Guest Blogger: Bruno!

[I'm still pretty overextended with moving and work, so here's a guest post from Bruno to pick up the slack. -Holly]

Women don’t like sex. They feign interest only to attract men and put up with it only to keep them or to get pregnant. They’d rather eat chocolate; when Lesbian couples dive, it’s into bags of Doritos.

It's absurd to recount that myth beside Holly Pervocracy’s detailed accounts of her gleefully perverted exploits, but it took me a long time to overcome it and deeply impacted me in the interim. I suspect many men are similarly affected. If women won’t give sex, men have to take it from them. If they can be tricked into offering it, men can learn legerdemain. If nice girls say no, nice guys won’t ask.

My parents didn’t give me a healthy view of sexuality. They rarely even kissed where I might see them, and when they did it was always a sterile peck on the lips. That became my benchmark for normalcy. When I saw my babysitter and her husband on top of each other on their couch after school one day, I ran to tell their kids. (“So?” was their response, in a tone that implied I might get hit.)

My dad did leave copies of Playboy around where I could find them, but although I knew my dad and I wanted to see naked women there was nothing to convey what those women or my mom wanted.

My other early source for information about sex was my parents’ copy of The Joy of Sex. Theoretically, it could have given me a realistic view of sexuality and a broad knowledge of sex practices. There were at least two obstacles to that.

One was that the book wasn’t exactly aimed at a curious kid. The line-drawn hippies didn’t look like anyone I knew and much of the material came across as alien. I think I would have preferred learning about erections before being confronted with armpit fucking.

The second obstacle was that the book wasn’t kept in a bedroom. I found it in a water-damaged cardboard box in the furnace room among disintegrating mimeographs, abandoned Tupperware, and broken desk accessories, so my parents presumably found it as useless and weird as I did.

But of course I read it thoroughly, hands shaking in fear of being discovered and eyes straining in the amber light of a bare 20-watt bulb.

By high school I’d encountered other sources of information, but they didn’t help dispel the myth either. I got pretty good sex ed, but of course it focused on the dangers of sex, not on why anyone would accept the risk, which I guess should have been self-evident to a teenager. The “letters to the editor,” I found in dirtier men’s magazines were written from the man’s point of view and based on factual inconsistencies and anatomical improbabilities I already suspected they were fiction.

High school also featured a few conversations about sex with girls, who also did nothing to dispel the myth. One friend insisted that she’d be a virgin on her wedding day, but that she wanted her husband to have some experience. Sex was like farting –of interest only to crude stinky boys.

College probably should have done more to convince me that women actually like and pursue sex, but apparently I was difficult to persuade, possibly because “women don’t like sex” was easier to digest than “women don’t like me.” I now had access to Internet porn, which meant actual fucking, but actresses’ moans weren’t always distinguishable from agony. Besides, I was soaking up the political correctness of the environment, and knew that all sex was rape unless every act received explicit, enthusiastic consent, and that pornography was inherently degrading to women. Women disliked sex and needed to be insulated from it.

There’s always been an important exception to the myth for procreative sex. A female college friend who was no doubt being sincere in her flattery regularly told me that I’d “be a good dad.” I’d yet to get laid, or even more than a truth-or-dare kiss, and never seen a naked woman in person, and here was my fate: For being a good person, women would reward me with diapers, not orgasms.

Eventually, someone liked me enough to proposition me. She scared the crap out of me, though, so it took a better friend and a couple rounds of propositioning to get me to second base. Then my first girlfriend found me, and eventually asked me to make love to her.

She never asked again, and after that relationship ended my second sex partner was completely passive. Eventually I felt rejected by and resentful toward both, and so the myth lived on.

Years later, I’ve had a few more experiences and may have finally integrated the truth into my mindset. Some of the credit goes to women like Holly who are willing to share their experiences. A lot of it is courtesy female friends who are honest about what they want, whether or not they seek it from me. Mostly, though, it’s about maturing beyond thinking of myself as aberrant.

But the myth still pops up. I ran into an immigrant friend while traveling to a bar to meet with mutual friends, and she complained about the amount of attention she gets from men. What a burden, to be desirable! My FWT (friend with tension) essentially propositioned me to be a sperm donor, albeit leaving the delivery mechanism ambiguous.

Most significantly, it’s exposed in the idea that women can get sex whenever they want, compared with the frustrated, lonely men. The 15th century Latin translates as “man proposes, God disposes,” but an equally popular philosophy is “man disposes, woman disposes.” Women are in control, and if they’ll condescend to fucking they’ll have limitless opportunities because not enough women want sex to satisfy the insatiable appetites of men.

Of course, women might have to settle for someone other than the hottie de jour. My FWT told me that for her birthday she wanted to “treat [herself] to some nookie,” and she got it. It was with a guy who’s older, fatter, balder, and dimmer than she’d presumably prefer, but yes, he’ll give her whatever she wants.

And what she wants includes orgasms.