The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Catching a man begins in the oddest place today. You’ll never guess where you will need to start. How do your teeth look? Well, that’s the number-one issue on the minds of men and women, according to a February 2013 online national survey.

  The other thing is, the same survey finds that “65% would not date someone with credit card debt greater than $5,000; 54% would not date someone with substantial student loan debt.”

  USA Today reported on the survey by Market Tools Inc. for the Dallas-based dating website Match.com. The sampling was 5,481 unattached adults age twenty-one and older. The survey found that “38% would cancel a date because of some-thing they found while doing Internet research on their date.” Men are also very picky about the pictures they see on a woman’s Facebook wall, with 55% saying they broke up with someone because of what they saw. Forty-eight percent of women say they have done the same. Only 38% of men, compared with 48% of women at Match.com, do Facebook research before a date.

  This same survey found that 36% said they’d sent a “sexy photo or explicit text.” The definition of sexy and explicit would be significant, but they were not narrowed down for this survey.

  There’s another finding from the survey I found interesting. As reported by Sharon Jayson in USA Today, “47% of singles reported a ‘friends with benefits’ relationship. And those surveyed last year were more than twice as likely to say it turned into a long-term relationship (44%) compared to 20% the previous year.”

  The Match.com survey also validates something I’ve learned, which is what’s really important to a man. The “must-have” issues for men begin with “someone I can trust and confide in.” Shorter translation: loyalty is number one for men, which explains why when a woman cheats, men are less likely to forgive. Number two on the must-have list is “trusts and respects me,” with number three being, “physically attracted to me,” which 40% of the men surveyed called a must-have in a relationship. “Sense of humor/makes me laugh,” comes in at number four, with “is comfortable with her sexuality” at number five, with 36%.

  When women were surveyed about looking for a man, neither physical attraction nor being comfortable with their sexuality showed up anywhere on their top five must-have list. For women, the top quality they must have in a man is “treats me with respect” (84%); at number two is “someone I can trust and confide in” (77%); “has a sense of humor/makes me laugh” comes in at number three; in the fourth position on women’s must-have list is “shares the same values as I do”; while, “is comfortable communicating his wants, needs and desires” rounds out the top five. You could surmise that number five is about physical attraction and ease with sexuality, but it’s really about talking about these issues, driving home women’s need for verbal communication as a big part of intimacy.

  Feminism liberated women to seek great educations that could lead to fulfilling careers and cash. But as women finally freed themselves of having to depend on men for basic needs and shelter, society’s economic dynamics changed, morphing into the “mancession” of the 2000s.

  Is the economic competition between men and women the “end of courtship,” as the New York Times proclaimed in early January 2013? Is it a “war on men,” as Suzanne Venker declared, because women want their own money, pitting them against men, in competition for the same jobs? The answer has evolved into what Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In focuses on. Couples must discuss the woman’s career in terms of having a family before marriage, so we don’t continue perpetuating the Super Woman syndrome that is making women feel guilty, stressed out, under-appreciated and inadequate. The movie I Don’t Know How She Does It with Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t work, but the premise made a point. The obvious answer is that she doesn’t, because she can’t do it alone.

  A woman who wants to be a mom and still maintain a career has a responsibility to herself to ask and expect her future husband to understand that since she’s committed to both career and family, this means he’ll be doing the laundry and fixing dinner for the kids when she has to work late, as well as carting the kids to lessons and doctor appointments when she can’t. Oh, and she’ll be glad to do it for him, too. If you’re a feminist, this is imperative, because what you do at home has direct repercussions for the workplace, with ramifications rippling beyond your own life.

  Just a month after Sandberg’s book was published, Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of the popular website Buzzfeed, had the evidence that the book was resonating:

  It’s been less than a month since Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and I’ve already had two women bring up her name in salary negotiations. I’m not alone: Other editors whom I asked this week told me that women who worked for them had brought up the book — its broadly empowering message, and its specific advice on pushing for a raise. It’s a concrete, if anecdotal, suggestion that Sandberg’s high-profile effort to start a movement is having real consequences on a dynamic that’s well known to managers and backed by volumes of research. Women often ask for less money than they could get, and negotiate less aggressively than men.

  What Sandberg’s book also proved is that women take on work and the majority of household duties, including parenting, while men never expand their responsibilities to make marriage a truly equal partnership. This might be the one reason why women don’t cheat. They don’t have time.

  In the ’90s, everyone freaked out about the end of dating as we had known it, with one big question at the dawn of Internet-dating being whether equality demanded that a woman pay her fair share on a date. The initial meeting for coffee is fine, but once the attraction is clearly sparked, it shifts. Of course, it depends on the woman, obviously, and there are exceptions, with the great news being we can craft what we want. My advice remains that a woman should not pay on the first date, even if she can. Of course, if you’re an older woman looking for a boy-toy, well, that’s a different story, at least at first. But even then there’s a need for the woman to understand the ego of a man, even one who makes less money than you do.

