"33"

I celebrated a birthday recently. This weekend I turned 33, and embarked on what will be the last year of my early thirties.

And, as is often the case when we pass these milestones, I've been reflecting. A lot. Reflecting like a mirror above the vibrating bed in a by-the-hour motel on the outskirts of Hookertown. Reflecting on who I've been, on who I'm becoming.

In the midst of all of my soul-searching, a thought popped into my head; a meme with incredible penetration and staying power. An idea that is seldom questioned, and is often accepted as gospel.

It's common knowledge, so they say, that men hit their sexual prime in their teens, whereas women don't enter prime time sexually until they're in their 30s.

This is, of course, not true and beyond absurd, but it's amazing how little critical thinking is applied to ideas like this, how sparingly we question sweeping generalizations, allowing them to endure long enough to begin to feel like facts.

For starters, this makes no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. A pimple-faced sixteen-year-old with a constant boner who's not yet grown into his gangly limbs is hardly the odds-on favorite to win a battle royale with a cave-invading saber-toothed tiger (an animal that is, it seems, quickly becoming the unofficial mascot of the Foul Papers column). Who would choose this specimen as their ideal mate?

And, ladies, let's face it: once you start knocking on the door of your late 30s, the factory warranty on that bun warmer in your belly isn't worth the placenta it's printed on. The fact that women in their 30s experience simultaneously more difficulty conceiving and increased occurrence of birth defects is well-documented.

(Wow, the essay this week is fucking hilarious, huh? No two-word phrase in the English language packs more comedy punch than "birth defects." Yeesh!)

A species that relied on circumstances such as these to perpetuate its survival would be doomed to extinction within a handful of generations.

I said before that this discrepancy between the genders was common knowledge. Well, I'm not interested in common knowledge. I'm all about extraordinary knowledge, and I think you should be, too.

So take your earbuds out and pay attention, because here it comes.

The notion that men and women hit their sexual peaks in their teens and their thirties, respectively, is not reality -- it's perception. And while, to the unsophisticated palate, perception can seem an awful lot like reality, in a head-to-head taste test there's really no comparison.

Then why do we perceive this to be true?

We'll start with the guys. Tony Randall proved that men are capable of fathering children well into their 70s, so it's not a matter of reproductive ability. What we're really talking about is some combination of performance, virility, enthusiasm and interest.

The biggest contributing factor to the perception that teenage guys are in their sexual prime is that teenage guys, by and large, are having sex with teenage girls. I submit that if you supplied me with a steady stream of nubile eighteen-and-nineteen-year-old girls with whom to have sex, you would see no discernible drop-off in my interest in -- or aptitude for -- sex between that fateful day in the Spring of 1992 when I eagerly forfeited my virginity, and today.

To put it another way, a guy in his 50s who's fucking a nineteen-year-old, fucks like a nineteen-year-old. Much like Scottie Pippen -- who, had he played on any other team, would be remembered as a mediocre forward with decent defensive skills -- our game is elevated when we have the privilege of sharing the floor with a superstar.

Now, before you hurl your judgments and hurt feelings at me, please understand, I'm not claiming that teenage girls are any hotter or more physically attractive than their more mature counterparts. Although they are.

No, the real reason that teenage girls can redirect the blood flow in our extremities is biological in nature. Evolution has taught us that women at that age are super-fertile. This is why a middle-aged couple will endure months and months of costly and cumbersome fertility treatments in hopes of conceiving, while a fifteen-year-old girl who once dry humped her boyfriend through a snowsuit can crap a kid into a porta-potty at Homecoming without ever even realizing she was pregnant. Girls that age are baby-making machines.

See, a Cave Man who had a natural preference for a more mature mate (a Cougar Hunter, if you will) would have found it difficult, without all of our modern reproductive technology, to procreate with his special ladyfriend. Which means he would be far less likely to pass his mommy issues onto a brood, effectively breeding those traits, if not out of existence entirely, at least out of dominance.

On the other hand, the guys who had a natural predilection for teenage tail were reproducing early and often, with greater frequency and success. Lather, rinse, and repeat this pattern for a few millennia, and what you have is a planet full of men who are hard-wired to want to mate with teenage girls.

I know some of you out there are following the bread crumbs I'm leaving for you, and are coming to your own logical conclusion, namely: The reason that men, as they age, seem less into sex (not in their prime, as it were) is because, no matter how much they like or love the person they're with, they'd rather be having sex with a teenage girl.

And you would be correct.

