Scenes From the Sexual Market

I shared space (acreage) on the elevator today with a woman pushing 300 pounds.  One of the VPs, a portly middle-aged man with strong body language, got on with us.  She exchanged a pleasantry with him and he briefly acknowledged her with a head nod.  She began telling him a story about her weekend when the elevator door opened and an attractive, slim Asian woman stepped in.  Right in the middle of the fat woman’s friendly conversation with him he promptly turned his attention to the Asian woman and offered up a big smile, eagerly asking about her week and flirting with her like he was a schoolboy with a puppy crush.

I watched the reaction of the fattie.  She looked chastened, forced to cut her own conversation off, and lowered her head looking at her shoes which were two sizes too small for her porky hooves.  I understood her pain, but I did not sympathize with it.  At her age, she should know how the world works.  If she wants to be treated better, she needs to lose a lot of weight and stop being a self-made sideshow freak.

Losers in life have to suffer in big and small ways every day, every hour, and every minute of their miserable existences.  Most of us don’t notice their suffering because we’re too wrapped up in our own dramas.  But suffer they do, their worthlessness as human beings getting shoved in their faces daily by others who aren’t even aware of their hurtful actions.

Welcome to the jungle.  There’s no opting out of this reality. 

“I only take Viagra when I’m with more than one woman.”

Fame, wealth, and charisma have made Jack Nicholson the heartbreaker of 2,000 women.  At the age of 70, and looking every bit of it, he spends his leisure time in boats with a tumbler in one hand and a bevy of young women draped around him like his royal concubines.  This means Jack is The Man.

I’ve got the biggest tits here.

I can already hear the female chorus of unctuous naysayers.  “Oh, I would *never* sleep with him.  He’s gross!”  “Fame and money don’t matter to me. It’s the man inside that counts.”  “If Jack Nicholson came onto me I’d turn him down.”

Right.

You don’t know how you’d act in the company of a major male celebrity, but I can guarantee you it wouldn’t be anything like you say you’d act from the comfort of your bedroom where there is no chance of ever meeting Nicholson.  Virtue is easy when you have no other choice.

A face-to-face meeting between Jack and a good girl who scoffed at the idea that she would submit to his charms would be a sight to behold as she gradually abandoned every one of her principles. 

First, her heart would race.  But she’d try to remain calm and aloof.  After all, she’s not like those starfucking sluts.  Then, Jack would speak.  And it would sound just like all those movies she watched with him in it.  He might even drop a quote or two.  *sqeal*!  Oh boy, her composure is starting to crack.  Maybe Jack might lasciviously angle his body so that his hot Oscar-winning breath blows across her neck and his belly brushes her arm.  He does this with his trademark sunglasses reflecting the light and his shit-eating joker grin exuding total unstoppable confidence.  She no longer notices his belly and man boobs.  Her loins feel like a rainforest. 

She looks around and something she does notice is how many beautiful women are languidly caressing Jack’s body, laughing at his every word, blatantly aroused to the point of orgiastic explosion.  For some inexplicable reason, noticing this turns her on even more.  Parrots and monkeys are swinging through her snatch.  Jack pats his lap.  No words exchanged; she walks over and sits in it.  He smells like drunken old man, but all she can think of is how attractive his eyes are when he squints from the sun.  Minutes later, in the cabin, Jack’s wang is driven in to the hilt.  Heeeere’s little johnny!

A woman’s principles are like an impressionistic painting — beautiful to contemplate from a distance but all over the place once you get up close.

Where Guys Falter

The best way to do well with women over the long haul is to think like them, understand them, and put yourself in their shoes.  The man who can empathize with a woman’s frustrations will know better how to make her happy.  All the great seducers of history co-opted to some degree the psychology and the courting tactics of women.  They used women’s pyschological weapons against them.

This is why European men have a reputation for smoothness with the ladies — they spend more time than American men in the company of women, participating in activities and intellectual pursuits that appeal to women, learning about them.  American men bemoan their dating hardships, but spending all their free time watching sports, drinking beer, video gaming, and golfing, where no women are present, only to take a flailing Saturday night stab at getting laid in overheated bar environments, is not a good way to learn how to turn women on.

