Why do guys talk about sex so much?
I spent most of the year abroad soaking up the sun and talking to people whose first language was not English and I almost forgot, as a result, the fascination male English speakers have with sex and sex positions. It’s not that non-English speakers are not fascinated but they are either more reticent to talk about it or generally more shy.
We, on the other hand, having grown up on a generation of Sex and the City, Friends and, more recently, How I Met Your Mother, have become adept at casual talk which takes in its stride subjects as traditionally taboo as pubic hair styling, the width of the true G-string and the best position to take your girlfriend when you want her to totally lose control.
In a way it is refreshing to think that we can so openly, in mixed-company, now discuss subjects which even twenty years ago would have been considered taboo but there is a downside to this openness which I only discovered upon my return and which has made me think about the double-sided edge of everything we do.
While abroad, in a country which was hot, sunny and where most people’s bodies were on show in swimwear or skimpy summer clothing all day long, I found it refreshing that I did not have to know about whether the girls they waxed or shaved their intimate parts, whether the guys liked having sex in stand up positions (hard on the legs apparently) or lying down or about who was going to be on top (and how that was being decided on a particular night).
The result of not knowing all this clinical information led to a higher ratio of romanticism being injected into the picture. By knowing less I imagined more and by using my imagination I know that inevitably I over-romanticized the truth of the situation, but that did not matter. To me what mattered, on holiday, was the fact that I was suddenly in a location where romanticism could take place.
That is something which we have lost a little today. We are so focused on telling things as they are and being open about what we think that we have lost the ability to enjoy the sunset and take candlelit dinners. We have lost a little of the smiles and nuances and looks which go in the usual build-up to sex outside the UK and most of the US. We have lost the ‘game’ being played between the sexes because we have learnt to be too-straight, too-frank and too-open in the hope that by taking the mystique away we also remove much of the uncertainty.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. We are just as confused, uncertain and vulnerable when it comes to relationships. We get it wrong as much as we ever used to and we struggle as much as ever to try and get it right. So, while we talk about sex, sex positions and sex-related issues more than ever before we really have not got any further than we were. I for one am all for bringing some of that lost romanticism back even if it does mean we will have to rebuild our sense of mystique about sex, anew.