But don't get mad at us. We're programmed to be this way. The survival of the human race has relied on our being this way. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at Mother Nature. Or Charles Darwin, I guess. But he's been dead a while, so I'm not sure what that'll get you.

Another reason teenage guys seem to be in their sexual prime is that sex is new to them. It's exciting. It's never let them down. In a weird way, teenage guys are still on the honeymoon when it comes to sex. Sex is always good; they haven't yet experienced bad sex. Unfulfilling, disappointing sex. Angry sex. Sex with someone they don't like, or someone who doesn't like them.

Ironically, many women would use these very terms to describe their early forays into fornication. Combine the fact that teenage guys aren't known for being the most sensitive or unselfish of lovers (hey, I used to be one, after all) with all of the societal pressures, and guilt and shame and double standards that young women have to deal with, and it's no surprise that teenage girls don't often list sex among their favorite activities.

So why do we perceive women in their thirties to be in their sexual prime? They didn't just suddenly get interested in or comfortable with sex. Most women will have gotten over the sheer awfulness of the first chapter of their sex lives by the time they finish college. No, the reason that women in their 30s appear to be hitting their sexual peak has to do, once again, with survival of the species. See, on some subconscious level, all women know that one of the built-in features of that Easy-Bake Womb is the biological clock on top.

(Interestingly, men have their own version of the biological clock, but it serves a completely different function. For starters, ours has a snooze button...)

By the time her age has a 3 in the front of it, all a woman's instincts know it's crunch time; if something's gonna happen, it's gotta happen now. So they kick it up a notch, into overdrive. How many times have you watched a quarterback execute a masterful last-minute drive to win the game and thought, "Yeah, but if he had played that well in the first half, this game wouldn't even have been close!"

That's the thing about crunch time -- it brings out the best in people.

A woman knows, on some level, that she's never going to get a guy to marry her if he thinks she's not into sex. And even if she's not looking to get married, her body knows that nobody ever had a baby without getting some sea monkeys in 'em first. And even if the woman has no interest in marriage or a baby, her body is screaming that the store in her uterus is preparing to close, and that all purchases should be taken to the check-out counter, pronto.

It's in her programming. All of her forbears who were lackadaisical about getting to the business of procreating, well, they never got to pass those reluctant genes onto anybody. The Modern Woman is the descendant of Cave Women who had the good sense to get to the sexin' before it was too late.

But I would be disinclined to describe this kind of last-minute, Hail Mary desperation as peak or prime. Don't get me wrong, it's damn exciting, and awfully fun to watch. But it's not the kind of play that Hall of Fame careers are built on.

So, if men are innately drawn to younger females, and women are less reproductively apt as they age, where does that leave us? It all feels pretty bleak when you break it down like this.

Don't lose heart though, ladies. Ancestral programming doesn't mean we men aren't interested in you. There's still a place for you in this world, as long as I'm in it.

After all, the kids I have with my nineteen-year-old trophy wife are going to need a nanny. ;)

Sex Changes -or- Special Delivery

Imagine, if you will, what a nine hour orgasm would feel like.

All right, I'm going to get back to that in a bit, but I have to lay some foundation first, and I didn't want you to think this was going to be a boring science lecture on human mating. So cling to that notion, the nine hour orgasm, and trust that we'll get there soon.

Okay.

There's no denying it: Sex changes things. It does. We can pretend it doesn't. We can be all casual about it, but sex really does have an effect on us.

In humans, for example, it can trigger what's known as "pair bonding," wherein prehistoric programming kicks in for the benefit of eventual offspring; instincts that help ensure the population will continue grow and be healthy.

That's why some girls will get clingy after you sleep with them. There's nothing wrong with them. They didn't suddenly go crazy. They are merely playing out the behaviors that hundreds of generations of evolutionary psychology have demonstrated are most advantageous for the survival of our species.

After all, who's going to keep the saber-toothed tigers away from the cave while she's pregnant? A woman has a better chance of successfully passing on her genes if she mates with a guy who will help out. So she tries to demonstrate to the man that the price of his orgasm is that she expects him to stick around. It's in her programming.

And similarly, ladies, this also explains why some guys get aloof after they've slept with you. They're merely anticipating this pattern, which generations of getting laid has told their brains is sure to emerge. See, guys are slower to pair bond. Guys are programmed to spread their essence far and wide, like Johnny... well, just Johnny "Seed," I guess. They have a better chance of passing on their genes if they impregnate lots of females.

What can we say, ladies? We gotsta ramble. It's in our DNA.

