Outside the purity ring set (those who adhere to a nut-job religious worldview, the type to equate women’s sexual desire with the toppling of collective moral firmament) reasonable folk would concede that seven is not an excessive number of sexual partners for a woman to have, especially if she married them all. By leading accounts, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the least promiscuous women in Hollywood, yet she was the target of relentless slut shaming by the media over the years, a nefarious cultural dictate which bullies any woman who claims a degree of sexual agency beyond the narrow proscription outlined by the hoary old Madonna/Magdalene stereotypes. Elizabeth Taylor fit neither category; she defied the rote pigeonholes virgin or harlot to which other women such as Doris Day or Marilyn Monroe easily succumbed. Taylor was an iconoclast by comparison. She wasn’t just the good girl or the bad one. Elizabeth Taylor was a woman in love. She followed her passion, announced it publicly and then refused apology or conformity.
At 18 and a virgin on her wedding night to ultra-scumbag Nicky Hilton, Taylor placed an emphasis on general propriety within marriage and wifedom. Hollywood Babylon, the raunchy tell-all of the industry dishes copious dirt on plenty of otherwise wholesome star biographies, except the only names it can link to Taylor besides the men she married are Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra. Three book length treatments of Taylor’s life (Liz: An Intimate Biography, How to Be a Movie Star and Furious Love) contain no evidence or rumour of her lovers taken outside marriage. Extramarital affairs and sexual hijinks are the bread and butter of the celebrity biography circuit, but there’s little to whisper about La Liz.
Hedda Hopper, the Pope and the international press traded on calling Taylor a slut, a homewrecker, morally bankrupt and the rest, when really, she was a fairly conservative lady who conjoined sex and marriage. The sexual double standard at play reeks to the rafters. While men in the industry slated hundreds if not thousands of conquests, Taylor was vilified for less than ten. Taylor’s treatment illustrates women’s perpetual vulnerability to cultural scrutiny and judgment regarding sexuality. Virgin until marriage and no sex without a ring means little in the end. Slut shaming is fickle business, one that ultimately reserves the privilege to denounce women who have the temerity to claim bodily sovereignty and independent sexual desire. The grim overview of Taylor's post mortem in the press is a reductive assessment of the lady as the sum of husbands, rather than her true legacy as the most gifted and bewitching woman to ever grace the screen.
