Sex Jokes Quotes

I don't know. I don't actually remember anything from before the surgery." His eyebrows rose, his blue eyes sucking in all the light of the room. "The cybernetic opetation?" "No, the sex change." The doctor's smile faltered. "I'm joking.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

While an elderly man in his mid-eighties looks curiously at a porno site, his grandson asks him from afar, “‘What are you reading, grandpa?’” “‘It’s history, my boy.’” “The grandson comes nearer and exclaims, “‘But this is a porno site, grandpa, naked chicks, sex . . . a lot of sex!’” “‘Well, it’s sex for you, my son, but for me it’s history,’ the old man says with a sigh.” All of people in the cabin burst into laughter. “A stale joke, but a cool one,” added William More, the man who just told the joke. The navigator skillfully guided the flying disc among the dense orange-yellow blanket of clouds in the upper atmosphere that they had just entered. Some of the clouds were touched with a brownish hue at the edges. The rest of the pilots gazed curiously and intently outwards while taking their seats. The flying saucer descended slowly, the navigator’s actions exhibiting confidence. He glanced over at the readings on the monitors below the transparent console: Atmosphere: Dense, 370 miles thick, 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane Temperature on the surface: ‒179°C / ‒290°F Density: 1.88 g/cm³ Gravity: 86% of Earth’s Diameter of the cosmic body: 3200 miles / 5150 km.

The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes. So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase? So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

People are really out there just … thinking about having sex all the time and they can’t even help it?’ I spluttered. ‘People have dreams about it because they want it that much? How the – I’m losing it. I thought all the movies were exaggerating, but you’re all really out there just craving genitals and embarrassment. This has to be some kind of huge joke.

The cybernetic operation?" "No, the sex change." The doctor's smile faltered. "I'm joking.

Your... Your aura. It's... amazing. It's shining. I mean, it always shines, but today... Well I've never seen anything like it. I didn't expect that after everything that happened.' I shifted around uncomfortably. If I lit up around Dimitri normally, what on earth happened to my aura post-sex?

It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.

Even if he likes me, I’m not sure he’d like me naked. I hate that I’m even thinking that. I hate hating my body. Actually, I don’t even hate my body. I just worry everyone else might. Because chubby girls don’t get boyfriends, and they definitely don’t have sex. Not in movies—not really—unless it’s supposed to be a joke. And I don’t want to be a joke.

Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s own taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to. A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys. But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man. When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!” I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome. Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?

What's with the serum?" I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything...Turn a massacre into a sex orgy..." Or a joke." Precisely. Arty type...No principles...

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Five years without sex was no joke, three months without sex, when you have just figured out who the person you wanted to have sex with for the rest of your life was, was flat-out torture.

What’s your favourite position?” “I usually play winger.” “Zach, I adore you, but you can’t make soccer jokes during phone sex. It just isn’t done.

Well, what of it? If sex isn’t a joke, what is it

Cam starts laughing, "Oh, I love it when she reads." He turns to Lucy who's face is starting to contort and turn to a bright shade of red, "She reads these smutty books, like full on dirty shit, full of sex and like... bdsm shit." "I'm not joking boys, they're like full on pornographic. Talking about silky shafts and veiny dicks and shit," Logan is now on the ground holding his side from the pain of laughing too hard. "Sometimes she'll be reading, then all of sudden she'll put her book down and look at me like she wants to eat me, literally eat me!" he yells, laughing harder, still swatting away her hands that are trying to shut him up, "I mean I don't mind it, not at all. It's hot as fuck. And she wants to try everything she reads in these books. Like... everything. She learns everything from these books... so I don't give a shit when, of how much she reads, I get rewards.

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men — friends, coworkers, strangers — giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.

Yes, you’re sleeping in my apartment,” I said. “On my sofa. It was an exciting night, but not that exciting. I’d really hope you’d remember if it had been.

History doesn’t start with a tall building and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking us for suckers and is playing a mean game.

You have to be a sexologist: when I wish your fuckin' advice, I'll let you know.