And Nature knows this. This is why babies more often resemble their fathers in the early going than their mothers. It's true. An Early Man (which is not to be confused with a "Morning Person") would be more likely to stay and defend his offspring if he can tell from looking at it that it is his.

Now, this offspring-centric plan for the human race didn't account for a lot of factors: sex for pleasure, homosexuality, contraception.

But we've had a lot more sex as a species B.C. ("before condoms") than we've had since, so a lot of that ancestral circuitry is still in play.

Sex changes things.

But, I think, the most interesting example of sex changing things -- I mean REALLY changing the participants in a significant way -- has to be utetheisa ornatrix, or as it's more commonly known, the rattlebox moth.

First off, the male rattlebox moth is a stud. According to Bugguide.com, he delivers a sperm package that weighs roughly 1/10 of his total body weight.

That phrase instantly turns me into a fifteen year old, laughing maniacally along with my friend Beavis: "delivers a sperm package." I can't help but imagine a moth dressed up in brown shorts and a brown button up, casually ringing a doorbell. The female rattlebox moth answers the door in a negligee.

MALE: "Yes, ma'am, I'm here to deliver a package."

FEMALE: (feigning modesty) "Oh, my. I wasn't expecting anything. What kind of package is it?"

MALE: "A SPERM PACKAGE!"

They embrace, and fall to the couch. Cue 70s funk soundtrack.

Aaaaaaaaaaand.... scene.

But seriously, the weight of his load is equal to 10% of his body weight! To put it in perspective, that's like a guy my size producing 17 lbs of jizz when he cums.

Note to prospective mates: I'm not NEARLY that messy.

What's even crazier is that the orgasm lasts 8 to 9 hours. (See, I told you we'd get back to it.) Can you imagine, an orgasm that lasts nine hours? The muscle soreness, the tingling. The pleasure centers in your brain and the nerve endings in your naughty parts would be fried. I doubt even Sting, with all of his tantric triathlon training, has been able to pull that off.

But in order to truly understand the love life of the rattlebox moth, you need to take into account the fact that they only live about 4 weeks. So a 9 hour orgasm represents about 1/75 of their entire lifespan. Assuming I lived to be 75 years old, that would be like me having an orgasm that lasted AN ENTIRE YEAR!

Note to prospective mates: I don't last nearly that long. The orgasm itself is probably... I dunno, 20 seconds? And the buildup, including foreplay, maybe thirty to forty minutes (featuring up to seven minutes of actual sex!) Can be as much as an hour total, if I'm feeling especially romantic, or if we've just started dating, or if you haven't done anything to piss me off in the last 48 hours.

Also important to note: Given my current lifestyle, there's NO WAY I'm making it to 75 years old. I think the Vegas line for the over/under is 42. Take the under.

Still, the most amazing thing about the sexual exploits of the rattlebox moth is that, after he's completed his "delivery," the female's body chemistry is actually changed by his sperm in a way that makes her a less appealing snack to predators. Having sex with him saves her life. That's a pretty neat trick.

Now, I don't know if it's true or not; I'm not an etymologist. What's important, however, is that he's convinced HER that it's true. See, Man, with our advanced brains and our opposable thumbs, has never, in all of our centuries of tricking women into sleeping with us, devised such a clever ruse to get laid.

It's genius: "Sleep with me if you want to live."

I might try that next time I'm at The Dresden as last call is approaching. "Hey, I saw this thing on the Discovery channel..."

See dick? Run!

I was reading in Men's Health the other day -- do you read that, the Men's Health magazine? It's like Cosmo for guys. Seriously, think about it: They both feature an incredibly appealing cover model whom the target demographic would very much like to emulate. There's these titillating headlines like "Super Sex Secrets!" "Fantasies she's to shy to tell you -- but she told our editors!"

And there's always some variation on "5 New Ways To Burn Belly Flab." Really? I've barely assimilated all the ways to burn belly flab from last month's issue! Come to think of it, I've been subscribing to this magazine for 6 years. I must know 3,000 ways to burn belly flab.

If there was any truth to this magazine, the cover would just say: "Men's Health -- all the shit from last month? Still true!" But I guess they're not gonna sell a lot of magazines that way.

In all seriousness, it's a pretty good magazine, better than a lot of them. Most of your men's exercise magazines are just thinly veiled gay erotica. Or not even that veiled, frankly. Hairless, muscular bodies, posed provocatively, all oiled up. Bulging thighs and buttocks protruding from snugly-fitting Speedos... what? like I'm the only one who's ever jerked off to it! Whatever...