  This gets into romantic territory. Just because a woman can pay and the man knows it, doesn’t mean both wouldn’t benefit from the romance created when a man has an opportunity to buy her dinner. This allows the woman to reveal she can give up control, even if she doesn’t have to, while the man shows he can take care of a woman, something that will be in his DNA no matter how advanced society becomes. The balance shifts in this moment: The woman is on the receiving end, an instant that is very much like sex itself, which can only happen if she gives permission. It’s the basic dynamic of a relationship. Everything depends on the woman.

  Women are claiming that dating has devolved into a series of text messages that end in women “hanging out” with men, without a date ever happening, which is being blamed on the “hookup culture.” Citing “asynchronous communication,” otherwise known as Facebook, texting and Twitter, as the reason for the demise of courtship and dating, culture-watchers and experts are once again proclaiming that another generation is being screwed out of the pleasure of intimacy. It’s leaving them bereft and without hope of what once was a wonderful experience. Man meets woman; man dates woman; man and woman fall in love; write your happy ending here.

  Dating hasn’t gone anywhere for women who know they deserve it.

  And, oh, how quickly we forget how badly we wanted out of what the 1950s offered women, which was no control over our lives whatsoever. A time people are now looking back on with… amnesia.

  It was a time when women were seen as a “man’s wife, sex object, mother, housewife — and never as persons defining themselves by their own actions in society,” as Betty Friedan describes it. The images flying through the culture in the 1950s were assaulting American women, “coming at us from the women’s magazines, the movies, the television commercials, all mass media and textbooks of psychology, and sociology,” writes Friedan. It was the image of the perfect woman, to which we all were to aspire. The “problem with no
name” was having all the things a woman was supposed to have, but still wanting more. Becoming overwhelmed with guilt because she “didn’t have an orgasm waxing the family-room floor.” Unhappy and unfulfilled, but she couldn’t name why, because it had nothing to do with the traditional things that women had been consumed with accumulating.

  It wasn’t long ago that what women wanted didn’t matter, because back in the pre-feminism, pre-sexual-liberation years, we were still told what we should want by the media, in church, and through what society would accept as our proper role. This was back when there were no “women’s issues.” Women weren’t taken seriously and didn’t much think there was anything wrong with that. Catching the man was the only agenda item, but how to go about it didn’t matter as much, because he chose you.

  Today, a match of mutually beneficial goals wrapped in an agreement is less likely to last forever than at any time in human history. On top of this, women are being led to believe there’s no good news if you’re looking for love. We’ve come a long way and have a multitude of choices, and now women are suddenly grappling with the notion that dating’s dead. It’s gone from the “Should I pay my share?” 1990s question to “Courtship is dead,” as proclaimed by the Style section of the New York Times.

  Women are allowing themselves to be whipsawed back and forth from one hookup to another, because a woman’s not sure if that last text message that came in — “dropping a line in the water, hoping for a nibble,” as the Times couched the challenge to women today — is a query a woman should grab for “FOMO” (fear of missing out), or maybe ignore because it doesn’t mean anything.

  Savvy Hanna Rosin, in an article about the millennial-oriented Gaggle website in the Times, published in October 2012, says, “Now feminist progress is largely dependent on hookup culture.” She goes on to say that women today are looking for “fulfilling relationships that exist outside the path of marriage.”

  This is what I’ve done my entire life, and I’m in a completely different generation than the twenty- and thirty-somethings. I never focused on Mr. Right and loved the company of men for decades, preferring serial monogamy to marriage. It’s just that more women are choosing it today and that is news. It’s not news, however, that the wider your social circle is, the more men you’ll meet, but if having a gaggle of men of differing types works, I’m all for it. I just know a so-called post-dating era couldn’t happen unless women were buying into it, which isn’t a good thing on any level, and I don’t have to be a millennial to figure that out.

  The Gaggle was founded by Jessica Massa and Rebecca Wiegand as an offshoot of Massa’s book by the same name, and considers itself, according to an article in the Times, part of the post-dating landscape. On the site, Massa and Wiegand champion the so-called non-date, group non-date and networking non-date.

  The mission statement of the-gaggle.com contains a “vow never, ever to publish a piece called ‘The 10 Best Ways to Satisfy Your Man in Bed.’ Thank the sex gods. Instead, they publish pieces like “Give A F*#!ing Fantastic Blowjob!” written by “a sex educator with five years’ experience,” the title in all caps, exclamation point! Their advice includes, “If you are fulfilling your man’s porn star fantasies, then fuck yeah, swallow.”

  That triggered my gag reflex, involuntarily. It’s déjà vu all over again, with advice that could have come from Penthouse.

  This latest advice for women, according to this article, is telling a twenty-first century female that in order to fulfill “your man’s porn fantasies,” you must swallow. Do you want to swallow? That’s not a question to be asked, evidently. Some women love it, some don’t. But it’s not like this is revolutionary stuff or even all that new to ponder.