Most women sell sex; most of them just don’t take cash (nor do they each sell to more than one ‘client’ at a time).

When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me. He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me. It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left. As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about being a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it. Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was mo longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and gray like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on. He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me. Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time. Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution. I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart. 'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face. He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic. But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love. 'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.' He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero. 'Then why should I be a heroine?' He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket. I considered my choices. I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated. I could leave and be unhappy and dignified. I could Beg him to touch me again. I could live in hope and die of bitterness. I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too. I hear he's replaced the back fence.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

A man's sexual organ is penis and woman's sexual organ is brains.

It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.

A little boy and his friends are being called bastards and bitches by bullies at school. The boy goes home and asks, "Dad, what are bastards and bitches?" And his dad replies, "Bitches are ladies and bastards are gentlemen." Then the boy goes upstairs to see his mom. As he enters the room, he accidentally drops a perfume bottle, and his mom says, "Shit!" "Mom, what is shit?" and she says, "Perfume." So he goes to see his dad (who is carving a chicken), and his dad cuts himself and yells, "Fuck!" The boy asks, "Dad, what does fuck mean?" and dad says "preparing." Then he follows his dad upstairs. A few minutes later his mom and dad are about to have sex when his dad says, "Where are the condoms?" The little boy asks, "What are condoms?" and his father says, "Condoms are coats and jackets." The following night his father invites over some important business clients. The boy opens the door for them and says, "Hello! Please come in, Bastards and bitches. Hang your condoms up here, my mom is upstairs rubbing shit on her face and my dad is downstairs fucking the chicken.

It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening. Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily. You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth. You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later. Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage. Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything. I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it. You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it. Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today? We shall see.

As a kid, Vix had had some warped idea that grownup meant having a job and living on your own. It meant no one could tell you what to eat, or what to wear, or how to behave. It meant that it was okay to have sex with guys. What a joke!

Ye see, Rab, it's due to the way we feel about our arseholes. We now believe, as a species, if our soul is located anywhere in our bodies, it's up our arses. That's where it all goes. It makes sense. That's why we're obsessed with anal jokes, anal sex, anal hobbies...the arsehole - not the brain, not space - is the last frontier. That's what makes us revolutionaries.

Some have argued that because the universe is like a clock, there must be a Clockmaker. As the eighteenth-century British empiricist David Hume pointed out, this is a slippery argument, because there is nothing that is really perfectly analogous to the universe as a whole, unless it's another universe, so we shouldn't try to pass off anything that is just a part of this universe. Why a clock anyhow? Hume asks. Why not say the universe is analogous to a kangaroo? After all, both are organically interconnected systems. But the kangaroo analogy would lead to a very different conclusion about the origin of the universe: namely, that it was born of another universe after that universe had sex with a third universe.

Brad (Lauren's ex) ignored Hayley (she's Brad's ex girlfriend) and looked at me, he did a top to toe and back again then his gaze moved to Tate. "I'm here to tell you I'm suing you," he announced. Jim-Billy, Nadine, Steg, Wing and my eyes moved to Tate. Tate stared at Brad then he said, "Come again?" "I'm suing you," Brad repeated. "For what?" Tate asked. "Alienation of affection," Brad answered. Without hesitation, Tate threw his head back and burst out laughing. Then he looked at me and remarked, "You're right, babe, this is fun." Ignoring Tate's comment, Brad declared, "You stole my wife." Tate looked back at Brad. "Yeah, bud, I did." Brad pointed at Tate and his voice was raised when he proclaimed, "See? You admit it." He threw his arm out. "I have witnesses." "Not that any judge'll hear your case, seein' as Lauren divorced your ass before I alienated her affection, but you manage it, I'll pay the fine. In the meantime, I'll keep alienating her affection. You should know, and feel free to share it with your lawyers," Tate continued magnanimously, "schedule's comin' out mornin' and night. Usually, in the mornin', she sucks me off or I make her come in the shower. Night, man…shit, that's even better. Definitely worth the fine." Sorry, it's just too long; I have to cut it off. But it continues…like that: "This is the good life?" (Brad) "Part of it," Tate replied instantly, taking his fists from the bar, leaning into his forearms and asking softly, in a tone meant both to challenge and provoke, "She ever ignite, lose so much control she'd attack you? Climb on top and fuck you so hard she can't breathe?" I watched Brad suffer that blow because I hadn't, not even close. We'd had good sex but not that good and Brad was extremely proud of his sexual prowess. He was convinced he was the best. And he knew, with Tate's words, he was wrong. "Jesus, you're disgusting," Brad muttered, calling up revulsion to save face. "She does that to me," Tate continued. "Fuck off," Brad snapped. "All the fuckin' time," Tate pushed. "Fuck off," Brad repeated. "It's fuckin' magnificent," Tate declared. "Thanks, honey," I whispered and grinned at him when his eyes came to me. I was actually expressing gratitude, although embarrassed by his conversation, but I was also kind of joking to get in Brad's face. Tate wasn't. His expression was serious when he said, "You are, Ace. Fuckin' magnificent.

Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.

It's theology. Were you expecting sex, drugs, and rock and roll?" "One out of the three would be nice.

Studies have shown a woman looking for a 'sense of humour' wants a man who makes jokes and who likes to laugh. A man looking for the same quality in a woman does not expect her to be funny; rather, he wants her to laugh at his jokes.

The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic. - Lou Reed (1965-1968)

entanglement: (n.) quantum physics term for when the sheets wrap around two bodies in space.

I've never had sex. Never wanted to. Not with a man or a woman or an animal, though my family jokes about it. And I never will. The thought of it disgusts me.

Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.

The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

People are really out there just...thinking about having sex all the time and they can't even help it? People have dreams about it because they want it that much? How the- I'm losing it. I thought all the movies were exaggerating, but you're all really out there just craving genitals and embarrassment. This has to be some kind of huge joke.

A panda walks into a bar. He asks the bartender how he can get a little action for the night. The bartender motions to a young woman. She talks to the panda, and they go back to her place. After having sex, the panda abruptly leaves. The next night, the woman goes to the panda's house. "You owe me money," she says. "For what?" The woman rolls her eyes and explains, "I'm a prostitute." The panda pulls out a dictionary and looks it up: "Prostitute: Has sex for money." The panda says, "I don't have to pay you. I'm a panda. Look it up." She is about to protest when the panda hands her the dictionary. The woman looks up "panda" in the dictionary, and it reads, "Panda: Eats bush and leaves.

The young women in all the YA books I loved were high-school age. By eighteen, the majority of them had saved the world, not to mention: kissed people, traveled, been in a relationship, had sex. At twenty I felt like a pathetic, unaccomplished, uncultured, virgin grandma. It sounds like a joke now, but at the time, around all these people my age casually discussing all of the above, I felt so small.

And so the twins had remained virgins. Julia and Valentina watched all of their high school and college friends disappear one by one into the adult world of sex, until they were the only people they knew who lingered in the world of the uninitiated. "What was it like?" they asked each friend. The answers were vague. Sex was a private joke: you had to be there.

My problem is I love sex. No joking I really love sex. Life without sex is unbearable for me. As a child my mum says I loved men and hated women. I use to smile at men when I was in the pram and offer them lollipops or sweeties. I guess it is in my genes, my little weakness. I can live without the Valium and Vodka but not my sex. To me my choice is simple men or Paradise and I love them both. I cannot make that choice. It is like there is some evil force driving me to flirt and sleep around. No one man has ever been enough for me and now I have to live like a nun in rehab. I am not bold I am just misunderstood. No, don’t laugh it is an illness and an exhausting one I am so tired, so very tired.

Some people are good at being in love. Some people are good at love. Two very different things, I think. Being in love is the romantic part—sex all the time, midday naps in the sheets, the jokes, the laughs, the fun, long conversations with no pauses, overwhelming separation anxiety … Just the best sides of both people, you know? But love begins when the excitement of being in love starts to fade: the stress of life sets in, the butterflies disappear, the sex becomes a chore, the tears, the sadness, the arguments, the cattiness … The worst parts of both people. But if you still want that person by your side through all of those things … that’s when you know—that’s when you know you’re good at love.

