Kathy Shaidle - Confessions of a Failed Slut

Confessions of a Failed Slut

A THOUGHT CATALOG ORIGINAL

2014 Kathy Shaidle

Published By: Thought Catalog

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Thought & Expression LLC

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

www.thought.is

Additive Credits

Cover Photo: iStockPhoto.com/izusek

Cover Design: www.athleticsnyc.com

Ebook Design: www.vook.com

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I t was a relic of the long gone era of gather-round-the-TV family viewing, a time when any talk of happy endings wasnt accompanied by knowing smirks.

How fitting, then, that the real-life Love Boats 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 Goulets 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 didnt see the world like this, through a Gen-X filter of self-defensive snark. I didnt 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 didnt help. The Patty Hearst and Chowchilla kidnappings scared me. Hell, Watergate scared me and I didnt 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 dont 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-didnt-I-think-of-that? website, Kindertrauma.com.

I mean: The Paper Chase scared me. Its one of the reasons I didnt 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 werent 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 didnt want love to be, in the words of The Love Boats 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. Id die first so I wouldnt have to cope with missing him. Hed die moments later so hed 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, thats not what I got, especially because, hey, it was the late 20th century, man. Nobody got that. Nobody was supposed to.

Love the one youre 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, shes 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 worlds 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 Bachelors runner-up lovers, beating out almost all his other girlfriends for the fellows 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.

Allemands last Instagram posting read:

Legend says, when you cant sleep at night, its because youre awake in someone elses dream.

And so my childhood left me ill equipped to participate in the someone elses 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 didnt 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 shed just read about: granting unwed teen moms special recognition in high school yearbooks, so they wouldnt feel left out.

But I dont 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. Wed 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 cant really blame her. Wed been marinated in that message throughout our 1970s childhoods. Never mind The Love Boat: At every 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