The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  It all depends on men’s reaction to this cultural shift, which is actually an immense opportunity to gain something valuable lost by the sacrifices they have been making without much acknowledgment. If men take women’s call for equality at home and in their careers as a threat, seeing women taking their power while the men are asked to take an expanded role at home that’s foreign to them, we’ll have a collision on our hands. The politics of sex could rear up and this chance could morph into competition. The potential for men to break the pattern of isolation and separation from family life that their heavy workload causes will be lost because they didn’t take the leap, which will require a bit of faith.

  An article in the Harvard Business Review by James Allworth made an incredibly important point on this subject. In “It’s Not Women Who Should Lean In; It’s Men Who Should Step Back,” published in April 2013, Allworth includes a poignant anecdote from Bonnie Ware, a woman who worked in palliative care, with people who are dying. One of the major regrets these dying men had was working too hard, which, Ware said, “came from every male patient” she nursed. “All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.” Women felt the same way, but they were also older-generation females, who weren’t the primary breadwinners, according to Ware.

  No one is saying this will be easy. It will be a foreign adventure at first. What we all have to gain, if the bravest and most adventurous among us give it a try, might be more balanced lives and a more equitable existence for everyone, with children understanding the value of a true partnership, not to mention seeing a path to happiness. Where no one gets cheated out of the most delicious elements of relationship — love, career and purpose, the myriad of family experiences, all of which makes up life’s abundance itself.

  Women have never been in charge before, which is only going to expand in the years to come. We’ve never had everything at our fingertips that a man has had. Now that we do, it’s understandable there’s some confusion. But it’s certainly no reason to throw the social engine in reverse like what happened in the post-WWII era and into the 1950s. That’s what led to the concoction of the feminine mystique, which sold America the notion that all a woman needed was children and a husband, or a kitchen full of appliances, because she didn’t have a brain in her head that was meant for anything but other people’s needs.

  Social media and the pleasures of instant intimacy — today’s equivalent of cheap thrills, which always cost more than anyone is told — are just the latest distractions for men and women. At least they do hold the hope and possibility of connecting in a way that generations before never had, expanding the playing field. There was once a time when after one bad relationship in a town where everyone knew each other, there was little hope of finding love again. There are ups and downs to online dating, fitting the best of roller coaster analogies, but life’s possibilities never offered so much extended value.

  Amid all of the technological changes stand women and men and the human craving to connect, touch someone, love someone and share dreams. The first thing that needs to be settled is what it is you want. All these years after the Pill, if there’s one thing that modern women have learned, it’s that our choices have expanded, but biology is a reality that men don’t have to face. But today, for women of means, there are lots of options.

  It’s easier to be single and have a child if you’re a woman; all you need is money and a good nanny. It’s easier to be older and have a child if you’re a woman; fertility treatments make miracles possible. But the decision to have children is still the one thing women grapple with that can require different dating patterns than those chosen by men, who don’t face a biological reality. At least women are not restricted today by choices on how to have children or the time-frame in which they choose to have them. Fertility miracles and options abound, so this puzzle is easier to fit together when you’re ready, which was never the case in prior generations.

  There’s another side to this single-mother story, however, which is that poor women have a totally different reality. According to UCLA psychologist Benjamin Karney, “Girls who think they have somewhere to go in life don’t get pregnant; girls who think they have nowhere to go are less careful about contraception.” This was just one of the things covered by Karney and other UCLA psychologists in a study on marriage, relationships and values, which was reported in the July 2012 issue of Journal of Marriage and Family. According to Karney, these women don’t trust the men they’re with to be responsible, and so believe any relationship or marriage would ultimately end, a belief that impacts their decisions. Statistics support their pessimism.

  Single mothers, especially the poor, value marriage as much as anyone, despite what criticisms have been leveled at them in the media. The difference, according to the UCLA psychologists, is that low-income women have no role model for what a good marriage looks like. Also from the study, posted on the UCLA.edu website:

  Karney said that an affluent eighteen-year-old girl does not want to get pregnant because that would interfere with her plans for college, her career and a future husband. A poor eighteen-year-old looks at what awaits her; she doesn’t see herself becoming a lawyer or even a college graduate. “But if she becomes a mother, she gets respect, purpose and someone to love her — and she doesn’t need to be married to do that,” he said. “She knows she can be a mom; she doesn’t know if she can be married forever.”

  There is an often forgotten world out there of poor, single mothers with limited opportunities for finding good, dependable men. Certainly, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is not speaking to low-income women either, yet we shouldn’t forget that any woman succeeding at the top has a chance to make it better for all women. That’s the unspoken pledge in the universal feminist charter.

  The post-dating advice contingent and the traditionalists who tell women to relinquish their “war on men” aren’t talking to low-income women either. “How to catch a man” for low-income women is more about making sure a girl doesn’t marry someone who would put her in deeper jeopardy because he can’t live up to what she’s providing for herself and her child. A marriage to a man like this is sure to make her life more miserable. Statistics have proven that divorce puts lower-income women and their children in even more perilous conditions, which the UCLA study backs up.

