The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Rosin in her article, “The End of Men,” illustrated the Secretary Clinton model she would apply at the State Department:

  In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 162 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to institute political quotas in about one hundred countries, essentially forcing women into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes.

  So, even as women aren’t at economic parity, our presence in the economic engine of our country is not going to decline, because many families need the second paycheck, and modern women want to have a husband, family, children and a good job, too.

  Rosin cites statistics showing that “about a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45% of associates in law firms — and both those percentages are rising fast.” Before the feminist revolution got going, women’s incomes were only 2-6% of the family finances. According to Rosin’s data:

  Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2%, and four in 10 mothers — many of them single mothers — are the primary breadwinners in their families. The whole question of whether mothers should work is moot, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “because they just do. This idealized family — he works, she stays home — hardly exists anymore.”

  Traditional relationships no longer resemble reality in twenty-first century America. There are stay-at-home moms, but they are not the norm anymore, often for practical reasons, but also because women want more. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t expect more.

  However, the notion that the ambitious, go-after-what-you-want thinking can translate to online dating is wrong. On the way to creating the perfect relationship, attracting a guy takes patience, discipline and having a full life to live while you’re dating. It’s the full life you’re leading, which could actually lead you to attracting the right man.

  If you’ve connected with someone online and have exchanged a few emails, maybe even a couple of texts, if that’s what you choose to do, at some point you have to step back to see what happens next. Like it or not, the nature of the beast is that if a man wants you, nothing will deter him from pursuing you, as long as the time is right for him. Whatever instant intimacy you’re conjuring up online before you meet means absolutely nothing. At some point, the man has to ask you out, and the two of you must set up a first rendezvous to see if there’s anything more between you. Until you meet, nothing is real, so keep your fantasies in check.

  But while you’re doing the online dating dance, don’t be surprised if after a few flirtatious emails or texts you get radio silence. He’s only seen a picture and a profile, whether on Facebook or an online dating site, so if he backs off, then you mustn’t take it personally, something I’ve been saying since the mid-’90s. Christian Carter of eHarmony says it perfectly: “There is no rhyme or reason for why a man will do this, and trying to figure it out will only drive you crazy.” Don’t get into your head.

  Carter gives advice through his website, all geared for women and how to “catch him and keep him.” His focus is teaching women the signals men give, understanding them, but also learning the secrets so that he is pursuing you, instead of you pursuing him, which is the wrong position for any woman to be in.

  You will only have success in creating the perfect relationship, however you choose to define it, by attracting the man to you. Men react strongly when a woman catches their attention. But a connection is just that and means nothing more if the man doesn’t make a move. Pushing the response yourself by moving in first is certainly something an independent woman can choose to do, and can work in the short term to jump-start something, but closing the space further with a man until he’s had a chance to make his own move is seldom the best choice. Trusting who you are and your own value includes letting things come to you, while trusting that a man will respond if he’s ready.

  A confident, secure woman knows she’s ultimately in control of any relationship that she creates with a man, so allowing him the space he needs to perform his own mating ritual doesn’t make her less of a feminist. It reveals her as a smart woman.

  Nothing is sexier to a good man than a secure woman who knows herself, what she wants, and is happy and fulfilled in her life, even while she wants more. She also makes the man earn the right to be with her.

  No man wants a needy woman whose life is filled with drama and emotional noise.

  The object is for two whole people to come together to create a larger world in which they both can thrive, as well as create something together. A partnership based on wanting the same things.

  At the foundation of it all is the courage to be honest with each other, no matter what. It means hearing things from your best friend that you’d rather not hear, but they’re what he thinks, so it’s important for you to listen. What he says must be of value to you, because without mutual respect, the relationship isn’t going to last very long. You’re coming together as equals, even if one of you makes more money, which as the modern era progresses could just as easily be the woman as the man.

  Women’s work is now man’s work, and a man’s world is now a woman’s world.

  What hasn’t changed is that our human desires and fondest dreams remain the magic carpet ride that exposes our most fundamental and basic human needs. To love and be loved in a relationship of meaning, maybe even some definition of permanence, if we choose, is a gift we give ourselves that requires space, patience and tenacity.

  A perfect relationship has to have joy in it, which takes root from the start.

  A marriage cannot last without happiness. Find it every day. When you’re furious, find a way to forgive. If you’re committed, almost nothing is unpardonable. Grudges are petty and for the weak. Getting even is for enemies. You must always be kind and each other’s best friend.

  Above all things, don’t let anyone else in. It doesn’t matter what your mother or sister thinks, or your girlfriends. They shouldn’t know the details of your relationship. If you’ve had a knockdown, drag-out fight, it’s your fight and no one else’s business. Smolder in silence until you figure it out. Protect the privacy of your relationship. If it blows over and you’ve told the dirty details, which always sound worse than they were, it taints what you actually have built. Hold your tongue, unless the conflict is of breakup proportions and you need help. If you can afford it, find outside help.