The inexperience of many guys around women shows in their ham-fisted come-ons.  They often act so counter-productively that it’s a wonder any girls give it up to them at all.  Verbally gang tackling a group of girls at a bar is one example.  Which guy, in a moment of reflection, really believes that approaching two girls with five of his buddies in phalanx formation and swarming them like vultures over a carcass will win their affections?  Guys who don’t have the sack to approach women on their own should not advertise their weakness by storming in with a giant cock posse for battlefield support.  Two guys maximum.  If necessary, hold off on waving the rest of the crew in until after the set has been warmed up in a non-threatening way.

Guys also do not listen.  Well, not in the way that women want to be listened to.  A guy should listen to a woman with the same intensity he listens to his buddies talk about football or German hookers.  The focus that a nerd brings to tackling a coding problem is the same focus that a guy should have when listening to an attractive woman speak.  The trick is to do it with the distracted aloofness of someone not hanging on her every word.  It’s very alluring to a girl when a guy off-handedly recalls some inconspicuous detail he picked up about her while she was talking without looking like he worked hard to remember it.  It subconsciously says to her “This guy is not desperate, but wow I must be making an impression because he remembers how I felt when I danced at my sister’s wedding.  We connect!”

This isn’t meant as mealy-mouthed John Gray relationship pap; listening intently to a woman will give him all the information he needs to successfully seduce her.  Women reveal so much about themselves in conversation — they can’t help it because they are self-obsessed creatures by nature — but they only do it in subtle read-between-the-lines ways, feminine ways, that to the uninitiated man will pass right under his radar.  It’s a double curse that boobs and pretty eyes cloud his efforts to stay engaged with her words.

To seduce women, you must seduce yourself first.  You are the guy who will be everything she needs.  How will you know what she needs?  Get inside her head.  Become her.

From Kitten to Cougar

It’s depressing to see drunk older women at nightclubs vainly trying to hold onto their former glory.  It’s a study in contrasts when these aging beauties go to clubs full of kittens.  They aggressively flirt with every guy because when they haven’t been hotly pursued by a man under 60 in ten years they turn to the hard sell for male attention.  If the cougar asks you the time and you give it to her she takes that as a signal to stroke your chest provocatively.  They rationalize this pathetic behavior as maturing into a confidently assertive woman who is done playing games like they did when they were “silly girls”.  There are so many self-help books now I think a person could positively spin just about any shitty life predicament.

I can think of quite a few girls I frequently see haunting the nightlife scene who’ve gone from kitten to cougar in just a few years.  Many women in the socialite crowd have crossed the cougar rubicon, yet stubbornly refuse to give up their lifestyle.  When all you’ve ever known is the inside of a club, 37 varieties of martinis, and dancing on raised platforms as horny guys give you your attention fix, it’s understandable you’d find it hard to accept your demotion to has-been hottie.

Cougarness in strangers is not hard to identify.  Friends are another matter.  When you see a person every day you don’t notice their physical changes from aging so much, but someone you see once every six months can shock you with their age-related deterioration.  The precise changes are hard to pinpoint but taken as a whole it’s obvious when the bloom of youth is gone.

The statuesque woman on the left is on the cusp of cougarhood.  Even though she has admirably stayed in shape, her upper arms betray her age, especially around the armpit, as do her sinewy hands.  You know her flesh would not bounce back from a firm squeeze, like a quarter off a Marine’s bed.  If she is still single, her time is short to find a life partner before she has to begin lowering her standards.

After marriage and kids, most women surrender the willpower to fight the ravages of time and let themselves go, content to become matronly and raise their children.  This is the normal progression of life.  But with career-delayed marriages and perpetual dating where she is waiting around forever to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist, the clubs are beginning to fill with women who have missed the boat yet won’t admit it to themselves.

Desperation causes them to do just about anything to cling to their fading looks.  You will see women over 30 suddenly lose a lot of weight because they are under the impression that being skinny will shave the years off.  Celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Renee Zellweger do this.  While it beats being obese, most simply look like bony older women with sunken eye sockets and loose skin.  Tom Wolfe, in his prophetic opus ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, called these women “social X-rays”.  It was an excellent description, as it highlighted their physical emaciation along with their superficiality.

This is an unwanted chest-stroking waiting to happen:

Eventually, the cougar who is sufficiently self-deluded about her ability to attract men becomes a brothel madam.

This woman is a fixture at the eurotrash clubs around town:

She is pretty, but it is only a matter of a few years until a roaring cougar emerges.  She looks Russian, which means that she will hit the wall sooner and harder than most women her age.  She has done the smart thing here by hooking up with an older man.  She will look hot to him for a longer time than she would to a younger man.  Not surprisingly, he displays the body language of a former player.  I suspect he is an artist of some sort.  Older male artists, as opposed to older male investment bankers or lawyers, are especially gifted at banging Lolitas.

