The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Caught between the ages of the feminine mystique and feminism, but also falling madly in love with the force that is Bill Clinton, there are few female leaders who have confounded younger women more than Hillary. This is borne out by emails and comments I received, and conversations I had, on the front lines of the 2008 election season. Women continually contacted me confused and resentful over how such a powerhouse female would choose to stay married to a serial philanderer. The story is generational, one that modern women can’t relate to without context of history, which includes the roles that have been expected of females before the age of Gloria Steinem. The human collision of feminism and marriage to a man who humiliates you is difficult to dissect and accept.

  You can certainly see the parallels in Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Rodham Clinton and even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was caught between them, in an era we can’t seem to escape. Eleanor had her own policy world, a world that John F. Kennedy ironically needed when he was trying to wrestle the nomination, pleading with Mrs. Roosevelt for her endorsement. Mrs. Kennedy built the Kennedy mystique to last, and it continues to reverberate. Hillary is a woman who saved her husband’s presidency at a time he was being hunted politically.

  All three women had the duty of making the success of their husbands’ presidencies possible through independent actions, which established their own legacies along with their husbands’. The media looked approvingly at the architectural work Mrs. Kennedy oversaw when she refurbished the White House, over the design and artistic elements, the social affairs and whirlwind glamour. These were all part of a woman’s duties in the days of the feminine mystique. However, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Rodham Clinton were seen as lightning rods in the presidencies of their husbands for daring to have voices, platforms and places in policy creation. Coming before the World War II dividing line, Eleanor had no chains; Jackie grew up in the throes of the war, whose ending created the feminine mystique that caught her up; Hillary was a product of both, her persona burnished by history and Eleanor Roosevelt’s power, at a time when the feminist revolution backlash was producing a puritanical second wave of “occupation: housewife.”

  Michelle Obama’s political position has the gift and burden of race, but not the other trappings of Eleanor, Jackie or Hillary. The first African-American first lady in U.S. history, Mrs. Obama is clearly shaping policy from behind the scenes as a strong adviser to her president husband in a way that has benefited women and families, with a special focus on the military. In addition, she has impacted the way children eat through her Let’s Move! initiative. She’s still making her legacy, so it’s unfair to weigh her impact, which already has been very real and potentially lasting, especially if you look at her role in emphasizing childhood obesity and the importance of real food in our diets. By planting the first ever White House garden, complete with beekeeping, she has made a historic statement on health and lifestyle.

  Going beyond Eleanor, whose assertiveness as first lady was revolutionary, Hillary took on health care policy for President Clinton, heading the President’s Task Force on National Health Reform. The knives came out and filleted her for her efforts, which went well beyond just evaluating the mistakes that were made. The true partnership of Bill and Hillary in the White House was seen as an overstep, even if it was a perfect picture of how the modern marriage can work. Hillary’s fierce commitment to make policy work for people resurrected the stereotypical feminine mystique picture of power being masculine, which meant the femininity that described the traditional nature of the first lady was challenged. The male-dominated media couldn’t wait to pick it up.

  When FDR was sick, Eleanor became his legs. Jack was sick his entire life and presidency, but Jackie was never his political stand-in. Hillary was a political partner, feminist representative on policy, traditionalist’s target, and savior.

  When Hillary was slapped down for her health care efforts that failed, a new role was immediately created for her. She was Jacquelineized, or at least, that was the goal of the White House image-makers. This happened even after she was said to have “taken Capitol Hill by storm” in the first months of the health care debate. A noted Clinton critic and MSNBC host, Lawrence O’Donnell, was the Senate Finance Committee’s chief of staff at the time of “Hillarycare,” as it was derisively called. In a May 1994 New Yorker article, “Hillary the Pol,” O’Donnell described the difficulties she faced with health care at the time, saying, “She held her position in the face of questioning by these senators around the table, many of whom know a great deal about the subject. And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair.”

  She’d failed on health care, so it was back to feminizing Hillary, but quick. To put it in one sentence from someone other than myself, Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast wrote in February 2013 of Hillary’s post-health-care debacle period back in the ’90s:

  She had to endure this little woodshed period of acting like she was passionate about historical preservation, trotting off to places like Edith Wharton’s house and handing out plaques (her historical interests, she once told me in an interview, really extend back to ancient civilizations, marveling over questions like “How many generations it took to figure out what you boiled and put in the sun to cure a dread disease”).

  But her inner-Eleanor wouldn’t be denied long. In 1995, she gave the speech heard round the world, saying, “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights,” that would herald the greatest cause of her life, the empowerment of women and girls across the globe.

  A woman who, like Jackie and Eleanor, had helped make her husband’s presidency possible is now on the cusp, at the very least, of having the option to take another shot at winning the presidency. When African nations have had female presidents but we haven’t, it’s a scandal. Still, people — women — shrug and wonder why it’s important.