  More from the UCLA.edu article:

  “There is a lot you can do with a billion dollars to promote marriage, including helping people with child care and transportation; that is not where the money has been spent,” Karney said. “Almost all of that money has been spent on educational curricula, which is a narrow approach, based on false assumptions. Communication and emotional connection are the same among low-income people as in more affluent group. Their unique needs are not about relationship education. None of the data support the current policy of teaching relationship values and skills. Low-income people have concrete, practical problems making ends meet.”

  Single motherhood is an option, but a Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund report from December 2012 should disabuse anyone of the nonsense that it’s a great idea. The study, titled “Worst Off — Single-Parent Families in the United States, a Cross-National Comparison of Single Parenthood in the U.S. and Sixteen Other High Income Countries,” and authored by Timothy Casey and Laurie Maldonado, includes this in its introduction:

  This report compares U.S. single-parent families with single-parent families in sixteen other high-income countries. We find that U.S. single-parent families are the worst off. They have the highest poverty rate. They have the highest rate of no health care coverage. They face the stingiest income support system. They lack the paid-time-off-from-work entitlements that in comparison countries make it easier for single parents to balance caregiving and jobholding. They must wait longer than single parents in comparison countries for early childhood education to begin. They have a low rate of child support receipt.

  Nobody is going to
tell you that today’s dating, sex and relationship scene is easy. It is absolutely terrifying on many levels. At least women are in full control, though that’s what is terrifying to some, and helps explain why some women are giving in to men’s demands, or society’s whims, which will always be whatever is easiest for men. I write this as a great lover of men. But, seriously, if men can have it easy in a relationship, they’re going to take it easy. If you don’t know this, study up. If a man isn’t expected to do something, he won’t, and with fewer societal expectations and expanded equality between the sexes, why should he? If women want to engage in the same game with men, that’s fine. But who says you have to? What if you don’t want to?

  Women hold power in their lives in a larger way than ever before in human history. This is not hyperbole. It’s why we’re often met with resistance when giving the revolutionary advice that women need to step up and claim the power we have. This begins with our own lives, of course, with the immediate extension of this power to include our relationships. But not just how we catch a man, because it’s never mattered more what kind of man a woman catches.

  It’s absolutely true that social media makes the need to find out about one another on a first and second date almost obsolete. That’s only because the social media blast excited us all, so we jumped on board and engaged in a voluntary personal data dump. Women and men got stoked that we could hook up virtually, verbally and sexually, without boundaries or rules, with a whole new era offering permission to let it all hang out.

  Grouper, a social media networking service that brings sets of friends together, is a lot of fun, I’m sure. Do it, don’t do it. But it’s not going to change the basic desires of men and women or prove anything, except that it’s fun to hang out with people and have cocktails. The 1960s and the 1980s pretty much proved that already. Today there are just more innovative and technologically advanced ways to introduce people to each other who could never have met before the new-media era.

  What is particularly seductive and misleading about the networking and post-dating rituals is the transient rush of emotions that are connected with a fleeting night of casual flirtation that women can often mis-translate. The rush of adrenaline when you connect actually means nothing. The request for a phone number, when given, often leads to a flurry of texting in a twenty-four-hour period, then stone-cold silence when Monday comes. We re-enter the orbit of real life, and that cocktail-induced meeting is reduced to another fabulous weekend, but that’s all.

  Romance is created through slowly unfolding intimacy. Longing grows, which can only manifest through curiosity and unlocking mysteries, as well as the hope that builds from knowing something about a person that can’t be learned on Facebook in a click. Giving out your phone number in hope of getting a text message is setting the bar very low. That’s okay if you’re very young and in it for short-term thrills, but it’s going to wear your heart out.

  Considering the scenarios that continue to suck people in on The Bachelor, which has now logged more than seventeen bachelors over twenty-five combined seasons, the number of girls and women willing to give it up in a text message is unsurprising. Desperation is hard to kick.

  Hey, I love my trash TV, too. But it makes me wonder what are viewers really after? Is it the long-held notion that a man can sweep you off your feet and fulfill your fantasies of romantic love and happiness? Feminism doesn’t change this notion, nor does having a fabulous career. But it rarely plays out as you think it will, especially if you’re going to hand everything over to the man to orchestrate. It didn’t work the first time out in the 1950s and it sure as hell won’t work as the twenty-first century progresses. Or are viewers really into the show for the tabloid gossip and the drama when it all turns into a train wreck? An April 2013 People magazine article said the show’s longstanding popularity is all about “the drama, cat fights, and hot tub hijinks.”

