Confessions of A Failed Slut
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© 2014 Kathy Shaidle
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Confessions of a Failed Slut
By Kathy Shaidle
It was a relic of the long gone era of gather-round-the-TV “family viewing,” a time when any talk of “happy endings” wasn’t accompanied by knowing smirks.
How fitting, then, that the real-life “Love Boat’s” final voyage was marred by a perfectly po-mo, Irony Age tragedy: in August 2013, two scrap yard workers were fatally overcome by toxic fumes while breaking apart the old Pacific Princess.
I wonder if the SyFy Channel (of Sharknado infamy) now has a movie in the works about a once popular, now forgotten cruise ship, retired to the indignities of dry dock, haunted and plotting revenge.
You can practically hear the pitch:
Just as tragic ocean liners of old burned uncontrollably due to accrued coats of varnish and glue, likewise every inch of the “Love Boat” was similarly imbued with ten years worth of smarm and schmaltz: a fatal air-borne marinade of Robert Goulet’s Brylcreem and Joan Collins’ eau de toilete. The nearby town is doomed unless our hero can somehow disperse the creeping cloud of corniness…
Better yet, The Love Boat was one of the only television shows of its time (1977-86) that still employed a laugh track, (a.k.a., “closed captioning for the humor impaired.”) By now most people know the story behind “canned laughter”: that sound engineers re-used the same sampled audience giggles – originally recorded at live tapings of, say, I Love Lucy – for decades. Which means the folks heard “laughing” (impossibly) at the wacky hijinks on The Love Boat were probably dead when the show aired.
Boo!
I sometimes wish I didn’t see the world like this, through a Gen-X filter of self-defensive snark. I didn’t always.
I blame, well, The Love Boat.
As the only child of two only children (both of whom were divorced multiple times), I was doomed to turn out twisted: timid, taciturn, touchy, and morbidly imaginative. Growing up in the 1970s didn’t help. The Patty Hearst and Chowchilla kidnappings scared me. Hell, Watergate scared me and I didn’t even know what it was. (Something about “bugs.”)
Terrified, too, of collapsing whatever pile of pick-up sticks we were calling “our family” at any given the time, I kept my crazy fears to myself.
I watched a lot of TV, of course. That scared me too. I don’t just mean the fetish doll finale in Trilogy of Terror or bits of The Night Stalker and all the other cathode ray frights now lovingly curated at the wonderfully-named, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? website, Kindertrauma.com.
I mean: The Paper Chase scared me. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t go to university. (Thank God, as it turned out.)
The Love Boat scared me, too.
Normal people think back on that show as clean, wholesome fun, and I suppose it is, compared to Breaking Bad.
What I saw, though, was a weekly parade of casual sex and craven deceit. Characters pretended to be something they weren’t – deaf, perhaps, or a millionaire or even a member of the opposite sex – to make their spouses jealous or seduce some semi-stranger they were in “love” with. Seduction accomplished, the pair discarded each other at the end of the cruise, like used condoms and Kleenex, and smiled fondly as they waved goodbye. Forever.
But I didn’t want “love” to be, in the words of The Love Boat’s insipid, insidious theme song, “exciting and new.”
If those silly shipboard shenanigans were “love,” then to hell with it. No, I wanted to meet a nice guy, ideally in high school, and be with him forever. I’d die first so I wouldn’t have to cope with missing him. He’d die moments later so he’d never have the chance to meet someone else. Some girls fantasized about being the next Dorothy Hamil or Farrah Fawcett. My pre-teen goal was to die with an unbroken heart.
Naturally, that’s not what I got, especially because, hey, it was the late 20th century, man. Nobody got that. Nobody was supposed to.
Love the one you’re with.
If you love someone, set them free…
And nakedly, unapologetically brokenhearted women were crazy uncool, right? Look at Glenn Closes’ character Alex in Fatal Attraction. Except, like Nurse Ratched, she’s one of the most misunderstood females on film. In her murderous rage, Alex is actually clawing backwards toward a sanity of sorts. All those old-fashioned, Austenish notions about “breach of promise,” about sex as an act of oxytocin-fuelled pair-bonding rather than a casual, consequence-free diversion — like a rollercoaster ride in the nude — could be tamped down no longer under all her tear-stained copies of Cosmo.
Meanwhile, back in real life, while the rusty Pacific Princess was sitting in the scrapyard, the former cruise director whose memoir had inspired The Love Boat was being dubbed “the world’s oldest cougar” by the Daily Mail. The still red-haired 90-year-old boasted of “12 hour lovemaking sessions” with a “toyboy” almost half her age.
That very same day, the Mail also reported the suicide of Gia Allemand.
The 29-year-old reality show contestant had been one of the eponymous “Bachelor’s” runner-up lovers, beating out almost all his other “girlfriends” for the fellow’s televised affections, and the ultimate the prize: a (highly rated) marriage proposal.
She always maintained that she entered the reality show in the genuine hope to find true love.
“I truly went on the show to find love!” she told Emme magazine.
Allemand’s last Instagram posting read:
“Legend says, when you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream.”
