Author: Stuart Greene

An old friend of mine, Rich, is gay but he was married to a woman for ten years. His was not the typical scenario, in which a closeted gay man discovers a decade too late that he prefers men. No, this was one of those marriages of convenience. Rich had had boyfriends since he was a teenager. He met Laura when we are all in college, and they became best friends. She was straight, she knew he was gay, and they made a handsome, platonic couple. They had an “open” marriage that allowed them to be physically involved with other people. (Talk about threatening the sanctity of heterosexual marriage!)

I caught up with Rich recently, because I wanted to know what he thought about a new study that shows that fruit flies have a single gene that determines whether they are homosexual or heterosexual. (Do you find it as weird as I do to think about fruit flies hooking up?) Scientists found that by tweaking this gene, they could make male flies totally get into whatever the fruit-fly equivalent of Judy Garland and leather chaps is. Also, they could make the females wear little mullets and drive motorcycles.

“They’ve done studies like that many times,” Rich told me. “Why do you think they call us ‘fruits’?” He laughed and pointed out that this latest one is interesting only because it seems like the most thorough, irrefutable one to date.
Rich said it is certainly satisfying for the gay community to be able to say that homosexuality is not a “lifestyle decision,” nor is it a perversion of the natural order of things, a deviation from doing things “the way God intended.” He and his gay friends have been hearing that kind of nonsense for so long, from so many horribly backward people, that they find it comforting to have a little backup from science.
I couldn’t help pointing out, however, that a little science never did anything to derail the fervent beliefs of the most willfully ignorant people—the sort who argue that being female or African-American is genetically determined and “normal,” but that it doesn’t mean God wants women or blacks to run for president. Still, confirming the existence of a “gay gene” may put to rest the most virulent forms of homophobia—the sort where people consider it a “disease” that can be “cured” through prayer and psychotherapy.

Of course, anytime you mix science and sex, trouble comes up. Another very interesting recent study, about women and orgasm, may have some troubling implications. It showed there may be a “genetic influence” on whether a woman can achieve orgasm. “Now you’re out of my depth!” said Rich when I brought up this one. But I thought his perspective might be interesting. How would he feel if he were one of these “genetically influenced” women? Rich said, “On the one hand, it may be reassuring to know that this problem could be based in genetics. I suppose that could take the heat off, and relieve some of the guilt or shame that comes with not being able to get off.” The authors of this study were very quick to say that the genetic influence on orgasm is just that—an influence that can be, uh, manipulated, given enough time and patience and practice.

I asked my precious wife what she thought. She is not what I’d call a person who loudly announces the arrival of her orgasms, but generally she does not have any problem getting there. She had an interesting take. “Consider what the biological imperative might be for a sort of gray-area orgasm in women,” she said. (So smart and sexy!) “If women had the same super-obvious, concrete orgasms that men have, would humans have survived the caveman period?” I guess she meant that men have orgasms that are consistent with the Darwinian drive to “spread the seed” around as much as possible—to maximize the possibility for the greatest number of conceptions in the tribe, assuming that polyamory is our natural state.

If females did the same thing, hanging out at the cave-bar looking to hook up with as many cave-partners as possible, there’d be no cave-women at home to take care of the little cave-children. Still, I’m skeptical about this sort of natural-selection determinism. I think it might be more personal than that. What if desire itself has evolved in self-preserving ways? If a woman’s orgasms are much more variable in quality and degree, it may serve as a form of insurance—her man, to stoke his ego, will keep coming back and trying for a higher score. Call it the pinball theory. I like it, and I’m sticking to it.

Last month was a good one in the annals of human sexuality. Early in May, a Winona, Minnesota, student got kicked out of high school for wearing a button that said “I Heart My Vagina.” Carrie Rethlefsen, an eighteen-year-old senior, had seen a recent college production of The Vagina Monologues, and decided to take up a cause that adults at her school felt would be disruptive. A week later, a small town in Brazil celebrated “Orgasm Day”–and a part of the day’s serious programming included a production and discussion of The Vagina Monologues.

Lots has been written about that vagina play, but I guess it won’t keep me from weighing in as a benighted married man. It seems that if people don’t unapologetically love it (it’s about female empowerment!), then they are dead-set against it (God hates obscenity. And sex. And women).

