The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  One reason we not only crave the unscripted but also expect it is because reality shows, social media and our 24/7, new-media, American Idol existence has made everyone a star — at least in their own minds. Women put intensely personal observations on Facebook for anyone to see. Men tweet and email comments they’d rarely claim one-on-one. A person’s fifteen minutes of fame may be one YouTube, tweet, Instagram away. So, when someone says something that doesn’t include the human, real-time reaction that matches the words, we reach for a virtual rotten tomato.

  Lawrence caught the social media zeitgeist perfectly. Hathaway blundered into it with an old stereotype of what women should say and do, the irrelevance of her efforts seemingly punctuated by Lena Dunham’s Girls. Ironically, regardless of their differences, Lawrence and Hathaway both still share the Girls universe, which is made up of women struggling to live amid a world commenting and critiquing our lives. These two very public women both do so with quite a lot of grace, while the entire global audience discusses them.

  It’s a cataclysmic collision that remains a rolling crash. There’s never been anything like it for girls, regardless of age. Anyone stopping to ponder what strength of character this demands of these particular public women would be as duly impressed as I am.

  I relate to both Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence, thanks to an incident that, while it’s not remotely the same magnitude as the Oscars, for me personally, it was. I had my own horrifying, public, near-catastrophe when I was competing in the swimsuit portion of the Miss Missouri Pageant and found a large, deep brown splotch of foundation makeup on the butt of my canary yellow one-piece. I had just been announced as one of the top ten finalists, so I had mere moments to get dressed before I had to flounce back on stage. Girls gathered as someone grabbed the suit to wash out the makeup, which otherwise would have looked like I’d sat in poop backstage. When it was handed back to me, rung out but still very wet, the names of the top ten contestants being introduced in the background, I pulled it on and had seconds before “Miss Gateway” was called (I had won the local St. Louis pageant to qualify for Miss Missouri). I went strutting out on what seemed like an endless ramp.

  Now, it’s bad enough to be judged in a one-piece swimsuit with heels to match. With the crotch wet from back to front, I was praying to the pageant gods that there wouldn’t be excess water leaving a dripping trail as I walked away from the audience and back up the runway! All I could do was grin ear-to-ear and look straight at the judges, then the audience, acting as if nothing in the world was wrong. To see, then hear the girls cheer when I got backstage was the biggest charge I could have gotten. They would top it later that night by TP’ing my room after I was crowned Miss Missouri, something that makes me smile thinking about to this day.

  In the second episode of Girls, Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah Horwath, shares a modern-day trauma for most sexually active females at one time or another in our lives. Why, she’s going to get an STD test. That’s preceded by an afternoon of Googling what the possibilities are of a condom not protecting her during sex, not to mention discussing the horror of the scary stuff found around the condom’s rim, all the while inspecting her vagina. “…And then when they pull out, it’s fucking mayhem. I’ve been diagramming it in my head all afternoon. And no one speaks about this,” Hannah shrieks.

  The Catholic League will need something strong for this HBO show, and it’s only a matter of time before Bill O’Reilly’s head explodes.

  But this is the ultimate gift for women who watch.

  It’s identity combat.

  In the doctor’s office for her exam, later in the same episode, Hannah just starts babbling. Hannah’s response to the pelvic exam begins where we all did way back when: “Ow.”

  “Is that painful?” asks the doctor.

  “Yeah, but only in the way it’s supposed to be,” Hannah responds.

  It’s the twenty-first century version of, “Only a man could have come up with the idea of stirrups and that cold steel vagina scoop”— the ultimate Girls joke.

  If the HBO show does one thing, I only hope it can energize the usage of the word girls for us all, no matter our age. Because it has become clear to me the older I get that deep inside me that thing that keeps me going no matter what comes is my very girl-ness. The energy at my core that doesn’t change, no matter the life assaults and the injurious physical indignities that begin once you’re out of your twenties, which isn’t my womanness, but the unflagging force of my inner, raging GIRL.

  Lena Dunham’s writing for her character is one thing, but her presence as a brilliant, average girl with anything but a Victoria’s Secret-model image is especially stirring. And there’s certainly no discussion on whether Hannah or any of her girlfriends have the perfect labia or not. The notion that Hannah would consider a labiaplasty seems outlandish, but the conversation about it would be one for the books. If Hannah did it, can anyone doubt that the reason would be to write about it? The post-operation labiaplasty ouch factor would be gut-splitting comedy, and one can only imagine what the back-and-forth about “meat curtain” would sound like.

  You cannot deny the statistics that show a lot of women are turning to “designer vaginas.” The pornification of modern culture is one reason, but it would happen even if women were supremely confident about themselves, because the accessibility and medical affordability of cosmetic surgery from face to foot makes it possible.

  From the UK Guardian in February 2011: A study published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 2009 revealed that there had been an almost 70% increase in the number of women having labiaplasty through Britain’s National Health Service over the previous year. The Guardian reports there were 404 such operations in 2006, rising to 669 in 2007, and jumping to 1,118 in 2008.

