by Ali Adler
This best-selling book of all time went on to become one of the biggest movie openings of all time. Proving, when people aren’t actually fucking, they love to read about fucking or watch other people fucking. People are really into fucking.
In overwhelming numbers, women want permission to give up control in some arena. Yes, sure, in the bedroom, too. Despite huge careers and motherhood and wifehood, women also want to have the option not to be liberated—even if it is just for eleven minutes a day. They want to relax a little, be taken out of their heads, be taken care of for a change. They want to stop all the list-making noises inside. Stop all the planning and noodging. Sometimes they can’t do it all by themselves, and that requires someone else to take over. And not just with sex. It is not fashionable to acknowledge that women need to be jarred from their mental to-do lists with an occasional sexy arm squeeze and/or light ass-smack. Women have and will work hard for equality, but we haven’t evolved so far that we don’t also still want to be taken care of sometimes . . . even if it’s only about half as much as we’re taking care of others.
Women don’t volunteer to feel this way; they need to be cajoled, distracted from their own heads. Christian Grey, that coiffed and humorless white dude, does it with cuffs and/or paddles. That’s probably too extreme for most, but the underlying emotional issue is still the same: “Take me out of my brain that instinctively nests and caretakes and mothers, worries and obsesses and takes care of you, too, in a thousand ways, large and small. Force me to be taken care of.”
This is a woman’s wiring. Do you know how much more pussy you would get if you took three seconds when you got home to grab your woman from behind, kiss her neck, tell her she looks hot with that makeshift ponytail of unwashed hair, and tell her she’s going to get it later? And, if you throw down a sack of Thai food on the counter to punctuate that notion, well, you don’t need to hear from me how much fucking you’ll get. Odds are, your dick is still wet.
So be sure to be in charge sometimes. I know, all this seems like a lot to have to do. Ugh, no one wants to go out and buy handcuffs or a cowboy handkerchief. Just seems like another to-do on your already endless list of chores. This is emotional dominance more than physical. It’s you taking charge, handling little details and giving her head a break from its constant whirr.
The Grown-up Version of the Gold Sticker
If you’d like to step yourself up to a new sexual plateau, there are so many tiny things you can do to improve your general sexual status. I mean, you work your ass off at Candy Crush, and no one’s going to blow you when you matriculate to the next level. In fact, if you boast to her about it, this thing you’ve worked so hard to accomplish, she will be so annoyed about the time you wasted on it and not on her or the kids or your lives together.
Wait, hang on, you were just clearing your head, zoning out—but to her, it’s another thing that is soaking up attention from her. Your game is like an electronic hooker stealing your time, attention, money, and fidelity of spirit. You’re a smart man. You live for the reward system. You love getting a promotion at work, or back in your childhood when your kindergarten teacher used to put a gold sticker on your test. Think about how hard you worked to earn those. It said, “Nice job.” This is how you should think about yourself and your relationship. There is a very simple reward system for your thoughtfulness in life. Let’s call it the “blow job gold sticker.” If you work extra hard, you will be rewarded as an adult, too.
Here are just a few small suggestions of things you can do to accrue quick and easy points that will add up to more fucking for you, but this list is by no means definitive; it is a constantly moving target only as small as your imagination or your desire to fuck.
• Put away your phone and listen.
• Ask about her mother.
• Listen when she tells you about her mother.
• Make a reservation for Valentine’s Day way in advance, at a restaurant only she likes.
• Remember the kind of ice cream she loves best. Buy two pints. Eat neither.
• Offer to rub her back. While doing it, don’t attempt to rub her front.
• Plug in her phone when you notice she is low on battery.
• Take her dry cleaning in. Remember to pick it up.
• Make the bed.
• Remind your child to make his or her bed.
• Clean out the fridge of all the disgusting, old, outdated, and moldy things.
• Buy all new condiments for the fridge.
• Compliment something about her that you really don’t like.
• Offer to work on something about yourself that she really dislikes.
• Get her a new umbrella and have it ready for when it rains. Yes, this is a metaphor of preparedness and protectiveness. She’ll see it that way, too.
• Send her a nonsexual selfie or video. It means you’re thinking about her when she’s not there.
• Text her just because you miss her, and not only when you want to remind her to do something for you.
• Write her an actual note on an actual piece of paper.
• Purchase something new for the house that she saw and wanted, but didn’t buy.
• Like her parents.
• Offer to get together with her parents.
• Don’t subject her to your own parents.
• Like her friends.
• Offer to hang out with her friends.
• Don’t subject her to your own friends.
• On the off chance that you ever let her drive, keep your opinions about the route she’s chosen to yourself unless she asks.
• Out of the blue, mention some small thing she did and say how grateful you are that she did it.
• Take your kids out for the afternoon without being asked.
• Take your dog to the groomer without being asked.
• Take her car in to be serviced, and deal with the to-and-from the shop all by yourself.
• Kiss her between her shoulder blades.
• Make out with her vagina.
• Clean the gutters.
• Hold her hand.
