Straight (18 page)

What finally tipped the scales of government acceptance was the contraceptive pill, a technology born of equal parts scientific innovation and feminist daring. Legal, moral, economic, and societal obstacles made contraceptives activism and research difficult at best. Fearing reprisal, universities, major medical researchers, and pharmaceutical companies refused to get involved. This was largely a social fear. Corporations were well aware of just how lucrative the contraception market was: Goodyear Rubber made $150 million in the condoms market in 1958, while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it manufactured them.[
26
] It was clear that if the job of developing a contraceptive pill was going to get done, it would have to be done privately. It was ultimately funded and directed by two formidable women. Margaret Sanger coordinated the effort, and philanthropist Katherine Dexter McCormick provided the capital.

Even before it became available, though, the Pill was a topic of intense, even desperate, interest. When news that it was in development hit the media, the researchers received a flood of desperate letters:

I am about 30 years old have 6 children, oldest little over 7, youngest a few days. My health don't seem to make it possible to go on this way. We have tried to be careful and tried this and
that, but I get pregnant anyway. When I read this article [
Science Digest,
September 1957] I couldn't help but cry, for I thought here is my ray of hope.[
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]

Many went so far as to offer themselves as research subjects, even though they knew virtually nothing about the drug or its possible side effects—it was worth almost anything to find a solution to the problem of unplannable, unstoppable pregnancies.

No one who had been involved with the development of the Pill was surprised by the eagerness and devotion with which women began to take it when it became available in 1960. The culture at large and the media, however, were flabbergasted, and sometimes horrified, that within five years more than six million women in the United States were taking it. But soon it was apparent that the Pill had ushered in a brave new world. By 1970, more than half of all adult women, married or unmarried, were using some form of contraception or had been voluntarily sterilized. Our relationship to marriage and childbearing was transformed.

Birthrates, already on the decline, dropped still further as more women availed themselves of the new technology. In England, a woman who married between 1851 and 1860 was likely to bear six children; an Englishwoman in 2007 would, according to the British Office for National Statistics, average 1.9.[
28
] In the United States, the story has been much the same. Even the supposedly extraordinarily fecund post–World War II “baby boom” American families averaged only around three children. By 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the American fertility rate had dropped to around the 2.1 births per woman average that is considered a baseline replacement rate for the existing population.[
29
] In both the US and UK cases, these very low fertility rates actually represent an increase over the all-time lows recorded in the early 1970s, shortly after both countries made contraception legally accessible to all women.

Such decreased fertility has meant, among other things, that women spend much more of their reproductive lives doing things other than having and rearing children. It has also changed what happens to women's lives when, and indeed if, they marry. Marriage, in the early twenty-first century, is by no means a relationship to which
children are presumed necessary, let alone all but inevitable as they were in the past. For a woman to go through life without ever bearing a child is no longer considered a startling anomaly. Married or unmarried, around 15 to 20 percent of American women aged forty to forty-four, at this point, have never had a child. It may be that the decreased emphasis on having children is also part of the decrease in the numbers of women who choose to marry. In 2002, it was about 79 percent likely that an American woman would get married, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and in 2008, the British media engaged in a bout of handwringing over the revelation that the marriage rate there had fallen to its lowest since 1862.[
30
]

The simple fact is that children are no longer presumed necessary to marriage. Marriage, likewise, is no longer presumed inevitable because of the demand that one procreate. And should one wish to have a child, one need only do it: marriage is increasingly optional. In both the United States and the UK, approximately 40 percent of babies are now born to unmarried parents; in Iceland, Sweden, and Norway, the percentage ranges to 50 to 65 percent. So much for the vilified “stinking Sluts” of eighteenth-century satire: unmarried women and men can now opt to live out their lives unmarried and still be happy, healthy, productive, mostly unremarkable members of society. They may be mothers. They may well even be partnered. Cohabitation without marriage has grown dramatically throughout the West, and people, not least celebrities like Angelina Jolie, openly and happily choose both unmarried partnership and unwed parenthood.

