Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (2 page)

Meanwhile, the media was blasting images—yes, even back then—of young girls who exuded sex appeal. Take the famous Calvin Klein ad from 1980 in which fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields purred, “Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” The underlying message was about sex and desirability, and even about her landing a man, despite her ridiculously young age. And wasn’t that what I was supposed to be looking for? I was ten years old, and I felt I
had
to look like her. At the same time, Brooke Shields was so distant a creature that it seemed preposterous to imagine myself ever being that seductive.

And yet every time someone said, “Make a wish,” that was mine: to be beautiful and sexy enough for men to want me. Forget about intelligence or wit; looking a certain way— sexy but not slutty, beautiful but not unattainable—was how you captured a man and got him to marry you. And although marriage seemed like a far-off concept, the idea of capturing men’s attention didn’t. I could see it in the ads, in the movies, and at the roller rink, as the girls threw back their feathered locks and shot the boys hanging on the rail at the rink’s edge that
look.

Even then, though, I knew that at some point, some magical switch would turn off and girls would suddenly drop the “Don’t you want me?” game, and would just as quickly start playing the role of the “good girl”—to groom themselves into marriage material. I just didn’t understand how or when that was supposed to happen. As far as the boys were concerned, at some point they apparently stopped being kitten chasers and started becoming wife wanters. But when? And when were girls supposed to stop wanting to be the object of every boy’s desire and start wanting to keep house? I couldn’t figure out just what it was that men wanted, and I didn’t understand how I could possibly be two different women at the same time.

So, despite being raised by a liberated working mother and an equally feminist father, I still believed that becoming a wife was the one thing above all else that I must shoot for, because it was culturally ingrained in me that it would

prove my worth as a human being and a woman. And if you wanted to be a wife, you had to be “wife material,” and that meant being virginal, for one. It meant being one of the “good girls,” which was defined for me very early on. When I was in junior high and high school, there was still a solid line between nice girls and sluts, and there was no question about who was who. Of course, that delineation hasn’t remained quite so clear. Today, nice girls aren’t necessarily expected to retain their precious virginity before being labeled sluts, but there’s no question that women are still struggling to claim our own sexuality and define for ourselves the sexual roles that continue to be mandated to and for us.

as a culture, we undoubtedly continue

to deal with the problems that arise from conflicting messages about how we’re supposed to behave, arguably more so now than when I was growing up. Jessica Valenti, author of
Full Frontal Feminism
and founder of Feministing.com, makes a living keeping her finger on the pulse of young women and the issues they face today. She writes, “Never mind trying to find an authentic sexuality in our fake-orgasm pop culture— it’s near impossible to find
anything
that makes sense. There are all of these contradictions in porn/pop culture that blow my mind and make it all the more difficult for young women to find an authentic sexual identity.”
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Ultimately, she concludes, what’s expected of women is the impossible.

Her observations echo my very experiences—only fifteen years later. I suppose it’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The media, the church, the politicians—everyone— wants to weigh in, and everyone has something different to say. Women experience a bizarre disconnect in which we are bombarded with images of sex—on television, in films, all over the print media—while receiving cultural messages that girls should strive to retain their purity. “We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hyper-sexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions,” explains Laura Kipnis in her polemic
Against Love.
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And it doesn’t stop there, because the messages not only are contradictory, but they also place an inexcusable emphasis on girls’ bodies. And despite my parents’ commitment to fighting that focus, it seeped into our home and my consciousness nevertheless.

I remember an argument my parents had the summer I turned sixteen, about a hot-pink string bikini that I’d bought for myself. Because I had purchased it with my own money, I didn’t think I needed my parents’ approval. It was just a bathing suit, after all. I had no idea that my purchase would incite such a conflict.

“Debbie, if she can fill the thing out, I don’t see what the big deal is,” my dad said.

“Very nice,” my mother said. “I’m just teasing,” he said.