I think Winona school officials have carved out an interesting middle ground. They have certainly bent over backward to show their sensitive sides–yes, yes, we know all about the oppression and the repression of women, and we’ll schedule seminars and discussions and panels and lectures and all that–but we have to be realistic here. We know this slogan will make kids giggle, and point, and joke, and skip classes, and blow up condoms like balloons, and sniff glue, and write graffiti on the bathroom walls, and steal the banisters out of stairwells, and smoke cigarettes, and disrespect the custodial staff, and so on … My paraphrasing is an exaggeration, of course. But honestly. We’re not talking about preventing school shootings here. Why don’t school officials worry about the disruption if it happens, rather than speculate about the potential disruptee? Why expel the messenger before even seeing what the reaction to the message might be?

The v-word itself has become a point of agreement in the culture wars–not so much for the troglodytes of the religious right, who hate sex and women, or in our high schools, but in various sects within feminism. This vagina activism works in two different ways, as I understand it. The post-feminists (or, as some like to say, lipstick feminists) promote a pro-sex, positive body image. Among the second-wavers, it is about exposing the history of female victimization (from both men and women). The nice thing is that feminists of any age can agree on loving their vaginas. So what’s the problem?

I think it’s just fun for women to say it out loud, and it’s fun for them to talk about it. It’s liberating to turn the word into a slogan on a button, a bumper sticker, or a T-shirt. Maybe they enjoy indulging in what has long been a male practice–speaking frankly and maybe a little proudly about their genitals. When I heard that one of Carrie’s male friends made his own T-shirt that said “I Support Your Vagina,” I thought, now that was a fine way to get behind the cause. Then I thought, Sheesh, what a dork. I’d make one that said, “I Heart Your Vagina, Too!” or “Let’s See It!” (Kidding… I’m kidding!)

Just by way of contrast, I like to imagine The Penis Monologues. (I don’t doubt there are dozens of parodies and maybe even a few serious, men’s-movement oriented treatments along these lines. Besides, you might say, most of modern life is already a perpetual penis monologue.) The subjugation and victimization of men is a hard sell. You have to believe in the hippy-dippy sophistry that to be a victimizer is also to be tragically unfulfilled. A Penis Monologues would invariably seem silly or self-indulgent, and it would certainly run the risk of trivializing The Vagina Monologues. But on a personal level (and there, by the way, is where The Vagina Monologues really triumph, I think), men have a lot to gain by thinking and speaking more openly about our own tragicomic equipment, and some of the indignities we suffer from in the daily, below-the-belt struggle for self-respect and fulfillment.

A reader recently commented that the Viagra paradox (mentioned in last month’s column–how many men and women seriously want to deal with a six-hour boner?) may be a result of widespread circumcision. There is surely a growing awareness that there are lots of reasons why we should call this what it is: a form of ritual genital mutilation. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the theory that this has somehow made American men less capable of having sex or obsessing about sex. We may be twenty to fifty percent less sensitive than if we still had our foreskins, but I don’t see that stopping my circumcised friends from having sex at every opportunity they get, and then some.

Maybe that would be a good place to start with our proposed penis monologues. Maybe we should all talk about our genitals a lot more, until it is no longer disruptive or even very interesting, like talking about our elbows.

Being a proud Anglo-American, I have long been a fan of the BBC soap opera EastEnders. (We see it here on TPT–the Twin Cities are a hotbed of British TV fans.) Everyone on this show, set in East London, eventually sleeps with everyone else, and there is an alarmingly high incidence of accidental death, felonious crime, and general high jinks. An episode that aired a couple of months ago got me thinking. Terry, a paunchy, headstrong, but generally likeable store owner, was having some trouble with Irene, his new-agey wife, who’d been struggling with a sort of female middle-age crisis. (She’d slept with one of her son’s friends, she was disgusted by her husband, she wanted more out of life, and so on.) Terry was increasingly agitated over their sex life, because it had, in his view, essentially evaporated–Irene was not “performing her wifely duties.” In intimate conversations with close friends, this was thought to be a very serious transgression indeed. Was it grounds for divorce? You bet it was. Irene was making things absolutely miserable for Terry. They were making love just once a week!

I have had enough conversations with enough friends to know that once a week means you’re doing pretty darn good; most of my married buddies would be happy as a pig in mud if they were getting that much intimacy. So I’m pretty sure this minimal requirement for “wifely duty” is not a function of English libido. No, I chalk it up to the writers of EastEnders, who have their pride, after all. Who besides a self-righteous celibate would brag about not having sex? Still, if they were shooting for veracity, the idea that once a week is not enough is intriguing. On the other hand, maybe these writers weren’t shooting for veracity, but rather trying to lay out some kind of standard or ideal.