What all this means for marriage is that its nature and purpose are fundamentally different now than at any time in history. While the old meanings and functions still exist, economically and socially, they do not dominate in the way they once did, and indeed are open both to public debate and deliberate reconfiguration. This is nowhere so true as it is with regard to fertility. Contraception, not to put too fine a point on it, has enabled companionate marriage to become focused almost entirely on that companionship. Financially, emotionally, and physically, spouses need not share their resources with children unless they choose to, and then, in most cases, only with the number of children they desire. There is no longer a sense that marriage means the near-inevitable arrival of a tiny, squalling roadblock to putting one
another first.

This expectation has spilled over into all heterosexual relations. Our optimal version of heterosexuality has become one where the entire gamut of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing not only can be but normally is cordoned off, a separate realm from sexuality altogether. Our contemporary heterosexuals are not compelled, willy-nilly, by biology or family pressure or religious dogma or government mandate, to pair up and make babies Just Because. They are free agents whose liberty to pursue sexual, emotional, and reproductive happiness with the partner of their choice has effectively become, no matter how social conservatives squawk, another human right.

“Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime,” Friend Owl explains in Walt Disney's classic animated film
Bambi
(1942). “You're walking along, minding your own business,” Owl continues, “you're looking neither to the left nor to the right, when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face. Woo woo! You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head's in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you're walking on air. And then you know what? You're knocked for a loop, and you completely lose your head!”

Sweet and superficial, this sort of step-by-step instruction in the emotional practice of heterosexuality is everywhere in Disney films. It always has been, from the very first of their animated fairy tales,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
which taught its 1937 audiences that if a pure-hearted young woman fervently believed “Someday My Prince Will Come,” he inevitably would.[
1
]

With their vaguely medieval fairytale settings of princesses and princes, witches and fairy godmothers, Disney's classic films have an appealingly timeless, magical feel. Their plots, many borrowed from the fairy-tale collections of European writer-collectors like Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm, are familiar, for all that they've been brightened, lightened, and defanged. With the darker themes of traditional myth pushed into the background, narratives of romantic heterosexual love are inserted where
necessary and blown up to superhuman size. Even in latter-day Disney films, like 1998's
Mulan,
whose plot and characters have clearly been influenced by feminist criticisms of Disney's tradition of hapless but plucky heroines in need of gallant male rescue, male-female attraction and romance are still central to the narrative.

Heterosexual romance, in most of the Disney oeuvre, is necessary to the happy ending. And the happy ending, in the Disney universe, is also the moral of the story:
And they all lived happily ever after.
The Disney corporation has a long tradition of selling this fantasy of heterosexual romantic bliss to every conceivable audience, starting virtually in the cradle. Disney's online store offers an entire division devoted to “Disney Princess” merchandise, including
Cinderella's Fairy-Tale Wedding Book,
aimed at girls ages four and up. And when little Disney Princesses grow up and want a real wedding, they can turn to Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings division, which since 1991 has offered services for every aspect of a Disney wedding, from gown to honeymoon, at an average price of $20,000 per ceremony.[
2
]

Surely there is nothing particularly novel in the annals of human history in looking for a happily ever after, a life that is secure and pleasant and easy. Expecting it to be the result primarily of romantic love, on the other hand, is a fairly recent historical trend. Even more modern is the oddly naïve insistence—particularly in otherwise sophisticated men and women—that somewhere out there, Prince Charming or a perfect princess is waiting for them, the only thing standing between them and a perfect life. For good reason, my circle of friends refers to this kind of overinflated, codependent fantasy of romantic love as “Disney damage.”