As a man and an aesthete, watching women grow old and their beauty disappear forever is the greatest tragedy of life.  If I could magically prevent every woman from aging and thus increase the aggregate beauty in the world, I would do it.

did anyone catch the number of that train?

hungover. sun hurts my eyes. here’s a very special saturday morning message from me to you:

much love.

Date 2 Location Reviews

First dates should almost always be simple affairs over drinks or tea.  No dinners, no nights out on the town, no extravagant expenditures.  You want to keep expectations at bay and create a comfortable zone of unzipped-lipped, nimble-tongued, playful jive.  The two of you are reading each other like schematics to the bank vault and external logistics only gets in the way of those lingering looks and wily wordplay.

Second dates open up to more creative interpretation.   If the first date has gone well, (but not so well that you closed the deal), the second date should amp the attraction with a mix of venues and locations that help build a foundation of shared experiences.  You want to be in motion with her; give your bodies more room for expression and your senses more opportunities for stimulation.  With that in mind, here are my reviews of some common Date 2 locations in DC.

Lincoln Memorial at Night

Cheesy, trite, and very effective.  You don’t have to blow away your date with originality if the ambience is perfect as is.  And the Lincoln Memorial, on the steps at midnight under a summer moon, shrouded in the glow of the reflecting pool, sets an unbeatable mood for encouraging closeness.  After the early night drinks, surprise her with a car trip to the Lincoln.  There’s plenty of parking nearby late at night.

Sculpture Garden Ice Skating

Unless your date can do triple sow cows and the Blades of Glory “crotch scissors”, skating with her means you’ll have plenty of chances to demonstrate your male protector role by holding her when she stumbles or letting her grab onto your arm for support as she struggles to find her balance.  The crowd will always work in your favor; whether the rink is filled with canoodling couples that enhance the romantic mood or kids skating recklessly around you that provide an energetic boost and lots of humorous material, you can’t go wrong here.  In the summer, there is an outdoor jazz festival at the sculpture garden.  Drinks at the patio bar are overpriced.

Billiards or Darts

Playing pool with her means lots of good-natured teasing.  Plus, most girls are not good at pool and will need you to show them how to properly hold the stick and shoot.  You can only do this from behind.  That is intimate body contact on the sly.  The best places are small basement-level pool halls that double as dive bars.  Bedrock Billiards and Kokopoolis come to mind.  Stay away from auditorium sized pool halls, as they are too impersonal.  Also, don’t bother with tiny bars that have only one pool table — what usually winds up happening is that other guys wait around to play next and you and your date get jostled all night by drunks trying to navigate the tight spaces between the table and the walls.  Cautionary note:  If your date is a shark (there seem to be an inordinate amount of DC girls who know how to shoot stick) then be sure not to let the ego-bruising show.  Just tell her you let her win this time.

The Pleasure Palace

If your date is one of those freaky chicks you picked up at DC9, take her to this sex toy shop on Conn Ave in Dupont.  Pretend to be walking down the street to a different location when you two just happened upon this dirty little place and oh, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to see what kinds of creepy things they sell in here!  Once inside, act like you never saw this stuff before.  [Examining glow in the dark clit tickler]  “What the heck is this?  Do you stir pasta with it??”  Don’t loiter, it’ll start to seem skeevy.  If she was really into it, take her across the street to the gay Lambda bookstore next to Kramerbooks for a good laugh.  While browsing the educational material, ask her, “Do lesbians really do this?”  This will smoke her out as a possible bisexual.  Tailor your game accordingly.

A Vision of Equality

What would a world where women were no different than men look like?  Where the utopian feminist ideals of gender equality held sway?

The executive summary:  there’d be grab-ass in the streets, on the metro, at the job, in the church pews, all hours all the time.  The city air would fill not with the sounds of traffic and construction and sirens but the gruntings of humans in mid-coitus.  Nature hikes at Great Falls would lose a lot of its ambience as the chirping birds and tree leaves rustling in the wind yielded to the Uuhs and Ahhs of sweaty thrustings.

