Who What Where and Wow!

WARNING: The following Sex Day entry (!) is a rerun of a Sex Day entry (!) first posted on the old Functional Ambivalent site a long time ago when no one was licking. I mean, looking. I hope all the links still work, but if they don't oh well. Also, this entry(!) is about sex, and some people don't like that, so I invite you kindly to go here where sex will be the farthest thing from your mind, I promise. For the rest of us...

It's Sex Day! Yay! Put on you CFM pumps and strap on your strap-on! Pour yourself a jelly jar of Smirnoff Ice, throw the switch on the electric fireplace, and settle in for three minutes of uninterrupted ecstacy.

Except, first, Sex Day needs a theme song. You know, something to get our toes tapping before we get our hearts -- among other things -- pumping. How about this one, sung to the tune of the music in the old AMC Gremlin commercials:

It's Sex Day It's Sex Day It's Sex Day Turn me on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

The Gremlin was a car that was a fad for about two months back in the '70s. They were terrible cars, so poorly built that you could actually hear them rust. But they had a great -- OK, really it was terrible, but work with me here -- advertising jingle.

"Sex is everywhere!", or so we are told by the kind of concerned people who see the fall of Western Civilization in sitcom subplots. "You can't get away from it," they lament on behalf of the upright NASCAR Dads and Soccer Moms who inhabit the Wal-Marts of the Real America. Everywhere those good people turn, they find sex, and they're fed up to here with it!

Well, maybe, but Wal-Mart might not be the place to search for people offended by public displays of sexuality, at least if you're to believe what you read on the web. (Seriously: Does anyone believe what they read on the web? Should I just stop right here, premise undermined, and find another topic?) I've got evidence that Wal-Mart is, in fact, a sexual hotbed. Or, more accurately, a sexual hotdressingroom.

Let's call it "Real Estate Sex," because it's all about location. When asked, in legendary television moment a few years ago, where the most unusual place she and her new husband had made whoopee, one blushing Newlywed Game bride answered, "In the butt."

Delightful, yes...but not what we're after here. No, we're talking geographic, as opposed to anatomic, location. The same good clean dirty fun we all enjoy so much in bed with the lights out and the shades drawn as God intended, but somewhere different, somewhere kind of public, somewhere perhaps even a little naughty. Like, for example, Wal-Mart.

"By far the freakiest place my husband and I had a sexual encounter was in a change room at Walmart," says Sara in this article. "It was great -- now that's what I call one stop shopping."

And, Sara, don't forget the low, low prices.

It is apparent that the crowd that laments Janet Jackson's publicity stunt as the harbinger of our civilization's downfall is woefully out-of-tune with the loins that express America's true feelings. It is not, apparently, just perverts and Democrats who are packing themselves into dark corners and kneeling down on industrial-grade carpeting. It is, in fact, just about everyone.

There is a website, Women.com, that has a message board entirely devoted to having sex in public places. In fact, Women.com has more than 300 pages of people who are telling, in 200 words or less (usually lots less) their tails -- oops! -- tales of excitement and ecstacy in places normally reesrved for prosaic functions like eating a McMuffin.

And you'd be surprised how many of them have been whooping it up in Wal-Marts.

I, myself, have witnessed public sex. One time driving home on a Los Angeles freeway on a Friday afternoon, I saw people having sex in the next car. Well, oral sex, anyway, right there in the high-occupancy lane. I was so...oh, offended isn't quite the right word. Neither is shocked. More like...jealous. Yeah, that's what I was. Jealous. I wanted to have those people arrested because all I had for entertainment was the radio.

The women of Women.com have shown all kinds of ingenuity, from the romantic ("in a park on a warm summer night with the moon overhead") to the icky ("The bathroom of a Greyhound bus.") Their descriptions sometimes sound like games of Clue: "Colonel Mustard, in the greenhouse, with my panties around my ankles."

