In Which We Routinely Roll Our Eyes At Institutional Sexism

For Sex and For Science

by RACHEL SYKES

Masters of Sex
creator Michelle Ashford

There is an awkward moment in the second episode of Showtime’s Masters of Sex, and it happens fully clothed. It’s October 1956 and a young woman, called Jane, is reading alone in the canteen of Washington University Hospital when she is approached by two men. The first is married and intent on beginning an affair which she, politely, declines. The second asks her to recommend the sluttiest girl in the room. Again, Jane declines, laughing at both parties as she pulls the book’s title into view. As she reads aloud, the audience is copied in on the joke. These men never had a chance: Jane’s reading The Second Sex. 

The prop department’s brief nod to philosophy would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sincere. Jane’s moment of triumph in the canteen is short, but the agenda bashing flash of The Second Sex is part of a disarming directness that runs throughout the show’s opening episodes.

Based on Thomas Maier’s 2009 biography, and inheriting its unenviable title, Masters of Sex is the True Hollywood Story of respected gynaecologist William H. Masters (Michael Sheen) and his secretary-turned-collaborator Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) as they begin their ground-breaking research into human sexuality.

This much history, and Google, can fill in: Masters and Johnson worked for nearly forty years to develop a scientific dialect for the various stages of copulation, tireless in their pursuit of a language for orgasm that moved beyond puritanism and witchcraft. From the first episode, we see the difficulties of turning sex into science; their work was in constant danger of being shut down, by every possible authority. Masters of Sex begins with their first tentative, illegal encounters as they trail brothels in search of willing subjects, and continues as Masters, a frigid but rigorous scientist, and Johnson, a sex positive anachronism, convince the chastened university to work in their (sexual) favour.

With this relationship at its heart, Masters of Sex can’t afford to stand on ceremony. It’s a tale of unravelling and revealing, of candour and seriousness, of reclaiming what is deemed unknowable as a field of potential discovery. Sex is the ultimate unmentionable and the clothes are off within the first few minutes. By the end of the pilot, Masters and Johnson are brandishing a vibrator/camera named ‘Ulysses’ as the provost of the university (a wonderfully perplexed Beau Bridges) internally monitors poor Jane’s climax.

To both anticipate and suppress the snickers, however, Masters of Sex offers up a sincerity which, it turns out, is the most disarming of their devices. Take Jane, for example. Despite the fact that her boss is sitting somewhere between her thighs, Johnson coerces her into staying with a series of grandiose and po-faced lies. “He’s not watching you,” she claims, “He’s watching science.” This is a line that Johnson peddles repeatedly and that people repeatedly buy, slowly building the idea that this study could be the greatest step for women since they obtained the right to vote.

Jane blithely and robotically chants about her contribution to science, and Masters, too, states motives of the highest order, ranting to the disapproving provost that he studies in the name of truth, unchartered territory, and, of course, the Nobel Prize. “Science!” is the show’s real battle cry, but it becomes more of a central thesis then the sex itself.

Masters of Sex was created by Michelle Ashford, the show runner on HBO’s The Pacific and John Adams. Ashford describes herself as “a perpetual student” and her loyalty to historical detail, to biography, make her shows oddly free of subtext. This is even more evident in Masters of Sex where the title gives up the game before any flesh has reached the screen; Ashford seems to embrace the fact that the story’s end is a foregone conclusion. This is a show refreshingly unafraid of spoilers, liberated by the fact that there’s no detail on Masters and Johnson that couldn’t be looked up online.

In other words, it’s a show without a climax, and a show about sex without a climax. Stripped of intrigue, it’s also markedly different from Mad Men to whom comparisons seem inevitable, if a little unfair. It’s not until midway through the pilot episode, as Caplan gamely juggles a mid-century secretarial pool and a wrathful ex-lover, that you realise how Draper might have ruined it for the rest.

When Sheen is introduced to the audience as Masters, at a lavish dinner in his honour, we can’t help but ask what’s wrong with him. But unlike Mad Men, where each episode is bound up in the slow reveal of hidden foibles, everything is already on display. To make this point more blatant, Masters proposes sex to Johnson, as part of their experiment, within the first episode. Is he attracted to her? More than likely. But Ashford knows there’s no point in keeping the audience guessing. 

