A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. – The Sherman Brothers
In my column of September 18th I related the story of how my 17-year-old self tried to gently explain to a very unattractive young man (whom I called “Ralph”) what he might do to make himself less so; it wasn’t easy because while I was trying to tell him the truth, I was also trying very hard not to hurt his feelings. That’s very important to most normal women; we don’t really like distressing people, especially not men, so when put into a position where something unpleasant has to be said, many women simply lie to spare the other person’s feelings. Those who don’t lie outright generally attempt to soften the impact, often by downplaying the most painful aspects or using humor to cut the sting.
One of the things I said in the aforementioned column was, “Unfortunately, Ralph wasn’t really all that unusual; there are a lot of men who admit they don’t understand how women think, yet angrily deny any explanation a woman tries to give them.” One of the most common denials takes the form of “that’s just your opinion”; by pretending in his own mind that the woman’s explanation is not a fact but a mere personal belief, he can still convince himself that many (perhaps most) women feel differently. That’s the reason for the “racism” defense to the NBA issue; by accusing the woman of “racism” he pretends that the problem is based only in her (bigoted) opinion rather than in reality, and his ego is safe. Most of my male readers are pretty open-minded guys, and judging by the comments I think most of y’all recognize that I know what I’m talking about and I’m careful to distinguish my opinions from things I’ve observed as fact or discovered through research or analysis. Even so, there are probably a few of you out there who have your doubts about the whole women-look-at-sex-differently thing, so today I’d like to call your attention to a pair of recent essays from other women (one pro and one amateur) which back me up. I think it’s important to do this because there are very few honest essays about this subject; neofeminists lie about it to promote their agenda, many sex-positive feminists misrepresent it for their own reasons, and most regular women lie or avoid the topic so as to spare men’s egos. But these ladies have tackled it, using humor to provide Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar.
The first is an August 28th blog post from an English escort named Sensuous Amanda, which I discovered via cross-posting on Harlot’s Parlour:
If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard “I reckon I’d make a great male escort, don’t you think so?” I’d have a significant amount of pennies. What’s your point/the problem? I hear you ask. Well, there are several, to be honest. For starters, the men who have the most unshakeable belief that they would be perfect male escorts, tend to be the ones who are 5’2”, average looking and (most importantly) humourless little personality vacuums…
Whilst I won’t say there is no market for straight male escorts, I will tell you that it is a teeny tiny market and it is awash with bright eyed hopefuls. As far as I know, even the successful guys do it part time and have another job to pay the rent. My guess (and that’s all it is) would be that there is a small demand for two types of male escort:
1) The educated, well spoken, reasonably handsome, good listener. The perfect gentleman who can listen to your problems, massage your feet, snuggle up on the sofa and can accompany you to any social occasion without drawing attention to himself for the wrong reasons and will have your fellow W.I. members frothing at the mouth with jealousy. Not because he’s a young stud, (women – in general – don’t really work like that. We would point, laugh and pour scorn upon the woman who turned up with a 20 year old shag toy)…but because he was the perfect gentleman. The coveted Mr. Darcy.
2) The 20-30 year old buff, tanned shag toy…[who] won’t be taken out in public…
The thing is though, that in general, women don’t want the first type to be a charade. We want a man to be all of those things to us because he wants to be. Not because we’ve just handed him a wad of twenties…Anyway, the point I was going to make, which has got completely lost in an avalanche of waffle, is this. Boys, go for it if you want, but don’t rely on it for income. For instance, my ex – a tall strapping chap, pretty good looking, in his early 30s at the time – advertised his services. He’d seen what I was earning and decided that he wanted in on the action. He never made a sodding penny. Nothing. Not so much as an email or a call. Not even a timewaster. However, he missed a trick. He was bisexual and if he’d announced that in his advertising, things may have turned out very differently. And THAT dear wannabe male escorts is the thing. You wanna be a male escort? Fine, you go for it sweetie. You wanna make real money as a male escort? Lube up, bend over and take one for the team.
The second one was a September 15th post on The Gloss which I discovered via a link on Tits and Sass:
The phenomenon of hiring a male stripper to celebrate your impending nuptials is a hard one to explain. I, for one, do not quite understand the void that it fills in the life of the soon to be married woman. In fact, if aliens arrived on this planet and the first thing they encountered was a greased up naked man tossing around a group of women, they would probably annihilate the lot of us, for being a superfluous species. And yet, women continue to enlist oiled up muscle heads to entertain them at bachelorette parties, so clearly I am missing something. I had a strict No Penis Policy at my own bachelorette party, a theme which one of my friends pointed out may have gone too far when we ended up at a strip club with topless ladies dancing around for us early Sunday morning.
Note the three chicks at stage right.
But to be honest, female strippers just make more sense to me than male strippers. They’re (usually) hot ladies who take their clothes off while (mostly) men watch. Men are highly visual beings, and there are actually a surprising number of body types on stage at the strip clubs I’ve been to…Male strippers are much different. For starters, I’m sure some women lust after bare chested juice heads. But most don’t. And that is the standard model male stripper that arrives at your door…Simply put, women aren’t as visual about their desires as men are. I think I can prove this with a simple comparison. Men love magazines filled with scantily clad women. This fact has kept Hugh Hefner wandering around a mansion in his pajamas for the last six decades. Women? Not so much. This is probably why Playgirl is a magazine for gay men.
All of that might also explain why male strippers don’t just dance for their patrons. Often times they toss women in the air, rub themselves on their privates and bend them into positions and shapes that resemble terrible yoga poses. If women weren’t paying for the pleasure of such treatment, these things would likely be considered criminal in a court of law…what you can expect when hiring a male stripper…[is] more like a gay cabaret show than anything involving my sexual fantasies. And yet, women continue to pay for the pleasure of being swung around by these men before their friends get married…
And there you have it. If you’ve got the time, I suggest reading them in unedited form because they’re both quite amusing and the pictures on the male stripper one are priceless, and there’s one feminist commenter there whose tail-chasing performance (trying to convince the female author that her feelings and experiences are wrong because they contradict “social construction of gender”) is a lesson in itself.
One Year Ago Today
“One Step Forward” reports the Ontario High Court decision, still being appealed by Ottawa a year later, which struck down Canada’s dangerous and tyrannical prostitution laws.