As I get older, I wonder if most thoughtful, generous men wouldn’t be glad to be freed of the constant biological impulse to make whoopie. It makes life complicated, and it underscores one of the more annoying differences between men and women. (Why can’t the genders want to do this with the same frequency–much less at the same time? God is indeed a jealous god, judged by some of the incompatibilities he created in man and wife.) Sex is fun, of course, but is it worth all the trouble and all the energy it seems to demand of the male mind? I think most honest married women would answer that question with a resounding, “Duh!”

Being neither a scientist nor a statistician, I am therefore quite unequipped to understand the wild popularity of drugs like Viagra and Levitra. I do think I know why “erectile dysfunction” is apparently such a widespread affliction. Let’s just say “use it or lose it” probably has biological ramifications. But still, why would women suddenly want their husbands functioning at, um, such a high level again? When I try to figure out why the little blue pill has been such a hit, I think it has everything to do with the image men have of themselves. Just as the issue with male pattern balding demonstrates, because we cling to a few signifiers of manhood–a full head of hair, an energetic libido–we are thrown into a crisis of self-identity when these things begin to ebb. Honestly, do you really think that there are huge numbers of women out there who are pushing their men to get to the doctor and get that prescription for Viagra? Honestly, how many wives relish the idea of their husbands sporting a six-hour boner? What could better fulfill a woman’s dream of a meaningful, non-threatening, non-annoying relationship than one that, due to medical issues, is limited to snuggling and spooning and the like?

It’s been well established, by many different studies in many different ways, that men are more obsessed with sex than women. We think about it twice as often as they do, and our actions bear out our thoughts. Nine out of ten men self-pleasure on a regular basis (as I’ve said before, the tenth man is either a politician or a clergyman), while only five out of ten women do it. Married men are a lot more likely to have an extramarital affair at some point in the marriage–close to fifty percent of them–while only thirty percent of married women cross the line. In short, men like to have sex, even when they aren’t capable of having sex. And if that isn’t screwy, then I don’t know what is.

The other day, my pal Steve finally loaned me a book he’d been telling me about for years. It was John Krakauer’s Into the Wild, which has sort of been eclipsed by his later blockbuster, Into Thin Air. It recounts the story of a young man who decided to move to Alaska and try to survive in the wilderness by his wits alone. But as I paged through it, I found I was most interested in the pictures—which were of Steve and Suzie having sex! It turned out that he had stashed a handful of naughty Polaroids the two had taken years ago, probably before the arrival of digital cameras. (The Polaroid used to be the camera of choice for amateur pornographers—no worries about nosy workers at the film-processing counter.)

This, obviously, raised some questions. First of all, my finding these snapshots inherently violated the longstanding moral code all guys have, which is to be tasteful whenever referring to one’s own spouse, no matter how lewd the conversation. It is okay to talk about your love life, but it is not kosher to be too specific about your lover’s unique assets or skills or liabilities. In other words, it is best to be general. Polaroid photographs of you making love with your wife are highly specific. You should not willingly share them with your buddies. I phoned Steve right away and told him what I’d found, and of course, he was mortified. I promised to seal them in an envelope without giving the matter a second thought, and I did. I could tell you more about what I saw. (Some readers may remember how I’d been briefly obsessed with whether Suzie had had any, erm, elective surgery done—but you’ll also remember how it was not appropriate to ask, no matter how intimate my friendship with Steve.) Needless to say, I won’t turn a moving violation into a first-degree felony by violating “the code.”

I hasten to add, though, that Steve’s and Suzie’s misadventures with a camera were a perfectly legitimate subject for general discussion. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve had already boasted about it to some of our mutual buddies. That’s the kind of thing guys discuss, but again, only within a certain range of what’s considered tasteful detail. (Women, you do this, too—I have it on good authority that you get just as down-and-dirty, but that you, also, observe certain unwritten rules about what’s foul territory.) If we hadn’t talked about it before, we certainly did now. Steve wasn’t embarrassed because they’d taken the pictures, just that they’d been seen by one of his buddies. Of course, I wanted to know if there was any back story to the photos, and there was.

Here’s how it happened. Suzie had once caught Steve with a girlie magazine, and she, being a solid feminist with certain predictable politics, had gone ballistic. Steve first confessed that men are the inferior gender—mea culpa, blah blah blah—and then he gingerly suggested that men seem to need frequent release more than women do. In his view, the girlie magazine was a harmless assist to a biological imperative. If Suzie wanted to have more sex, then she would surely be asking for it, right? In Steve’s view, it was saving his good wife some hassle to be taking care of his own business, as necessary, instead of pressing his need onto her. It also seemed to him that Suzie was asking the impossible—was he supposed to be celibate just because she didn’t happen to want to have sex as much as he did?

