Friday, August 26, 2005

pillow talk


Sometimes I feel sorry for guys. They likely have no idea how much women really tell each other about their sex lives. Which is of course. . . everything. My first distinct memory of this phenomenon was in high school when Pepper Lindsley described in explicit detail what it was like to give a guy a blowjob. We must have been 14 or 15. She had braces at the time and this presented some major logistical problems with his pubic hair. She also gave me this report with her neck covered in hickeys which was almost as gross as her blowjob story. Well, since that time, all my female friendships may be thought of simply as a long series of giggled confessions of their sexual encounters. As if the act of telling affirmed that something had indeed happened. The first blowjob, lost virginity, the elusive orgasm. And there was the advice too. Don't give a blowjob with braces for starters. Or never have sex in the sand. Girls learn a lot of important stuff from each other in this sort of tribal way. Even as early as fifth grade, my entire class read Judy Bloom's Forever, passing it around wrapped in an innocuous brown paper cover, handed off surreptitiously from one girl to another in the back of study hall as if we were dealing drugs. When it got to be my turn, it was like entering a secret society whose code words were penis, condoms, and sex on top.

By my 20s, not only did the stories get more interesting, but they got more explicit as well. But in all that time, I just sat there listening, nodding conspiratorially, without any lurid stories of my own to share. And even if I did, I didn't have the nerve to talk about it. I don't know why this was. Maybe it was because when I was five, an older neighborhood boy once trapped me in my bedroom and chased me around the room trying to get me to touch his penis. It wasn't particularly traumatic, probably because it wasn't all that "threatening", but I knew it was something I shouldn't tell anyone about. When I finally got around to being comfortable talking about sex, I was already in my mid-20s and it was as if the dam had cracked and all my innermost thoughts began seeping out of me, a little at a time, liberating me and making me wonder why I didn't start talking sooner. But what is it about women that enables us to share everything with each other? Is it chromosomal? Why do we feel comfortable getting naked in front of each other and assessing our tits, which we indeed do? The awful truth underlying all of this is that women totally objectify men, as much as we resist our own objectification. We talk size, we talk shape, we talk performance. We can be ruthless. We cackle. At any given time a women will know the penis size of all of her friends' boyfriends, and even boyfriends of the near and distant past. We then file this information away for future reference. We also talk with a complete vulnerability and transparency that most men will never experience unless with a woman. This is why men need women in their lives. Because though they may not admit it, they want to be a part of this secret society. In fact, I think that maybe men are only able to wholly fall in love with a woman when they acknowledge this feminine part of themselves, the part that has nothing to hide. Unfortunately, women are much more superficial. We just fall in love with the guy with the biggest cock.

7 comments:

Rachael said...

Loved you post, just loved it!

Anonymous said...

It's definitely indecent for guys to talk about this bedroom stuff with each other. And no, I don't want to see my guy friends naked, tho I have no problems being naked in a locker room with strangers.

- Dan C

Anonymous said...

"It is only on the basis of clinical facts that the discussion can be fruitful. These facts reveal a relation between the subject and the phallus that forms without regard to the anatomical distinction between the sexes and that is thus especially difficult to interpret in the case of women and with respect to women, particularly as concerns the following four points:

(1) why a little girl considers herself, even for a moment, to be castrated, in the sense of deprived of a phallus, by someone whom she at first identifies as her mother—an important point—and then as her father, but in such a way that one must recognize therein a transference in the analytic sense of the term;

(2) why, more primordially, both sexes consider the mother to be endowed with a phallus, that is, to be a phallic mother;

(3) why, correlatively, the signification of castration in fact takes on its (clinically manifest) full weight in the formation of symptoms only on the basis of its discovery as the mother's castration;

(4) these three problems lead, finally, to the why and wherefore of the 'phallic phase' in development. Freud, as we know, used this term to refer to the first genital maturation insofar as, on the one hand, it would seem to be characterized by the imaginary dominance of the phallic attribute and by masturbatory jouissance and, on the other, he localizes this jouissance in the case of women in the clitoris, which is thus raised to the function of the phallus. He thus seems to exclude in both sexes any instinctual mapping of the vagina as the site of genital penetration until the end of this phase, that is, until the dissolution of the Oedipus complex.

This ignorance smacks of misrecognition in the technical sense of the term—all the more so in that it is sometimes fabricated. Could it correspond to anything other than the fable in which Longus depicts Daphnis and Chloe's initiation as dependent upon the explanations of an old woman?"

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, from "Die Bedeutung des Phallus," 686-687.

babibi said...

hehe, you said "jouissance"...

are you trying to suggest that i have phallus envy? or are you trying to admit your own fear of castration?

Anonymous said...

The former. And call me "Longus."

babibi said...

as in "longus duck dongus"?

Anonymous said...

loved your 'blog' only wish it were longer.

-double a