"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!