WARNING: The following post contains information about sex. Those of you new to this website, drawn recently by the incisive political commentary and dog stories that recall Thurber without being actually funny, might not realize that sex is a regular topic of discussion here. But it is. In fact, every Friday used to be Sex Day at Functional Ambivalent. Ah, yes: Those were the days. But then, a few months ago, I got bored with the whole subject and started writing a lot about golf. Well, not alot, actually, but you get my point. For those of you who aren't interested in reading about sex, go here, where no one would even think about sex, at least not without feeling horribly guilty. For the rest of you, well, this week and this week only: Sex Day is back. And, to be totally honest, feeling a bit randy.
If there is one thing about sex that I know (and hopefully, there is at least one thing about sex that I know) it is that people worry about sex. If you, like me, spend time searching sexually oriented websites entirely for research purposes, you have no doubt been struck by how many people there are who are really, really worried about some aspect of sex. Not the familiar I-haven't-had-sex-in-two-months-and-wonder-if-I've-turned-gay type of worry. More along the lines of the I'm-doing-something-horribly-wrong kind of worry, the kind of dread you get after assembling Ikea furniture and discovering that you have a lot of those little screw-clamp things left over.
The entirely normal people who inhabit the Worldwide Web seem to believe that somewhere there is a key to sex, a book of rules and techniques that will free them of concern, allowing them to enjoy sex without fear. And they believe, usually without coming right out and saying it, that someone -- probably the government -- is keeping that information from them on purpose.
So they are out there on the various Internets, searching for answers to their own, peculiar worries, some of which grow so worrisome that they're nearly crippling. Take, for example, this inquiry on the ever-entertaining iVillage message boards:
My girlfriend doesn't have a problem with sex, however when we go for oral she almost seizes up. I have tried speaking to her about it, but she doesn't want to discuss the matter. Has anyone else had this problem?
First of all, when a woman goes catatonic before a sexual act, I'm not sure it's fair to say she "doesn't have a problem with sex." If she doesn't have a problem with sex, maybe she has a problem with the man, which she surely doesn't because this fellow is the kind of sensitive guy who'd post the intimate details of their sexual problems for complete strangers to comment on. Which the completely strange crew at iVillage does, speculating at length that she is probably worried about the smell and taste of her vagina:
tell her you like the way she smells (as long a she is clean) tell her she tastes great too, let her know how much you are enjoying it, she may become aroused while you are telling her reassuring things while you are down there...
Like, for example, whispering that she tastes way better than the women at iVillage.com says she does. That'll bring her around, for sure.
The history of sexual worry is long and begins at the moment when man first experienced self awareness. In some long forgotten time, a caveman sulked in the corner after being denied gratification by his cavewife, who was tired after a long day of skinning bison. The caveman thought to himself:
She is disgusted with me because I have too much hair on my back.
Which is an entirely rational worry for a caveman and, for that matter, Armenians, as cavemen and Armenians both have too much hair everywhere.
Men and women worry about sex in approximately equal measures, though they worry about entirely different things. Few non-Armenian women, for example, worry that they have too much hair on their backs. For a long time, before the discovery of female orgasm in the 1950s, men's and women's sexual worries were limited to:
- Men: Getting sex.
- Women: Getting pregnant
Once women started having orgasms, of course, sex got a lot livelier, especially for the women. Coupled -- no pun intended -- with the invention of birth control, the publication of Playboy magazine, and the development by Stanford University of recreational uses for breasts, the great American sexual panorama grew wider. Perhaps paradoxically, the number of sexual worries grew much shorter, consisting entirely of:
- Men and Women: Getting sex.
The 1960s, which are currently being erased from the American Memory by order of the Republican National Committee, were a time when there was really only one rule about sex: If it feels good, do it. Since sex pretty much always feels good, people were pretty much always doing it. Sex came to be thought of as the central meaning of many, if not most, people's lives.
This period lasted just long enough to allow the dreadful movie "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" to become a hit, spawning bumper stickers and a conservative backlash that gave us, among other things, Zell Miller raving like a lunatic at the Republican National Convention. Soon enough, people started saying to themselves: It feels good, but I must be doing something horribly wrong because my life still sucks.
