun deck on more than one occasion, and out of the club entirely. That my big brother Larry was in the Missouri Senate and was one of the many co-sponsors supporting the Equal Rights Amendment meant I actually knew what the key twenty-four words meant and could do. The women married to elite St. Louis men were sure it meant they’d have to squat in cubicles next to men peeing at urinals, which would bring the end of polite society as they knew it. That this visual in no way represented the point of the ERA didn’t matter, because they had a tape of Phyllis Schlafly on a loop in their heads.

  Enemy Number One back then was anything liberated, which certainly started with sex and the purveyors of such insane notions that good girls liked it, too.

  Hugh Hefner called himself “Kinsey’s pamphleteer” for
a reason. Publishing the first issue of Playboy in 1953, the same year Kinsey told America that women were sexual, Marilyn Monroe on the cover codified the Kinsey Reports in our culture. Celebrating fifty years of the magazine in 2013, Playboy once again put Monroe on the cover. Magazines were slowly being edged out and replaced with online smut and video memberships for voyeurs. It made the commotion Marilyn’s nudes in print once caused seem quaint.

  Author Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett, played on film by Vivien Leigh, who also won an Oscar for best actress, was made of much tougher, more determined stuff than Liza Minnelli’s character in Cabaret, or Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniels in Klute, never mind The Chapman Report or Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. Scarlett represented women before Freud got to us, as she blew through husbands and became a ruthlessly unemotional capitalist who partnered with carpetbaggers. She is someone who lives her life separate from the men whom she needs to accept her. At the same time, she can be practical and do business with the enemy to survive.

  “What a woman,” says Rhett Butler, as she heads off to shantytown with a gun in her lap, a testament to the hellcat spirit of liberated women, which fell silent in the 1950s. Contrary to the “men may flirt with girls like that but they don’t marry them,” comment in the film, Scarlett got to do both, repeatedly, while working in a man’s world in the post-Civil War South.

  Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves smack in the middle of an unbounded visual extravaganza, while still trying to cement the fearlessness that came without guilt for the businesswoman Scarlett, no matter what she did. In the last twenty years, beginning in the early 1990s, the image of women in movies has whipsawed from Pretty Woman one year to Thelma and Louise the next. Today we have Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya (Jessica Chastain), the woman who got Osama bin Laden, not to mention Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who tortures her rapist. Then there is Cameron Diaz, who comes close to melting the screen, and the windshield of a Ferrari, as the wicked and sexually carnivorous Malkina, in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, who manages to also best the men in the category of wits while she’s at it. There’s not a hooker in sight, while Lovelace is a reminder how seventeen days of sex can change a girl’s world.

  On top of it all comes a barrage of images, stories and new confrontations that assault us all so quickly in a variety of platforms that few can digest it fast enough to help women, whatever the age, put it all into context.

  When Sexy Baby hit Showtime, the web lit up. Billed as a documentary about “how pornography, social media and pop culture affect women and girls,” it chronicled the sexual education I’d mined over many years. The film follows the lives of a hip twelve-year-old girl, a twenty-two-year-old looking for a “normal” vagina, like what guys watching porn expect to see, and an ex-adult film actress who’s now on the production side of things and longing for her first child with her husband. The girls have nothing in common but the exploding visuals of women in the media they see everyday and the impact these images have on their lives. These images now aren’t just found in magazines, movies and on TV, but are part of our visual day through billboards and other advertising, which we see any time we log onto the web or our smartphones, via social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, which is where people today hang out.

  One of the first lines in the documentary is “Sex, sex, sex everywhere.”

  A screen-shot from a web page: “Has Pubic Hair in America Gone Extinct?” flashes across the TV. The caption below it reads, “Carrie Bradshaw, Hugh Hefner and Barbie have all helped construct a new generation’s ideal woman, who is athletic, alluring…, and waxed.”

  No doubt Carrie Bradshaw and Sex and the City changed the perception of women, but it’s doubtful that a waxed bush was the nut of it.

  It’s been politically incorrect to like Barbie for a while now. That’s someone else’s rule that didn’t compute in my world. Barbie wasn’t made to be held, fed or rocked. Hallelujah. She came with a baby as an accessory. Sure, you could have a baby — most girls want to — but it wasn’t all of what you were as a woman. Barbie’s perfect body and her erect tits weren’t what I saw. Barbie had a Dream House. She had a hot car and lots of clothes. But best of all, Barbie had a career choice. It meant someone understood that girls didn’t have to check the wife-and-mother box unless we wanted to, but also that there was something beyond it, too. So, Barbie was a heroine to me.

  I didn’t even notice she didn’t have a vagina. Most of the adults around me didn’t think girls under eighteen had a vagina either. In fact, lingerie for Barbie wasn’t introduced for decades. She was sexy, but sexless. If you’re not married, that is America’s idea of the perfect girl.