We get a window into that imaginary world in the lives of gay men circa 1970s before the AIDS epidemic inspired the media to paper over the true nature of male homosexual libido.  If women had the same intense, indefatigable, indiscriminate sex drive as men it would resemble M. Blowhard’s description of his time as a straight man witnessing the gay scene in New York:

If Fire Island was acres of beef on the hoof, Christopher Street was Mardi Gras in New Orleans, only with fewer inhibitions and without a female to be seen. One club or bar after another … Each establishment, and the street itself, filled with exuberant gayguys in freaky costumes … Music, drugs, and booze everywhere … Carousing of a pitch that would put beer-drinking Spring Break jocks to shame …

As well as the most aggressive and direct sexual behavior I’ve ever witnessed. I found the scene overheated and hair-raising all at once. I’d never before and have never since witnessed a scene so single-mindedly focused on getting off. People as commodities … Relentless dick-centeredness …

And what was courtship like between gay guys?

At the bars and on the sidewalks of Christopher Street there wasn’t a pretence at conversation, let alone at recognizing that anyone might have a personality. You were understood to be there to have sex, period. The single and only point was to find someone you could get off with, and quickly, because someone else you would want to get off with might stroll by in a few minutes. Imagine city block after city block offering nothing but sexual challenge and sexual invitation.

The author of the book on the gay sex scene of the 1970s describes it in vivid terms:

Whatever fantasy you had, you always knew you could satisfy it any time, night or day, at one of the many sexual playgrounds …

Urban gay male life had evolved over a decade from personal salvation into a communal identity and now, as the Saint [a famous disco] became our weekly Mecca, into a quasi-religion. Several thousand muscled, shirtless gay men in black 501 jeans … Upstairs was a huge darkened balcony converted into carpeted bleachers where hundreds of stoned men fucked all night and into the day.

To lose oneself so completely in the wall-to-wall men moaning in the dark … soaring on a hit of ethyl chloride … was like being transported to some heavenly other planet somewhere beyond the stars.

Don’t kid yourselves.  This is exactly what relations between men and women would be like if women possessed the mental and emotional machinery of men, except instead of one Christopher Street there would be millions.  If we were equal in the ways that the feminist movement which inculcated two generations of women into its warped worldview insisted we were, and our psychological differences were only social constructions amenable to change, then the result would be a lecherous orgy of such proportions as to make de Sade blush.

Rampant sex and the perpetual pursuit of sex with thousands of willing partners would grind society to a halt.  If STDs didn’t wipe out a significant portion of the population, sheer physical exhaustion from day-long fuck marathons would render the rest incapable of anything more than satisfying the bottom of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs.

Romance novels about dating, seduction, and intimacy would have to be re-engineered to reflect the new reality.  Actually, romance novels would cease to exist.  Porn would become even more ubiquitous than it is now, flashing from giant electronic billboards over musty cityscapes drenched in the effluvium of sex fluids like some raunchy Bladerunner alternate universe.  Every vice imaginable would find its expression unfettered by moral disapprobation.

In this equalist fantasy, or nightmare, dating takes on a whole new hue.  Those first shy stabs at awkward flirtations would pluck the heartstrings like this:

Him: “Hi.”
Her: “Hi.”
Him: [grabs ass]
Her: [grabs ass back]
{sexual intercourse}

If courtship progressed as far as a first date:

Him: “Hi, you’re cute, wanna get a drink sometime?”
Her: “I’d like that. Here’s my number. Call me sometime.”
[15 minutes later at bar]
Him: “Wow, that’s really cool that you’re into golden showers.  I heard the bathrooms here are great for fucking.  All the walls are mirrored.”
Her: “Let’s find out!”
{sexual intercourse}

Put away all your player manuals, you won’t need them.  Want to broach the subject of multiple short and long term relationships?  Threesomes?  A2M?

Him: “Wanna do A2M, threesomes, or be a member of my harem?”
Her: “You had me at A2M!”

Marriage?  Kids?  Um, yeah.  Civilization?  It’d putter along for a while, but eventually the voracious id unleashed would reverse human achievement so rapidly that the forests would retake the cities, as it is doing in Detroit right now.  I doubt you could walk M Street more than two blocks without seeing penis in vagina somewhere along the way.

Left to their own insatiable appetites, men are dogs.  Underneath all the game playing, romantic gestures, conversational fluff, and resource display lies a feral beast who’d smash through that facade as soon as the gatekeeper relinquished her keys.  Women put the brakes on this steamroller of lust.  Love helps keep it distracted… at least for a while.