Rather than concluding that their lives sucked for reasons unrelated to sex, people started analyzing what it was they were doing wrong in sex that made their lives so miserable. They had conversations with each other that went like this:
Man A: "Like, my Zenith console television stopped working and now I have a 700 pound piece of furniture in my living room that serves no purpose."
Man B: "Man, you must have a highly bogus sexual problem."
Man A: "Wow. That's exactly what my guru says."
All this analysis lengthened the list of sexual worries. For men, the list looked like this:
- Getting sex
- Does she swllow?
- Will she cry when I leave to go home?
For women, the list of things to worry about looked like this:
- Getting pregnant
- He doesn't expect me to put that in my mouth, does he?
- I hope he doesn't remember where I live or what my name is
Nobody has a nose for insecurity like the publishing industry, and before long there was hardly a magazine that didn't have some kind of sexual worrying column, in which self-declared experts answered questions like this:
Q. Are black men's penises larger than mine?
And:
Q. Are black men's penises larger than my husbands?
The answer to both of which is almost certainly yes, given that if either writer had access to a decent sized penis they wouldn't have asked the question in the first place.
But that is beside the point, which is: Sexual worries became big business.
The situation grew dire when some goofball with too much time on his hands invented the Internet. (Insert Al Gore joke here.) The next thing you know, sexual worries and their cohort, sexual experts, were everywhere. We were all of a sudden worried about things that no one had even worried about before the Internet. Like, for example, this:
I'm looking for a way to lighten the darker skin around my anal area.
Trust me: Before the Internet, not one person in the history of the world worries that his or her anus might be the wrong color.
The Internet was not founded, of course, on worries about the color of our anuses. (Ani?) The evolution of Internet closely mimics the evolution of man, begining with basic functions before moving on to more sophisticated forms of dread. For that reason, it will not surprise you that the early Internet was filled with questions like this:
Q. Where do babies come from?
That's a pretty basic question, all right, and the Internet was handy with its own kind of answer.
A. Babies come from underneath women's skirts, and we've got more upskirt photos than anyplace else on the web!
Worries about making babies quickly permeated the Internet. Again, we visit iVillage.com to find out what America thinks. Specifically, we enter the dank psyche of the apparently ironically named "Luckygirl09" to see what she's worried about:
for the past 16 times iv'e had sex my boyfriend has always used two condums and i wanted to know if that is safer than just one? one of my friends tell me it's more of a hazzard but when i asked my boyfriend he said that it is more safer to use one and the last time we had sex we used one and it diden't feel any diffrent ...but doe's using two help prevent pregnancie better?
She and her beau are both worried about the same thing: An unwanted pregnancy. To tell you the truth, I'm worried about that, too. Luckygirl09 and her boyfriend don't seem the type of people who should reproduce, at least not if we're serious about raising the national literacy rate.
Nonetheless, the puntuation-challenged folk at iVillage come to the rescue, tossing another worry onto the pile to really heat things up:
Well from a man point of view, he will get less simulation with two condoms and it will take him more time to cum. This might be a reason other then safety.
I can imagine Luckygirl09 thinking: So you think my boyfriend's a premature ejaculator? What in tarnation makes me think I'm so lucky?
While human evolution took millions of years, the evolution of sexual worries on the Internet took only a few months. Soon, we were off the basic biological worries and out wandering our own psychological wilderness Like, for example, this from Ageless Love, a website devoted to "age gap relationships" like those more often referred to as "robbing the cradle" or "statutory rape," except that lots of the activity is between older women and younger men, which is just plain hot. An Ageless Love member frets:
Are there any younger men who don't mind the sagging boobs, cellulite, and wrinkles?
Thus appeared the most common of all worries for women: Body image. There is hardly a woman in the world who doesn't spend long, dark nights of the soul fretting that some part or parts of her body are too big, too small, or --apparently -- too smelly to please men, who are creatures who fight the dog over month-old Chinese food that has fallen on the kitchen floor. While men with bellies the size and consistency of vats of boiling paper pulp terrorize the world's beaches in Speed-Os, women with figures homosexuals write poetry about starve themselves to drop that last five ounces.
