In most of these entries I do a lot of complaining, and I often sound like an old-fashioned librarian with my bun twisted too tight. Can't do much about the complaining - I think that's a function of age, like I've waited all my life for people to smarten up, and instead they seem to be getting more stupid, and I don't have that much more time to wait.
But I might shake my hair loose this evening.
Under-18s should stop reading now. And if YOUR bun is twisted tight, you should go away for a while, too. You've been warned.
Topic 1: On a recent episode of Boston Legal, the acerbic character played by Candace Bergen barged into the men's lavatory, catching Alan Shore at the urinal. It was their first meeting, and within seconds they were trading insults. Naturally, this being Alan Shore, it got sexual right quick. He ended up with a comment that if he were looking for a woman, he'd choose something younger. Stung, she replied that if she were looking for a man, judging by what she had glimpsed in the mirror, she'd choose something larger. Alan was startled into silence. I think the point was that he may finally have met his match.
I thought "Oh, Candace! I thought you'd been around enough to know better! How could you allow the writers to make you say that!"
I don't really know about Ms. Bergen, but this little bun has been around enough to know that size in the relaxed state bears little relation to size in the rampant state. In fact, assuming that it's adequate when rampant, it's better to be small when relaxed. The greater the difference between min and max (in both dimensions), the harder it gets! Like it's more fully packed. In my experience, the corollary is true, too. The smaller the difference, the less hard it gets. Like it's not really trying. Resting on its laurels. Lazy thing!
PS - Later note - if you ever walk into the men's room and find someone at the urinals, don't bother looking down. Look at his nose. It'll tell you all you need to know. This is not hearsay or mere theory. I've thoroughly tested it. There IS a direct relationship in all aspects!
Topic 2: What the heck does "hook up" mean now? I'm confused. A few years ago, at its origin, it was clear that it meant pretty much the same as "sleep with", but with a more base and casual connotation. One-night stand sort of thing. You'd "hook up" with someone you met at a bar. Sort of like snagging a fish. "Hooking up" spawned (for me, anyway) an unpleasant mental picture - like train cars connecting.
But it seems to have changed. "Hooking up" now seems to be more like "going steady", more a sense that the two have been circling each other for some time, and have finally got together. Connotation seems to be spending intimate time together. Mental image, holding hands.
But on a talk show yesterday, a woman said that she and her boyfriend see each other on weekdays, but on the weekends he likes to "hook up" with his male buddies. So now it means simply "meet up with"? Socialize?
If it has no set meaning, it can be a dangerous word to use.
Topic 3: "Viagra for Women"? Bah! That stuff they’ve got in the pipeline now is not really for women at all (although they say it’s only for women with hormone imbalances). All it does is raise the libido. It’s really for men to talk their women into. It’s just going to give all those randy old men on Viagra something else to pester their women about. "Why don’t you try it? Huh? Huh? Come on, give it a try."
Randy old men? Pooh! It’s worse than that. Just about every wife and girlfriend in the world will be under pressure to use it. Every healthy heterosexual man wants nothing more than a lascivious woman at home, and in the same way that men who don’t need V will try it anyway because they think it will make things better, many will push their women onto this new junk because, after all, there can’t ever be too much of a good thing. (I think it's testosterone. With any luck, if you use it when you still have ovaries, it'll grow you a beard!) I’ll bet the brains who came up with this one were all male.
Men and women are different. Desire, capability, and satisfaction are three different things for women, but pretty much the same thing for men.
Generally, otherwise healthy men almost never lose their desire, even long after the capability is gone, and as long as they have the capability, their satisfaction level stays high. Their graph for desire is a straight line, and satisfaction tracks capability. Viagra raises the capability, and the rest just follows. All straight line, all high. (If you remove all legal and social restrictions, every man, on a deep pineal level, wants to sire as many children as possible with as many women as possible. If he could assemble a herd, uh, a harem, if he were allowed to, he would.)
Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), women are in charge of breeding. Therefore, a woman’s desire naturally fluctuates. In the first flush of new love, the lacy pink "I want to have his baby!" phase, desire is sky high. It’s a hormonal thing. Nature likes babies. How long this phase lasts varies. In the natural course of things, it eventually wanes. Passion gives way to duty, with occasional flashes of passion. And the more work a woman has, the more tired she is, the more stress she feels, thelower desire dips. That’s hormonal, too. Nature planned it that way, for good reason - a tired stressed woman is not a good candidate for motherhood.
Lucky is the man whose woman falls newly in love with him over and over. (Lucky is the woman whose man courts her over and over.) This is the aspect that the new drug addresses. Men will think that women can be manipulated into a constant "new love" state. The guy won't even have to work to win her. No fair!
If a man’s capability goes, it’s because there’s a medical problem. It’s abnormal. A woman’s capability is absolutely guaranteed to lessen at the top of her prime. Even if childbearing hasn’t damaged anything, menopause eventually will. The blood won’t rush south any more. No more pouting. The tissues thin and dry out. "Reactions" are slower, if they remain at all. Things get a lot more difficult. [FLASH! Update 10/26/05 - Doesn't seem to have happened yet! Either I'm lucky or he's really good. Or both.] Hormone replacement therapy was supposed to "fix" this, but that got blown out of the water. The new drug isn’t going to fix, doesn’t even consider, capability, even for its intended target, women with no or non-functioning ovaries. There’s this male myth that a woman is always capable, since all she has to do is receive. Heightened desire with lowered capability (equals lowered satisfaction) is out of balance, and will probably result in heightened frustration for women weak enough to be talked into the new stuff.
