Cherry Bomb of Queen of Cream: True tales of the sex industry in the city summarized, oh, three quarters of everything I’ve ever tried to say about relationships, sex roles, alienation from your sexuality, and social pressure to have sex in one tidy little paragraph.
The point is, if you want to get laid, go hunt someone down on Craig’s List. If you want to get fucked, wander into a relationship without any idea of what you want or what the other person needs, and you’ll find out exactly what I mean.
Yikes! Wow! That pretty much says it all.
CB works in a adult-accessories store. Someone bought a vibrator, claiming she was swearing off men and needed something to replace them. In an extended post exploring that customer’s offhand remark CB just lays out the other side of a point I keep coming back to: that men, alienated from intimacy, are led to believe they need sex when they really (also) need love.
I couldn’t help being incredulous at the idea that that’s all men were to her. Not to wax Old School or anything, because we all know you don’t have to love someone to sleep with them, but I wondered if she had considered that maybe her issue with men didn’t have anything to do with sex. People, do NOT purchase a vibrator if what you should be buying are therapy sessions. I promise it is not an even trade.
Listen, I am a huge advocate for getting off without getting complicated, but don’t go soliciting sex if what you’re really after is love.
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So, back to the chick buying the male-replacement vibrator. She sounded like she was reading a script straight out of Cosmo magazine or something: “Ladies, if he doesn’t understand you, kick him to the curb and buy yourself a vibrator to celebrate!â€? That’s not an independent, feminist attitude. That’s fucking stupid. It’s buying into all the commercial, Men-Are-From-Mars, Women-Are-From-Venus divisive tactics meant to convince us that there’s no way we could have anything in common. Of course we don’t. If we were more similar, then you could probably share a bottle of shampoo with your boyfriend instead of him needing his pine scented American Crew shit, and you using Herbal Essence. Get it? The more we believe we are incapable of understanding the opposite sex, the more money we’ll spend on books, condoms, toiletries, Sex in the City DVDs, liquor, vibrators, and therapy to help us try and figure it out.
Guys get such a bum rap. They’re portrayed as clueless fumbling morons who couldn’t tell the difference between a woman’s naval and her clitoris. I mean, seriously ladies, on average it takes us about 13 years inside our bodies to find our own clitoris well enough to induce orgasm, so how can you expect every guy you jump into bed with to know immediately how to get you off? Men in our society are raised to think that emotional connections and feelings are pussy shit, and then when they get into relationships and have a difficult time understanding their partners, women roll their eyes and fume about how inept men are.
Well here’s a news flash: people are fucking complicated. I am a woman that dates chicks, and believe me, that does not give me any helpful edge. We spend our whole lives trying to figure out what’s going on inside of our own heads, so is it any wonder that we need a little help when trying to understand our partners?
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The point is, if you want to get laid, go hunt someone down on Craig’s List. If you want to get fucked, wander into a relationship without any idea of what you want or what the other person needs, and you’ll find out exactly what I mean.
That’s pretty powerful stuff, a very pointed refutation of the thesis of Pamela Paul’s Pornified and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvenist Pigs which cast women’s behavior in terms of trying to “fit” into promiscuous roles (created for them primarily by men, no less.) If you’ve followed this blog for any time at all you know I’m the first person to say enough sex is critical to everyone’s happiness, and though I say it less often I’m also the first person to say that love, real love, is every bit as critical. I’d like to be the first to say that the only immorality, the only sin, is to confuse the two but I’m afraid Cherry Bomb has beaten me to it.
My father, a deeply but unconventionally religious and philosophical man, is visiting this week. We were talking about the perils of modern society this morning and he said “you can’t can never get enough of something you don’t need.” This applies equally to sex. It applies equally to love. We can quibble about how much of anything we need, and acknowledge that everyone’s need is different, but if you’re not getting enough of one then I’m not sure you can be satisfied by more of the other, even lots more.
