Manslations (8 page)

Knowing this, you should be aware of what happens when you are in public. If you're attempting to be sexy out there, you might attract the attention of your targeted man, but it's not exactly a surgical strike. You are also going to hit every other man in sight. And you don't get to decide which one of them gets the fantasy. We're all getting it.

And for what it's worth, we really appreciate it.

Given that, you're probably ready to debunk this next one without my help, right?

FACT: It doesn't matter who a man wants/likes/loves, he is going to fantasize about her, her friends, her sister, maybe her mom if she's hot, his ninth-grade Spanish teacher, that girl on the train, and that honey he saw in college that time where he didn't quite get a good look at the whole woman.

This dovetails neatly into the next one:

FACT: Oh, yes, he is. And it's fine, I swear.

Look, even I'm like this, and I'm
nice.
I love my girlfriend; I brush my teeth several times a day; and I do my taxes on time. I'm about as
nice-enough-to-introduce-to-your-grandmother
a guy as you're likely to meet (as embarrassing as that may be), and yet the contents of my brain at any given moment would probably shock and offend Courtney Love, if only she could stay awake long enough for someone to explain them to her.

Fantasy: Girl-on-Girl Action

In October 2007, scientists figured out how to get female worms to be attracted to other female worms instead of males.

Let's put aside, for a moment, any questions about whether a worm has a lot of choices anyway. Look, you're a worm: everybody's covered in dirt; everybody looks really weird yet indistinguishable from each other; nobody's got any money. It's like living in New York City, just without arms, legs, or an iPod.

But in terms of application of this study, the scientist cautions anyone who thinks that this is going to unravel the mysteries of human sexuality. “A human's brain is much more complex than a worm's brain,” he
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said. Yeah, right. Says the man spending his days trying to teach worms to switch-hit.

The point is this: Every man who read about this wondered if they had an experimental version of the treatment that he could try out on his girlfriend.

We aren't 100 percent sure why we want you ladies to bat for the other team at least once. Lots of women think it's because men like the idea of being the center of attention in bed, and they might not be wrong there.

Personally, I think the whole girl-on-girl fantasy comes from this: When two women are having sex, a woman made the first move, which is hot. She almost had to have, right? (I mean, unless the two of them got a phone call from a third party asking them to do each other or something, which…does that ever happen?)

Okay, is everybody still with me? Anybody decide to join a nunnery or sign up for a solo space mission or anything? Good. The worst is over.

Now we get into what happens with the male mind as he is actually going after sex. Remember, this isn't necessarily in any way related to whom he's fantasizing about. This is when it's for real.

Let's start with maybe the biggest mistake a woman can make in trying to read a man's intention:

FACT: If a man wants to have sex with you, it means that he is alive and capable of imagining having sex with you. There is no relationship between a man wanting to have sex with you and a man liking you.

Now, I'm not saying that if a man wants to have sex with you he
doesn't
like you. He might—who knows? But the sexual desire by itself isn't an indicator of anything. After all, that's only one of the Two Big Questions.
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It's never enough information.
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To put this another way, all men want to have sex with you, but only some of them want to date you. It's like a pyramid:

Okay, I think you're probably getting the hang of it now, so let's look at a tricky one:

FACT: All men have two types of
interest:
either he wants to have sex with you
and
date you, or he wants to have sex with you
and not
date you.

Sounds similar, but it's totally different. See, it's not that there are the “nice” guys out there who will always want a relationship and then there are the jerks who are only after sex. Sex and dating are not related in quite that way for us. Nice guys or jerks, we all unconsciously categorize women in one of those two ways. Either it's sex
and
relationship, or it's sex
and not
relationship.

So if a guy only wants to sleep with you, that's how he sees
you
specifically—not necessarily how he sees all women. And a different guy might want to date you specifically, even though he thinks of your friends as people to sleep with. (And yes, the guy who wants to date you does think about sleeping with your friends. And so does the guy who doesn't want to date you. It's very equal-opportunity.)

So we know that men fantasize about all women, but what about going after them?