  And I’m still trying to figure out the difference between “Give A F*#!ing Fantastic Blowjob!” and “The 10 Best Ways to Satisfy Your Man in Bed,” except that the former is a lot stingier. There’s another problem. Advice on giving a f*#!ing fantastic blowjob that includes “fuck yeah, swallow” as its climactic pointer is a bait-and-switch proposition when the post begins with a smart “play it safe” caveat, stipulating that a “mint flavored condom keeps you and your partner safe, but it will get you so minty fresh you’ll feel like the porno version of the Orbit girl.” I don’t know any man, whatever his age, who considers getting a blowjob with a condom to be f*#!ing fantastic.

  If you want sex, have it, though I’d suggest you know the guy, because in the modern era, sexually transmitted diseases are still lethal, which I hope at stardate 2014 I don’t have to tell anyone. Like to swallow? By all means do. Having sex because you enjoy it won’t preclude finding a relationship that matters, which my life proves. If you meet someone and it hits, it hits. That’s a way to live life that is vitally exciting. Men were never the center of my universe; they simply added to the joy and excitement of the life I was leading. I had no intention of going without men. They were a spectacular dessert during my bliss-quest.

  Much of my dating life was always done on the fly. Dinner reservations? What’re those? Some men certainly do plan, plan, plan, but there are a whole lot of people who don’t, myself included.

  But is this evidence of a post-dating world?

  Only if that’s what you want to orchestrate and that’s the way you want to live your life. Just because guys are into group dates or non-date events doesn’t mean women have to start once again playing by their set of criteria. Log this under another event in the cultural boomerang to the bad old days.

  The Guardian’s Jill Filipovic, who writes spectacularly modern advice on “gender and other agendas,” took the New York Times’ “end of courtship” article down very easily by giving credit where it’s due to “feminist victories” that make women’s lives today better. She tells her generation, “If your goal is to live a varied life, to learn about yourself through a variety of relationships, romantic and not, and to develop reasonably fully as a human being before you settle down, then there has never been a better time to be alive (especially as a woman).”

  Where many girls, including myself, had to take a boatload of grief for not wanting what we were supposed to want in the era of Gloria, today’s generations are free and clear of the traditionalist guilt, unless they’re dumb enough to listen to it. What Filipovic described is exactly the life I have led.

  The means of communication since the Pill all of a sudden turned the language of formal courtship into having sex at will, and screw marriage. Today, it’s called simply the hookup. This latest definition of having sex without consequences hasn’t shattered all form. It’s just been given a new name.

  Women have always done that, just without the fancy technology that makes relationships between the sexes even quicker and more disposable. At least now we have all the cards men have, though, unfortunately, the latest generation of non-daters is so intent on equating the era of post-feminism with one of post-dating, that women are negating the power they’ve got to craft whatever it is they want, whether the men like it or not. Because the one thing that hasn’t changed is that women still control what kind of relationship they want and receive.

  When a man sets his sights on a woman, he won’t get sidetracked. It’s at this moment, at the beginning, that the woman has to communicate what she expects from him. The man will also have expectations that he believes the woman must meet. Her response tells him whether he has it right or not, but also sends him a message of her own value. It’s the standard she sets now that will impact his respect for her. A good man wants to be worthy of you, because you’re the woman he might marry, and maybe have children with. This all comes through a negotiated agreement known as dating. It’s the mother of all mating dances that sets up the standards of your relationship, which will never be higher than at the time of courting. This is very serious stuff for a woman, because what she’s taking on includes not only the possibility of who will be responsible for her children, but also the life they will share and build together even if children aren’t part of th
e package. When children aren’t present, the woman must still convey what type of creative life they will manifest through their relationship, because that will be the foundation of their partnership.

  Does anyone actually buy into the notion that men have changed as much as women have? At least Suzanne Venker gets that much right: “Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.”

  It’s a continuation of the argument against feminism that hit decades ago.

  Venker continues: “But after decades of browbeating the American male, men are tired. Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.”

  Methinks Ms. Venker doth protest too much on behalf of men.

  Men have never had it so good: sex without marriage; women who can help pay the bills; and fewer demands, because the woman is supposed to be responsible for her own life and happiness. After all, she finally is in charge and can make any choice she wants. And if you marry her, she’ll not only work as hard as you at her career, but do all the domestic chores, too. What a deal for men.

  Once again, women are being lectured to from the same book that birthed the 1950s and convinced women that household appliances were their oasis, and that when relationships and marriage don’t work today, it’s all the woman’s fault. When we pick the wrong man, it is, but when we transparently communicate and act on what it is we do want, making sure men get our signals, it sets men free to either follow or get out of the way for a man who wants an equal partnership, which means more for everyone, including happiness.

  When you put this all together, and add in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, what you’ve got is the next stage in a feminist, sexual and economic revolution that has a real chance of shaking the dust off of American society and finally manifesting marriages that make the people in them happier.