  Most of all, keep investing in yourself. Your relationship can only be as perfect as the relationship you have to your own life and the things you do that are important to you.

  Don’t be afraid to set standards that you expect, things you want, then make sure you get them, because you deserve them. He does, too.

  Then keep referring back to make sure you’re both delivering to one another and be mature enough to make an honest assessment. That’s the only way to be happy, which is the only state of mind that will attract the right partner to you in the first place.

  Enjoy yourself. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled. In the middle of living your life, you just might shock yourself by what you’ll attract on your own.

  And guard against letting your ego get involved. To have a perfect relationship, both individuals must be humble toward one another. This means you are always working together to make each other feel valued, loved and supported, at all times. Your problem isn’t more important than his, and vice versa. But sometimes it will seem that way. Take turns giving in. Trade off, when it’s time for one of you to bitch about something. Putting ego aside to make peace must be more important than proving you are right.

  The perfect relationship is also vulnerable. Everything can be going great, then a life-altering catastrophe hits it and the bottom falls out suddenly. In a marriage this can happen. No matter how you’ve both
prepared, and even when what you both created is exactly what you both signed on for, sometimes what life delivers is a lot different from what was imagined. There are times when you just can’t push a resolution. You have to wait for it. Let turbulence blow over so you can see the combustion from a distance, because if you push things at certain moments, it can make matters worse.

  No matter how perfect a relationship, you remain two individual people. Two do not become one. The magic is what each person brings to the party. The outcome is seldom the picture you’ve been given to hang in your head.

  It’s extraordinary when you find someone. It heightens the adventure you’re already living. It can even change you.

  In 1943, a federal judge named J. Waties Waring met Elizabeth Avery Hoffman. You’ve likely never heard of either person. Waring was an eighth-generation Charleston man, with segregationist beliefs in South Carolina, a state where this wasn’t at all shocking. Elizabeth Avery Hoffman was a staunch liberal from a wealthy family in Detroit, Michigan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Waring for a U.S. district judgeship in 1942, and he was confirmed without objection.

  When Waring met Hoffman, they were both married to other people. But by 1945, he had divorced his wife, to whom he was married for thirty-two years, going to Florida to get it done, because South Carolina didn’t allow divorce. Hoffman divorced her second husband. They then married each other.

  A former bigot, Judge Waring would eventually end the segregation of white and black jurors in his South Carolina courtroom. In October 1948, according to Charlestonmag.com and other reports, he appointed an African-American man, John Fleming, as his bailiff. In 1948, a time when the Democratic Party was segregationist, Waring ordered the party’s rolls opened for everyone, regardless of race, “with all deliberate speed,” as was the saying at the time. Time magazine wrote about Waring in 1948, headlining their story about him “The Man They Love to Hate.”

  Waring’s famous dissent would become a part of American civil rights history. “His most dramatic ruling,” wrote James Hutchisson for Charlestonmag.com, “was the 1951 Briggs v. Elliot case, for which he declared the Clarendon County school board’s separate but equal doctrine unconstitutional, laying the groundwork for the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision.”

  J. Waties Waring and Elizabeth Hoffman Waring became outcasts, pariahs of white society, with African-American civil rights activists often invited into their home. The Warings had a cross burned on their lawn. They received hate mail and telephone calls that “began and ended with slurs and condemnations.” Elizabeth was called “the witch of Meeting Street,” named for the street on which the couple lived. The new Mrs. Waring was blamed for her husband’s turn against segregation, her liberal politics the scourge responsible for changing his stance.

  Elizabeth Waring appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on February 11, 1950, which you likely now recognize as the crescendo before the feminine mystique era, when women’s activism was hardly appreciated. When she said that states were making progress on civil rights, but South Carolina remained “an exact replica of Russia,” all hell broke loose at home. According to an article posted on CharlestonRevisisted. blogspot in 2012, “On February 12, 1950, the South Carolina House of Representatives introduced a resolution to appropriate funds to purchase one-way tickets for Judge Waring and his wife, Elizabeth, to ‘any place they desired, provided that they never return to the state.’”

  Waties and Elizabeth Waring would eventually settle in New York City. Activists today are working to get a memorial for J. Waties Waring, the South Carolinian who became a civil rights hero, influenced, no doubt, by the great love of his life, Elizabeth.

  The right partner can make all the difference.

  It’s a gamble, a great adventure you’re in together.

  The perfect relationship requires you do the work to keep it that way, which means you spend time together. If you both have careers, make dates if you must, but see each other. Schedule the time and don’t break it.