  Then there is RealSelf.com, billed as “the world’s largest consumer review and information site for plastic surgery,” which found that in 2012 the hottest trend in plastic surgery was a laser-based treatment for cellulose. The website reported 1.25 million searches on the site in 2012. It was followed, believe it or not, by “butt augmentation,” with the most popular such method being the “Brazilian Butt Lift,” which takes fat from “unwanted areas of the body and injects it into the buttocks.” Talk and blog gossip have surrounded hip hop artist Lil’ Kim and rapper/singer Nikki Minaj, who are said to have these Brazilian Butt Lifts. If you’re also flashing on Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, in Sex and the City, you’ve got it.

  Labiaplasty by the way, came in third, but was up 22% in 2012.

  Body image follows us all. To be able to change the body parts that have become your nemeses through procedures that won’t break you, and sometimes won’t even break your bones, means we’re now into a whole new world for girls, especially since we’re all living longer.

  When you’re over forty, it’s harder for women to find positive face and body images in the media, not to mention sexual role models. That’s finally beginning to change. The 85th Academy Awards, televised in February 2013, featured sumptuous women in their seventies, including Shirley Bassey, seventy-six, Jane Fonda, seventy-five, and Barbra Streisand, seventy, all looking radiant and ready for their close-ups at an age when men are seen as “distinguished,” but women have rarely been seen at all, especially not in Hollywood.

  Meryl Streep stepped up in the movie Hope Springs, demanding that her husband, played by Tommy Lee Jones, offer a full marriage — aka they need to start making love and touching one another — or she was going to end it. No sex sucks, Meryl’s character declares, and she’s not going to take it anymore. It’s an unheard of demand from women in the movies, especially a character willing to walk if her man won’t satisfy her. That Streep plays a sixty-three-year-old in a marriage demanding more or else is something we haven’t seen before.

  Why would you let that happen? How do you let that happen? Those are my first questions. Well, it creeps up on you, I’ve been told. Then women start telling themselves it
doesn’t matter, marriage is a friendship, too. That is true, but what makes marriage different from friendship is it also comes with the benefits of sex, as Steve Harvey labels it in his book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. Well, Streep sets out to fix what’s broken and does, with the help of Steve Carell, who plays a marriage counselor.

  Long before we get to be sixty-three, women hit a huge age-and-sex speed bump. It’s one of the least talked about issues, but it’s not by accident that a man’s midlife crisis often comes at the same time as a woman’s hormones are turning her sexuality upside down. Women can lose their libido, as well as their orgasm, the cruelest blow by nature of all. When men are feeling age hit and want a reminder of their once-youthful virility, women are often feeling their most dowdy and asexual. Today we can do something about it, or at least read Suzanne Somers and go from there.

  A popular video made by safersex4seniors.org has attracted more than 1.2 million hits as of 2013 and shows clothed seniors doing Kama Sutra poses. I’m still waiting for eighty-six-year-old Hugh Hefner and his twenty-sex-year-old wife Crystal Harris to do their own video. On another subject, can anyone imagine the ages being reversed and equally celebrated? You’d have to go back to the 1971 film Harold and Maude, which became a cult classic partly because the age role-reversal of its two title characters was so groundbreaking.

  One of the most iconic film actors of the twentieth century, Jane Fonda, who is getting deserved praise for her role in HBO’s Newsroom, not only looks great at seventy-five, but she says she’s having the best sex of her life. She told Britain’s The Sun that she was experiencing “true intimacy” and was more confident about her desires than ever before.

  “The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely wanted to discover that before dying. It has happened with Richard,” she told The Sun, of her relationship with music producer Richard Perry. “I feel totally secure with him. Often, when we make love, I see him as he was thirty years ago.”

  The story came tumbling out when Fonda was doing promotional work for her movie Peace, Love and Misunderstanding in July 2012. Having been married to Tom Hayden, French director Roger Vadim, as well as CNN founder Ted Turner, Fonda’s candor about sex at the age of seventy-four was phenomenal. I can’t name another woman so forthcoming about being libidinously satisfied at that age. She’s the girls’ answer to Hugh Hefner, and looks a hell of a lot better, too.

  Fonda went even further in Britain’s Hello! magazine, saying she was “always a courageous woman, capable of confronting governments but not men.” In the interview, which made news in the U.S. and all over the web, Fonda called herself “a chameleon, the woman men wanted me to be.”

  What’s even more interesting is where she places the blame — on her father, Henry Fonda. “I don’t want to make a cheap analysis,” she was quoted saying, “but when you have, like I did, a father incapable of showing emotion, who spends his life telling you that no one will love you if you aren’t perfect, it leaves scars.”

  The pornification of our culture; our own insecurities; daddy issues; how society feels about women getting older, looking sexy and enjoying being sexual at any age — all of these things have to do with who we choose to listen to and what tape we allow to play in our head.

  We control it all.

  3

  Talk Dirty to Me

  It was September 11, 2001.

