The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  There’s nothing like a little service sex, as I call it. The depths of your sexual appetite and imagination depending, even when things at work are nuts, it can be the tonic to set you both back in sync. Service sex always goes both ways. It’s a moment in time when you decide that you want sex and you know he’ll love it, but you’re going to forego all the candles, music, wine and delicious fluff and just get down to business. (Toys can help.) It’s satisfying yourself and him in a way that doesn’t require a lot of time and energy, but gets you to a climax that is thrilling just the same. It’s the ultimate stress-reliever.

  “Set your standards high,” Harvey suggests, and I couldn’t agree more.

  After I met Mark, my husband of eleven years (and counting), when he called to ask me out I was pretty blunt. I have always known what I wanted and what I didn’t, and I also didn’t have an investment in whether I married or not, because I was a confirmed bachelorette and happy staying so. What I told Mark on the phone is that I enjoy drinking wine, and wouldn’t be wearing a skirt on our date. We’d met at a moment when my whole world revolved around launching a radio show, so although I was flirtatious, I didn’t have time for bullshit.

  When I eventually found out Mark’s reaction to that simple statement, we both laughed about it. He said he panicked immediately, because he was a beer drinker and hadn’t a clue about wine, but was intent on pleasing me, so he set out to find a restaurant that served it. When we arrived and I was thrilled, he was in heaven. As for the skirt, when Mark saw me in my ass-hugging pants, high heels and fitted blouse, he couldn’t have cared less.

  It’s not that wine is the ultimate bar for me, but I wanted to see if he could deliver something so simple that would make me happy, but also make him the hero. Win-win at the start, which also gave me a chance to thank him for his thoughtfulness and reward him with a big smile.

  In one simple assignment there is communication without a lot of words, the outcome being a conversation that matters.

  Who are you and what are you worth? Do you want your door opened? Then stand by the car and wait for it. If he doesn’t make a move to open it, you’re better off asking him to open it or walking back inside your apartment. Does he ask you to split the tab? If he can’t pay the check, he certainly won’t take the risks and pay the price required to build a relationship. If he can’t call ahead of time to set up a date and expects you to meet in a group, the guy’s a child and you need to find someone who actually wants a relationship.

  Marriage still requires love, trust and deep abiding friendship that’s glued together with the stickiness of sexual friction that only your chemistry mixed with his can produce. This requires time alone together, having fun over many days and weeks and months to nurture into something real that might have the possibility of lasting through moments of marriage hell.

  It all begins with a date, the ever-indispensible, dynamically combustible, originating catalyst to connection, long before love ignites. Anyone thinking that it all doesn’t begin here is concocting an alternative, false universe.

  The post-dating idea fits perfectly into what Steve Harvey frames as “terms that [men] created so you can require less of us.”

  It’s just so obvious, and women are doing it to themselves, which is the only way these things can happen.

  As Harvey says, “Chivalry’s not dead — it’s just not required anymore.”

  7

  God’s Outdoors

  Organized religion and the men who run it have screwed things up for everyone else. If women had a fifty-fifty stake in the leadership ranks of all religious organizations, perhaps “religiously unaffiliated” wouldn’t be so popular. Religion has also not kept up with the times. Most of us still believe in something greater than ourselves — a belief in God, however it’s defined — but more and more people are rejecting traditional religion, which is a very good sign for women, as well as for our relationships.

  Considering the gender segregation in the overwhelming majority of organized religions, it’s a miracle that women still seek out the church to have our wedding ceremonies. It really makes no sense at all, except that there’s something about the ritual, the singing, the ties to our roots, as well as the architecture of a great church, that draws us back. Traditionally, many have been comforted by the guarantee of God’s blessing to our unions, though modern people have realized that’s absolutely no guarantee at all. Church architecture always seduces me, because I cherish privately meditating inside a beautiful chapel. Even as far away as I have moved from traditional religious worship, that’s one thing that remains a joy.

  Given the institutionalized misogyny in most religions, why a woman would willingly embrace this hierarchal outlet for herself, as a guide to her relationship, defies the basic foundation of our liberation. Churches that continue to encourage, institutionalize and guarantee that only male leadership dictates what faith, empowerment and connection mean have outlived their usefulness, yet too many still support this ancient ritual that denies women an equal role. It’s long past time this validation ended, which can only happen if women reject it.

  The newfound freedom to mine our spirituality outside the church has the potential of inspiring profound changes in how we live and what we experience in our relationships. Traditional role-playing in a relationship robs women, but also the liberated men who love us, of new ways to make a life together, which begin with shaking up gender roles to embrace full equality. We can define our marriages together, uniquely, rejecting the tired traditionalist rules from past generations that no longer serve the modern family.

