Called Babez Station at Shuteye Town. Click your way to heaven.
Funny. I’ve been accused my whole writing life of being a misogynist. Never was. Never occurred to me my true state was relevant to the body politic. Which it most definitely now is. Flaubert would know what I was talking about. And Tolstoy. And Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Shelley.
Writers like us are wholly male with a wholly female persona living within us. We are both. Like Adam, who lost a rib over it to the detriment of a great many men since. Haven’t seen this in the proliferating gender diagrams. But we’re the only ones who actually understand the foolish notions that are being perpetuated. Why we understand a lot of things no one else does. Like the LGBTQ+ thing. Child’s play. Harmless for years, now murderous.
Yes, there’s a woman in me. Why I’m posting about this here. My sexuality has been affected by the culture at large. But more importantly, by my dual nature. As a man I am completely heterosexual. I have a dirty mind. Built in. Or instilled in. My parents sent me away to a boarding school when I was thirteen. I learned about sex from pornography. Why I wrote a pornographic book about a year ago. And designed a dozen others. My fantasies are perverse but not sadistic.
Cristopher Hitchens wrote a thing some years ago that made me suspicious of him. He said the most overrated things were Champagne, lobster, and anal sex. He was a Brit. No doubt he had a bad experience of all three on one night. My own experience has been that all three are superlative, as long as the context is right. The fantasy has to be right.
My favorite pornographic premise. She wants it desperately, but she can be offhand about it. And, yes, she wants it up the ass, on her knees, and I am always there behind her, and she is older, because I have always been the one approached, the target of lust not the pursuer. Only a fantasy anymore. My wife is a better person than my low sexual fantasies. She thinks I don’t love her anymore. The opposite is true. My sexual nature is low. She is the one above me here to save me.
I know this can get Freudian in a hurry. But it isn’t really Freudian. It’s about sex. Women like getting fucked. Hard. Dominated. Even made to feel a bit low. But I never watched or read the ones where she was actually in pain. She just wanted it. And she wanted me.
Which has been my love life. I never learned how to approach women because they always approached me. It took me many years more than necessary to lose my virginity. After prep school they kept telling me how beautiful I was.
This one’s only a couple years old, and I
was drunk at the time. But you can see.
Which one you looking at? Me when I wasn’t in my late 60s. Girls at mixers, matrons at club luncheons told me I was the
most beautiful boy they’d ever seen. I shrank under their
stares. They were drunk too, sometimes very. Handsy too.
So my whole romantic life I was the pretty girl getting hit on and I was a hopeless dunce at small talk. But I did learn how women talk. When you’re quiet they talk. When I finally did lose my virginity, she said, “Just stick your hand in my pants. I can’t stand it any more.” So I did.
From Shuteye Town 1999. I do have an ear..
But all my life had been arranged in advance. The part nobody gets. Comedy of errors. My mother took a pill to prevent miscarriages and had my sister. Kept taking the pill and had me 18 months later. Later learned that pill might have sterilized both me and my sister. Never mind. I have Monica. Susie wasn’t so lucky.
Susie and I grew up absolutely together. One might even say too closely. I was a boy, hooked on toy cars. But she was a girl, hooked on Barbie. So I played Barbie with my sister (and Ginny dolls too), which is how I learned that Ken had an arm that kept falling off and Barbie was sometimes difficult to squeeze into her outfits. I also learned that Barbie was the image girls wanted to be and wouldn’t ever get to somehow.
I loved the Barbie and Ken thing. They even had an Austin Healey 3000. Peach colored. I told my dad one night at bedtime maybe I should have been a girl. That upset him. But we were WASPs and after he said I was dead wrong we never spoke of it again, I never thought of it again.
Susie was there to accomplish four things. 1) To show my father fathers don’t always win. She once sat for three hours at table not eating what she had been ordered to eat or get no dessert (always worked with me) until he had to concede defeat; 2) To prove that a female could bring him to heel on every important issue, including education, marriage, and politics; 3) To make me WORK in school. She worked all the time, all the homework every night while I cribbed the necessities from Terry Drorbaugh in Greenwich, forced me to do a 500 page Latin Notebook vs. her 1,000 page monster; and 4) To show up his Vassar genius sister and her Vassar genius daughter (author of Quickbooks btw), which is why Susie went to Vassar and then to dad’s alma mater Cornell for eight years getting a PhD in “Little Women” and how women can escape the patriarchy if they are just educated right,
Eighteenth months of difference. She is in me. I can see how it is. I can feel how it is. So many things. Too many things. (There’s a link to a song* in here, I know it). More than that. She’s the me I would have been if He had not touched me on the head for some unknown reason and made me an outlaw to everyone, including my own family. They all came to hate me. Even my mother. After I failed so spectacularly I succeeded. My dad kept the cassette tape of my NPR interview. I can’t swear that my mother ever read The Boomer Bible.
Susie did, She never told me it was great. We got into a spectacular fight, caught on the intercom my parents used to keep tabs on the cats, in which she insisted that a girl, raised like a boy, could be as great a pitcher as Sandy Koufax.
I thought and thought and thought about that. I made a place for that belief in my heart. I understand where these women are coming from. I played with Barbie and Ken myself. Life is a plastic thing if you insist.
Meanwhile, I was still in my romantic life the guy who played with Barbie dolls. I became a warrior in prep school, a drunken clubbie at Harvard, a failed novelist in my year off, and almost but not finally ever a CPA at the Cornell Graduate Business School before I became a computer jock, a corporate player, and a Fortune 100 management consultant.
Throughout, when it came to romance, I was a shy girl more at home with the Barbie and Ginny dolls on MTV than copping feels at the movies.
What holds you back, girls? You don’t think you’re really better looking than the other girls. You don’t smell good, your clothes are off-putting or just not right, you never had that signal public achievement, cheerleader or whatever, that makes you irresistible, and if you make the first move, you will brand yourself irretrievably as the SLUT.
And so I know how the women feel. She’s still in there. Why I am so publicly vain even in my seventieth year. My brains have made me their lack of self-esteem. Because the boys you want to like you don’t want you to be smart, so you have to get even smarter to show them up, et Cetera, et Cetera, et Cetera. (Letting AutoCorrupt have its way on this spurious capitalization because at heart I’m just a shrinking violet.)
Not a big step to understanding how the ugly, unattractive boys feel. Better to be a girl. You know you’re female because you want so much to accommodate everyone else. Be what they want you to be. See, you can buy tits. Not such a big loss to lose a cock that never got wet. And so it goes. On the female side, same thing. Little tits don’t matter. Hiding them under bras always felt like a joke anyway. Castration? No one’s ever rhapsodized about my vagina, including me. Accept the faux schoolgirl in me, maybe I’ll get a date. I am 14, you know.
I know the clouds the female of the species live under. I know the rapacity of testosterone and the battle to contain it. I am an Alpha male by the record and an Alpha female because I know the difference between the two sexes is not that much.
Ho ho ho hum. I’m the first man to concede that he is both sexes rolled up into one. I’M THE FIRST ALL-GENDER PERSON WHO IDENTIFIES AS HUMAN TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET. Does the NYT want to interview me? They should. But they don’t want to hear it.
___________
*Extreme Ways
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