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Okay, okay. So. First things first. Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh! Second thing: I should probably say “thank you” for saving my life. Say it and then follow it up with something funny like… okay. Spinach joke. Spinach joke. Shit. Um… Oh, I know! What do anal sex and spinach have in common? If you’re forced to have either as a child, you won’t want it as an adult. Holy fucking Christ. What the fuck is wrong with me? There is no way I can make a spinach/molesting joke! I am a monster. Think of something else. Think of anything else!

Three guys are drinking in a bar when a drunk comes in, staggers up to the counter, and points at the guy in the middle, shouting, "Your mom's the best sex in town!" Everyone expects a fight, but the guy ignores him, so the drunk wanders off and bellies up to the bar at the far end. Ten minutes later, the drunk comes back, points at the same guy, and says, "I just did your mom, and it was sw-eeeeet!" Again, the guy refuses to take the bait, and the drunk goes back to the far end of the bar. Ten minutes later, he comes back and announces, "Your mom liked it!" Finally, the guy interrupts. "Go home, dad, you're drunk.

Some men are dogs; some dogs are women.

There would definitely be way fewer instances of cheating, if the average couple did not have sex only when the woman feels like it.

Just my luck; finally offered free, weird sex and it was by a freaky-ass priest. Dude wanted to save me… with dick. Was this a joke?

Recent research suggests that while both men and women say they like a “good sense of humor” in a potential mate, they differ in what they mean by this phrase. Women tend to prefer men who make them laugh, whereas men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes.

Ye see, Rab, it’s due to the way we feel about our arseholes. We now believe, as a species, if our soul is located anywhere in our bodies, it’s up our arses. That’s where it all goes. It makes sense. That’s why we’re obsessed with anal jokes, anal sex, anal hobbies... the arsehole – not the brain, not space – is the last frontier. That’s what makes us revolutionaries.

Several years ago, Great Britain funded a study to determine why the head on a man's penis is larger than the shaft. The study took two years and cost over 1.2 million pounds. The study concluded that the reason the head of a man's penis is larger than the shaft is to provide the man with more pleasure during sex. After the results were published, France decided to conduct their own study on the same subject. They were convinced that the results of the British study were incorrect. After three years of research at a cost of in excess of 2 million Euros, the French researchers concluded that the head of a man's penis is larger than the shaft to provide the woman with more pleasure during sex. When the results of the French study were released, Australia decided to conduct their own study. The Aussies didn't really trust British or French studies. So, after nearly three hours of intensive research and a cost of right around 75 dollars (three cases of beer), the Aussie study was complete. They concluded that the reason the head on a man's penis is larger than the shaft is to prevent your hand from flying off and hitting you in the forehead.

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers -- downers who don't realize how good we actually have it. Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop- a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or shellfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, ‘Do you ever smoke after you’ve had sex?’ She answered, ‘I never looked.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot.

A small boy asks his Dad, "Daddy, what is politics?" Dad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way: I'm the breadwinner of the family, so let's call me Capitalism. Your mom, she's the administrator of the money, so we'll call her the Government. We're here to take care of your needs, so we'll call you the People. The nanny, we'll consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we'll call him the Future. Now, think about that and see if that makes sense." So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said. Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. The little boy goes to his parents' room and finds his mother sound asleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father having sex with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed. The next morning, the little boy says to his father, "Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now." The father says, "Good, son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about." The little boy replies, "Well, while Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, the Government is sound asleep, the People are being ignored and the Future is in Deep Shit." ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦

Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer and issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire-meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged.

Male Amazon river dolphins will even insert thier penises in each other's blowholes in the only known example of nasal sex.* *I refuse to make the obligatory "blowjob" joke here. Science writing is very serious business.