  Some people still wonder what kind of woman would permit her husband’s philandering and not leave. Jacqueline and Eleanor were captivated by bigger things, as was Hillary. It wasn’t just a marriage that was at stake; it was America itself, as well as what each man stood for, and the opposing forces that would have benefited if their presidencies had been destroyed. How many divorces hinge on such a world-shaking pendulum?

  In 1998, if Hillary Rodham Clinton hadn’t fought for Bill Clinton’s presidency, it all would have ended. All of it, because Democrats were so upset at the lying and deceit of it, the dangerous risks taken when it was clear the Republicans had hunted Bill Clinton from the start, plotting for the moment to take him out. Hillary’s the one who stood in front of congressional Democrats and told them they had to stand fast. The American people were behind William Jefferson Clinton, having decided it was just sex and they couldn’t care less.

  We cannot possibly understand what it must have been like growing up in the generation of Jackie and the feminine mystique, caught between the expected “occupation: housewife” and the sexual revolution, as Hillary was caught between that and Gloria Steinem feminism. Eleanor likely would have understood both, because she had the freedom of being beyond both. These women were and are the last of their kind, women who helped, then capitalized on their husbands’ statures to make bigger and broader lives for themselves, even as they were responsible for keeping their men and their myths alive in deadly times. They were archetypes that don’t exist today.

  Being Jackie and being Hillary were both a lot different from being Eleanor. Today, women can choose anything we want with nothing out of bounds. We have to beware to not go backward again, as happened between Eleanor Roosevelt’s time and Jacqueline Kennedy’s. The ground of equality in relationships, between marriage and work, is not solidified. Expectations of women’s roles are being argued again today at a moment when we have a chance to shatter not only corporate glass ceilings forever, but also break open doors to equality in our homes.

  At the end of 2012, Suzanne Venker, the daughter of Phyllis Schlafly, the
crusader against women’s equality and the ERA, wrote an article titled “The War on Men,” in which she proclaimed that “women aren’t women anymore.” Then Venker sets off in the direction of 1950:

  The so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families — it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

  Never fear, there’s an answer. All women have to do is “surrender to their nature — their femininity — and let men surrender to theirs.” What’s our nature? It’s to nurture, Venker says, to stay at home, to let men be men, which means women can’t be in the workforce, because competing with them is bad for marriage, which men supposedly don’t want anymore.

  Why wouldn’t any man want a woman bringing home a paycheck, one that might equal or exceed his own? What family doesn’t benefit from the matriarch’s financial contribution? Maria Shriver found out in her 2009 study on working women for Center for American Progress that many women are not only breadwinners but are also their families’ chief financial officers, which Citigroup VP Lisa Caputo first put on the map. There is no going back.

  Venker’s prescription comes straight out of the post-WWII advertising age, and we all know where that led us.

  Being Jackie won’t work anymore, economically, romantically or sexually. Philandering as a sport is out, unless it swings both ways, and most men aren’t built for that, never mind that it won’t make anyone happy.

  Marriage requires what Jackie, Hillary and Eleanor all had, to varying degrees. We’ve benefited from feminism, which has taken the dog out of the male beast as we appeal to their better nature, because women now have the financial option to leave. What’s optimal in a modern marriage is a creative partnership that includes children but also allows both partners to think wider, to invest in each other’s lives and careers, while sharing an equal role at home and in the family.

  What we all need to guard against is being sold an advertising campaign that was bought once before and caused generations of women to suffer. We can’t blame anyone else, because this time we have history to remind us. Women have changed; we are closer to equality than ever before. Men have changed, too, and are getting used to what we bring to the table. Now, women have to encourage men to step up and take their share of what used to be called “women’s work,” because if we don’t, we’ll lose ground again. Women are allowing the modern era to engulf and overwhelm them, because many can’t admit they need a fifty-fifty partner.

  We mustn’t let anyone romanticize a bygone era that wasn’t that good for women. It’s not just women who will pay the price this time. Men will, too, and the next generations will suffer through yet another era of boomerang regression, already immortalized by the feminine mystique, and marketed by people with an agenda that has nothing to do with a woman’s happiness.

  6

  How to Catch a Man

  Some things never change.

  There is no doubt that what you look like matters. It’s a lie to think otherwise. But it’s not about perfection as much as it is about confidence and knowing how to make the most of what you’ve got. That includes being comfortable with your own sensuality, whether you’re a beauty queen type or a big and beautiful, plus-size girl. At the root of it all, in case you haven’t caught on yet, is not just what you look like, but who you are as an individual. The key is not pretending or projecting some magazine’s view, but being the person you actually are in your own skin. You cannot do this without knowing what it is that excites you, which goes well beyond externals.