  The alternative to Barbie when I was a kid was a baby doll called Thumbelina. She was a crushing bore. Holding, feeding and rocking a baby doll didn’t require any imagination. I saw mothers everywhere with babies, so I knew the drill. It was a constant picture in my life, the norm, traditional and expected. I wanted to see alternatives. What else was out there?

  There was a waist-high talking doll called Chatty Cathy. The name said it all.

  Culture doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as Sexy Baby proves. But Kinsey had now left the conversation. There was someone new to blame.

  At the top of Sexy Baby, it shows three teenage boys hanging out. A woman asks them whether they’ve “ever seen a bush on a girl.” One guy says, “No bush, none,” and the other guy says, “Once, but I didn’t ever talk to her again.”

  I immediately wondered if this is setting up an expectation that matters. Guys talking smack, sending a message girls should heed, or whether girls should be reminded they don’t need guys like this in their lives. It did remind me of when I was that age and not having sex when everyone else seemed to be. One time in high school I trusted a guy to go down on me, though when he began, I wasn’t sure where he was going or what he was about to do. It was glorious. It was also the first and last time I allowed it until I was long gone from high school, because the next day everyone informed me they knew I had a “big bush.” Did I really?

  The best defense for the onslaught of peer pressure and judgment is having something to do in your life that matters to you more than what’s being said about you. Finding that can be a lifelong search, or it can hit you when you’re a kid; it can also change with age. It’s where everything starts. It’s where your uniqueness takes hold or is reinvented. Over a lifetime, it’s what will ground you, no matter the combustible, changing nature of events.

  Cut to a little four-year-old girl in Sexy Baby, watching a web video of Lady Gaga. Asked her favorite artist, she says “Britney, bitch.” Not much later, she’s humping the floor and giggling, before her mother stops her and tells her she doesn’t want to see that type of dancing.

  When I was that age and already addicted to dancing school, I didn’t even know that type of dancing existed, because it wasn’t in my face.

  “We’re like the first generation to have what we have,” says Winnifred, the twelve-year-old, who’s one of the three female stories being chronicled and documented in Sexy Baby. “We are the pioneers.”

  Next shot is Winnifred performing with her acting troupe. On stage, Winnifred proclaims, “What we’re saying is, people know more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than Susan B. Anthony and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and that’s gotta change.”

  It’s enough to make you believe that everything is happening as it should. Transparently, openly, young girls speaking out amid the barrage of sex, sex, sex coming at them.

  Until twenty-two year-old Laura introduces the Sexy Baby audience to “meat curtain,” meaning part of the girl’s labia is hanging down so long, well, you get the picture. She’s readying to get a labiaplasty. Laura is an assistant teacher with kindergartners. She’s determined to get genital cosmetic surgery so she’ll feel better about herself, because she’s heard what guys have said about other women’s vaginas. She says she has ni
ghtmares about her labia, but also admits that her first serious boyfriend, who watched X-rated movies, commented to her, “Oh, it’s bigger than most girls’, what’s wrong?”

  “I just feel it would be a huge turn-on to a guy to look like a porn star,” Laura continued.

  Are you wondering if Laura was risking her teaching assistant position for sharing her labiaplasty story in the documentary? That’s the way things work today.

  One of my serious relationships, after leaving New York, lasted four years and was among several serial monogamous partnerships I had over the years. Jeffrey, a handsome lawyer in a Beverly Hill’s law firm, couldn’t get it up, though I didn’t discover his real issue until much later. It was before Viagra became widely available, but again, that wouldn’t have mattered either. It was the ’80s, and we were big partiers and enjoyed the L.A. club scene, which I threw myself into once I left performing. We’d go clubbing and drinking, getting into all sorts of mischief, then come back home where we were living together. It would get hot and heavy… then… stop. Cold.

  We weren’t having sex, but were in love, and he was so hot it was driving me crazy. We slept together every night, but nothing was happening. I was losing my mind. Then I found out what his deal was: getting off on porn magazines. He kept them in his briefcase, which I found one frustrating night. He liked to masturbate to all different types. I honestly didn’t care about that, as long as he didn’t throw it in my face, but I cared a lot that he wasn’t having sex with me.

  Miss Missouri couldn’t get laid. How hilarious.

  I wasn’t laughing.

  So I know some of what Laura is feeling when she talks about the guy she’s in a serious relationship with loving X-rated porn and asking what’s wrong with her labia. In my situation, we weren’t having sex because he was either impotent and didn’t know what to do about it or because he was masturbating enough to satisfy himself and didn’t really care about me. The bottom line is that he was spending all of his sexual energy on porn to get off, leaving me in a sexless relationship.