For her part, Suzie said what bothered her most was that Steve was getting turned on by other women. Without even going into the nettlesome politics of porn, Suzie basically said that playing solitaire mentally was one thing, but playing it with someone else’s deck was going too far. So Steve made the radically brave suggestion that he’d prefer, of course, to look at dirty pictures of his wife. Suzie one-upped him—she actually agreed to it!

Perhaps the best part of the story was that, according to Steve, the Polaroids had loosened both of them up quite a bit. Suzie came to enjoy the idea that she could be stimulating to Steve even in her physical absence, and the two had since graduated to video. Obviously, they’d never want these tapes to fall into the wrong hands. But we must all learn to celebrate that there is an inviolate line between the public and the private, and that line can be played with for fun and personal growth. Your love life is your own business, so why be constrained by what others would think?

My pal Steve used to travel a lot for work, and he found himself in Thailand a few years ago. He tells me that one night in Bangkok does, indeed, make a hard man humble. He says there are hundreds of beautiful women who literally throw themselves at you. You cannot make eye contact with a woman in Bangkok, or you will find that you suddenly have a new best friend. This is depressing, I know—at least in principle. But Steve claims he had several conversations with these sorts of women, and he came away more impressed than depressed. While there are plenty of hard-luck cases, and there is little doubt that most young Thai women working Bangkok are looking for a ticket to America, many told him that Thailand is an open, accepting, joyful place. As an example of this openness, most Thai people will tell you that there are actually three genders: male, female, and transgender. Steve did not find it all that hard to behave himself—after all, he is a devoted husband and his wife was on the business trip with him. Still, he was astonished at the number of American men he saw availing themselves of the local offerings.

Prostitution is a terribly exploitive and dangerous business—but that’s partly because sex itself can be exploitive and dangerous. Prostitution and promiscuity are two very different things, but they are parallel. And there are a lot of cultures in the world that think and act differently than we do about sex. Remember the old stereotype about Eskimos? That they considered it normal hospitality to offer their wives to visitors, and distrusted visitors who rejected the offer? That’s simplifying the matter quite a bit. Where it happened (and this is in the, uh, pre-missionary period), it was more accurately a form of spouse swapping for religious and social purposes. Even so, it happened enough to early white explorers that it seems some of them actually got tired of the obligation, but saw the necessity of assistance and goodwill in a harsh climate.

And isn’t it interesting how indignant Americans can get about the old Mormon practice of institutionalized polygamy? Despite being “against the law” even in Utah, it is a fact that numerous Mormon men live today in situations where they have multiple wives, in practice if not in name. Never mind the shockingly resurgent activity of “swinging.” I recently stumbled across at least one website dedicated to helping married Minnesotans find willing and discrete extramarital partners. By the way, polyamory is not always a one-sided, misogynist phenomenon, either. In some Himalayan regions, and also in Oceania and Africa, there are polyandrous societies where a woman takes numerous husbands (or sexual partners).

The reason I bring up all this anthropology is that ever since I started writing this column, I have received a considerable amount of mail about my first column, which asked the question, “Should married men go to strip clubs?” I have now pretty much heard every possible opinion on the matter—and mostly from thoughtful Minnesotans. On the far end of the spectrum, I have heard from women who were tortured and angry about their husbands going to strip clubs (or, say, looking at porn), who were literally getting divorced because of it. I am certainly not saying their pain isn’t real; at the same time, though, I wonder how it is possible that—at the other end of the spectrum—there are lots of women who don’t find it threatening at all, who maybe even find it a bit of a turn-on themselves. (Then the recriminations begin, the prudes claiming the promiscuous are self-deluded, and vice versa.)

I suppose it all comes down to jealousy. Most of the women I have known have been incredibly jealous, not because I am any great shakes as a lover, but because that’s just the way they are. My precious has been an amazing exception to this rule. She wants and expects me to be unfailingly true to her, the way I promised I would be the day we got married. But a few weeks ago, she admitted that she sometimes fantasized about me making whoopie with another woman, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a friend of hers. Is that creepy? She made it clear to me that this was her own private fantasy. Like the widespread (usually male) fantasy about an orgiastic multiple-lover session, these are just ticklers for the biggest erogenous zone of all, the brain. But I do think it is a healthy check on jealousy to admit to each other that we find other people attractive, and that sexual fantasies can add a little spice to life. Jealousy is ultimately a very selfish, very insecure kind of emotion—as if to say to your lover, “If you can’t love me, then you shouldn’t love anyone.”