• Call her your girlfriend, even though she’s your wife.
• Brag about her to her girlfriends; it will get back to her.
• Stop her with a compliment about something that’s not about how she looks physically.
• If you notice that she’s lost weight or gained it, don’t say anything either way. Instead, grab her by the waist and kiss her gently on the mouth. That’s it. That’s your woman, and that’s the size she comes in. The kiss is your stamp of approval.
• Cook something for her or clean up something that she cooked for you.
• Volunteer to provide whatever idiotic thing your kid’s school wants for the teacher appreciation day.
• Be in charge of something, anything, and follow through with it.
• Notice something that is broken around the house all by yourself. Either fix it or have it fixed without being asked.
• Order a jacket she doesn’t know about and wear it on a date you ask her to go on.
• Pretend to be on a first date together.
• Or, even better, pretend it’s your first date and you haven’t fucked her yet. Don’t tell her you are doing this. You will act as interested as you pretended to be the first time.
She won’t even know this is all adding up to sex. She will think you’re being generous with your time, paying attention to her and to others. She will feel like she has some weight lifted off her shoulders. All this will allow for some time to entertain the notion of sex. You will be rewarded, and she will feel as though she is really rewarding herself.
Exhausting, right? All of this will probably make you want to throw in the towel. But imagine what your life would look like without her, or some other version of her in your life. Seems fun for a few days or even a month, but then there’s you alone, living with a hand-crank can opener and spooning a can of who-ca
res-what into your mouth. That’s you all by yourself, doing whatever you want with your computer, never having to remember to clear your history. That’s you with an economy-sized container of lotion with a pump dispenser and a giant flu season–sized box of Kleenex. So what if you occasionally have to make an extra effort to march double-time? It will ultimately be more fruitful in the struggle for lifetime happiness.
When you understand what a woman actually wants, it’s worth it because you share a true emotional connection. Plus you get laid. But whether you understand this actively or not, she is the receptacle for all of your desires, even if you sometimes confuse them for just the ones associated with your penis.
Chapter 7
The 21st Century Female
“I guess you didn’t get my text.”
I just downloaded a new operating system to my phone, only because the little numeral circly thingy on it wouldn’t disappear. It nagged at me visually, like a text I hadn’t yet checked. And after my free and painless download, it really has the phone looking so much prettier. It came up with a whole new way of doing things that I never would’ve guessed, or even knew to need. And it did it so thoughtfully, without me ever imagining I’d want this stuff. It took care of me. This phone is my very diligent lover, anticipating needs I didn’t even know I should have.
But as with any relationship, there are always tiny drawbacks. Now the whole thing has slowed down so much, I feel like I have to go out and buy the next generation of it. So I go out to buy the new phone. (If you’re the one asking why I didn’t just buy it online, then you’re part of the problem.) It’s a good thing I went to the mall, too, because I can buy anything from a computerized kiosk now. It doesn’t smell like a bakery, but I can have a cupcake at the push of a button; no need for human contact or its endless bad cologne choices. Which is also good because of the transmission of airborne illnesses, plus stuff like having to make irritating small talk, which I like less and less because I could be checking Twitter or Instagram during life’s inconvenient pauses.
But when I finally get to the Apple store, there are all these other new and next things, all because I clicked the little numeral update thingy. Now I have to go buy a bunch of other stuff because they’ve changed the way the newer phone plugs in. More prongs or fewer prongs, which will charge me up faster and juicier. Now I need a new car adapter and a bedside charger and a charger for work and a backup charger and a bonus battery-powered adapter, you know, just in case I need to Vine a video of a hike I’ll never take. Oh, yeah, I also need a new sturdy but ironic says-something-about-me protective case for my larger and faster, but certainly differently shaped phone. When I get home, I put all my old tech stuff in a drawer. And as I do, it hits me that the idea behind faster, newer, better, upgradable, toss-it-away, Adderall-fueled technology can be applied to our sex lives and relationship attention spans.
See, bitches? This did have something to do with fucking. And, by the way, I still haven’t upgraded my phone. They didn’t have any in stock, those back-ordered teasing motherfuckers. Plus, my contract wasn’t up.
My kids don’t believe me when I tell them that when I grew up . . . “I walked three miles to school every day in the snow, without shoes.” No, but I do boast of my own agonizing bootstraps: “There was no pause button on my TV remote.” However, they don’t even look up as I say this. Why would they? Their eyes are stuck on their various iPads, LeapFrogs, or, if I’m lucky, Kindles. I continue, “Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. When the commercials came on, my whole family would shove each other out of the way to grab a snack or be the first one to get to the bathroom!” My kids still manage to make me feel stupid as they ask in dismissive unison, “Why didn’t you just watch it on your phone?”
Yearning Is Sexy
When did this happen? When did it all just get to be too much? Do we think that our sexual relationships haven’t been dramatically altered by this whole new technoscape? And forget about masturbation. As long as there have been hands, there have been people looking at objects and faces and lumps and curves and creases of genitals in various degrees and rearranging them in some new and imaginary way in order to self-stimulate.