(Just a joke, folks!)

But, in the interest of full disclosure, on the heels of such a joke, I feel I should come clean and admit that I did give tranny porn a shot once.

Tell me if you've ever done this: You say something as a joke, just to be glib, to get a laugh... and then you end up spending the rest of your life defending that statement.

I seem to do this a lot, and in this particular case, well, I said at a party once that I would rather do it with a tranny who looked just like Britney Spears, but had a penis, than with an old, fat and/or ugly chick.

(And, by the way, I can't tell you how happy I am that Britney is hot again, so this reference is once again current. The minutes I wasted on awkward explanations back when she looked like a haggard, strung-out grocery store clerk from my small hometown in Illinois, I'll never get those back. To all you guys who use Jessica Simpson as your go-to example of feminine sexiness, you have my sympathies. Inserting the phrase "but, back when she was hot" into your stories gets exhausting.)

My thinking was this: I'm a visual creature. I'm into the plumage, the presentation. And option A, while yes, she does have a penis, is only really about 5% objectionable when you assess the entirety of the situation. Whereas, option B, ya know... I'm sure probably has a dynamite personality. I thought this was pretty sound logic. Air-tight reasoning.

Not the case, at least not according to a jury of my peers.

Apparently, I'm the only person I know who feels this way. The way I figured it, guys are always trying to bang girls in the ass anyway, so how different would it really be?

Fast forward to now, after half a dozen vigorous defenses of this point of view, I'm to be forever branded "The Tranny Guy."

(Coming this fall from CBS: The Tranny Guy!)

But I was looking at internet porn one night -- I know, scandalous. You're shocked and appalled. Look, do me a favor and keep this between you and me, okay? I'd hate to lose my job as a youth minister.

So I'm looking at internet porn, and slowly a very disturbing realization washes over me: I've seen all the porn.


All of it.


I'm like: [click] Seen it.
[click] Seen it.
[click] Seen it, with director commentary.
[click] [click][ click]

And I start freaking out. "Oh, fuck! I'm gonna have to wait for a whole new crop of girls who hate their dads to turn 18 before I have something to whack it to!"

Then, as is often the case with the internet, I wind up some place I wasn't expecting to go -- a phenomenon which explains nearly all the traffic to sites like Engrish.com, I reckon -- and before I know it, I wind up on a page of Tranny Porn.

Chicks with Dicks.

But, you know, their own dicks.

I thought, what the hell. Any port in a storm, right? Let's take my little theory out for a test drive.

So I download a scene, and I'm watching it, and I'm thinking, "Okay, cool."

She's kinda cute. Tight little body. Nice fake tits, too much makeup -- in fact, her makeup is wearing too much makeup, but beggars can't be choosers. Dressed all slutty, alright. Here comes the guy. Now they're making out. Oh, now she's stroking him off, nice. Now she's blowing him, cool. Okay, okay, now they're having sex. And now he's...

Oh! No! Why is he doing that!? No! Don't do that! Take that out of your mouth! Why would he do that!?

Why would he do that??

And right then and there, my love affair with the mythical Britney-Tranny died. And, I think, a little part of me died with it...

* * * * *

I'm sorry, what the hell was I even talking about? Oh, yeah, Men's Health. So I'm reading an article that claims watermelon is nature's viagra. Apparently there's something in the watermelon that acts like viagra, keeping all the plumbing working, keeping everything all nice and engorged.

And it makes sense if you think about it, because aren't black guys supposed to have huge penises?

Ah! See, now half of you are laughing, and half of you aren't racist. Everybody wins!

Birds of a Feather

I was watching TV the other day, and I saw a commercial for Six Flags amusement park, and something really bothered me. You know how they have the Looney Tunes characters there, greeting the guests, taking pictures with the kids? Well, in this commercial, they had Sylvester the Cat dancing right next to Tweety Bird... and they were the EXACT SAME HEIGHT!!!

It freaked me out.

I'm beginning to think those are impostors.

I told this theory to a friend of mine, and he had an alternate (and probably more sensible) theory: those are, in fact, the actual characters there at the park, but when they shoot the cartoons, they use all kinds of trick photography and forced perspectives (like in those Lord of the Rings movies) to make them appear different sizes.

So if you were shooting a scene, say, Sylvester would be closer to the camera, and Tweety, well you'd place him...

Wait, is Tweety a him or a her? Is there any kind of consensus on this?