My buddy Ben saw an advertisement for a little boutique that specializes in sex toys for smart women—a small, independent shop owned and operated by women. It got him thinking. He told me it made him want to buy something for his wife, Val, as a surprise for their anniversary. Ben started to sort of drop hints, trying to figure out if Val would be into this. As far as he knew, Val has never had any little “marital aids”—so his assumption was that she would be horrified by the idea.

He was exactly right. When he jokingly said he thought it would be fun to buy her a vibrator, Val looked at him like he was a first-class pervert. Ben could not detect the slightest hint that she was putting him on for the sake of modesty, and that made him a little sad. Apparently, she sensed that Ben was half-serious, and said, “Honey, I want the real thing. You’re enough for me.” That’s sweet, of course, but maybe too sweet. Indeed, Ben told me he is afraid he married a puritan. He wishes Val could allow herself to be a little less orthodox about their love life—or at least be open to new ideas. How do you know you like something unless you try it? They still have fun in the sack, sure, but their repertoire is limited to a standard routine—which, he says, gets exercised less and less frequently. Yes, it’s the dread disease that one of my readers likes to call “SMBD”—sudden marital bed death.

Yet what’s interesting is that we horny married men tend to assume that Val is not being honest. Why do we insist that she is not interested in sex toys because of some kind of politically correct hang-up or sheer embarrassment? If I am serious when I say married couples should allow themselves the freedom to be whoever they want to be, then I must be prepared for the possibility that there are women who don’t want to be, well, all that sexy. That is, they don’t have much need for sex, or they have vanilla tastes in bed, and that’s that. At some point, we simply have to accept our lover’s words at face value. If Val does not want a vibrator, it is possible that she really does not want one. Then Ben will have to examine why it is such a big deal to him. Who knows—maybe he wants a vibrator, and is merely projecting his desire.

Part of this depressing, deterministic view comes from having seen the recent film about Alfred Kinsey, the legendary sex researcher. Kinsey’s groundbreaking work did two things: It proved that sexual variety—deviance, if you’re a fundamentalist preacher—was normal, or at least a significant, measurable phenomenon. Second, it categorized and quantified this variety in a scientific way. This is slightly depressing, because it suggests that even sex, one of the most transcendental and mysterious facets of life, is subject to a certain scientific repeatability. We know, but would prefer not to believe, that we have patterns and routines that we probably will never escape. Paradoxically, hardcore Bible-bangers and lefty women’s libbers can agree on loving to hate Alfred Kinsey for robbing sex of its divine spark, and seeming to legitimate a lot of uncomfortable fetishes and perversions.

And yet, the choice is, as ever, between what we are and how we see ourselves. Between reality and perception. If Val does not see herself as a person who wants to use a vibrator, what does that really say about her? Apparently, she falls into a Kinseyan category (women who do not wish to use vibrators). Should she feel reassured that there are others like her, or upset that there are so many others unlike her? (I suppose it depends on how she feels about other women using vibrators.)

So, does Val fall into the category of the radically normal, unexperimental women who begrudge their sexuality, just because she claims not to be interested in sex toys? Kinsey’s work has been so heavily politicized in the past fifty years that we forget: It is possible to strip sexual research of its heavy moral baggage, invariably projected onto it by the prudish and the frigid and the enraged. It is possible to actually read it in a merely descriptive sense, in a way that celebrates diversity in human sexual behavior. But does that automatically belittle those who are perfectly happy with missionary position, lights turned out, once a week? Maybe repression is a healthy, normal choice. What would Kinsey think?

The other day, my friend Carl sheepishly asked me a funny question while we were at the gym. I could tell he wanted a serious answer.

“What would you say if your wife told you she wanted a boob job?”

“Rachel wants to get a boob job?!” I almost yelled it. “What do you think I think? Duh!”

I was joking, but if I were to play the classic, dumb, buzz-cut bruiser at the gym, I’d say, “That’s like asking the pope how he feels about communion!” My actual answer was that Rachel looks great just as she is, but it’s certainly OK if she wants to do it.