  We’ve got better things to do now than worry about how to catch a man, right? Women are no longer focused on being perfect, because we’re more invested in being the individuals that we know we can be. Right? We want it all, and why not? Especially since we are no longer tied down to rules and expectations of behavior that someone else drew up. If men have been masters of their fate forever, at least now women hold the reins to their own destiny, an option my mother didn’t have.

  Whether women can have it all depends on your personal definition of what that means, which includes the financial means you have at your disposal to manifest it. There’s also a lot to be said for making specific choices that cut off other avenues that you have decided aren’t for you. It’s not feminism’s fault if things aren’t happening as you’d like. Sometimes, it’s just being patient, waiting for life to unfold in its own time, which is the hardest lesson to learn. At other times, we aren’t kind to ourselves, harshly judging what really is the best we can do at the time. There are still other times when we have no one to blame but ourselves — when it’s all our fault that we’ve ended up in the mess we’re in, often knowing it was coming long before it landed.

  As Taylor Swift admits, “I realize the blame is on me. ’Cause I knew you were trouble when you walked in, so shame on me.”

  That’s when it’s all the woman’s fault. It’s a topic I’ve mined for more than a decade. Obviously, it’s not about blaming yourself every time you turn around. It’s about those times when you knew he was bad news, but you just couldn’t resist. Or maybe it’s not that he was the wrong guy, but you just knew it was never going to work, and you plunged ahead anyway. Maybe it was a guy who has been hovering for a long time, who catches you at a weak moment and you succumb, just to have someone to take up the slack in a life that’s become too much to handle on your own.

  Been there, done that. When I married Brian, a guy who had known me most of my life, I knew it was a mistake. However, I’d spent my childhood, adolescence, teenage years and college life, all working so hard, going through so much; I was just tired and wanted an escape. As if you can escape inside a marriage. There are innumerable other details that inevitably come with thinking you can escape your life into marriage, but they hardly matter to anyone but me, because the specifics come in any number of shades and colors, named by women of every generation in time. I was just another one of them to make the same mistake. I’d graduated early from college, then headed into marriage. It was over before we said, “I do.”

  What became so incredibly unbearable to me, however, was this man who had known me all my life and hounded me for years to be his, all of a sudden forgot why he’d liked, then loved me in the first place. The greatest passion and purpose in my life was performing, which is one thing that drew him to me from the start, because we shared a love of musical theater. But suddenly, after we were married, out of the blue, there Brian stood after coming home from work one day, declaring to me that I must be relieved that I could now give up all that silliness and not worry about anymore auditions. That I actually thought Brian would understand that I was still on my way to New York even after we got married was my biggest blunder.

  He was the guy I’d seduced during Christmas vacation, the day before my family paid for my very first trip to New York City in the middle of my junior year of college, because I was so antsy to get to Broadway that I was ready to drop out of college. And now he didn’t get me at all.

  What made Brian’s sudden pronouncement doubly difficult to hear was that I had my eyes on a dinner-theater-bound road show that would travel across the Midwest, with the plan to end up on the East Coast. When I informed Brian that I had no intention of giving up performing or staying home, he erupted in an explosion of fury I’d never witnessed from him. It scared the crap out of me and was a harbinger of physical intimidation and emotional collisions to come, which eventually led me to flee from the comfy condo and take refuge back home. This delighted my mom and family, because the whole thing had been one colossal mistake from the start and everyone knew it. My un-marriage, as I call it because it was over before it began, cured me forever of tying the knot, or so I thought. I wanted an annulment, however implausible, because that was what I felt about the union, but I was in such a hurry to go on the
road, getting out became enough. It’s why most people who know me think I’ve only been married once. It’s an uncounted un-marriage, as far as I’m concerned, which says it all.

  I can honestly say it wasn’t entirely my fault, because I was the same person the day after we got married as I was the day before. That this guy who’d known me since we were kids thought I’d change just because we got married was not my fault. What was my fault is talking myself into marrying Brian in the first place. The clue of what was to come was when his dad, who was an amazing man, took us to a jewelry store so Brian could get me an engagement ring. His dad laughed out loud at him when he freaked out about the cost, because it wasn’t like it was a huge ring or that he had money problems. Brian’s mother was always a challenge, a woman who didn’t drive a car and demanded to be driven everywhere. It was the mid-1970s! I used to tweak her by picking fights about the Equal Rights Amendment, which she viciously opposed. She also complained about the minister I chose, so we had two. Then she started a fight with my family in the middle of our living room as guests mingled at our reception. I’ve learned a lot since then.

  It’s really not all that hard to seduce and snare the man you want, but what once was a game of catching the man, today is much more complicated when you get to the fine print. The repercussions when you do set your sights on someone are far more important to consider. What needs to happen from there is a course in managing expectations and being honest with yourself, while making sure you both want the same things and that the relationship is really one built on equality. What you want must be compatible with his desires, because that’s how you get there.