And so my childhood left me ill equipped to participate in the “someone else’s dream” of the 1980s and 90s – that someone being Helen Gurley Brown or Dr. Irene “Nice Girls Do” Kassorola or Candice Bushnell, depending on what year it happened to be. My aversion to casual sex was considered deeply unfashionable, the sort of weird quirk – like a compulsion to eat cotton balls — one struggles to keep to oneself in polite company.
Alas, I didn’t always succeed. One afternoon, very late in the 20th century, my then-best friend and I were walking back to the office with a co-worker after lunch.
Our colleague was mocking a new trend she’d just read about: granting unwed teen moms special recognition in high school yearbooks, so they wouldn’t feel “left out.”
“But I don’t think the poor girls should be shamed,” my friend put in, a bit meekly.
“I do!” our co-worker shouted gleefully — in unison with me.
My friend and I had been practically sisters since age sixteen. We’d reached our thirties having had a grand total of three disagreements in all that time. And this was one of them. The whole “casual sex” thing had always been a sticking point – or should that be “wet spot”? — between us.
My friend was convinced that she could “screw like a man.” I can’t really blame her. We’d been marinated in that message throughout our 1970s childhoods. Never mind The Love Boat: At ever
y cash register, Cosmo celebrated one-night-stands, and the ubiquitous Fear of Flying touted the Holy Grail of “the zipless fuck.” My friend and I were hooked on after-school reruns of M*A*S*H, which depicted the Korean War as a khaki clad orgy of no-regrets cot-hopping.
The embarrassing truth is, however, that – in spite of having two of the main qualifications: an absent father and a drunken, slightly pervy stepdad — my attempts to ascend the heights of zeitgeisty sluttery were an abject failure. Like a midget’s dream of signing with the Lakers, the project was doomed from the (very late) start. (I screwed up the booze-fuelled courage to dispose of my virginity at the advanced age of nineteen, to a very nice boy who was as inexperienced as I was, thank God.)
In the first place, I was never a head-turner, and could never be bothered – as had my equally plain pal — to cultivate a bubbly, “open for business” personality to compensate.
Even if I had been more attractive, “events, dear boy” kept conspiring to thwart my half-hearted ambitions: a temporarily crippling chronic illness, AA’s “first year” rule, the AIDS scare.
For two years, I wasted my then-22 inch waist on a trust-fund anarchist with an aversion to toothbrushes and wristwatches. Then I spent another three dating a sinewy Heath Leger clone with Asperger’s who stuck around longer than I’d expected.
Add to that my Catholic education, such as it was. Even in that post-Vatican II, folk Mass era, I still absorbed the barely articulated notion that sex was A Very Special Thing.
As a result, my “number” (as the kids call it these days) is so low, I’m reliably informed that there are regions of the globe (such as certain Australian provinces) where I would still be technically considered a virgin.
As my fiftieth birthday looms, I feel myself finally growing into my lifelong fogey-dom, and it’s a comfortable fit, for me if not for anyone else. At my last cubicle farm job, one of the other girls made the mistake of asking me brightly if I ever watched Sex and the City.
“Those women are whores!” I heard myself bellow. I don’t work there, or anywhere, anymore, and we’re all so much happier for it. But even in my home office, the Internet ensures there’s no respite from “slut walks” and “slut shaming” and all the other eruptions of Slut Liberation or whatever it is.
The young women who’ve embraced this “movement” can be forgiven somewhat for wanting to take their nubile, horny bodies for a spin or ten while they can. If I looked like Miley Cyrus, I’m not sure I could refrain from flaunting myself on national TV, either.
Which reminds me — I was lucky in one other respect: By the time wannabe bombshell Madonna arrived on the scene, my female musical idols had already established a beachhead in my teenage brain. None of them –Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Patti Smith, Pauline Black, Lena Lovich – felt compelled to prance about semi-naked. If and when they did so, one could almost hear the punters shouting, “Put it on!” Decades before Miley donned that rubbery bikini, Nina Hagen wore a similar two-piece on stage, the difference being that Hagen knew she looked slovenly and unsexy. That was, from what I could make out – and with Hagen that was sometimes a challenge – the point.
Today, flat chested Susie Quatro’s “shocking” tight jumpsuits look comically chaste. The Slits accomplished the astonishing feat of posing topless and covered in mud on their first album cover and still throwing off all the sex appeal of road kill.
These days, even the plain punky girls with powerful voices, like P!nk, jump around in their underwear. Cosmopolitan is sleazier than ever. Ditto Sex in the City.
And slutiness pays, or appears to, if you’re a young woman with few prospects watching Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton transform sex tapes into multi-million dollar empires.
Plus I suspect today’s Catholic girls receive even fewer lessons in common sense, let alone chastity, than I did.
So I doubt they’ll heed an old broad like me, telling them to keep their legs crossed and their shirts on. To (sort of) quote Aquinas:
“To one who was a slut, no explanation is necessary. To one who is a slut, no explanation is possible.”
Being a scold may be an impotent, unrewarding pastime, but that doesn’t prevent me from indulging anyhow, or better yet, learning from the masters. Watching Judge Judy and her multiple imitators is a (not) guilty pleasure.
And I’ll admit it: I’m unfashionably fond of Dr. Phil, too.
