Dave Barry - Guide To Marriage And/Or Sex

Okay. We’ve covered the two biggest potential problem areas involved in living together, namely dirt and food. This leaves sex, which in the interest of decency we will put in a separate chapter.

I’m afraid that, in this chapter, we must talk about sex in a very explicit manner, because we want to expand the Frontiers of Human Understanding and also we want to sell as many books as possible to adolescent boys. This means we are going to have to use certain highly clinical sexual terms, such as “puberty” and “mollusk”, which can lead to arousal in some instances. So if you have a shred of decency in you, you’ll want to stop reading and go make fudge or something until this chapter is over. You’d better leave right now, because the heavy pornography starts almost immediately after these asterisks.

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Still with us, eh? Ha Ha! Don’t feel ashamed. You’d be surprised at some of the readers we get in this chapter.

Okay. Now that we’ve cleared out the religious fanatics, let’s take a look (so to speak) at ...

The major male sexual organs are the testaments, the nomads, the doubloons, the inner tubules, the vasal constrictors, the reversion unit, and of course the Main Organ, or “wiener.”

Men are very protective of these organs. This is because Mother Nature decided, apparently as a prank, to place them on the outside of the male body, where they are most likely to get hit by baseballs, or punched by small children, or even—this makes me cringe, just thinking about it—attacked by crazed birds. And what is worse, Mother Nature made these organs extremely sensitive.

You know how women are always talking about the Pain of Childbirth, and how awful it is, and how men will never really understand it? Well, we men don’t wish to make a big deal about this, but if you women really want to experience pain, you ought to try being male and taking a line drive to the privates. Yes sir. When this happens in a professional baseball game, and the player is down on the ground, writhing in agony, obviously clutching his private parts, the color commentator always says to the announcer: “Looks like he had the wind knocked out of him, Ted.” But the male spectators know better, and if you look around you’ll notice that they’re all hunched over protectively, thousands of them, as if a sudden epidemic of Bad Posture Disease has swept through the crowd.

What this means is that, as they are growing up, males develop an attitude about their sexual organs very similar to the one that over-protective, doting parents have about their children. This is not a problem when the organs are young and innocent and basically dormant. But things change drastically when we reach puberty.

Puberty generally occurs in males about two years late. By this I mean it occurs about two years after it occurs in females, which is somewhere around sixth grade. I remember at the end of my fifth-grade year, when we left for summer vacation, and the boys and girls were all just about even in the race for adulthood. But when we got back the next fall, the girls suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, were all a foot taller and had somehow acquired bosoms and God only knew what else. It was as though they had all attended Summer Bosom Camp.

This gives the girls an unfair head start. They get two whole years in which to get used to having sexually advanced bodily parts, and the result is they develop a certain maturity about it, a coolness of judgment, a savoir faire, that they retain for the rest of their lives.

Boys, meanwhile, are condemned to two years of wandering around the corridors of the junior high school, their eyes cruelly positioned by Mother Nature at just about bosom level, and consequently they develop this tremendous yearning to catch up. When puberty finally strikes them, this pent-up desire has become so powerful that they develop erections that last for an average of slightly over three years. You men out there know what I’m talking about. The main reason adolescent males carry school books is they need something to hold in front of them.

Okay, then. To summarize what we have, in the typical healthy young male: We have a creature who tends to be highly indulgent toward his sexual organs, and we have organs that are semi-out-of-control much of the time, and almost always Ready to Party. Now let us contrast this with the sexual development of the typical female, starting with a discreet and sensitive examination of ...

I don’t know what the major female sexual organs are. I get extremely confused just looking at the diagrams. Frankly, I don’t think anyone really has a handle on the entire female reproductive system, because the organs are located inside the female body, where you can’t see them. The only way a woman can have even a vague idea of what’s going on in there is to have a gynecologist root around with primitive implements, and perhaps even call in an associate for consultation (“Hey Bob! Come in here! What do you make of this?!”).

So in contrast to men, who are always touching themselves and giving themselves little nicknames, women develop an attitude of almost clinical detachment about their reproductive systems.

Furthermore, where men’s organs seem to be carefree and impulsive, women’s are serious and hard-working, with a single-minded devotion to the idea of having a baby. No matter what the woman is doing on the outside—having a career, writing a novel, bowling—her organs are busy on the inside, gathering food for the baby, fixing up the baby’s room, etc. At the end of each month they sigh, throw everything away and start all over again, thus sending the woman the friendly biological reminder: “Okay. Fine. Go ahead and have your fun out there. Don’t mind us in here, slaving away, trying to ensure the very survival of the human race.”

In summary, then, we see that, because of the location and nature of their respective organs, women tend to have a more serious, thoughtful, and responsible attitude toward relationships than men do. I realize this is an absurd generalization, but my feeling is that if we can’t have absurd generalizations, we might as well not even bother to write books.

NOTICE: THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL IS OF A SEXUALLY EXPLICIT NATURE THAT MAY AROUSE PRURIENT INTERESTS IN READERS WHO HAVE INSUFFICIENT CONTROL OF THEIR URGES.

Q. How long should sexual intercourse last?

A. This is an area of some disagreement between the sexes. As a rule, women would like to devote as much time to foreplay and the sex act as men would like to devote to foreplay, the sex act, and building a garage. This tends to lead to dissatisfaction on the part of the woman, who is often just beginning to feel pleasantly sensuous when the man is off rooting around in the refrigerator to see if there’s any Jell-O left.

Q. Well, isn’t there some sensitive and caring and loving technique that a couple can use to slow the man down?

A. Yes. When the woman senses that the man is nearing climax, she can whisper: “The Internal Revenue Service called again today, but don’t worry, I hung up on them.”

Q. I am a good-looking woman, as you can see from the enclosed glossy color photographs of me naked.

A. Yes. Thank you.

Q. Although I have an otherwise wonderful marriage, my husband seems to be losing interest in me sexually. It’s the little things: he hardly ever smiles at me; he often works late; and he comes home with as many as four naked women. So I thought, to rekindle the old flame, I’d surprise him, using a method suggested by Marabel Morgan in her book The Total Woman, namely greeting him at the door wearing only Saran Wrap. However, we were out of Saran Wrap, so I used Tupperware, which I feel is a better product anyway, but this unfortunately failed to produce the desired result, in the sense that when my husband saw me, he suffered some kind of seizure, and I had to drive him to the hospital while attempting to cover my private parts with two quart canisters and a Deviled Egg Transporter. My question is: Can we deduct this mileage on our income tax?