For a guy who is not all that boob-obsessed, I’ve written quite a lot about boob jobs here. I’ll acknowledge that men sure do love breasts, big, small, perky, bodacious, ad infinitum. Women, of course, know this and act accordingly—even while they feign outrage and point their fingers and call us misogynists or chauvinists. To my testosterone-addled mind, it’s similar to the argument about makeup and sexy clothes: If you don’t wish to be “objectified,” why spend so much time making your body look its very best? This is a rhetorical question, ladies, so no need for angry letters. My point is just this: Be honest about enjoying your body. And if it’s what you really want, go ahead and modify it. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re being shallow or you’ve been brainwashed by a paternalistic, sexist society. It’s your body, you only get one. Life is an adventure, right?

Wrong. See, there’s a new plastic-surgery craze among a certain kind of woman: vaginoplasty. It’s designed to “perfect” your nether regions, from tightening perineal musles to reducing labia. Listen, girls: Your boys do not want you to do this.

I think Americans are so used to the idea of boob jobs that we don’t even think twice about them anymore, not in any serious ethical way. But when it comes to other, more radical bod-mod procedures, things get pretty weird pretty fast. I’ve always felt iffy about elective facial cosmetic surgery, especially if it’s a nose or chin job that suddenly turns you into another person. I guess I don’t have any serious ethical point to make, but on some weird level, your face is you. It’s the window of your soul, whereas your breasts are … well, the knockers on the door. (Oof. OK, you can send angry letters now. I deserve it.) And when it comes to vaginoplasty, I think this procedure, which must be almost wholly elective, points to some deep, serious (and somewhat bizarre) issues that women have about their genitals.

I’m not sure where these come from—in my view, this anxiety seems a lot more visceral and personal than any kind of cultural conditioning could ever account for. Women seem innately to feel that there is something essentially unfeminine about their most feminine parts, something unpleasant and messy and ugly.

This is no great insight, of course—other than the part about maybe not blaming men for this uneasiness. (And, in the interest of equality, I would like to add that lots of men I know, especially thirty- and forty-something liberals, have had the same feeling about their own parts, and it’s why we can be surprisingly meek, almost apologetic, under the covers.) Of all of my gen-x and boomer-aged friends, this is a universal truth: We enjoy giving oral sex to our women more than our women enjoy giving oral sex to us. This is probably just more evidence of the fallout from growing up with feminism (more men learning to enjoy giving and more women not feeling obligated to give), but that’s not my point.

My point is: Shaving! Experts say this rise in interest in vaginoplasty, particularly among more aesthetically motivated folks who are way too worried about how things look down there, reflects a broader new level of anxiety with our bodies. Women are growing comfortable enough to leave the lights on, pull out hand mirrors, and allow their husbands unlimited walk-abouts down under. They are watching and enjoying pornography, and they are emulating other women who seem to be thrilled with their Brazilian wax jobs and so on. But it seems that one person’s comfort is another’s anxiety. If you like what you’ve got, you should show it off. And if you don’t—why?

The correct answer is: No. Actually, in my experience—and a quick survey of all the usual suspects confirms it, anecdotally anyway—transitional seasons seem to be the more active time for human, uh, rutting. Among ourselves, we men frequently talk about how the “sap begins to run” in the spring, and I can tell you from personal history that there is some truth to this. When the snow begins to melt, and the sunshine begins to stick, we start feeling just slightly more amorous than usual. (Obviously, we don’t go into hibernation through the winter. It’s just that in the spring, there seems to be a slight acceleration in the hormonal urgency to repeat that old act in the human comedy.)

Now, it may be that part of this elevated interest is related to sartorial triggers. No doubt men, being visually stimulated as we are, grow a little randy when we see our women begin to de-layer after a cold Midwestern winter. But all of creation follows this pattern: Procreation, especially among mammals, takes place early in the year. I assume this is to maximize the opportunities for the young to feed and grow and mature before life-threatening weather returns.

So it may be generally true that animals like to do it in the early spring, when the days are beginning to get warmer and longer, but we humans are more complicated than most animals. I think there is an equal kind if libidinous upswing for us in the late fall. When the light begins to fail, and the chimney has been cleaned, and you make the switch from summer lagers to winter porters—well, that can be an awfully romantic time of the year as well.

Do married women experience the same seasonality with their libidos? I asked my precious, and she doesn’t think so. She said that women tend to be overwhelmed by their own monthly schedule, and biologically seem less affected by seasons. Some interesting anecdotal evidence may bear this out. It used to be that a solid majority of children were born in the spring months—particularly in April. That would mean that most conceptions occurred in the late summer, just when the nights are beginning to cool down and you need an extra blanket on the bed. If you consider the relatively long gestation period of human babies, autumn would actually be the time of heightened sexual interest in the species, to maximize the chances of a spring birth.

