The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  The E.L. James dark-and-twisted romance starts with a magic moment, irresistible attraction. It escalates into hot, kinky sex, but what develops in Fifty Shades becomes a role reversal, with Anastasia the driver of the relationship and sexual boundaries that include extremely erotic experiences where she’s taught the endless bounds of passion and how to say no to what goes too far for her. She also refuses to accept anything less than she deserves, while lapping up the domination, making Christian want to be a better man. It leads to the aggressively dominant male being taught sexual intimacy, something Christian Grey has never experienced and ends up healing his tortured heart. The two find middle erotic ground, add in villains that continually work to derail their happiness for drama and suspense, which is all tied up in a relationship bow that makes for a satisfying end for Fifty Shades fans.

  However unbelievable, this is what romantic fantasy is all about, turbocharged with kinky extremes. Love, mind-blowing sex, a great marriage and kids, with no money problems, it’s the ultimate happily ever after, because Anastasia gets everything she wants, multiple orgasms included.

  When Katie Couric had E.L. James on her ABC daytime show Katie in early 2013, the former Today Show host showed up dressed in a figure-hugging leather dress. The entire show was geared toward the audience that had put Fifty Shades on the map. Graphics were handcuffs and erotic intros and exits, with the conversation taking the sex James included in her novel seriously, which is a major milestone, even if it’s because she’s monetized erotica in a new way.

  One of the men invited on Katie that day to talk about Fifty Shades of Grey was Craig Carton, who’d recently featured the topic on his morning talk-radio sports show on WFAN. Carton had a sense of humor about the James book, but delivered the truth to men who cared to hear it: “It literally proves that the average guy is either not good in bed or not satisfying his woman to the point where she could be satisfied,” Carton said to Couric. He’s exactly right, too. Women want more from their men in bed, and for the man who delivers, the reward will be worth it.

  5

  Being Jackie, Being Hillary

  How’d we get here? The state of women’s angst about dating and relationships seems to be at a high again. We’ve been hit by a boomerang of back-to-the-past nostalgia, brought on by amnesia, or invigorated sentimentality for something that won’t work any better than it did the first time around.

  The most revolutionary arrival to the conversation is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which demands that women ask men to handle fifty percent of the domestic duties in addition to their careers, just as most women do, versus women opting out of leadership roles, because expecting a man to do as much at home as a woman is still foreign territory in American culture.

  We’ve been here before — that moment where progress stops and retro becomes fashionable again. We’re on the cusp of equality in our relationships but can’t quite tip the balance, because corporations, government and our culture in general won’t do their part unless women convince men to do theirs. When did the amnesia begin to set in, despite the obvious clues that the backward boomerang is a circular spiral downward?

  Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, at the time when Jacqueline Kennedy became America’s representation of womanhood. It was a cultural and political collision, as Mrs. Kennedy’s perfect image blasted across television sets at the moment when the stitches of the traditional American family quilt were fraying. The embodiment of female perfection, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was Madison Avenue’s picturesque personification of a woman who couldn’t be happier than living her life through her husband and children. Uninterested in the education and talents she had dropped like a hot rock when she married the man who, along with her children, would become the center of her universe. What woman could hope for more?

  The Kennedys became American royalty, Jackie Kennedy the queen personifying what it meant to be a woman at the time. Jackie married Jack in 1953, when Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female landed like a thud. The timing was epic. It was the height of what became an era where it was “unquestioned gospel that women could identify with nothing beyond home,” as Friedan wrote, in the Introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of her book, emphasis hers. After World War II, America would present to women a challenge that would be met by women’s magazines redefining what roles were good for women now that the boys were back. Jackie Kennedy exemplified this perfectly.

  As Michael Beschloss writes in the introduction to Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy believed at the time that “the old-fashioned style of marriage is ‘the best’” and that “women should stay out of politics because they are too ‘emotional.’” In these conversations with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy describes her first social secretary Letitia Baldridge as “sort of a feminist” and “so different from me.” They were indeed different, but the private Jacqueline Kennedy has been revealed in subsequent books to be quite a different person than what she wanted America to think she was when she was first lady.

  According to Sally Bedell Smith in her book Grace and Power, Jacqueline Kennedy’s beauty regimen included “sprinkling cologne on her hairbrush (‘fifty to one hundred strokes… every night’),” and that was just for starters. Letitia Baldridge is quoted saying Mrs. Kennedy watched her weight obsessively, “with the rigor of a diamond merchant counting his carats,” with the stress and pressure of female perfection always present. Jackie Kennedy was “addicted” to L&M cigarettes but hid her habit from the world, including those in the Kennedy circle. That she ditched first lady responsibilities is rarely covered, but she knew there was always someone else in the Kennedy entourage to sub for her. If not, Lady Bird Johnson could always step in. All the American people saw was the perfect first lady, a woman to be emulated, never the stomach-churning reality of a woman playing a role that seemed superhuman.