I had always assumed that Tweety was a dude, but a few years ago I started noticing Tweety all the time on little girls' pajamas.

...on hangers at Target! Jeez! You people should be ashamed of yourselves. That's how rumors get started!

Anyway, it struck me as me weird. Why would they put a guy character on girls' pajamas?

But the more I pondered it, the sad reality started to dawn on me: Who are they going to put on girls' pajamas? There isn't exactly an overabundance of good female role models in the Looney Tunes canon. Really, what are the choices?

The old Granny who owns Sylvester and Tweety? Who is, at best, a neglectful pet owner, leaving her poor defenseless bird alone with a blood-thirsty predator -- a pet himself who's clearly malnourished, as evidenced by his willingness to commit an act of violence just to get a bite to eat? This woman should not be enshrined on pajamas! She should be sharing a cell with Michael Vick!

Or what about the haggard old hen, a desperate single parent who's willing to use her only child as a pawn in her pitiful attempts to ensnare the dubiously oriented Southern bachelor Foghorn Leghorn? What kind of message would that send to little girls?

Or how about the poor unwitting cat who, after an unfortunate run-in with the machine that paints the lines down the center of the highway, becomes the unwilling recipient of Pepé Le Pew's lecherous overtures?? Actually, now that I think about it, that may not be such a bad choice. At least that character communicates something useful to girls about what the world will be like for them when they grow up.

I heard a staggering statistic recently: by the time she's 23 years old, the average American woman has been hit on 7,000 times.

Seven Thousand! And that's just the average ones. Imagine how many times the hot ones are getting hit on!

Believe me, I, personally, am not doing anything to drive those numbers down.

I remember reading this book called The Gift of Fear, and in this book I encountered a nugget that was probably the most profound insight into the difference between men and women I've ever heard. Forget all that shit about "Women want to talk about their feelings and Men just want to be left alone," or "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." That's all a bunch of white noise.

Open up your mindhole, folks, because I'm about to drop some knowledge into it.

The real difference between men and women, according to this author, is that, at their core, the thing that men fear most is that women will laugh at them. And, at their core, the thing that women fear most is that men will kill them.

Yikes, right?

In the face of this discrepancy, the fact that any two people of opposite genders have ever managed to get together is nothing short of a miracle.

Don't misunderstand me, ladies. I'm not saying all men are likely to kill you. A good 50% would never try and kill you at all. But how are you supposed to know which 50% those are? It's tricky.

And so you put up these walls, and I completely understand. You have my sympathy. But you have to feel for us, too, because we're expected to scale those walls. We have to circumnavigate the defense shields that have been built in response to the 7,000 other idiots who came before us, and that's a lot to contend with.

How does a guy communicate to a woman that, "Hey, I'm one of the good ones. I just wanna talk to you, get to know you, maybe buy you a drink. Or, God forbid, yes, I'd like to have some kind of sex with you. But murder does not make an appearance anywhere on my to-do list."

It's tough. The other night I was at this fancy restaurant, and there was a table of attractive ladies. As I made my way over to them, before I could even open my mouth, the leader of the... uh, oh damn... shit.

Quick, what's the collective noun for a group of women?

Oh, that's right: Coven.

(I'm just joking, people! Come on!)

So the leader, the alpha, she starts in with me right away, before I can even say hi:

"Look, Jessica just broke up with her boyfriend, and we don't want to look at men tonight, we don't want to talk to men, we don't want to be around men, nobody's interested in you, nobody's going to give you their phone number, nobody's going to have sex with you, so just go away and leave us alone!"

I was totally taken aback. It was quite a greeting, and I'm not sure she even took a breath. I hadn't anticipated that level of ferocity, and as I tried to recover my composure, the only thing I could think of to say in response was:

"So, should I come back later to take your order, or...?"

Oral Arguments

I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble for what I'm about to write. Many of my fellow men are going to be none too pleased with me for this. But my conscience compels me, consequences be damned.

'Cause, guys, let's face it, we've gotten a free ride on this deal for some time now. But fair is fair.

Girls -- eyes up here. Stop texting your friends, what I'm about to tell you is important.

Ladies, whoever it was that convinced you that a blowjob was some kind of compromise, that it was some kind of way to dodge a bullet and not have to have sex... whoever told you that PULLED ONE OVER ON YOUR ASSES.

Think about it for a second -- we've got a Mexican standoff. I want to have sex. You don't. So how 'bout this, we'll meet in the middle and you'll put my penis in your mouth!?

How, exactly, is that a compromise?

