"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. ;)