What’s telling, though, is the weight of this hindsight. If we think about that moment with The Second Sex once more, we suppose that Jane can laugh as the men approach because she knows that the tide is turning. We, the audience, see change as inevitable because we live in the progressive future. But the bluntness of this technique is also a kind of double-bluff. Masters of Sex approaches sexism with the same sensibility of Mad Men, presenting it as so overwhelmingly pervasive that it constantly knocks you on the head. When we meet Virginia Johnson, we roll our eyes at the institutional sexism she faces just to enter the typing pool. Yet we only laugh at how times have changed before we realise how little they have. De Beauvoir hovers somewhere out of shot not from narrative ham-fistedness, but because it is still jarring to see her name in passing. And we can only laugh at the prudishness of the 1950s, until the instinct to giggle takes us over.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about the storm outside.

"Heaven Go Easy On Me" - The Head and the Heart (mp3)

"Cats and Dogs" - The Head and the Heart (mp3)

In Which We Describe The Events From Their Very Beginning

How the Heat Broke

by RACHEL SYKES

Grandma Kate lived for 102 years beneath the Shropshire hills. She was raised by her grandma, who lived to a mere 70 in a cottage eked out from the shadow of the Brown Clee, ten miles, or thereabouts, from the border with Wales. Her whole life, she spoke about the bakery next door. Kate remembered how the smell of bread would wake her, how children would dart under the baker’s feet as he tried to keep the loaves from the flames. She remembered the tennis courts over the fence and the rich people she would watch as rapid streaks of yellow bounced between them.

When Grandma Kate was seven, her favourite uncle went to the Somme, though she hoped for some years that he would come back. When I turned fourteen, some eighty years on, she asked me to help her find him. It was only once I was in France, looking for one name in fields of Dover stone, that I felt as strange and as stupid as I was supposed to be feeling.

And, she would add, so brief as to seem casual, it was in the 1920s that Granddad Pointer had died on the kitchen table, when a doctor tried to save him from a strangulated hernia.

But the men in her life did tend to disappear. It was shortly after that Grandma Kate went into service as a parlour maid, at the big hall down the road. She would leave to marry Jim, a local man who preached on Sundays and sold fish during the week. It was Jim who would stop the goods’ train on its way across the border, at a point where the road intersected with the lowest slung rail bridge. Jumping up onto the tracks, the passengers passed down the fish, one piece at a time, and Jim would cart it round the villages to sell where he preached.

Their children, Bronwyn and Griffith, arrived before war came back, but the man who would be my step-dad was born in a snowstorm in 1947. He was a post-war baby, borne in a flurry of winks and nudges. The midwife had to dig her way into their house through the snow. At her 100th birthday we read the clippings of the snowdrift and looked at photos from the ‘60s that betrayed something that we had long suspected: Grandma had always been old.

Kate plucked herself neatly from out of her wheelchair and batted away the help of her daughter. She had prepared her own speech.

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Everyone in England calls their home county “The Shire.” Until we could manufacture something more enigmatic, that’s what Shropshire was too. Yet, in terms of mystery, we had two things that worked in our favour. First, Shropshire is a county that is almost completely empty; so empty that the rest of England forgets its existence. And, second, its western edge runs the border with Wales, a division roughly marked by an earthwork called Offa’s Dyke.

Writings from the 8th century refer to King Offa as a “vigorous” king who terrified the rulers of neighbouring provinces. Offa had the earthwork constructed to intimidate his enemies, forcing his subjects to heave piles of earth that spread, in places, 60 feet across and 8 feet high. Modern guesswork suggests that the dyke never ran the whole of the border. It might only have ranged around the area in which I was born, somewhere south of the direct centre of the Borders, and slap bang in the middle of nowhere.

The Borders are rich in disintegrating earthworks and violent rumours about the Welsh. In 1862, George Burrow, “a gentleman writer,” wrote a book about the Welsh landscape after touring the country. At the Borders, he observed that “it was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman whom they found to the west of it.”