I don't know who your representatives were at the summit meeting where this was decided; I don't know whose signature is affixed to the bottom of the "Blowjob Accords," but whoever it was let you down. These were not good-faith negotiations.

Now, don't get me wrong, we men are pretty happy with the way this turned out. I dare say the notion that a blowjob is viewed as a compromise when we want to have sex and you don't is quite possibly the greatest thing Man has ever created.

But enough is enough.

Despite the image you may have of me based on some of my jokes, I actually am a feminist. I believe in equality of the sexes. I have nothing but respect and admiration for you silly bitches.

Oh, come on! I'm just kidding!

I don't respect you. I want to, but how can I when you were gullible enough to fall for this premise?

Okay, so now that I've shined a light on this issue, let me get to the part that's gonna get me in real trouble. Guys, you know where I'm going with this. I can see some of you out there, shaking your heads, "Don't do it, man!" But don't you see, we're all living a lie.

What I'm about to type is the biggest dirty little secret in the entirety of the gender wars. Pay attention, ladies, because I'm about to give you the plans to the Death Star.

Not only is the blowjob-in-lieu-of-having-sex scheme a lousy compromise, I submit that it's not actually a compromise at all!!

That's right, and here's why: In every situation, every time it's come up, every guy in the history of guys would rather get a blowjob than have sex. Always. Without question. Hands down.

(Now, usually, when I talk about "all guys," I'm using it as shorthand to refer to straight guys. But in this particular case, I actually mean ALL guys. Even gay guys. Especially gay guys. Isn't inclusion wonderful?)

The best thing that can happen at the end of a date -- the absolute best case scenario -- is as follows:

GIRL: Wow, I really like you. I don't wanna move too fast, though. I'm just not there yet... but maybe this will hold you over.

*UN-ZZZZZZIIIIP*

*GULP!*

That's a touchdown with a two-point conversion, that right there.

Now, girls, if you ask your boyfriend about this, he'll probably deny it. But don't be fooled; he's only trying to preserve this sham for his own benefit.

The reasons a blowjob is better than sex are many.

In terms of how they feel, it's basically a push -- EXCEPT that most of you ladies aren't insisting on the condom for the blowjob (and who can blame you), so the edge in this category goes to the blowjob.

Doing battle with a condom might be the single worst part of being sexually active. There's all of the common anxieties:

"Did I put it on right?"
"Is it gonna slip or break?"
"Is it gonna choke the life out of my poor erection?"

But it gets so much worse. Guys, have you ever, when rolling a condom on, accidentally gotten some hair caught up your sheathing? And now it's pinned there, tugging excruciatingly every time you attempt to move. If our brave soldiers used this method to extract information from terror suspects, it would be universally decried as a violation of human rights.

And, ladies, in most cases, you may notice, the condom is lubricated on the outside. "For her pleasure." But inside? That's rubber-on-skin, baby! Every time I go to have sex, I have to weigh how badly I want to get laid against how little I want to endure a balloon burn on my wang.

The chance of procreation is another way in which the blowjob is better than sex. No man has ever been sued for child support for fathering "mouth babies."

(Just sayin'.)

The next way the blowjob is far superior to sex is performance pressure. Now, you girls can repeat all day long how these things don't matter to you, that it's pressure we put on ourselves... Well, that's all fine and good, but it doesn't make it any less real. And any guy who's ever put his penis inside a woman has wondered, at LEAST once, about his size and how long he was going to last.

So you see, once again, the blowjob reigns supreme. In fact, if a chick is going down on you, and you're slightly smaller than average, and bust your nut in under three minutes, you've actually done her a solid. She'll thank you for it.

Sex has a better publicist, to be sure. But for all its hype, sex is often complicated. And frustrating. And annoying. There are so many things that can go haywire, so many ways to be incompatible with someone. Will we be into the same things? Will we like the same positions? Will our bodies fit together well?

I remember this one girl, the first time we had sex, we were in the missionary position, which was appropriate since that's how we met -- I was bringing the Word of Christ to her people. So there I am, on top of her, basically perched in a push-up, and the second I enter her, she coos in my ear, "Play with me."

WHAT!? I just stopped for a second, looking at my hands, trying to figure out how I was supposed to make this happen. Surely I had misheard her. She didn't really expect me to do the Jack Palance. (If you don't get that reference, YouTube it, you'll laugh.)

"Play with me," she repeated. No, I had heard her correctly. And apparently she thought this was a reasonable request. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how I was supposed to manage this, so I froze.