There are also people having sex in places that would make my own, personal genitalia shrivel up to the size of two raisins and a grain of rice. For example: The bathroom of a Sunoco gas station, in a Baptist Church in Alabama, in a horse stall, and -- you're going to want to sit down for this -- in a subdivision. There are even people who have sex in public places without anyone else being present, as is the case with this fellow, who crashed the Women.com message boards to announce that he's pathetic: "I gave myself a hand job while I was driving down the road. Another driver saw me and honked, but that was ok. I kind of liked it."

I can see the bumper sticker now: Honk if you're whacking off!

"My husband and I decided we needed to find a different place, so we ended up on our friend's trampoline," says Tammy, a bouncy Ashville, North Carolina, resident, whose spirit of adventure raised the hackles of Anonymous, a judgmental old fuddy-duddy who apparently didn't do a close reading of the activities by Tammy AND HER HUSBAND before opining, "Ladies don't have sex until they marry. Otherwise we're just SLUTS!!"

Which raises another interesting point, at least as far as guys are concerned. Which is: "OK. We can live with you being just sluts. In fact, we'll buy you expensive jewelry."

To tell you the truth, I'm a little confused by a couple of Women.com prudes who think that women who have sex in unusual places and at unusual times are never, ever going to land a man. It seems to me, being a man and everything, that some action in, say, the written-test carrels at the DMV might be just the thing to keep our eyes and imaginations from wandering over to the teenager in the belly shirt waiting in line for her first driver's license.

But that's just me, and my license doesn't need to be renewed for another two years.

Whatever, for some of the women of Women.com, the subject has apparently become tiresome, as this posting indicates:

SEX SEX SEX is all you ever think about?

Well, yes. It's a sex message board.

Just how widespread -- ahem -- is this public sex phenomenon? Well, the good people at Harlequin Romance, who publish "Women's Fiction" featuring fictional women with names like Molly Dewberry and Darling Montgomery, took an official, international poll as part of their "2002 Romance Report," and found that public sex was going on pretty much everywhere. Well, everywhere except Canada. In our good, clean neighbor-to-the-north, only 15% of surveyed adults reported that they had had sex in public, versus a worldwide average of 41%. (For a possible explanation of this Canadian lack of vigor, click here.) Leading the pack: The Norwegians, of whom 66% have had sex in public, perhaps because it's dark up there most of the time and no one can see you. Plus, Ikea furniture isn't as strong as you might think.

Among Americans, 80% of those who have sex in public do it an automobile, which is niether ingenious nor comfortable. (The statistic also suffers from a lack of detail. Just exactly where were all those automobiles parked, if it was parked at all? There's a big difference between, say, a garage and the parking lot at Wal-Mart.) The Japanese, on the other, uh, hand, prefer movie theaters. Other locations of note: Offices, yards, parks, restaurants, concerts, and dressing rooms -- particularly in Wal-Marts.

Lest you believe that this is something vile men foist off on virtuous women, a poll by Queendom.com indicates that men and women are about equally turned on by sex in unusual places, many of which are public and some of which must be discount store dressing rooms.

The Poll shows that 39% of women and 41% of men like humping away in (in order of preference) a jacuzzi, on the beach, in a forest, on a boat, on the kitchen table, in public places, in the backseat of a car, on an airplane or in a bathroom. Curiously missing from the list: Canada. The disparity of only two percentage points can, I believe, be explained by the Women.com fellow who "gave himself a handjob" while driving alone.

One of the few places that gets little mention as an alternative location for sex is the Oval Office. Interesting, given that the whole country -- particularly those people who are currently obsessed with Janet Jackson's breast -- was consumed with a desire to spend $40 million investigating whether sex had, in fact, taken place in the Oval Office.

I think that there's a big segment of the population that kept quiet during that debacle because they knew that if they were President, they'd have had sex in the Oval Office, too. (Maybe not with an intern, though.) I mean, when you move into a new house, don't you "break in" all the rooms? So if you were President, would you not roust the spouse one night and sneak down to the West Wing for a little game of Commander in Chief teaches the French Ambassador an unforgetable lesson?

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you may be. Even if it's Canada.

Comments

[Camilo]

I think that the Oval Office has seen a lot of sex already: the whole country has been screwed.
OK, off to Walmart.