  While America adored the first couple, and women wanted to be Jacqueline Kennedy, the Kennedy marriage behind the scenes was an emotional blender, a sham even, unless you lived inside the jet set. John F. Kennedy was a legendary womanizer and cocksman, which everyone in their orbit, including the media, knew. It was not only accepted behavior in men of this era, but the wives were expected to look the other way. The media sheltered the truth about John F. Kennedy’s philandering, because men will be men, after all, and what’s an affair, anyway? “But we didn’t know that there were that many!” Robert McNamara exclaimed in an interview, quoted in Bedell Smith’s book.

  The role of the American man after WWII was all-powerful conqueror of the land he surveyed. The country was shifting, driven by the explosion of the easy suburban lifestyle.

  Married women took comfort in their appliance-filled homes, which were intended to make for easier and fuller lives for women, who had only one job. Making her home a perfect haven for the returning warrior, or if your husband had been in the factories, you made way for his shift in professions.

  Underneath all of this was what Friedan labeled the “feminine mystique,” the foreshadowing of an American society that was about to come unglued, because nobody realized that what was being seen on the surface came with percolating discontent at its roots. Women weren’t seen as individuals, but instead were objects, with their only acceptable role being to please their husbands on the way to having babies. By being female a woman was, through her biology, destined not to do anything, a boiled down version of what Friedan saw.

  There were some professional women, with Friedan herself a perfect example. She worked in the Mad Men world depicted in the popular AMC series, but also came to blame herself for her part in creating the happily ensconced, picture-perfect female, completely content with a domestic bliss storyline.

  In 2012, the book Mad Women was published. The author is former advertising executive Jane Maas, who was billed as a “real-life Peggy Olson,” as Salon’s Emma Mustich wrote in her
February 2012 interview. Ms. Maas talked about her existence as a professional woman in advertising in the mid-’60s: “There were very few working mothers at Ogilvy, because, as I wrote in the book, it just simply was not done in the ’60s to work full-time if you had children under the age of twelve or so. Other women looked down on you and said, ‘What do you do if they’re sick?’ That was the first question you were asked. And men thought you must be married to a bum, otherwise why were you there working?”

  Maas received the Most Obnoxious Commercial of the Year Depicting Women award twice from the National Organization for Women. Salon’s Mustich asked her if she was conflicted about creating the ads that won? Maas’ response was blunt: “No, I wasn’t conflicted. Not a whit. One of the products was Dove-for-Dishes — Dove dishwashing liquid. The whole premise of Dove-for-Dishes is that it kept a woman’s hands soft and smooth, even if she had to do a lot of dishes. The whole object there, the whole strategy behind the product, was that it was ‘made for a woman’s hands.’ And the National Organization for Women berated me that I didn’t have men doing the dishes. Well, that never crossed my mind….”

  All these years later, too often it still doesn’t cross the minds of women or men, which partly explains why reactions to Sheryl Sandberg’s book have been electric on all sides.

  Maas goes on to talk about the 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. working juggernaut that was Madison Avenue advertising in the mid-’60s, with husbands spending little time with their wives and ending up getting “lonely.” From Maas: “I think part of it was just pure sex, and part of it was that they were kind of lonely. Here were all these young women — many of them single — working as secretaries but wanting very much to get professional jobs, and they’d be happy to sit down and talk about the brands that these guys were working on, and the future of the agency, and what was going on in the office. And they were also sexually available….”

  Fast forward to the second decade in the twenty-first century, and the equivalent you have is wives with their own careers and professional lives that are often demanding. Add to that the need for two incomes in today’s competitive economy, and you’ve got a lot more stress on relationships. As we learned through the reckoning of the feminine mystique, modern women enjoy having a vibrant home life but also being engaged in the world. It makes modern relationships more challenging, and we haven’t even gotten to the longevity aspect, with people living longer. Mates people take in their twenties or thirties, by the time fifty-something rolls around, have already seen a full marriage by twentieth-century standards.

  The Kennedy marriage was described through interviews in Bedell Smith’s book as nomadic and separate. John F. Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity wasn’t really about sex, which these things rarely are, but more about “having his own secret life.” Bedell Smith writes that JFK’s “profound disloyalty defined their marriage.”

  What also defined their marriage were the times in which they lived. Jacqueline Kennedy was forced to carry a heavy weight, living her “own secret life” behind the scenes at a time when American culture was telling women they had to live a certain way.

  Given what was expected of her, but also the outsize role she played in American life as the wife of the fabulously handsome and glamorous president, who himself was seen as the new light of the western world, is it any wonder Mrs. Kennedy was addicted to cigarettes or that she obsessed about her weight and ducked out of first lady duties whenever she could? It drove Letitia Baldridge nuts enough to want to quit. There was much, much more to Mrs. Kennedy, which was seen through her historic hand in the restoration of the White House, as well as making Washington, D.C. the cultural and entertainment center of the universe, where everyone from Los Angeles to New York to London and beyond, wanted to be seen. However, these talents were also feminine in nature. Quite different was her journalism training, which she would embrace later in her life, long after the JFK era, once her children were grown and she became a successful editor in her own right.