But that’s all changed now, and there is an even distribution of birth throughout the year. I would hypothesize that this evening-out of the sexual calendar is a direct result of women being empowered to dictate when they want to get friendly, and not just accommodate their men as part of their “wifely duties.” And the downside is that married men, no longer being able to count on seasonally enhanced periods of intimacy, may go even longer than normal without any discernible uptick in the action. (Variety is the spice of life, they say.)

This is a sort of cautionary tale to married folks, I guess. My friend Steve recently told me the painful story about how, years ago, he’d gotten involved with another woman. It was a disaster, and, as you might expect, it almost ruined his marriage. He and Suzy spent months with a marriage counselor who forced them to talk about a lot of things that—in hindsight—Steve says were very hurtful, and probably would have been better left alone. But things were said, and new wounds were made that merely worsened the breach. One insight, however, did help their relationship a lot. It was a discussion related to this biological seasonality of sex. Their counselor told them that it was a proven fact that couples who are more frequent and irregular and creative about their intimacy tend not to have problems with infidelity. Which sounds pretty obvious, but it’s worth repeating in the simplest terms: Married men who have an active and not entirely predictable marital bed tend to have fewer problems with the wandering eye and the lustful heart.

It makes sense, then, that as long as we are acknowledging the biological imperative to make whoopie, we might want to be sensitive to the subtle fluctuations in desire that happen throughout the year. Whether they are seasonal or monthly, we married folks have to work extra hard to make our time tables jibe. Philandering is a moral failing, but there are certain forms of insurance a couple can take out, and one of them is a simple matter of scheduling. In the long run, it literally saved Steve and Suzy.

I am not a sex-advice guy, nor am I an expert on intimate relations. I’m just a regular married guy, trying to tell it like it is from my point of view. I’ve got to get something out in the open, though, and it’s going to sound kind of obnoxious. OK, I’ll just say it: Married women don’t enjoy sex enough. I don’t mean they can’t; they just don’t. (I also don’t mean to generalize, but what the hell, I did it anyway. If you’re an exception, lucky you! Write a letter and tell me about it.) But I think there is a very easy solution to this, uh, widespread problem.

Men have long had a reputation for being selfish about sex. We want it, we gotta have it, we resent foreplay, we want to cut straight to the main attraction, and so on. (A corollary of this, by the way, is that women make love as a “favor” to their husbands—a favor they are happy to withhold, if necessary, in the usual give-and-take of the household. Can you imagine a man doing that? Not me.) Well, here’s a secret for all you married women: Men, despite (or perhaps because of) their somewhat simple wiring, are turned on by a partner who is turned on. Married men are too polite—and often too desperate—to say so, but it is not much fun to make love with someone who either isn’t enjoying it, or isn’t letting on that she’s enjoying it, even if she is your soul mate. Sub-secret: We tend to assume that she is not enjoying it, if she doesn’t make it fairly obvious.

Ironically, men are so selfishly focused on the finish that we assume women are incapable of faking it for the long haul. Even setting aside the orgasm issue, the fact of the matter is that it is easier for a woman to tolerate bland sex than it is for a man, just as it is easier for her to fake enjoying it. You could consider this just another example of male pig-headedness—he wants proof from you that he’s an irresistible, orgasm-inducing sex machine. Or you could take the opportunity to let yourself go and have more fun under the covers.

I freely admit that this may merely be a “reporting problem.” In fact, we all tend to be self-conscious about expressing desire and pleasure, in the heat of the moment. I know that most of my friends have worked really hard most of their postcollegiate lives to be sensitive to the women around them, maybe especially in our most intimate moments. We don’t want to be perceived as boorish or self-centered, and we don’t want our women to feel threatened or turned off by aggressive sexual behavior. But is it possible to be a good, liberal, sensitive male, and still be noisy and naughty in bed? A lot of us struggle with this, and we’d like a little help from our women.

Ladies, one of the nicest gifts you can give your beloved is to tell him—better yet, show him—precisely what it is that turns you on the most. We are so accustomed to being secretive about pleasuring ourselves that ironically we won’t do it in front of the one person we entrust to do it for us. It’s like: You own that beautiful instrument, but I’m the only one who ever plays it! I’d like to see how you play.

The underlying assumption here is what therapists and couples’ counselors have been saying for decades: Make a special effort to do it the way your partner wants to do it. Get outside yourself, amd try to speculate what might really turn your lover on, and then do it. But in my opinion, this suggestion should be directed squarely at men, not women. Women need different, opposing advice: Figure out what most turns you on, and then beg your husband to do it for you, and then, for once in your life, ignore him. I don’t mean forget him, but let yourself go a little bit, and don’t worry so much about whether he’s enjoying himself. If he’s a real man, your pleasure will directly fuel his.