From kindergarten on, we were told that any Welshman caught within the castle walls after midnight could be legally shot with a cross bow.

A few miles north, they were kinder and would only use a long bow.

The land looked like Wales, in fact, because it was Wales. When Jenny came to stay in the summer of ’09 she began referring to Shropshire as “Welsh land taken by the English.” She would call it nothing else. Jen was born and raised in Baltimore and knew a little Welsh folklore. When she arrived she would barely say Shropshire, would never say England.

Jen liked to take pictures of the road signs, split as they were between English and Welsh. She learnt that “croeso” meant “welcome” and would repeat it to shopkeepers, though no-one in our town could speak any Welsh.

She drew out the border and its long divisions of green and brownish fields onto pieces of fine greaseproof paper.

The land between England and Wales is like everything beautiful and bleak: under peopled, over gorsed, devoid of cities and landmarks. In England, it is typically impossible to reach your arms out without grazing the sides of another town. But from where we grew up, it took hours in either direction, into either country, to reach a city.

We felt far from the rest of England, a feeling made worse by British trains which are incapable of travelling sideways across the country. On the Borders, we have no accent, although at times our voices pass for farmer. But in the belief of our seclusion, we felt rare.

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Poets pour nostalgia into any space that will hold it; A. E. Housman wrote about a half imagined Shropshire in a thirty-three poem cycle, self-published in 1896. A Shropshire Lad fixated on the luxuriness of country boredom, mixed with the idea of Housman’s own fading youth.

In Poem 30, he deals most openly with his sexuality, describing how his “Fear contended with desire” to “have willed more mischief than they durst”. Against the mellowness of the hills, what he named “the land of lost content”, Housman imagined that his troubles might diminish, that his life would begin to seem simpler: “Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: / Then the world seemed none so bad.”

But though Ludlow was thirty miles from where he grew up, Housman would not visit the area he so idealised until he had written the majority of the collection. He wrote from London, in love or fascination with a place so far from urbanity where he might imagine a seclusion that could make his problems insignificant.

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On the day of Kate’s funeral, the royal baby was born. By the time we woke up, the BBC were already tired from reporting. “There’s plenty more to come from here of course. None of it news, because that will come from Buckingham Palace. But… that won’t stop us.” The day forecast thunder storms that would break a fortnight long heat wave, a kind of summer we hadn’t known in years.

A tiny Methodist chapel overlooked the bakery where Kate had lived one hundred years before.

“Dad must have owned that field. He’d have planted those walnuts.” Bronwyn was trying to look beyond the trees, to a large house at the right of the village hall. “I remember, there was a tennis court.”

Her hands traced lines in front of her as she drew an imagined court in the air. “It was the most beautiful thing,” she said. “I used to throw the tennis balls back when the rich people missed them. Then I’d run next door to the bakers, get right under his feet.”

The village hall was so old no-one knew which war it predated. The doors had been refurbished a fortnight before the funeral and a tiny siren now hissed whenever you crossed over the threshold.

“WARNING! You are being recorded by a security camera.”

Tweenage cousins in high visibility jackets set off the alarm every few minutes, proud of their duties as parking attendants for the grieving, but addicted to the metallic whispers of the terrible and needless security. Another cousin, slightly elder, dragged them out by their ear. They pulled sullenly at the shoulder pads sewn into her first suit and the new floor bounced lightly underfoot. Each footstep echoed like the knock of a tap shoe.

“I used to dance here,” Bronwyn said, and gently nudged her husband, whose hearing aid was turned low.

“I ran a disco here in ’74,” my step-dad muttered.

As we walked back to the chapel, a cockerel began to crow, fooled by the storm clouds that had so far held off. And now Uncle Griffith remembered the walnut trees, which had grown so tall they entirely obscured the old house. In a voice thick with country, he pointed to the cows standing at the sides of the road. They were eating thorn bushes, he said, not because they felt no pain from the thorns, but because the taste was sweet.