“I know. It’s just not the right time, okay? This is serious.” “I’m sorry. Your mother’s right. You know I was just

teasing, right?” “I know.”

“It’s just, well, I don’t know what to say about this stuff.”

That was generally how my dad dealt with situations that he desperately wanted to lighten. His jokes didn’t always go over well with my mom, especially when they affected my sister and me. It wasn’t that our growing up “right” was any less important to my dad; it’s just that he could turn anything into a joke, and my mother didn’t always see the funny side of things.

My parents went on to argue about the importance of cultivating my sexual confidence versus the likelihood that men would look at me or treat me in a way that they wanted to avoid. “I don’t want her boobs hanging out for every pervert to see,” my mom told my father. “And besides, it’s fashion to her, but it comes across as a statement of sexual availability to others.”

“I’m still in the room, Mom,” I said. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why does everything have to turn into a political discussion?” I asked.

“Because everything
is
political,” my mother stated matter-of-factly. I didn’t know what she meant then, but I certainly do now. The idea of the personal as political is something I became acutely aware of as a women’s studies

minor in college, and it’s continued to strike me daily ever since. I may be wearing an outfit I like, reading a book that interests me, or watching a movie that I enjoy for some perfectly valid reason, but others may read those actions differently, and I can’t walk around with my head in the clouds, acting like that’s not the case. There is no reality— there is only perception. My mother’s strong feelings were a foundation for my approach to life. Thus, the way I wanted to look, dress, and be perceived became a quandary as I changed from a girl into a woman, trying to balance my mother’s ideas with my thoughts and with the messages I was getting from the world around me.

Confounding as this situation was, the messages I received at home could sometimes be as confusing and mixed as the ones I got from the outside world. Although both my mother and my father encouraged my younger sister, Rachel, and me to be aware of the power we held as women, and to realize how important it was to hold our own in a world where our sexuality could be used against us, only our father was willing to talk to us about using it to our benefit. My mother saw that as profoundly antifeminist, a concept I later discovered was a divide that existed within the feminist movement—this idea of what a “real” feminist even looks like. Can a woman be sexy and seductive and still be a feminist? My mom belonged to the camp that believed it wasn’t possible, and I definitely belong to the camp that thinks,
Oh, yes indeed.

As much as my mother wanted us to be aware of the choices we were making, she wasn’t always so self-aware when it came to her own decisions. Eating, for example, was a huge issue in our house. My mother always prepared healthy, well-rounded meals, and she expected my sister and me to eat everything on our plates, even the things we loathed. Yet while my father and Rachel and I ate our balanced meal—meat and starch and vegetable—my mother ate a Lean Cuisine. She was trying to maintain her weight for her health, she told us, and I don’t doubt that was true. But the message was clear: What we were eating wasn’t for weight loss. And she wasn’t even eating smaller portions—she was eating something entirely different than we were.

Though my mother primarily emphasized the importance of our being smart and nice, espousing over and over her belief that being pretty didn’t matter nearly as much, her concerted effort to lose weight left me feeling conflicted. Wasn’t weight not simply connected, but central, to looks? So, despite my mother’s explanations, her actions spoke volumes to my sister and me: We shouldn’t be focused on looks, but it was okay that
she
was.

I got the message that it’s okay to wear a bikini, but only in a vacuum in which reality can’t intrude. Being pretty doesn’t matter, but you don’t want to get fat. Being interested in sex is healthy, but appearing sexually available can be dangerous. And so on. The fact that my mother’s values often seemed

contradictory baffled me at times, but the signs the universe was sending me were outright dangerous.

The conflicting information that the media, parents, and other sources feed to girls and women leaves us in a space that can feel nearly impossible to navigate: We are told to be sexy, but not too sexy. We are told what is sexy, but wait—only for that minute, actually. We are told what to buy to become sexy—that we
have
to buy things to be sexy—but not slutty. We are told to be able partners, but not too able—because where would we have learned such things? We are told to be willing, but not on the prowl. These contradictions send a lot of women (and men) into a tailspin as we come into our own sexuality.