FACT: Men not only want women with perfect bodies; we want their friends, their sisters, maybe their moms, their ninth-grade Spanish teacher… you get the idea.

Here's a problem in our society: The pervasive attitude among American women is that they are fatter/skinnier/taller/ shorter than they should be, that they are being compared to models with unrealistically perfect bodies, that men are only interested in women of that type, and if they are not perfect, men will not pay attention to them.
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I am here to help and/or be funny in the process. Maybe not in that order.

First, I am not going to lie to you. Yes, we all really do want to have sex with the models with the perfect bodies and the big, fake boobs and all of that. We want it all the time. I want it right now. In fact, every time I see one of those women, yes, I think about having sex with her. And even when I don't see one of them. That's what memory is for.

Women know this and think, “Well, how do the rest of us stand a chance?”

Here's how you stand a chance. We are not looking for ONE woman. We are looking for zillions of women. And we would love for you to be one of them.

Okay, that didn't really come out right.

What I am getting at is this. Most men do not really have a “type,” any more than professional wrestling has rules. It's more of a “hey, whatever works” kind of philosophy. We look at
all
women.

Listen, I know how women often complain that men are only into appearance, and they always date younger women, etcetera, etcetera. And how women are more than happy to date older men, etcetera, etcetera.

Fine, but let's not pretend that women are into these “older men” because of the content of their characters. Look at these older men that women want to sleep with. Who are these men? Sean Connery? Harrison Ford?

Probably just a coincidence that they are powerful, famous, and rich. I'm sure that if Sean Connery worked as a greeter at Wal-Mart to supplement his $300-a-month Social Security check, you'd still be after him, right?

Guys don't
only
care about a woman's looks any more than a woman
only
cares about a man's bank account. (Or his guitar playing, if she's under twenty-five or so.)
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To get back to the original myth, men do not “only” want to have sex with
any
body type, age, or anything else. We entertain every possibility.

History Break: Sex and the Twentieth Century

Lots of the last century has been interpreted
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with metaphors of male sexuality. If you don't mind hearing about penises as they relate to foreign policy, read on!

World War II

This was in the height of the classic American home, in which the man did X and the woman did Y. And when somebody came into your backyard and stomped all over your Pearl Harbor, well, it was a man's job to go out there and sock someone in the nose.

Wars are often described in sexual terms. One man gets a little too big of a “war boner,” and he swings it in the direction of some other man who doesn't like how big it is. So the second man gets HIS war boner together, and they swing them around at each other until one of them gives up or is dead.

If that sounds a little creepy, well, it is.

Cold War

This was another prime example of the “hey, get that boner out of that country!” kind of thinking. Russia kept poking its peter into various nations around it; we started pushing our pee-pee into all kinds of places around us. Neither of us liked how well the other one seemed to be doing with the lady countries. So we attempted to “nation cockblock” each other as best we could. Eventually, we won because they ran out of money. Which is totally a penis victory in the modern world. If a Porsche is an extension of the penis, how much more so is cold, hard cash?

Vietnam

As it has been said many times, the big fear was that we would “pull out.” This was an example where the male ego could not take the fact that we simply could not give this country a war climax. So we just kept pumping away while North Vietnam pretended not to yawn and look at the clock.

Meanwhile, the Communists were fooling around with North Vietnam behind closed doors, and everyone knew it. We just could not let them get away with getting
our
woman country off.

By the way, this is exactly why those Vietnam veterans got so little respect back then. They somehow were blamed for not bringing North Vietnam to orgasm. (As it turns out, we are now hearing that that country had never even had one in the first place.)

It was during this time they invented THE PILL, which meant that women could fool around if they wanted to. And they suddenly realized that maybe they
did
want to. Before that, it was sort of about doing whatever your tweed-jacketed man wanted. Now, suddenly, a woman could go out there and say, “Do I want to have sex? You know, I think that yeah, I actually do,” and a line of confused and aroused men would form.

Okay, here we are. Doin' it, going all the way, hitting a homer, and other nicknames we haven't used since we were eleven. There are definitely some major differences between men and women here as well.
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