Men Are The New Women

The opposite sex has always been a source of great confusion and mystery to me. But recently, it’s like they’re all, “Oh let’s fuck with the girls some more” and invented some new gender thingies that completely throw me off. Let’s recap: some of the men I’ve been with in the last year or so have said stuff to me like, “Let’s take it slow”, “I want this to mean something” blah blah blah to which my only bemused (half-naked) reaction has been WTF?

At first, I thought it was a one-off. Just one anomaly in a sea of otherwise normally horny men, for whom good sex was when you showed up and took off your top. But noooooooo. The one thing that women through the ages had going for them (see Lysistrata), the power of sex, the power of saying not tonight, I have a headache, has been taken over by the men. In fact, not so long ago, I actually heard a boy tell me, “Not tonight, I have a headache.” Seriously? SERIOUSLY? You’re taking this away from us?

More and more of my male friends tell me, “You know, sex isn’t that important.” And I’m wondering when they reached that conclusion, for me, sex isn’t that important unless I have to go without it, in which case I turn into a mixture of Cruella De Ville and Bambi, alternating between long drags of my cigarette and fluttering eyelashes at whatever’s closest. My female friends, a strong posse who are not afraid to say what they want, often lament the lack of sex, we talk about everything, unless the boy is special, we are ribald and often objectifying. My male friends are now beginning to talk about “feelings”. I’ll say (in a moment of drunkenness) “Oh my god, I don’t think I’ve ever seen breasts that huge!” and they will look at me reproachfully, and turn their bodies away, pictures of injured innocence.

Am I missing something here? Is this just the men I know? Or are all the men in the world taking the reversal of gender roles one step further and embracing our stereotypes? As women get stronger, more assertive, more take-your-pants-off-in-a-movie-theatre, men are becoming the chased, the ones with the goods to be withheld, the ones with the sheets clutched up to their chins. Therein lies the catch. So, traditionally, women do not chase right? As it is, while we’re chasing (well, me at any rate) we’re constantly second guessing ourselves—will he still respect us, will he still want to be with us—so the more the men are doing this drama about oh-sex-isn’t-all-that, the more we’re going, really? What’s wrong with us?!?

Why are the men doing this? To be the forbidden fruit, I'm assuming, to be the ones with the sexual power along with everything else. HMPH.