Similarly, he forgot - or never really understood - that we live in a culture where men, as a group, have more power than women. This isn't a controversial statement, despite the protestations of guys who funnel their frustration that not all extremely young, conventionally attractive women want to sleep with them into and argument that women, as a group, have "all the power." (Bill Maher, repping for his fan base, famously jokes that men have to do all sorts of shit to get laid, but women only have to do "their hair.") The really great thing about this argument is how the patently nonsensical premise - that some young women's ability to manipulate certain men equals a greater degree of gendered power than say, owning the presidency for 220-odd years - obscures the most chilling part: in this mindset, "all the power" means, simply, the power to withhold consent. Let that sink in for a minute. If one believes women are more powerful that men because we own practically all of the vaginas, then women's power to withhold consent to sex is the greatest power there is. Which means the guy who can take away a woman's right to consent is basically a superhero. Right?

Given these differences between the sexes, the sexual revolution was the biggest joke men ever played on women. By convincing them that the old rules didn’t apply and that two could play the predator game, men enticed women to do what men have always wanted women to do. But what a price was paid for the new “freedom.” And predictably, women were the ones who got stuck with the bill.

It Hurts To Be Alive and Obsolete: Often when men are attracted to me, they feel ashamed and conceal it. They act as if it were ridiculous. If they do become involved, they are still ashamed and may refuse to appear publicly with me. Their fear of mockery is enormous. There is no prestige attached to having sex with me. Since we are all far more various sexually than we are supposed to be, often, in fact, younger men become aware of me sexually. Their response is similar to what it is when they find themselves feeling attracted to a homosexual: they turn those feelings into hostility and put me down. Listen to me! Think what it is like to have most of your life ahead and be told you are obsolete! Think what it is like to feel attraction, desire, affection towards others, to want to tell them about yourself, to feel that assumption on which self-respect is based, that you are worth something, and that if you like someone, surely he will be pleased to know that. To be, in other words, still a living woman, and to be told that every day that you are not a woman but a tired object that should disappear. That you are not a person but a joke. Well, I am a bitter joke. I am bitter and frustrated and wasted, but don’t you pretend for a minute as you look at me, forty-three, fat, and looking exactly my age, that I am not as alive as you are and that I do not suffer from the category into which you are forcing me.

So why the stress?" said Gene. “You have had sex before?” “Of course,” I said. “My doctor is strongly in favor.” “Frontiers of medical science,” said Gene. He was probably making a joke. I think the value of regular sex has been known for some time. I explained further. “It’s just adding a second person makes it complicated.

... she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life. The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.

Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.

Malcolm chuckled wickedly. "You, my American friend, are like a hidden landmine of sex appeal. I'm going to have to look out for you." "Too late." Owen raised his face to the unfamiliar smells, breezes, sounds of the city, enjoying them even more now that he knew something of it and it had become personal to him. "I've already exploded. You're caught." He tilted his head back and laughed, inviting Malcolm to share the joke, but Malcolm was unusually quiet.....

I admire nudity and I like sex, and so did a lot of people in the Thirties. But, to me, overexposure blunts the fun…Sex as something beautiful may soon disappear. Once it was a knife so finely honed the edge was invisible until it was touched and then it cut deep. Now it is so blunt that it merely bruises and leaves ugly marks. Nudity is fine in the privacy of my own bedroom with the appropriate partner. Or for a model in life class at art school. Or as portrayed in stone and paint. But I don’t like it used as a joke or to titillate. Or be so bloody frank about.

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking." All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual father or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery.

This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire—meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …

...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...

A panda walks into a bar. He asks the bartender how he can get a little action for the night. The bartender motions to a young woman. She talks to the panda, and they go back to her place. After having sex, the panda abruptly leaves. The next night, the woman goes to the panda's house. "You owe me money," she says. "For what?" The woman rolls her eyes and explains, "I'm a prostitute." The panda pulls out a dictionary and looks it up: "Prostitute: Has sex for money." The panda says, "I don't have to pay you. I'm a panda. Look it up." She is about to protest when the panda hands her the dictionary. The woman looks up "panda" in the dictionary, and it reads, "Panda: Eats bush and leaves. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, “Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. There are dirty words, dirty laughs, dirty noises, dirty jokes, dirty movies, and dirty things to do to her in the dark. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: obscene. She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology. where she is not maligned she is magnificently condescended to, as in this diary entry by Somerset Maugham written when he was in medical school: The Professor of Gynaecology: He began his course of lectures as follows: Gentlemen, woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, parturates once a year and copulates whenever she has the opportunity. I thought it a prettily-balanced sentence. Were she loved sufficiently, or even enough, she could not be despised so much. were she sexually loved, or even liked, she and what is done with or to her, in the dark or in the light, she would not, could not, exist rooted in the realm of dirt, the contempt for her apparently absolute and irrevocable; horrible; immovable; help us, Lord; unjust. She is not just less; she and the sex she incarnates are a species of filth. God will not help of course: "For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.