He asked when I could come back and as I said it would be a long time, he smirked and shook his head.

“A boomerang always comes back.”

When we arrived home that evening, the air was thick with burning wood. A thin trail of smoke rose from a garage at the end of our street. Someone was living there, dad said, because he’d been evicted from a caravan that had been towed from the street. When his mum had developed dementia, his sister had sold the house but let him keep the garage for himself.

That night, when the heat broke, the rain came in at 2 a.m. through the crack in my bedroom ceiling. Slow and subtle at first, it leaked through the paint that had tried for years to hide it, and dripped softly on my face so that I woke to hear the storm outside.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Katy Perry and John Mayer.

"Simone" - Goldfrapp (mp3)

"Drew" - Goldfrapp (mp3)

In Which We See What Katy Perry Feels About Everything

Ongoing Dream

by RACHEL SYKES

Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream is three years old next month. The album, which sold 2.6 million copies in the US alone, and 6 million worldwide, was only the second in history to have five number one singles (the first: Michael Jackson’s Bad), keeping Perry in the top ten of the airplay charts for a total of 71 weeks. This week also marked the first anniversary of the film made to document her success. Katy Perry: Part of Me is part biopic, part concert film, released over the weekend of July 4, 2012 and premiered with an array of Pepsi sponsored, US-themed outfits.

On July 4, 2013, Perry was draped in more stars and stripes, in an Instagram of her reunion with John Mayer. Dressed in matching outfits and locked in an embrace, the couple’s heads are turned away from the camera. It’s an image that is both strikingly intimate and playfully coy. Even the photographer seems unsure of how close they should be.

The caption, “Whose broad stripes & bright stars?!”, alludes to the same mystery: who are these people and how are they so recognisable that they can communicate through the backs of their heads? 

As Susan Sontag once wrote of the camera, on Instagram we are ever more “a tourist in other people’s reality”. And in the great tradition of the pop-umentary, Part of Me is another exercise in the construction of intimacies. We, the fans, gain access to the breadth of Perry’s career, beginning with her teenage years as gospel singer, Katheryn Hudson, and ending with the behemoth California Dreams Tour, 11 months long and 124 dates wide.

“This film,” Perry said, “you’re going to see it from my best friend/buddy perspective; you’re going to see exactly what I mean and feel and think about everything.”

You’re going to see it all, and you’re going to see it in 3D.

In claiming to show us everything, however, Perry shows fissures in the curation of her image. Part of Me portrays her transformation from preacher’s daughter to professional glamorama with a trajectory so smooth that it jars.

What’s more, her anti-bullying mantra, most palpably observed in the self-celebration of ‘Firework,’ comes through in the oddest of ways. “Thank you for believing in my weirdness,” she yells from the stages of different continents - but that is the weirdest thing she will say throughout. It is the task of imagining her as an outsider that proves the most bizarre - Part of Me is a wholesome movie, for a wholesome audience, which carries no hint of the blackout centred party girls, awkward lovers, and teenage runaways that her songs so frequently refer to.

The poster, for example, shows Katy, her hair flowing freely bar the cutest of hair clips, as she sings obliviously into her hairbrush. Reflected in the mirror is her on-stage persona, hair now bright blue, décolletage spruced up, in a sparkly pink tutu and lilac silk gloves.

The reflection is a hybrid: Hollywood starlet, ballerina, and cyber princess all in one. Her ‘real’ self is all American, the girl next door surrounded by battered ornaments and faded wallpaper. The comparison is simple: there is nothing she has that you cannot achieve. But what she is is a polysemy, a performance of different identities, of different fantasies, that allude to possibilities without a glimpse of a reality that is anything less than polished.

Similar claims to normalcy were made in the early days of the Spice Girls, who grossed $77 million from their 1997 mockumentary, Spice World. There was something ramshackle about the band, although this was as highly cultivated as Perry’s coiffured sexuality.

But they were a bunch of girls who had no talent in particular, their performances reeking of Tia Maria stained lyrics sheets and last minute rehearsals. All five had worked their way through odd jobs and bit parts and made no attempt to hide their ambitions. Geri was a former Turkish game show hostess; Victoria had decided to become famous after watching the musical, Fame.