  Choosing a traditional relationship in today’s economic reality is becoming less and less attractive, especially for modern women and men who simply do not benefit from rigidly defined gender roles. Since more women enjoy a career today than ever before, the faster we redefine marriage outside old traditional stereotypes the better it will be for women, their partners and generations to come.

  From the 2012 study “Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace,” by Sreedhari D. Desai of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dolly Chugh from NYU, and the University of Utah’s Arthur Brief:

  We found that employed husbands in traditional marriages, compared to those in modern marriages, tend to (a) view the presence of women in the workplace unfavorably, (b) perceive that organizations with higher numbers of female employees are operating less smoothly, (c) find organizations with female leaders as relatively unattractive, and (d) deny, more frequently, qualified female employees opportunities for promotion. It’s becoming stark for the average middle class household.

  A 2012 article in Forbes includes research that shows that women are founding businesses at one-and-a-half times the national average, and that venture backed companies operated by women have 12% higher revenues. The Forbes article goes on to say, “Companies with more equalized gender distribution in the upper echelons garnered 30% better results from [Initial Public Offerings]; only 3–5% of all women-owned businesses receive venture capital funding; only 16.5% of U.S. companies have women on their boards; only 25% of the tech industry is women.”

  The WorldBank.org website on gender points out, “Countries that invest in promoting the social and economic status of women tend to have lower poverty rates.” A 2012 World Bank report on “Gender Equality and Development” explains the landscape modern women find ourselves in today: “Women’s lives have improved greatly over the past decades. Enjoying ever-higher education, women have greater control over their life choices. They use those choices to participate more in the labor force; have fewer children; diversify their time beyond housework and child care; and shape their communities, economies, and societies. And the pace of change for many women in the developing world has accelerated.”

  Clearly, women lead differently from men, and in very good ways. In March 2013, a study of 624 board directors in Canada, conducted by the International Journal of Business Governance and
Ethics, revealed that women were more likely to use “cooperation, collaboration and consensus building,” while male directors more often made decisions by using “rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business.” Women were also more likely to “rock the boat” and be “more open to new ideas” than men. Chris Bart, the study’s co-author, said, “Men are pack animals and they are very much quick to recognize the hierarchy of the alpha males in the group. They would be very unhappy with people coming in with different values or views to the board.”

  During the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis in October 2013, which brought our country to the fiscal brink, Jay Newton-Small of Time magazine chronicled how women senators showed the boys’ club how it’s done. In an article for the magazine’s Swampland section titled “Women Are the Only Adults Left in Washington,” Newton-Small reported what happened when Republican Senator Susan Collins stood up on October 8, as the United States was on the brink of economic default, saying, “I ask my Democratic and Republican colleagues to come together. We can do it. We can legislate responsibly and in good faith.” Democratic Senate Appropriations Committee chair Barbara Mikulski, from Maryland, stood up, saying, “Let’s get to it. Let’s get the job done.” Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski joined in, too.

  Jay Newton-Small also reported something rarely heard of today: “Most of the Senate’s 20 women had gathered the previous night for pizza, salad and wine in the offices of New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. All the buzz that night was about Collins’ plan to reopen the government with some basic compromises. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, proposed adding the repeal of the unpopular medical-device tax. Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow suggested pulling revenue from her stalled farm bill. In policy terms, it was a potluck dinner.”

  Women now either sit or are ranking members in ten of the twenty Senate committees, according to Newton-Small, which gives them a say on the most powerful issues coming before the Senate, from economic issues to military sexual assault. Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has led this fight and confronted Senate male seniority, as well as the highest military brass, to press the fight for the Military Justice Improvement Act. While she differs slightly on a key administrative detail, Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill is working with Gillibrand to change the horrendous reality that the military men’s club continues to ignore. To do something about the 26,000 sexual assaults in the military reported in the Pentagon’s own 2012 study, attacks that often come when higher ranked officers abuse their authority through sex crimes, with the victims having no way to get justice without ruining their careers.

  California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein, who turned 80 in 2013, chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence and holds dinners for women in the national security universe, where men still rule. She also keeps her door open for any new female Senator wanting advice on how to make her office effective as she learns to work the Senate.

  Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat, is quoted by Newton-Small as saying, “One of the things we do a bit better is listen.”

  Partisanship isn’t allowed between these female senators, focusing only on what they have in common instead. They also don’t publicly criticize one another. When Senator Claire McCaskill was facing a tough reelection, New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte refused to work for her challenger, Republican Todd Akin. Not only did Ayotte not campaign for him, but she called him out for his ludicrous claim that biology keeps women from getting pregnant during a “legitimate” rape. As if rape requires a designation of whether it’s “legitimate.”