Where are we?” I interrupted Gregory as he spoke with the other angels. He looked around. “Intercourse, Pennsylvania.” I snorted—he said “intercourse”. What a great name for a town. I needed to move to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. I wondered if there was a Climax, Pennsylvania? Gregory’s lips twitched. “Yes, there’s a Climax, Pennsylvania. It takes about four hours to get there by car from Intercourse.” I didn’t know what was more funny, the fact that Climax was four hours from Intercourse or that the two angels standing beside Gregory had expressions of horror on their faces. An archangel, the archangel, had just made a sex joke. Damn, I loved him. “I can get there faster,” I choked out between laughter that nearly brought me to my knees. “Because four hours from intercourse to climax is cause for immediate medical attention.” He waved a hand. “For paltry humans, maybe. Four hours for an angel is a quickie.” Those other two angels looked as if they were ready to sink through the ground. “Oh, please, can we have a quickie? I’ve got four hours to spare, and we are in Intercourse. It’s fate.

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

I've never had sex," repeated Artemis. "Never wanted to." It was her turn not to look at him as she spoke. "Not with a man or with a woman, or with an animal, though my family joke about it. And I never will. The thought of it disgusts me. But the others - my family - they think that means I haven't got any feelings. That I could never care about anyone, that I don't know what love is, just because I don't-" she shuddered. "But you know what?" she said, turning to him now. "I really loved my dogs. Everyone laughs at me for it, but it's true. The time I spent with them, running, hunting, those were the happiest times of my life. They understood me. They were animals but they understood me far better than anyone in my family ever will. We shared something, we were the same. And they made me kill them.

Because a mother's love is God's greatest joke. And besides - who is to say what is the first and what is the final cause? -that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas... This is how we all survive. We default to the oldest scar. So I left the house with a howl of regret for all I had been denied, though there was nothing there I actually wanted. I wanted out of there, that was all. I wanted a larger life. My children are of a different breed. They seem to grow like plants, to be made of twig and blossom and not of meat. There are long stretches of time when I don't know what I am doing, or what I have done - nothing mostly, but sometimes it would be nice to know what kind of nothing that was...I try not to drink before half past five, but I always do drink - from the top of the wine bottle to the last, little drop. It is the only way I know to make the day end.

Three guys are drinking in a bar when a drunk comes in, staggers up to the counter, and points at the guy in the middle, shouting, "Your mom's the best sex in town!" Everyone expects a fight, but the guy ignores him, so the drunk wanders off and bellies up to the bar at the far end. Ten minutes later, the drunk comes back, points at the same guy, and says, "I just did your mom, and it was sw-eeeeet!" Again, the guy refuses to take the bait, and the drunk goes back to the far end of the bar. Ten minutes later, he comes back and announces, "Your mom liked it!" Finally, the guy interrupts. "Go home, dad, you're drunk. ♦◊♦◊♦◊♦

I think you two are secretly friends,” I joked, as Vidrol shoved Vale to the side to avoid a rotten piece of wood jutting from the wall. Vale shoved him back. I assumed in thanks. “Me and that pampered prince?” Vale scoffed derisively. “Not in your lifetime.” “I only associate with nonpsychotic individuals,” Vidrol agreed. “You only associate with pussy,” Vale shot back. “I haven’t associated with pussy in such a long time, I’m basically as nonperforming as you are. I might as well get a hut in the woods and start wearing unflattering robes and waxing on about how everyone’s fate belongs to the water while I howl at the moon with the rest of my weird-ass sector.” “Everything flatters me,” Vale responded calmly. “And I performed to the hilt inside the very body you went celibate for, so I can understand why you now strive to be like me.