As with Perry, there were contradictions in their claims to authenticity but these were more pronounced because they couldn’t dance, couldn’t sing, and they definitely couldn’t act. And whilst the media accused them of illegitimacy, the public didn’t follow. Their first single, ‘Wannabe,’ was released in June 1996. By August 1997, the Spice Girls had filmed their movie and signed over twenty sponsorship deals. The Spice Girls sold records from their ‘normal’ personalities, and Spice World accentuated the personalities that they sold.

In Part of Me, however, Perry is caught somewhere between a pop music of aspiration and of the everyday. She claims to be both the girl singing into her hairbrush, and the embodiment of old school glamour. Her commercialism is so complete that it’s almost admirable; even the movie’s title seems resigned to her commodification. But although she tells us that she will be showing us “everything”, Perry seems more than aware that her image can be divided into segments.

But what is disturbing is imagining how Perry might conflict in the minds of younger girls. There are the lollypops which equate her sexuality with a literal consumption so phallic that it’s embarrassing even pointing it out. Then there’s ‘E.T.’, which I think of because my housemate delights in repeating the lyrics back to me:

“Infect me with your love? Fill me with your poison?”

“Take me, ta-ta-take me / Wanna be a victim / Ready for abduction?”

I am talking about childhood, but also about authenticity, a term which is often applied to popular music in order to find it lacking. In the 1920s, critics used the idea of authenticity to attribute relative values to jazz and pop; in the 1930s, between black and white jazz; in the 1960s, between rock and teen pop. The musicologist Elizabeth Leach suggests that although the musical markers for authenticity change between decades, the implication is always the same – “the authentic music is more real because it is less designed as a commercial venture.”

In this respect, Katy Perry can’t win. As a pop musician she is already defined as an effigy of the inauthentic and as one of the world’s most successful pop stars, she can only perpetuate the rot, so inscribed is she with the protensions and retensions of both the music industry and rock music’s dominant authenticity.

The idea of authenticity is thankfully so vague that people quite wisely stay away from it. Yet it will always be bandied around when discussing pop songs with indie kids. Pop music is commercialised bollocks, they say, with no depth and little meaning. Where’s the integrity in Justin Bieber? 

These men (for they are men) use ‘pop’ as a swear world. Pop music is so aggressively attacked because of the reaction it provokes in young girls, so readily dismissed because it so firmly embraces the temporary as to be unsettling. But pop music is a shot, a talisman, or a lover, and should be defended as such. I’ve heard half-hearted defenses that describe it as escapism, but it has to be bigger than that. Pop music is incantation, the invocation of something larger than yourself, the affirmation that follows you like a flashback through the day. Don’t fob me off with guilty pleasures, because that isn’t real - pop music’s effect is no slighter for its immediacy.

Why I listen to pop music is another matter, but this sentiment is something that Perry knows too well. The movie’s opening song, ‘Teenage Dream,’ went through a series of drafts before it was finally recorded and released in July 2010. Perry and her co-writers knew that they wanted to explore the feeling of being forever young; the first draft of the lyric was written about Peter Pan which all decided was too devoid of sex.

Focusing instead upon the emotions of becoming a teenager, Perry had the verse perfected, an ode to finding a love in which you can finally admit vulnerability. Without make up, without a punchline, she says, “I let my walls come down”.

The chorus was written after meeting future husband, Russell Brand, yet Perry defaults back to clichés: “You make me feel / Like I’m livin’ a / Teenage dream / The way you turn me on.” By the middle eight, the teenage dream has changed completely. Perry is no longer living her dream, she has become someone else’s: “I’m a get your heart racing / In my skin-tight jeans / Be your teenage dream tonight.” The shift in agency may be a slip, missed in the process of drafting and redrafting. But what was so securely conceived as a song about Katy’s personal reveries, becomes a song in which she is an object. It becomes, like all things concerned with Perry, both strikingly intimate and provocatively coy, both reality and fantasy combined.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about her fear of flying.