At least early on – before he got caught up in shady stuff like trying to brand his family as the Osmonds of advice – his folksy football-coach routine was a welcome palette-cleanser throughout the unicorns & rainbows “inner child” era.
Oprah Winfrey discovered Dr. Phil McGraw when she hired him as a trial consultant during her now forgotten Texas legal beef. Before she gave him his own show, he was a regular “expert” on hers, cranking out bracing, bullshit-free one-liners.
If a troubled guest tried to excuse an extramarital affair by mumbling, “It just happened,” Dr. Phil would snap, “So you were just walkin’ down the street and your pants fell off?”
He also didn’t hesitate to bite the chubby manicured hand that fed him. During (still) one (more) episode about weight loss, Oprah opined hopefully that maybe, just maybe, some fat women really were “big boned” or had “thyroid problems.” Dr. Phil drawled back, “Yeah, well, but that ain’t you.”
For a guy who specializes in helping fix other people’s problems, though, Dr. Phil gets into semi-regular trouble: along with all the lawsuits, there’s the FTC probe that eventually shut down his short-lived “Shape It Up, Woo, Woo!” line of weight-loss supplements; an authorized biography that spread rumors of spousal abuse; and a televised “intervention” shot in Britney Spears’ hospital room which drew considerable scorn.
However, it was a tweet sent out in the summer of 2013 that got Dr. Phil into some of the hottest water of his career. He – or more likely, his chase producer — tweeted out a now-notorious question to his million-plus followers on August 20:
“If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil #teensaccused”
The hashtag referred to an upcoming show inspired by recent high profile cases of young women allegedly raped at booze-fuelled parties, after which, explicit photos of the incidents were posted on social media. After one such instance, a Canadian teen named Rehtaeh Parsons took her own life. Her mother was scheduled to appear as Dr. Phil’s guest on that particular episode.
Although clearly intended to simply “crowdsource” prevailing attitudes (however politically incorrect) in advance of the program, Dr. Phil’s “drunk sex” tweet was quickly deleted after it started an online firestorm.
“Rad-Femme Lawyer” huffed, “You know good and goddamn well that ‘asking when a girl ‘deserves’ to be raped is a destructive question in itself.”
“If a TV Shrink makes my daughter feel guilty b/c she was date raped while drunk, can I punch him in his dick?” one fellow tweeted in reply.
Consensus rapidly congealed: Dr. Phil’s query had been self-evidently “shocking.” Particularly on the distaff side of the Web – sites like Jezebel and xoJane, where mythical beasts called “rape culture” and “slut shaming” are sighted with alarming regularity — the reaction was predictably hysterical.
All this makes perfect sense, and, simultaneously, none whatsoever.
After all, these very same female-oriented sites promote brainless, soulless “hook up” culture day in and day out. Look at xoJane’s perversely pedagogical “It Happened To Me” features, in which our youthful authoresses discover to their astonishment that when two strangers mix mind-altering chemicals and nudity, mutual rapture doesn’t necessarily result.
These girls could have saved themselves a lot of tears and Kleenex if they’d only talked to me or some other old broad first…
In my day, “all sex is rape” was the prevailing radical feminist wisdom. Now it seems to be “drunk sex is rape” – or not. Is thi
s latest pronouncement just a spread eagled straw-woman reeking of tequila, one of those outrageous sexual-politics “rules” that everyone is convinced everyone else is trying to shove down society’s throat (as it were.)
The obvious flaw in this latest slice of puritanical progressive “thought” is obvious, if somewhat embarrassing. (See, “old broad,” above.) On his podcast, Adam Carolla asked female comedian Nikki Glaser what she thought of the new “rule” that “drunk sex is rape.” Blindsided, she chirped back, “Wow! I’ve only ever been raped! I just realized that.” (“I’ve raped myself,” Carolla deadpanned.)
As previously noted, sex and alcohol are the two things on earth that probably should never be combined, yet that hasn’t stopped men and women from doing so anyhow since time immemorial.
Anyway, during this “controversy,” two – count ‘em! — individuals stepped up to defend Dr. Phil.
One of them was Rehtaeh Parsons’ stepfather. Glenn Canning wrote on his blog that, “It is possible, and very likely, the question was asked in that context — sexual assault and teenage drinking. That question needed to be asked…”
The other was Jerry Springer.
Dr. Phil’s afternoon ratings rival and television’s id to McGraw’s superego, CNN asked Springer to comment on the kerfuffle.
“He does a serious talk show,” Springer replied. “I do a circus. It would be different on my show and maybe not appropriate. In his show, it is a serious issue.
“For them to raise it as a subject on their show, I don’t see what the problem is. It should be discussed. I don’t know why they took it down.”
So here’s a “tweet” from me:
“When Jerry Springer is the voice of reason, is America crazier than we realized? Yes or no? #whatacountry”
At first glance, “dinosaur porn” might qualify as Exhibit A for the “yes” side.
Talk about yer “carbon dating.” I guess I’ve been asleep under a rock, but “dinosaur porn” is supposedly, as the young people today like to say, a thing. Or at least it was, for about three days in the autumn of 2013.