Glamour
magazine has a column in its “Sex & Men” section called “Jake: A Man’s Opinion,” written by what the magazine calls “a real, live single guy.” Jake’s Septem- ber 2007 column was titled “What’s Sexy, What’s Scary in Bed.” He opens the piece talking about a woman who bit his nipple—“hard,” he writes. He didn’t like it, and he sees this scenario as emblematic of a larger problem: Women are finally taking control and coming into our own sexually, and yet there are men like Jake who take issue with that, who feel as if women’s assertiveness (or slut- tiness) belongs in a different realm. That behavior is for fake porn girls, not girls Jake wants to date. He blames the web, which he refers to as “that great, sometimes sordid bastion of exhibitionism”:

What’s a woman to think . . . when she finds out her boyfriend spends hours . . . watching barely legal girls stripping in their bedrooms on YouTube? . . . But that’s not necessarily what your boyfriend wants you to do—that’s why we have YouTube (and, to a greater extreme, porn).
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excuse me? Virgin/whore complex,

anyone? This column, in a mainstream magazine, speaks to the continued way in which we are maligned for our sexuality, yet are still expected to be sexual. “We want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed,” Usher sings to his tween and teen fans in his song “Yeah!” Notice that it has nothing to do with what
she
wants—just with what he expects.

Other media “experts” are propagating this balancing act as well. Laura Sessions Stepp, in a
Washington Post
article entitled “Cupid’s Broken Arrow,” actually suggests that sexually confident women cause impotence in men. One of the young men she interviewed for the article told her, “I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits. The pressure on the guys is a huge deal.”
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A girl willing to do anything? Presumably every guy’s fantasy, right? But this college junior is saying that a girl like this can actually feel like too much to deal with, and can prevent a guy from being the ladies’ man he might otherwise be. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about college girls or married women—the problem is the same. Women’s sexuality must somehow simultaneously exist and

not exist. And if men can’t perform, we’re to blame. Forget confusing—this is just plain not okay.

Unfortunately, when it comes to marriage, this issue doesn’t go away; it only becomes magnified. No matter what most people have going on before they get married, it has to stop once they get married. When you date, you have the opportunity to try on different partners: the guy you dabble in S&M with; the girl you play doctor with; the partner who wants you to be a schoolgirl. But once you have a spouse, you’re not only left with no outlets, you’re also burdened by social definitions of marriage and of who you are expected to be—or become.

Even when sex plays a huge role in the premarital relationship, women are often surprised by the way things change once they become someone’s wife and are suddenly expected to be Holly Homemakers, not sex kittens (though we’re supposed to still be “desirable” to our husbands, whatever that means). And even if we’re working full-time, we must also play the roles of überwife and supermom. We’re expected to create an ideal balance, and we’re supposed to magically know what that is at any given moment. The truth is, the messages we get are so mixed that it’s impossible to know what men want—and
men
probably don’t even know what men want.

Even the most liberated couples find themselves falling into traditional patterns once they’re married—or even once they’re exclusive. Shannon Davis, an assistant professor of

sociology at George Mason and the lead author of a 2007 international study entitled “Effects of Union Type on Division of Household Labor: Do Cohabiting Men Really Perform More Housework?” told
USA Today
that “the institution of marriage seems to have an effect on couples that traditionalizes their behavior, even if they view men and women as equals.”
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A man wants his wife to cook dinner, and he doesn’t want her to take over in the bedroom. I am generalizing, of course, but it’s a common and dangerous pattern. According to Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College and the author of
Marriage, a History,
“we have all inherited unconscious habits and emotional expectations that perpetuate female disadvantage in marriage.”
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We’re raised to believe in an institution, and to follow the rules of that institution, whether or not it counters our own thinking and experiences. It’s what we know, and it’s what society values.