  I had the early shift that day and had gotten up around 5:30 A.M. and turned on NBC’s Today Show. I was living in the flats of Beverly Hills, around Doheny Drive and Burton Way.

  Matt Lauer had just broken away from an interview, ready to go live, when everything sort of stopped. “We have a breaking story, though…” Once into the 9:00 A.M. hour, 6:00 A.M. in Los Angeles, Katie Couric joined Lauer saying, “Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago…”

  Then, along with everyone else watching NBC’s Today Show, and no doubt other stations as well, I watched the second plane hit the other World Trade Center Tower.

  Couric had eyewitness Jennifer Oberstein on the phone, as the history continued to play out before our eyes, all of this still preserved online for posterity through YouTube.

  What I was watching unfold seemed utterly unreal. But I watched it throughout the day, sound on mute once my phone-actress shift started, my head pounding with one of the worst migraines I’d had in recent memory, my mind reeling.

  To say I was lousy at phone sex is an understatement, though the second time around I wasn’t as freaked as I was the first, which barely lasted a weekend. I’d been doing phone sex this time for about two months or so. The stint as Relationship Consultant had solidified my expertise. The massive interaction I had with men and their views on sex during my thirteen months at the soft-core site had given me knowledge about them few others had.

  After watching the events of 9/11 play out that day, I cared absolutely nothing about the book I was intending to write that would compile my sexual education and relationship secrets together. Everything immediately became secondary to what I’d seen on the screen and the revelation of what it meant to our world, which had just come crashing down, quite literally.

  I’d been a student of politics because of when I grew up, including living through Vietnam, so I knew all hell was about to break loose. Not many had been around as I had at the start of new media, and 9/11 was a moment I had to cover; the international politics involved in telling the story was something I couldn’t miss. I’d have to put writing about relationships, women, men and sex aside, trusting that another time would come. Bailing on phone sex within days of 9/11, I moved to covering politics as I had been doing since I started writing. This time what I’d be writing about was different, the stakes higher, because our country had just been attacked.

  But on 9/11, I still had my shift, though it would be a short one, just a few hours, with very few calls.

  Some things you don’t forget. That day I had three calls, all from men who said they were air traffic controllers. You must take all identification when interacting with strangers, whether it’s the extreme example of phone sex, or even something more benign as social media, with a grain of salt. However, I have little doubt that the men, on this day, were who they said they were and did what they say they did. No one talked about sex. None of the men wanted to do anything but just talk about what had happened that morning. How freaked out they were. Only one man stayed on for very long with me. I had no way of knowing what the other girls were experiencing, because I wasn’t on the more popular lines that day. Besides, it was very early Tuesday morning, not exactly a banner shift in the best of times.

  Looking back on the research and anecdotes I have compiled over the years, whether it was the adult soft-core business, the phone sex industry or my job as a Relationship Consultant, the impetus was about understanding the human animal, our emotional and sexual urges. It’s our imperfect selves who long for connection and emotional and physical confirmation of our importance, affirmation that we matter, especially to someone else, if possible.

  How did Miss Missouri end up excavating sex on a phone sex line? It’s never one thing that starts you on a quest to quench curiosity and answer questions rolling ’round in your mind. That I landed on earth amid the sexual, political and feminist revolutions played a big part in it all. In the mix was making sense of my own life, too, which is the one job we all share in common.

  When my long-term relationship ended with porn-obsessed Jeffrey, I was liberated from the excruciating humiliation but left with all sorts of questions. The first was how such a sweetheart and hunk of a man, who was very successful, could make such choices. It wasn’t like I was unattractive, inattentive or sexually stiff. At least I knew it wasn’t my problem that Jeffrey wasn’t interested in satisfying a libidinous feminist who enjoyed sex and wanted to take turns leading the way sometimes.

  However, since Jeffrey’s porn fetish w
as all-consuming, not only was I sure I couldn’t be the only woman experiencing this, but it set a fire in my erotic brain center to find out why men choose porn even when they have a hot and ready woman in their bed. Very few men reject sex for pornography, especially when it’s a daily option. That’s just stupid. They enjoy it in addition to what they’re getting, which if they’re smart is from a woman they adore.

  Porn is about variety, the strange and the unknown. It satisfies the frequency some men need, which porn makes easy, especially when their partner isn’t available or the guy just wants to get off fast. For a minority of men it’s an addiction, as I saw first-hand.

  Thankfully, my relationship with Jeffrey, who was a listless screw when he did get it up — with apologies to Erica Jong, because I was incapable of the “zipless fuck” — came amid other interesting men.

  One of the most sexually satisfying and deliciously life-affirming triangles a girl could conjure up in her imagination, let alone actually experience, proved to me that not only can a woman have sex without committing to the men she was bedding, but every girl should try it at least once. It also proved to me that you can be crazy about two men at the same time.

  I highly endorse being loved and devoured by two virile men at the same moment in time, if not in the same location and bed. You may be curious about threesomes, but they’re not my thing. But dating and having sex with two different men you care deeply for can be deliciously satisfying, not to mention great for your ego.