Womanly virtues Friday

People lie about what they like and don't like in bed. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. There are complicated and not complicated reasons for this.

Here is an example of an uncomplicated reason. Some studies show that one third of men get turned on at the thought of their girlfriend or wife having sex with another man. Okay, now imagine you have a group of men in a room and you ask them to raise their hands if they are turned on by this sort of thought. Not bloody likely.

For women the range of things that are not likely to be admitted in public is rather wider. I was thinking about this yesterday after I linked to a post at the Frisky and one of the teasers in the sidebar was for a post in which a woman admitted that she likes to be called a certain name in bed. It's a name she is not necessarily so fond of outside of bed.

Talking to other women, she has found she is in the minority on this. Or, perhaps more precisely, she has found they aren't willing to raise their hands when asked the question in public.

Okay, I'm going to be rather ungentlemanly here but I'll be so after the break so anyone who wants to check out can.


Okay, the name in question is "slut" and my rather ungentlemanly observation is that my experiemnce has been that a surprising number of women do respond positively to being called this. And I'm no Warren Beatty. I appreciate that this is the sort of thing that a gentleman should normally keep to himself but there are exceptions and I think this is one of them.

A general aside to all women: your best girlfriends lie to you when they talk about sex. Not sometimes but regularly. Get a group of women in a room or in a discussion thread discussing what they do or don't like in bed and you will accumulate a long list of truths, half truths and outright lies and disentangling them from one another is a task worthy of a genius. But you don't need me to tell you this do you?

But here is the thing, whether anyone actually declares it is of secondary importance because what really matters is that it should be true: this is ungentlemanly but whether or not you like being called a slut in bed you should be a slut in bed. And that perhaps is the real issue. The real problem here may not be about the language but the desire to hold back.

Here is an interesting revelation from that The Frisky article:

And still another friend said it would really bother her if a boyfriend called her a “slut” in bed, but she used to hook up with a guy she didn’t have feelings for who called her a “slut” (in addition to other dirty talk) and she was fine with it.

Recently I picked up a sex advice column by a writer named Gillian Telling reporting the following:

One of the biggest draws of sex with an ex is that it allows you both to be truly uninhibited. After all, you've already decided a relationship won't work.

Along with this first-hand report:

"I had the best sex of my life with an ex-boyfriend. It was even hotter than when we were dating because there were no complicated emotions involved."

And then there is my old friend Natasha Vargas-Cooper:

... the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life.

I have no right to tell anyone what to do but if any of these women were in a serious relationship with me and told me something like the above, I'd be gone before sundown and I'd never come back. My parting thoughts would be this:

• You've let yourself go completely in casual sexual relationships but you can't or won't do it in the relationship with the guy you actually want to build something with? 
• Leaving aside the issue that you think that boring sex is an appropriate gift for the man you want to spend the rest of your life with, has it crossed your mind that saying you can't have really hot sex in a relationship where there are complicated emotions is pretty solid evidence that you are not an emotionally mature person?
• Whatever gave you the notion that it is even close to acceptable to let go more sexually in a casual relationship than with the man you're is actually supposed be, you know, in love with?
• Quite frankly, any man in your life doesn't have the good sense to dump you then he probably deserves to be stuck with someone like you.