If he isn’t that kind of man, find one who is. Love, marriage, and sex are a two-way street, and you owe it to each other to be honest about what really turns you on. You owe it to yourself to go ahead and do it. Life is too short and difficult to be shy in your own bed.

In the end, sex is one of those strange human transactions where the sum of the parts adds up to more than it should. Our mutual pleasure is an exponential thing; it’s a turn-on to participate in someone else’s turn-on. I’m certainly not expert enough to figure out what part of my pleasure is made up of my lover’s pleasure. I just know that, like a good movie or a funny joke, it’s a lot more fun when you can share. Here endeth the lesson; go forth and multiply.

I’ve been to a few weddings this summer, and it’s interesting. It seems that most of my generation waited until our late twenties, even our thirties, to get married. Then we’re waiting another ten years to have kids—right when a woman is up against the wall, biologically speaking. Forty is when doctors really start to worry about pregnancy—and start requiring large needles and invasive tests. Maybe more important, insurance companies lose their cool at forty, and every procedure starts costing big bucks.

As a result, many of us have had about fifteen years of experience with birth control. Just the other day, my single friend Alan, who is thirty this year, was complaining that his new girlfriend wouldn’t go on the pill. A kind of funny anachronistic conversation followed regarding the relative merits of condoms, diaphragms, sponges (remember sponges?), and so on. My precious and I haven’t discussed birth control for years. She went off the pill ten years ago, and we’ve relied on good timing ever since. Apparently, Alan and his new girlfriend were enjoying so much loving that they weren’t capable of holding off for the seven days a month when she might get pregnant. After you’ve been married for five years, this is not a problem. We didn’t discuss abstinence. Does anyone over the age of eighteen or under the age of sixty discuss abstinence? Seriously, I mean?

Can you imagine waiting until age thirty to have sex? It may be the crowd I run with, but I doubt whether many of my marrying friends ever bought into “the new chastity” the way many twenty-somethings have supposedly done. But one thing married (or otherwise committed) couples forget is the unholy terror of an unplanned pregnancy. I think we should all be honest that fear of pregnancy is the only selling point to abstinence as birth control, and it’s a big one. The other reasons, also fear-based, are unconvincing. Avoiding disease is, to me, kind of a non-starter. If that were a compelling reason not to have sex at all, then we should also abstain from hand-shaking and using public restrooms. (I mean as an alternative to protected sex. Condoms can be nearly as effective in stopping the spread of disease—without the negative side-effect of never having sex.) Every religious reason I’ve ever heard is plainly insane; if God had intended sex only for procreation, He would have made it significantly less fun. Abstaining from what every fiber in your body wants to do is just plain masochistic.

When it comes to birth control, married couples who eventually want kids are a lot less neurotic than other couples. How do I know? Because we’re pregnant! My precious and I weren’t really planning it. In fact, now isn’t a great time, because we’ve both started new jobs. But the truth of the matter is that we’re both very happy, and if the insurance companies let this blessed event happen, the world will surely be a better place with another baby who is loved, wanted, supported, and raised with world-changing values.

I’ve heard from some of my friends with kids that my life is about to go completely upside down, and frankly, I’m ready for it. I think there is a point where you decide whether you’re going to go on with your life in a somewhat self-centered way, pretty much just looking out for number one, or whether you want a dramatic shift in your world, one that involves making sacrifices to a living legacy—your kids.

I have to say that my friend Steve is a really nice, interesting guy with tons of cool hobbies and the time and money to enjoy them. But there are few people I know who are as selfish. Steve and his wife Suzy are among those slightly annoying people who are always complaining that our society favors adults who choose to have children. Steve complains that his coworkers are constantly getting passes on personal days to attend to family business. He complains that he pays a higher premium on health insurance to subsidize coworkers with family coverage. Steve and Suzy are certainly free to not have children, and I say God bless them. But if everybody thought as selfishly as they do, the species wouldn’t get very far.

On the other hand, Pete believes that once you become a parent you join a worldwide club. One of the tenets of that club is that the world is full of bad people, because the world is filled with bad parents—people who resent their own kids, for a wide variety of reasons. I can’t think of anything sadder than that. If you don’t want kids, for God’s sake, don’t have them. If that means abstaining from sex until you’re thirty, so be it. Let your own masochism be the end of the cycle of pain and fear.