Be a Better Lover

This line always makes me laugh:  “The reason that so many women fake orgasm is that so many men fake foreplay.”

Yep, it’s both funny and true—and now there is proof.

I’m reading the book, “The Normal Bar” which is an “improve your relationship” book, which is completely based on scientific study and longitudinal research. It’s no one’s theory—rather everything the authors address from marital money to the impact of weight gain in marriage is evidence based.

Since I am super curious about all things sexual I was happy to read the chapter called, “Keeping the Flame Alive” in which the authors report on the results of research about what we really want—“we” meaning men and women. What do women want (besides that perfect black skirt)? And what do men want (other than to be left peacefully alone with the remote on the day of the Masters Golf Tournament)?

Well, here’s what years of couples research has to tell us:

What men want most from their partners:

#1 Sexual diversity (new sexual acts)

#2 Less passivity (more passion)

#3 Sexual noises (more feedback)

and….

What women want from their partners:

#1 Foreplay (more touching)

#2 Romance (more loving passion)

#3 Less predictability (more spontaneity and fun)

Isn’t it helpful to know this stuff? Each of those things can be tried, practiced and learned—and talked about. I’m a believer that sensuality and great sex can be learned and yes, re-learned. Even if it’s been a really long time and even if you are hanging out in CancerLand.

Here's a link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Normal-Bar-Surprising-Relationship/dp/0307951634

Bull Durham--Why Women Love This Movie

Baseball season and in addition to games we get to watch the best baseball movies. The past couple of nights I have been watching Bull Durham. This is the movie from 1988 with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor leagues. This is a movie that appears to be about baseball life with its travails and hopes and the desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living. It is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing and ass slapping and drinking and real life baseball lore. But no, this really is THE all time best chick flick.

Yes, we love Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and the khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”, and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”.

Yes! You had us at “long, slow and deep”—and yes, at the Susan Sontag critique too.

But there is a later scene that truly outs women for what they really want.

“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but instead by sweeping all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor. He spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling and clutching.

Oh, that’s part of it. We want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time so much that he goes for it on the kitchen table. We do want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is something else in this scene that truly makes this a women’s dream come true.  What most women truly desire is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and the leftover food crash onto the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a dish cloth or saying to her lover, “Hold on just a second, I’ll clean this up and then meet you in the bedroom.”

No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not saying, “Oh God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table fucking her brains out.

Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not a woman thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going down on her.

Oh, we do wish for a partner to love us with such sweet abandon, but Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon herself.