  In Season Seventeen, bachelor Sean Lowe and all the dirt that circulated about him after he got a jolt of celebrity made for a lot of tabloid dish, with his appearance on Dancing With the Stars adding an additional ego boost. Contestant Catherine Giudici was in the classic no-win situation. She had no one to blame but herself after allowing Lowe to make a fool of her, though if the media stories are even half true, the publicity-hound couple just might deserve each other. What’s waiting for them after their glitzy televised wedding on ABC? It’s all been great fun, but what happens in the days and months after the party is what makes a marriage.

  The money and attention doesn’t change the fact that the dynamic is all wrong in this relationship. The minute Lowe started treating Catherine like a bit player in her own life, she should have gathered the courage to walk out, shaking up his world by revealing him to be the boy he’s behaving like. Catherine Giudici is using Lowe as her sun, hoping the glow reflects onto her. A smart woman creates her own heat.

  A matchmaker on NBC’s quickly canceled Ready for Love, Matthew Hussey, put it perfectly when he advised one woman, “Men value what they earn.” That’s absolutely true, and it’s something the girls in The Bachelor never seem to learn.

  But as a soap opera, The Bachelor is a reality show bonanza. When the news broke that ABC was going to mine seventeen seasons of the show and eight seasons of The Bachelorette to produce a blooper show, I can only imagine how ecstatic Bachelor fans were.

  You’ve got to be clear about what you want and not be afraid to ask for it, as well as walk away from adrenaline love affairs that you know aren’t going to deliver anything close to what you had in mind, let alone what you deserve.

  Contrary to what you might have been told, men love strong women who know what they want, ask for it and don’t settle for less. They respect women who have boundaries and aren’t going to sell themselves short. They won’t think it odd if, at a hookup event, you prefer to keep some mystery to yourself. If you set a date for coffee instead of going for texting it won’t scare him off if he’s really interested. Of course, if you’ve let it all hang out on your Facebook page, he’ll find that out before you leave the event through the convenience of his smartphone, and you’ll just come off a phony.

  It doesn’t do much good to have that first night connection if everything has already been uploaded for the world to see, or is going to be unloaded when you initially meet. It’s tempting, because you think if you don’t play the instant intimacy game you’ll end up losing to some girl who will, but there’s nothing that can keep a guy away if he’s ready and you connect with him.

  Of course, if he doesn’t have a job or has money troubles, it’s over before it starts. Hooking up with a guy who is a mess is a dead end road, just like it is if a guy meets a woman who doesn’t know who she is. No matter how much you’re attracted, it’s not meant to be, if he can’t deliver at the moment when you’re ready for something real. That’s not saying a guy who’s dealing with financial troubles isn’t worth your time, but it’s a serious issue you have to consider and discuss.

  If we’re talking love and marriage, we also have to talk about children. Our lives are no longer defined by our relationships, and that includes marriage and motherhood. A February 2013 interview with Dame Helen Mirren in Vogue magazine reveals as much about modern women as anyone has before. “‘[Motherhood] was not my destiny,’ she says. ‘I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought.’” Of course, it’s never that easy. It wasn’t women who gave her grief, Mirren adds, “It was only boring old men. And whenever they went ‘What? No children? Well, you’d better get on with it, old girl,’ I’d say, ‘No! F---off!’”

  Like Mirren, I’m child-free by choice. It was a deliberate life decision for me that boggled the mind of my mother and also more than one of the men I dated, which invariably made me more attractive to them and inevitably made them more annoying to me. My mind couldn’t be changed or altered by people who said they knew I would change my mind once I found “the right man.” It was
not about finding “the right man.” In fact, the “right man” had shown up several times in my life, and I’d enjoyed his company immensely and never once had the longing for children or marriage.

  Modern women are carving new ways to live. A 2010 Pew Research report based mainly on Census Bureau data found that almost 20% of American women do not have children, compared to one-in-ten in the 1970s: “Among all women ages 40–44, the proportion that has never given birth, 18% in 2008, has grown by 80% since 1976, when it was 10%. There were 1.9 million childless women ages 40–44 in 2008, compared with nearly 580,000 in 1976.”

  There is less of a social stigma for child-free women than ever before in America. Most women today do not have to struggle with the incoming barrage of guilt trips women fought off all of the time in the twentieth century, especially since there are so many role models of happy, contented and fulfilled women who have willingly chosen to be child-free. One’s family, however, can be something else, though that was never an issue for me.

  The same Pew poll revealed differences according to race: “One-in-five (20%) white women ages 40–44 was childless in 2008, the highest rate among racial and ethnic groups. By comparison, 17% of black and Hispanic women were childless in 2008, and 16% of Asian women were childless. Rates of childlessness rose more for nonwhites than whites from 1994 to 2008.”

  Childless is an ancient label with obvious meaning, though why it’s still accepted should be questioned. A woman isn’t “less” if she is child-free.

  A study reported on the LiveScience.com website in October 2012 revealed that even though motherhood is “highly connected with adult femininity in the United States,” women also show “low or no distress about not being mothers, even if their friends and family want them to have children.”