The JCPenney catalogue used to be a sperm-coated mess. National Geographic? Men somehow managed to look past the distended bellies of a starving population of women to objectify their indigenously necklaced tits. But at least guys back then had to use their imaginations to some degree. They actively had to picture what the perimenopausal models in a catalogue might look like without their flammable underpants on. Did she have a big bush? A little bush? No bush? The imagination required to think of these questions all served as the backbeat to the front-beat. The curiosity cultivated a need for human interaction that we no longer have.
We no longer have to imagine what breasts look like without the benefit of a Sears, Roebuck and Company brassiere, the way your grandpa did, hunched out of sight from your grandma inside his rusty and warped toolshed. Nope, now there are free vaginas everywhere to jack off to. In more recent decades, boys would have to sneak their parents’ VCR copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High in order to fast-forward and freeze on Phoebe Cates’s perky boobs as she removed her bikini top in diabolically timed slo-mo. They would watch Basic Instinct, craning to snag a glimpse of Sharon Stone’s are-they-really-blond vagina lips as she crossed and uncrossed her panty-free legs under her microskirt.
But now, forget it. It’s so easy; too easy. Any person can search for any version of women’s private parts imaginable. All they have to do is memorize what birth year alleges they’re “Safe to Enter” and then, without the slightest hint of proof, boom, there they are: bountiful vaginal bouquets. We can look at any version of any vagina at any time, at no cost other than to self. We can have a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week all-access pussy pass (including all the endless unpronounceable Jewish holidays) for a front row seat to any crazy and rare anything and everything. I guess postmillennial imagination is a new kind of muscle, one that only requires that we dream it in order to find it. Any vagina, any tits, no oddity too big to conjure. “May I see a hound’s-tooth vagina?” No thank-you is required.
Congratulations on being born when you were, because men for generations had to jerk off to fig. 1171 from Gray’s Anatomy. (You are searching for this image right now.) In our on-demand society, where is the want? Want is that unfulfilled piece where yearning is born. That yearning is sexy. Looking forward to something we can’t immediately access is what creates desire. Desire creates urge. Urge creates action. Action creates connection. Connection is when people meet. When people meet, they can love and/or fuck. If they love and/or fuck, life is possible. What happens to us without all that? End times. Sigh.
Never Send a Picture of Your Penis
There are so many apps for secret-style fucking now. Apps and websites dedicated to people who are looking to have affairs. But, beware, as convenient as they are for hooking up, that same technology can also get you busted. Snoopy spouses can search stuff to get clues about what you’re doing in private. There are even apps like Couple Tracker or mSpy or Find My Kids that she can download onto your phone to track where you are, versus where you say you are. Gone are the days of just walking in on someone fucking someone else. Ironically, technology will probably end more relationships than ever before, because there are so many more ways to find out if someone is lying to you about the women he’s secretly met while technologically hooking up.
Okay, super-big point here with photo sexting: DO NOT SEND A PHOTO OF YOUR GENITALS, EVER. Your genitals are called “private parts” for a reason. It just is never a good idea. Even in a moment of testosterone-fueled bad decision-making, it is as forever as the memory of Anthony Weiner’s political career.
Also, less discussed than the forever quality of owning the image of someone’s dick pic is the new age-old question, “What the hell are women supposed to do with this photograph?” If you’re kind of a stranger, we don’t wan
t to see your dick unless we’re checking for quality. If you are our boyfriend, someday we could get mad at you and send it to all our friends; show them how short, tall, big, or small, or how extreme your bend to the left is. A photo is forever, and easily forwarded. So just don’t take it to begin with. It can never be unsent.
But, if you’re not going to listen to me, and you feel like you MUST take a pic of your turgid weenie for some girl you’re sexting with, do not ever include your face in the same shot as your cock. Do not include any identifiable tattoos or incriminating background locations, moles or spots that indicate that this dick is your dick. Imagine your penis walking in a perp lineup. Don’t let it be ID’d. This is some very good advice; please take it.
It’s Delishy
So I’m engaged for the first time in my life. Maybe as you read this, I’ll already be legally married. All a sort of fantastical series of words mashed together to form a sentence I never would’ve thought possible. Who knew that, as a gay woman, I’d ever enjoy the same privileges granted to other couples?
Well, technology plays a part in how I met Liz, my fiancée. But if technology could be thought of as old-fashioned, that’s the typing type we enjoyed. A mutual friend introduced us and it began; certainly slowly, a Duggar-like courtship of endless back and forth texting. We got to know every detail about each other before ever going out on a single date. We never even spoke on the phone.
As we texted for months, we let each other in on whatever moment-by-moment feeling we were having in real text time. These late-night text sessions were rife with unveiled emotional intimacy. No, not the kind you’d think. Not a single sexy text was exchanged but, instead, moments of real vulnerability. It felt even more intimate than the more garden variety “Whatcha wearing . . .?” sexy-type typing.