They’re baffled by my singleness. A smart, pretty, nice girl like me, a girl with so many interests and enthusiasms, a cool job, a loving family. And let’s say it: money. They knit their eyebrows and pretend to think of men they can set me up with, but we all know there’s no one left, no one good left, and I know that they secretly think there’s something wrong with me, something hidden away that makes me unsatisfiable, unsatisfying. The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked. Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only … and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

I wanted to be a sex goddess. And you can laugh all you want to. The joke is on me, whether you laugh or not. I wanted to be one -- one of them. They used to laugh at Marilyn when she said she didn't want to be a sex-goddess, she wanted to be a human being. And now they laugh at me when I say, "I don't want to be a human being; I want to be a sex-goddess." That shows you right there that something has changed, doesn't it? Rita, Ava, Lana, Marlene, Marilyn -- I wanted to be one of them. I remember the morning my friend came in and told us that Marilyn had died. And all the boys were stunned, rigid, literally, as they realized what had left us. I mean, if the world couldn't support Marilyn Monroe, then wasn't something desperately wrong? And we spent the rest of the goddamned sixties finding out what it was. We were all living together, me and these three gay boys that adopted me when I ran away, in this loft on East Fifth Street, before it became dropout heaven -- before anyone ever said "dropout" -- way back when "commune" was still a verb? We were all -- old-movie buffs, sex-mad -- you know, the early sixties. And then my friend, this sweet little queen, he came in and he passed out tranquilizers to everyone, and told us all to sit down, and we thought he was just going to tell us there was a Mae West double feature on somewhere -- and he said -- he said -- "Marilyn Monroe died last" -- and all the boys were stunned -- but I -- I felt something sudden and cold in my solar plexus, and I knew then what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be the next one. I wanted to be the next one to stand radiant and perfected before the race of man, to shed the luminosity of my beloved countenance over the struggles and aspirations of my pitiful subjects. I wanted to give meaning to my own time, to be the unattainable luring love that drives men on, the angle of light, the golden flower, the best of the universe made womankind, the living sacrifice, the end! Shit!

Sex is one of the situations where all things submerged in our subconscious come out, all fears, all desires, all the violence, and all the needs. That's why sex, in my opinion, is never as easy as television shows or jokes present it to be. We are often told that taking pleasure, especially from sex, and surrendering to it are things that happen naturally, gestures that come for free. I find it harder, instead, to learn how to surrender than to learn how to resist. That's exactly what my characters suffer from: the difficulty of covering the distance between desires and their fulfillments, the difficulty of doing "easy" things, such as kissing a girl or lying in bed with her, difficulties that are not only due to external causes, but also often to internal ones.

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them. A close look at our speech-our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies-can therefore give us insight into who we are.

Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged that he was given jobs which allowed him to work alone. The smell of ink, and the steady rhythm of the press, then induced in him a kind of peace - it was the peace he felt when he arrived early, at a time when he might be the only one to see the morning light as it filtered through the works or to hear the sound of his footsteps echoing through the old stone building. At such moments he was forgetful of himself and thus of others until he heard their voices, raised in argument or in greeting, and he would shrink into himself again. At other times he would stand slightly to one side and try to laugh at their jokes, but when they talked about sex he became uneasy and fell silent for it seemed to him to be a fearful thing. He still remembered how the girls in the schoolyard used to chant, Kiss me, kiss me if you can I will put you in my pan, Kiss me, kiss me as you said I will fry you till you're dead And when he thought of sex, it was as of a process which could tear him limb from limb. He knew from his childhood reading that, if he ran into the forest, there would be a creature lying in wait for him.