  Most women today want to work but also need to work, and so, for the first time in history, are fully one-half of America’s workforce. In 1967, women were only one-third of all workers, according to the 2009 Shriver Report, done through Center for American Progress, a progressive group that sponsored the study.

  A recent, sobering reality is that men lost three out of four jobs in the first two years of the great recession that started in 2007.

  The traditional world of our ancestors, a world that depends on organized religion’s male-dominated foundation to survive, is gone. With modernity threatening the old ways, organized religion has become obsessed with political wrangling and enforcing rules that no longer resonate, with churches weighed down by scandals of all types.

  God’s as relevant as ever, but how we convene with this force has forever changed, mostly out of necessity, because the old ways don’t ring true anymore, especially for women.

  Organized religion is not currently prepared to support the world of today’s liberated reality. The entire structure that has defined gender roles from the home to seats of power, from boardroom to the Senate, House and White House, is supported by traditionally male leadership roles. It wasn’t until October 2013 that Janet Yellen was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the first-ever female Federal Reserve Chairman in United States history.

  The only way to change what organized religion has set up in our society is to replace ancient traditions that no longer apply with what empowers everyone, including places of worship that could become revitalized if they modernized.

  Spiritual is now the word heard more often than religious.

  The openness implied by spirituality also honors modernity and the way more people are living their lives. It respects the original craving for connection once experienced only through religion and the church. Spirituality has become the new modality; prayer in its modern version is represented more and more through meditation. Whatever draws so many of us to organized religion at the start remains important, but the specific rules and regulations of organized religion are no longer of primary importance.

  All religions initially act as simple gateways to what lies beyond, which can only be excavated privately. Meditation offers a similar gateway in abundance. The benefits of excavating the mind and body connection through meditation go deeper than religiosity’s reach.

  The possibility of discovering a broader philosophy that helps answer life’s imponderables is irresistible to most. Though it can be accessed through a deity or holy book, we are finding wider reaches independently and beyond. Spiritual freedom changes forever our outlook on what once was the original glue of relationships and marriage, which came with designated roles that promised predetermined lives.

  Many now dare to imagine that God is outdoors.

  That a connection exists beyond any church or organized religion is a revelation to some. Even as most respect that the holy books were divinely inspired, we seek modern solutions and a more private path to asking timeless questions. We still crave a way to discover the mysteries of life, of God, but we want a more independent experience, one that doesn’t include the oppressive male-centric hierarchy, which includes misogyny and bigotry, as well as politics, that we just can’t reconcile with any empowering spiritual message that resonates.

  What does this mean for our relationships? What if we choose for our marriage or union to be sanctified in God’s outdoors or elsewhere and not in a church? We are each free to decide, with the stigma of building your relationship’s universe without organized religion at its center long gone.

  In the 1950s, religion sanctified relationships and made them valid. Religion made people feel safe and protected in rough times, which remains a reason many still embrace it. My mother couldn’t have survived without her faith and the First Christian Church, with her religiosity something she handed down to me, though I bucked the tradition from the start.

  Many people, including myself, have gravitated toward modern alternatives.

  New-age gurus and spiritual advisers have blasted onto the scene. These include people, teachings and books that offer a more direct route, a personal path to mining spirituality without the dogma, pleas for cash, and the guilt that bears down from most podiums in churches across the spectrum. People like Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson and many others
offer alternatives to religion, which were featured regularly on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show and now through her website, giving alternative spiritual routes credibility. The web has opened up avenues for questions to be asked and answered personally, freeing people from having to rely on our parents’ pulpit.

  Meditation has exploded among the spiritually curious and mystically adventurous, offering a private and very personal way to connect the mind and body with no outside interference or interaction. The process revolves around a simple technique that begins with quieting the mind and shutting off that tape playing in your head, as Dr. Wayne Dyer has referred to it for years. With people learning to calm their emotions through meditation, the practice has caught fire, replacing prayer, and bringing creativity and unlimited possibilities with it.

  The behavior of organized religion’s hierarchy makes me truly sad for all those people who attend church every Sunday, especially the women. The gender power segregation isn’t the fault of regular church-goers, which I have been most of my life. But any spiritual person looking for answers to the great mysteries of existence should at least question the relevance of religious organizations that practice the maxim that women aren’t allowed to lead and stand with the men who have always run the church.

  As defined by twentieth-century norms that have been blown to smithereens, religion is a female’s worst enemy, because the entire structure is laid out against us. It’s not an accident that the church’s traditional gender roles and power structure have been mimicked throughout our capitalistic, political and economic history.

  In most religions, women who crave connection to God actually need men as conduits, because we are seen as unworthy and unequal to men in the church’s mind, doctrine and tradition. It’s this same structure that gives men power over women, which, in under-developed nations around the world, men are using to control, abuse, torture and kill women and girls.