She sensed the awkwardness, and attempted to defuse it. "Or no. Or no? Or... no."

Great! Now she was disappointed. Awesome.

But the more I thought about it, it pissed me off. Play with you? Play with YOURSELF! What are your hands doing!? I felt like I was carrying heavy boxes up the stairs, and she was asking me to tie her shoes. Tie your own fucking shoes! I'm busy here!

So she's having disappointed sex, and I'm having angry sex. Mercifully, it didn't last very long.

Then there was this other girl, the first time we had sex, as soon as I entered her, her hands shot up and latched onto my nipples. Hard, like jumper cables. Now, I'm not really into nipple play. Worse than that, I don't like it. I find it irritating, and not at all pleasurable.

But because this was her first move, she must have thought this was perfectly normal. The way I looked at it, one of three things was taking place:

1) Maybe she had some kind of nipple fetish, and was pretending she was milking me, or something.

2) Through sheer random chance, she'd been with a string of guys who were all into having their nipples assaulted.

3) One of the advice columnists at Cosmo thought it would be hilarious to write something like, "One thing that drives all men wild is when you try to peel their nipples off, like a sticker from a piece of fruit."

But what could I do? Say something, and make her self-conscious, ruining the session for both of us? Forever be the pussy she tells stories about who didn't want his nipples touched!? No, I just sucked it up, and had a lousy time.

And then there was the girl who wanted to constantly change positions. I'm not talking about slight variations, like legs up for a while, then legs down. I'm talking about fully disengaging, totally reorienting, and plugging back in.

"Oh, now do me like this!"
"Now let me get on top!"
"Over here, against the grandfather clock!"

It was like she thought she was competing on a reality show. "Now, for a $250,000, perform the entire Kama Sutra in under three minutes! Go!"

Make no mistake, I admired her enthusiasm. And I'm not saying I expect to just get to lay there like a tranqued-up lion. But I have to be allowed to settle into some kind of a groove. Little Arik will only put up with so many false starts before he's like, "You know what, guys? I think I'm gonna call it a night."

Now, I'm not complaining just for my sake in any of these scenarios. All three of these girls would have had a better time being with someone who was into the same things they were. But it's like Forrest Gump said: "Sex is like a box of chocolates. You never know when a girl is going to try and remove your nipples."

There's no way to know until you're there. But all of this awkwardness, you see, could have been avoided with a good ol' trusty blowjob.

With sex, there are just too many things that can go wrong. Too many factors have to line up, too many things have to go just right, or you're better off scrapping the entire launch, lest someone get seriously hurt.

I guess that's my ultimate point: For as complicated as it is, having sex is a lot like trying to launch the space shuttle.

Whereas, by contrast, getting a blowjob is a lot like sitting back and having someone suck on your dick.

Hollywood Ending

I feel good. I recently got a massage. The funny thing about getting a massage in L.A. is that, if you tell someone you just had a massage, they always ask you the same thing:

"Did you get a happy ending?"

Happy ending! Every minute, with the happy ending! It's soooo Hollywood -- everything has to have a happy ending. I'm not a huge fan of the happy ending with a massage, frankly. It's too predictable. Whatever happened to the wry, ironic ending? The make-you-think ending, huh? The haunts-you-for-days-afterward twist ending...

(Maybe I should have M. Night Shyamalan direct my next massage.)

Another question you always get asked -- guys, you'll relate to this; girls, you may wanna... I don't know, text message your friends or something. But, guys, how many times has this happened to you? You're telling your friends about this girl you hooked up with, and you mention that you got a blowjob. Someone in the group (because every group of guys has one of these guys) is sure to chime in with this oft-repeated, time-honoured query:

"Did she swallow?"

They're very serious about it, these guys. "She better swallow. Bitch better fuckin' swallow..."

These are the same guys who slide cleats-up into an unprotected catcher in a friendly, utterly inconsequential game of softball. They're fired up -- as if, somehow, her refusal to ingest his seed is an indictment against his suitability as a sexual being.

I never really got caught up in this whole notion. I never care if a girl swallows or not. The way I look at it, my jizz is like... it's like a wounded falcon, that I've nursed back to health. And my only hope, my only wish, my only dream, is to one day release it into the world. Set it free. I don't care where it goes.

And if I'm being perfectly honest, roughly 90% of the orgasms I've had in my life have ended in a sock, anyway, so it seems a little disingenuous to start being picky about where stuff winds up.