  But being an editor when she was young wasn’t an option, because of who she was, where she came from, and her era. These constrictions grew even tighter when she met and married Jack Kennedy, then became first lady. Not only did she play the role to perfection, but as a PR machine, nobody was better. After JFK was assassinated, her last interview on record was mind-blowing. “Jack so obviously demanded from a woman — a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman would be his wife and look up to him as a man,” Mrs. Kennedy said to Arthur Schlesinger. The historian had said to Bedell Smith that Jacqueline Kennedy had “an almost European view” about her husband’s disloyalty. Jackie Kennedy called her marriage “rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic.” Mrs. Kennedy also said, “I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.” All the while, she wove the image of her slain husband so tightly around the myth of Camelot that it has managed not to unravel throughout the ravages of history.

  She also talked about when “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson over her husband, it was because they “were afraid of sex.” Eleanor Roosevelt was a dedicated Adlai Stevenson supporter and uninterested in Kennedy’s 1960 campaign until he reportedly pushed his case to her personally. So even though Mrs. Kennedy’s words came after Mrs. Roosevelt’s passing, they carry a hint of innuendo. When talking about Madame Nhu, the South Vietnamese first lady, and former congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, Jacqueline Kennedy whispered to Schlesinger, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.” The other implication of Mrs. Kennedy’s statements was that women interested in power obviously couldn’t also be interested in men. That was in 1964, with Jacqueline Kennedy still playing her role, validating that power is masculine.

  In late October 2013, The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger was published, revealing new insights from the famed historian through his private letters, never before seen. In a letter to Tina Brown, dated 8 July 1999, Schlesinger recalls having lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy in 1993. The topic of Hillary Clinton came up, whom Schlesinger had not met, though he knew her husband. He said to Mrs. Kennedy, “I gather that she is a very intelligent young woman, but I imagine that she is awfully earnest and humorless, a real blue stocking.” Jacqueline Kennedy replied, “I saw something of Hillary during the campaign last year, and she is a delight, filled with fun and irony. You will have a jolly time.”

  When you contrast Mrs. Kennedy to Eleanor Roosevelt, it reveals the twentieth-century trap women fell into after World War II. Mrs. Roosevelt was as controversial as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was traditionally conventional, at least in her public persona.

  In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated, Eleanor revolutionized what it meant to be first lady. She had a newspaper column titled “My Day,” which sixty years later would inspire Hillary Clinton to do the same. Mrs. Roosevelt held press conferences and was very involved in political issues of her own. Eleanor Roosevelt would be the first to address a convention. According to “legend,” reported by Elizabeth Deane of WGBH Boston, Mrs. Roosevelt squeezed Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy into creating what would become the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in exchange for dropping her resistance to campaigning for him in 1960. She is considered the very first person, a public official in her own right as first lady, to use what we know as mass media to publicize the issues she was championing. She and her husband also had six children, even though Eleanor Roosevelt admitted, “I do not think that I am a natural-born mother,” which came out in Hazel Rowley’s book, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage. Rowley describes their partnership as “one of the most interesting and radical marriages in history.”

  It was radical, indeed, because Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt “gave each other space” to have relationships outside their marriage. Rowley’s book takes us inside the relationship, which NPR covered when it was published. It was an open marriage, once Franklin had his affair with Lucy M
ercer, who had been Eleanor’s secretary. He worked to persuade Eleanor to stay, promising to end the entanglement, but also that they would sleep in separate beds, because Eleanor had her pride and had no intention of being made a fool. However, Franklin couldn’t stay away from his mistress, and the relationship reportedly lasted all of his life.

  Eleanor’s romantic life thrived and included men, as well as Lorena Hickok, a lesbian, beginning around the time of FDR’s first inaugural. It was obviously the stuff of great gossip, to which Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to “Hick,” from Rowley’s book: “And so you think they gossip about us… I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little about what ‘they’ say.”

  It’s positively unfathomable today to think of having a first lady being in love with other men and having her own sexual life that would evolve into a lesbian romantic life — no matter what her husband was allowed to do. People in the throes of living their lives at the pinnacle of power are now forced to navigate personal complications and human proclivities in a different manner. Back in the Roosevelts’ day, independence was possible. In our mass media environment it is not, especially since our puritanical society remains in a permanent pubescent state.

  There were suspicions about President Eisenhower and his driver Kay Summersby. Historian Gil Troy, writing in the Washington Post in 1998 about the rumors, brought up something I find far more revealing than any affair gossip: “The willing-ness to turn the uncertainties about Eisenhower and Summersby into fact says more about us than about him, and suggests that when presidents fail to act according to a higher standard, they can indeed damage the nation’s moral fabric.” That our nation’s moral fabric is still seen to revolve around the politics of sex instead of the morality of American policy is revealing.