  Have a good time often.

  Laugh.

  Enjoy delicious food.

  See a great movie; take turns picking them if one of you likes action and the other likes comedy.

  Talk.

  Have sex.

  Nurture the attraction you first felt. The moments when you’re first starting a relationship are times you’ll celebrate forever. Fill them with fun and never stop.

  We can be inspired by tales of great love in books, and through the movies. Casablanca is one of the most famous and most cited. People in history we romanticize, like John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, impact us, even though their real stories hardly match the myth, bringing them down to mere mortals in size. Ronald Reagan’s confessions to Nancy that he was “the most married man in the world and would be totally lost and desolate without you” remind us of love’s intensity. The adventure of Hillary and Bill is an epic tale of undaunted commitment lived beyond the blaring headlines. Then there are those ordinary people we know, deciding to create a life together, who simply make their own corner of the world a better place, sometimes through civic accomplishment, or having a family, maybe by having children who go on to move the world forward.

  A perfect relationship is the one you create and live yourself with someone who has joined with you to see what you can discover and share together. It starts with attraction, then a bond of friendship that explodes into passion, lust and then love. If you’re ready and willing to do the work that comes with anything in life that’s worth having, you just might be able to make it work.

  Whether you can make it last is another matter entirely.

  That depends on how you each ride the ravages of life’s events, personally and together, which can only happen if you remain strong as individuals as you stand alone. Nothing can divide two people who know who they are and what they’ve got, and are determined and committed to protect it for life. It’s a decision you make no matter what the act of living throws at you, which is often unfair and at times overwhelming, but inevitably thrilling, if you never give up.

  As a beauty queen who dreamed as a kid of working on Broadway, I never thought stage fright would hit me out of nowhere at the end of those heady days and jettison me to Los Angeles, California, where I found my calling as a writer, leading me to excavate the worlds of love, politics and sex. From Beverly Hills, the very last place on earth I thought I’d land was in Las Vegas, Nevada. And if anyone had ever suggested it was here I’d meet a blue-collar, truck-loving, gun-toting gas technician, a man who would walk through my front door 12 hours after I arrived in Sin City, whom I would marry five months later… Well, I’d have said you were nuts!

  It’s not like I mapped it out.

  “If They Could See Me Now” has a whole new meaning from when I sang it at the Miss America Pageant.

  One thing I never planned to have was the perfect relationship. But I’ve got it. Life happens when you’re busy fulfilling your own dreams. It comes when you least expect it, whether you think you want it or not. However your perfect relationship is defined, it doesn’t mean it will be easy.

  Life is wet and messy.

  I actually attracted the perfect man for me simply by surviving and thriving through the battles of life that made me who I am, however wild things might have gotten on the road that led me to his city and he to my front door.

  It happened by making room for a man as he shows up, not as you think he should be.

  On paper, my husband and I couldn’t have been a more unlikely match. But that’s the thing about being unafraid to live your life as it’s presented to you. It honors the mysteries of life’s adventures that blow us onto an unplanned course, dropping wildly fascinating people in our path. The moments that arrive out of nowhere that dare you to be brave and choose the risk.

  Just make sure you know what you want and don’t be afraid to ask for it. You just might meet someone who’s prepared to del
iver his half, leaving the rest up to you.

  Epilogue

  So, what did I learn in the trenches?

  That relationships depend on answering the question What do you want? The answer is different for every woman, every individual.

  Sofia Vergara was the highest-paid TV actor (of either gender) during the fiscal year of 2012-2013, according to Forbes magazine. The gorgeous and talented star of ABC’s Modern Family is crafting her own modern family. She and her fiancé Nick Loeb want to eventually have a child together. Vergara confessed she intends to use a gestational surrogate; Vergara’s eggs, Loeb’s sperm. The rumor started spreading, Vergara believes, because she had her eggs frozen, which required going to her “doctor’s office a hundred million times to do injections,” as she put it to Cosmopolitan magazine in June 2013. “A friend will carry the baby for them. They have been planning this for a while,” said an unnamed source. Vergara explained she had had “thyroid cancer and lots of radiation,” making the surrogate a necessity for the couple.

  This is not your average decision, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be, because women can choose whatever they can afford. Women of means can throw money at their challenges to create the exact life they want. Vergara’s option is one prior generations of wealthy women couldn’t have dreamed of doing.

  If a poll were conducted of women who have children, how many of them would prefer for someone else to carry and deliver a child for them, especially at forty-something?

  Such conversations are important, not because women will all start making these choices, but to widen the discussion of what women can do for themselves if they have the support group and means. Financially independent women blowing out a few norms makes it easier for other women to customize their own lives without worrying what people will say, though how other people see your life shouldn’t matter. It’s your life.