I was living with a girl once, and she discovered my shameful pile of soiled, discarded socks behind the couch. (This was back in the days when I watched porn on the TV, before I had a laptop.)

But she didn't just come right out with it and confront me. Oh, no. Suddenly she was Mariska Hargitay from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (an actress whose name sounds to me like Pig Latin for "target," but I digress).

Her plan was to back into the whole thing, and not let on that she had the damning evidence up her sleeve. She played it cool, good-copping me to get me to let my guard down.

HER: "Have a seat. Would you like some coffee?"

ME: "No thanks. What is this about?"

HER: "Well, I've been thinking about your sworn statement from the other day..."

ME: "Sworn statement?"

HER: "And something about it's been bugging me. So I wanted to ask you a couple questions."

ME: "Okay..."

HER: "Remember the other day, when you were complaining that you couldn't find any clean socks to wear?"

ME: "Um, that sounds like something I would say, I guess."

HER: "You guess? I can read it back to you if you--"

ME: "Fine, I said it."

HER: "What do you suppose happened to those socks, Arik? I mean, how do you explain them just... disappearing?"

ME: "I don't know... Maybe it's like Jerry Seinfeld said, and they escape from the dryer one at a time."

HER: "Come on. You don't really expect me to believe that, do you!?"

ME: (very confused) "What's going on here?"

Just then, she produces a lawn-size trash bag stuffed full of stiff, crusty socks, and plops it down on the table in front of me.

HER: "Perhaps you'd like to tell me about THIS!"

ME: (breaking down) "Okay! All right! I did it! And I'd do it again!!!"

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those darn socks...

She got all indignant at this point, "I'm not going to wash those! That's disgusting! I'm throwing them out!"

I was backed into a corner, and I knew it. I wasn't going to be able to appeal to her emotions; she was too wound up. I was going to have to attack this from a practical vantage point. I was going to have to appeal to her logical mind, and make a well-reasoned case, if I hoped to defuse this situation. I'm a problem-solver by nature. This should be easy.

"What are you talking about?" I started. "I came on your face, and you washed that!"

In response to this, as you can probably imagine, she walked away, so I'm not entirely sure she heard what I said next, but I'll share it with you kids at home, anyway:

"We didn't throw out your tits after I came on them!"

...


Yeah, I miss that girl. Still not sure why things didn't work out between us.

Some thoughts on downloading...

So you're telling me I can have 8 million songs loaded onto a device the size of a postage stamp, and I can listen to those songs in crystal clear digital Dolby 5.1 stereophonic magic by placing speakers the size of corn niblets inside my ears... and yet we can't come up with anything better than toilet paper?

Seriously??

Because, you know, it's a continuum. At one time on our history, we had something else. And as time wore on, we arrived at toilet paper; toilet paper as we know it today was first introduced by the British Perforated Paper Company in 1880. And at that point, somebody threw up their hands and said, "You know what? That's good. Let's stop here. We don't need to work on this anymore. I say there's no need to try to improve upon what we've got."

Well, I'm here to tell you -- there's a need, okay? We're talking about cleaning ourselves after what is probably the foulest act we commit as human beings.

To put it in perspective: If you're walking around barefoot in your back yard, and you accidentally step in some dog poo, you don't just take a couple swipes at it with a napkin. NO! You run inside and boil your foot in soapy water!

If the unthinkable happens, and the toilet paper actually breaks down on you during its intended use, and you wind up with some unpleasantness on your hand, would your reaction be, "Ah, I'll just wipe it off with some toilet paper"?

OF COURSE IT WOULDN'T!!!

What year is it? Nineteen ninety something? Well, I think we deserve something better than paper. If you get dook on any other part of your body, you don't just swat it with a newspaper!!! This is insanity!!!

I can hear you now, "Just use baby wipes." I've tried the baby wipes, and while they're a step in the right direction, you can't flush them. So you end up with a waste can full of wipes with a brown spot on them, like little Spuds McKenzies. Nobody should have to live like that.

And don't even start in with the bidet. Because, first of all, nobody even knows how to use a goddamned bidet. And secondly, you're just getting everything down there wet, which makes it even more disgusting in my opinion.

I'm calling the top minds in the world to take up this cause -- all of our best scientists, and engineers, and inventors. I want government endowments, grant money and privately funded initiatives. I want a Cold War-style space race to discover the new excretory cleansing technology, and all the spoils that come with it.

And I... won't... rest... UNTIL... WE... HAVE IT!!!!

My name is Arik Martin, and I'm running for President!!!