A NOVEL ROMANCE

It isn't all Disney's fault, of course. Disney is just the most iconic recent manifestation of a sort of cultural propaganda that had its beginnings in the Renaissance, around the same time of the many other cultural changes—the Counterreformation, the rise of humanism, the birth of companionate marriage—that have transformed heterosexual experience. The Protestant emphasis on marriage over celibacy, a new focus on individualism, and of course the notion that there should be an affectionate element in marriage all provided a congenial climate
in which the tropes of the romantic love story could take root and grow. And grow they did: as early as 1670, the Catholic bishop and scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet could declare of the earliest prose novels or “romances” that “we esteem nothing to be properly Romance but Fictions of love Adventures, disposed into an Elegant Style in Prose, for the Delight and Instruction of the Reader.”[
3
]

Huet's insight that novels are instructive is instructive itself. His was an age in which literacy was still limited primarily to the elites, and a long connection between reading and religious study meant that the mere activity of reading tended to be viewed as automatically educational in nature. But as Huet pointed out, the stories were teaching tools of a specific kind. These “love Adventures” taught the reader about the battle between virtue and vice and the struggle to avoid disgrace in a very specific context, that of relationships between women and men. This was important, Huet explained, because enthusiasm for love and love stories was apparently universal. They appealed to the intellectually sophisticated and the frivolous, the man of letters and the lady of leisure. Romances easily captivated the imagination and the attention, the passions “agreeably provoked and appeased.”[
4
] Much, Huet explained, could be effectively conveyed straight to the hearts and minds of readers through these “Dumb Tutors, which succeed those of the College, and teach us how to Live and Speak by a more Persuasive and Instructive method than theirs.”[
5
] The question, which has been asked again and again over the centuries, was not whether novels (or films, or video games, or pop songs) were influential, but whether their influence was a good one. Huet was a moderate on the subject, his views summed up with a liberal shrug: “I know what they are accused for: They exhaust our Devotion, and inspire us with Irregular Passions, and corrupt our Manner. All this may be, and sometimes does happen. But what can't Evil and Degenerated Minds make an Ill Use of?”[
6
]

Novels did not just promote the ideal of companionate marriage but also the notion that it should be arrived at through an experience of passionate romance. Fictional examples encouraged ever larger numbers of readers to accept the possibility, and perhaps even the desirability, that the roles of lover and spouse might ideally be filled by the same person. Some of these books became well known, like
Fanny Burney's 1778
Evelina,
still taught today and popular enough that Jane Austen referred to it by name in her own 1817
Northanger Abbey.
Other titles of less lasting reputation but nearly identical attitudes toward romance numbered in the thousands, including those of the almost ridiculously prolific Eliza Haywood, more or less the Nora Roberts of her day. Haywood published more than thirty-five novels with titles like
The Distressed Orphan; or, Love in a Madhouse
and
The Fatal Fondness,
each one a testament to the pressure on writers to produce a happy-ending love narrative the public could find irresistible. Even Charles Dickens succumbed, rewriting, with a bit of prodding from colleague Edward Bulwer Lytton, the very ending of
Great Expectations
to suggest the possibility that Pip would find a happily-ever-after with Estella and thus, he hoped, boost the novel's acceptance. (If you found the ending unconvincing, now you know why.)

To be sure, the romantic-love novel had its loyal opposition. Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Johnson tended to be of the opinion that romantic love was, as Lawrence Stone puts it, “no more than a purely artificial emotion invented by novelists and adopted by men as a cover for sexual desire.”[
7
] Wollstonecraft's unfinished final novel
Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
(1792), in fact, depicts the disaster of what the titular heroine believed to be a love-match marriage. Maria's husband, George, turns out to be a libertine, gambler, and general wastrel who put up a gentlemanly and loving front while courting Maria in order to secure her large dowry. Maria's attempts to salvage her life, marriage, and fortunes result in her husband committing her to an insane asylum. It is a grim story that seems all the bleaker by contrast with the wildly popular cult of the happily-ever-after. Yet it too explores a part of the reality of what romantic love brought to the practice and experience of heterosexuality.