The third aspect is satisfaction. This is the drug women really want! Men know when they get to the top of the mountain, and know exactly what it looks and feels like (being careful of AOL keyword checks here...), and they get there fairly consistently, but there are a lot of women, perhaps even most, who don’t know. They think they do, but they don’t, because they’ve never been there. Researchers ask "Do you?", and they answer "Yes", but nobody defined what IT is. They went somewhere, it wasn’t just a stroll along the river, so they suppose they must have been there.
When women climb the mountain, they go from ledge to ledge. If the highest ledge they ever get to is the one with the warm loving breezes, they figure there must be more, but what the heck, this is nice enough. If the highest they ever get to is the ledge with the rippling silk and fluttering butterflies, they think that’s it, and if they get there consistently, they are satisfied. If they get to the one where they clench the rocks to hold on as the earth shakes, they think that’s it, and if they get there consistently, they are very satisfied. If they get to the one that Asians describe as "the little death", where the world disappears, there is nothing anywhere, and everything goes black like you've fainted except for the hot red glow growing in the south, and then the lightening hits the ground and opens a spring that gushes pure clear sweet water, they hope that’s it, because anything more is too scary to contemplate, and if they can get there whenever they want, they are very very satisfied. (If there IS a higher ledge, I don’t even want to know about it!)
The satisfied women are those who go to the same place, no matter how high it is, every time they want to. Having never been higher, they don’t know enough to be dissatisfied (and are answering "Yes" to researchers even though most of them should still be answering "No", but they don't know that). The very unhappy women, the majorly frustrated women, and there are a lot of them, are those who have been a ledge or two higher than usual only once or twice or so, they’ve seen what’s there, they know what's possible, but they can’t get back, no matter what. It remains tantalizingly out of reach. Brutal! Give us a Big V for that, you clods! Then desire will spike on its own! This new stuff you want to push on us will just frustrate us more. You want us available, amenable, and lascivious. We want satisfaction! An end to frustration! Address that!
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I believe the drug is a testosterone preparation, probably a patch. I believe that the way things normally work is that the ovaries secrete testosterone (testes, after all, are basically extruded ovaries) just before the egg drops. This raises the libido at the most advantageous time. Men secrete more testosterone, constantly. The reason women grow little beards after menopause is that there is no longer enough estrogen to moderate the effects of the testosterone.
An exercise for you women - remember when you were in the first blush of true love, when you had the overwhelming urge to drag the object of your affections off into the bushes to wreak mad mayhem on his trembling body whenever no one was looking, or even when they were? Remember that? Now multiply that by 5 (and that's probably way too small a factor), and that's how hetero men feel about all women at all times. Gotta admire their restraint.
And that's why, through history, men have considered women a commodity, to be fiercely guarded and protected until they can be used as reward, loot, barter, treaty, or brood mare. We are very valuable to them.
On the other hand, if women could reproduce asexually, if men one day disappeared from the earth, we each might miss a few individually, but would we miss them as a group? Do we need them like they need us?
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I'm on a roll! I keep adding to this. Having been up all night again, I'm probably drunk on sleeplessness.
That spring on the fourth ledge is known as "letting down". It seems to be rare these days. There are glands on either side that produce a fluid similar to seminal fluid (remember that women have essentially the same equipment as men, just arranged differently), but lighter, thinner, watery. These days, the usual male reaction is "$#|+ !! She peed on me!" They are not generally aware of the phenomenon.
Most doctors will deny it exists. I don't know why. Maybe it's a misguided attempt to protect the psyches of women who don't have it, but I doubt it. I suspect it's because they have never seen it in their own experiences, therefore it must be a myth. It was well known in England in Victorian times, but mostly just in the upper classes (and among prostitutes and "kept women", who often faked it with inserts). It was considered proof of the superiority of the upper classes. I don't suppose the fact that the upper class women had a household staff, including nannies, and that the lower class women were worked to death, had anything to do with it. Relaxation does help.
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Hummm.... "Lucky" women were well-kept by men, fed, housed, protected, ... and considered chattel. Their intellects were not respected. Their legal rights were few. This so angered them that they set out to claim their birthright as equals, to wrench power from and share power with men. But getting out of the home and making their own way, participating in the world, has led to stress, which has probably contributed to a sad loss of the other half of their birthright. So much so that they've forgotten it. I wonder if this is why conservative religious "traditional" women express high levels of sexual satisfaction? Or maybe it's just a subjective thing, that it would be "unChristian" to not be happy, no matter what. Hummm.....
Jay and I had an arrangement. Before we married, I outranked and out-earned him. After we married, he went out and earned money to take care of me, and I stayed home to take care of him. Required income was not dictated by outgo; outgo was determined by income. He brought home enough rabbit skins to keep me relaxed and fed, and I kept him VERY happy. That was my job. It worked for us, because even though I was not earning, he respected my intellect and capabilities. He never played the lord of the manor. I had the best of both worlds. And I was very relaxed......... Sigh.
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