That case was not unique in the sexual history of New Haven. When a second deformed pig was born in that troubled town, another unfortunate eccentric was also accused of bestiality by his neighbors. Even though he could not be convicted under the two-witness rule, he was imprisoned longer than anybody else in the history of the colony. When yet a third defective piglet was born with one red eye and what appeared to be a penis growing out of its head, the magistrates compelled everyone in town to view it in hopes of catching the malefactor. The people of New Haven seem to have been perfectly obsessed by fear of unnatural sex. When a dog belonging to Nicholas Bayly was observed trying to copulate with a sow, neighbors urged that it be killed. Mrs. Bayly refused and incautiously made a joke of it, saying of her dog, “if he had not a bitch, he must have something.” The magistrates of New Haven were not amused. Merely for making light of bestiality, the Baylys were banished from the town.12

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

He can even talk about nonsense as long as he does it in a confident manner and flirts whenever the opportunity presents itself. A male runs the risk of losing far more women because he does not say anything at all than he does because he is saying the wrong things. You can even talk about sex, and usually should, as long as you do not make the woman feel like a slut by asking her foolish things like whether she goes all the way on the first date or intimate questions that other people may overhear, for instance. Sex is nothing to be embarrassed about; it is part of whatever relationship you are looking for, and bringing the topic up is the easiest way to make a woman think about having sex with you. Therefore, it would not make sense to avoid it, but you do have to treat the subject as the no big deal that it is. Be serious and candid instead of joking about it. People who joke about sex all the time do so because they are uncomfortable with the topic, and women prefer such a male as their entertainer rather than their lover.

Exchanging Hats Unfunny uncles who insist in trying on a lady's hat, --oh, even if the joke falls flat, we share your slight transvestite twist in spite of our embarrassment. Costume and custom are complex. The headgear of the other sex inspires us to experiment. Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach with paper plates upon your laps, keep putting on the yachtsmen's caps with exhibitionistic screech, the visors hanging o'er the ear so that the golden anchors drag, --the tides of fashion never lag. Such caps may not be worn next year. Or you who don the paper plate itself, and put some grapes upon it, or sport the Indian's feather bonnet, --perversities may aggravate the natural madness of the hatter. And if the opera hats collapse and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps, he thinks what might a miter matter? Unfunny uncle, you who wore a hat too big, or one too many, tell us, can't you, are there any stars inside your black fedora? Aunt exemplary and slim, with avernal eyes, we wonder what slow changes they see under their vast, shady, turned-down brim.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Anyway, my dad gave me a whole birth-control kit for college, so we don’t even have to worry about it.” Peter nearly chokes on his sandwich. “A birth-control kit?” “Sure. Condoms and…” Dental dams. “Peter, do you know what a dental dam is?” “A what? Is that what dentists use to keep your mouth open when they clean it?” I giggle. “No. It’s for oral sex. And here I thought you were this big expert and you were going to be the one to teach me everything at college!” My heart speeds up as I wait for him to make a joke about the two of us finally having sex at college, but he doesn’t. He frowns and says, “I don’t like the thought of your dad thinking we’re doing it when we’re not.” “He just wants us to be careful is all. He’s a professional, remember?” I pat him on the knee. “Either way, I’m not getting pregnant, so it’s fine.” He crumples up his napkin and tosses it in the paper bag, his eyes still on the road. “Your parents met in college, didn’t they?” I’m surprised he remembers. I don’t remember telling him that. “Yeah.” “So how old were they? Eighteen? Nineteen?” Peter’s headed somewhere with this line of questioning. “Twenty, I think.” His face dims but just slightly. “Okay, twenty. I’m eighteen and you’ll be eighteen next month. Twenty is just two years older. So what difference does two years make in the grand scheme of things?” He beams a smile at me. “Your parents met at twenty; we met at--” “Twelve,” I supply. Peter frowns, annoyed that I’ve messed up his argument. “Okay, so we met when were kids, but we didn’t get together until we were seventeen--” “I was sixteen.” “We didn’t get together for real until we were both basically seventeen. Which is basically the same thing as eighteen, which is basically the same thing as twenty.” He has the self-satisfied look of a lawyer who has just delivered a winning closing statement. “That’s a very long and twisty line of logic,” I say. “Have you ever thought about being a lawyer?” “No, but now I’m thinking maybe?