For the record, men worry about women's bodies, too, though in an entirely different way. Like this:
I'm worried that I'm not seeing enough naked women. I wonder if I'm gay?
But that is beside the point, which is: Of course there are younger men who don't mind sagging boobs, cellulite, and wrinkles. Younger men are attracted to older women because of their confidence, worldliness, and our belief that older women are desperate for any old beef injection that comes their way. (Though the more romantic among us prefer to use the term "man-meat macarena.") What's a little saggy flesh, we think, when we young studs can make a woman who looks disturbingly like our own mother beg for more. Certainly, no younger woman would beg us for anything but cab fare.
This delusional belief is, of course, driven by a whole different set of sexual worries, which are:
- Maybe if she takes her bifocals off she won't notice how small my penis is
- It's probably been so long since she had sex she won't realize how fast I come
- I'll compliment her hair and she won't notice my penis is really tiny
Older men involved with younger women pose a whole different set of worries. It is an established fact that every man more than ten years older than his current mate is impotent. Here's proof: Bob Dole is 13 years older than his wife, Elizabeth Dole. Bob Dole made Viagra a household name.
These men attach themselves to younger women because they are worried that other people will discover that they have what is constantly referred to by Bob Dole on television as "erectile disfunction." Their solution is to date and eventually marry younger women so that they give everyone the impression they're having a lot of sex, though I'm not sure Elizbeth Dole really gives anyone that impression.
How do I know all of this? Because I read it on the Internet. Like, for example, this Older Man who, after being unable to satisfy the sexual demands of his much younger girlfriend worried:
Just because you go out with someone, why does that imply you're sexually interested?
As you can see, this older man wanted to be seen with a younger woman so that other people would assume he was virle and having lots of athletic sex. He didn't want the actual sex part.
The women in these Older Men/Younger Women relationships have worries of their own. They are:
- I hope he's as rich as I think
- Gosh his penis is small
- I'm not changing his diapers no matter how rich he is
The most basic and mysterious of sexual worries is this: Am I normal? Basic because who among us hasn't, after an especially degrading weekend of re-enacting our most horrifying fantasies, wondered whether we might not be just a teeny bit off-center. And mysterious because, if you think about the most normal person you know, why would you want to be like that?
Trust me, you wouldn't. You'd rather be a Peruvian feather sadist than, say, the chair of the Chamber of Commerce's ways and means committee anytime.
Still, for some reason, we worry. A quick Googling of the phrase "am I normal" turns up more than 600 gazillion web pages, a surprising number of which feature questions about body hair, the answer to at least one of which is:
A. Some people have the same colored hair and pubic hair color, whereas other people have different hair and pubic hair colors. Both are normal.
Whew! That's a relief. I was really worried.
So what else is normal, according to Internet experts? Just about everything.
Which means, if you think about it, that we're all normal, and should stop worrying.
We won't, of course, because secretly we like to worry. Worrying makes sex sexier, because most sex turns out pretty much OK. The relief, in the end, is more than physical. It's also psychological, because all those things we were worried about...they hardly mattered at all.
Unless, of course, your anus was the wrong color. If it is, you'd best keep your pants on. If you don't, you're going to be filled with regret for the rest of your life.
That's it for this Sex Day! I hope you all have a wonderful, worry-free weekend, and who knows? Maybe we'll have Sex Day next week, too!
Dear Dr. Sex Day Expert,
Do men really care if I swallow? Why? Is it 'more safer' than if I let him do it in my you-know-what? Will he still want to kiss me on the lips afterward? What if I accidentally burp it all up on him? Even if I say 'pardon me'? Will he want to have sex with me again?
Sincerely,
Confused
Posted by: michelle | 03/29/2005 at 07:18 PM
One more thing, can I get pregnant if I swallow? If I drink a soda pop right afterward, will it keep his stuff from making it to the baby-making part of my body? Sorry to keep bugging you.
Sincerely,
Confused
Posted by: michelle | 03/29/2005 at 07:20 PM
Dear Dr. Sex Day Expert,
Also, are black dildos bigger than white ones? How do you think my parents will react when they find out I'm dating a black dildo?
Sincerely,
Confused
Posted by: michelle | 03/29/2005 at 07:22 PM