Sunday 25 May 2003

Pic of the day: Sometimes, love and lust are not the same. And a good thing too.

No sex please, we're friends

Feedback is good, even when it is not flattering. I want to say thanks to the one reader who responded to yesterday's entry. I will readily concede that it looks kinda single, lonely and desperate if you don't know me either from life or from reading my archives regularly. So, first some correction of impressions.

My best friend (or at least she used to be) was a girl around 18 years younger than me, and who I had known since before she started school. So any kind of sexual interest would have been kinda perverse, not quite like nuclear family incest but a bit like lusting for your close cousin or a step-sibling. Or perhaps step-child / step-parent, given the age. (I understand that these things are a serious turn-on for some people in indecent fantasy, but they are things you would definitely avoid in real life.) Perhaps in a cheap anime, it would change as she grew up ... but my life is not a cheap anime. Yet.

So when we did things together that would have been romantic between lovers, it was exactly because it was safe. Metaphorically swimming in the shallow pool, where you cannot drown by accident. Would I have breached her trust even if I felt like doing it? I hope not! I never meant to.

But in our society, a sexual relationship (marriage, for us Christians) is the only valid reason to stick together in good days and bad, until death do us part. Not even brothers and sisters do that (normally), much less family friends. So there was never any doubt that we would go our separate ways. And even though I loved her more and more as time went by, I did not develop an ever stronger wish to squeeze her breasts. (Obviously my reading on this matter is a bit rusty, but I am pretty sure husbands are supposed to do that.) I certainly would not mind an embrace, which is simply an extreme case of hug, a physical manifestation of the emotional closeness. But when it comes to activating gender-specific appendages ... well, I never seriously considered that.

***

And it's not for any systemic failure either, I guess I might add. For each passing year I grow more skeptical of the theory that men in their 40es need Viagra. Beside marketing, I suspect the idea could be a trickle-down from the higher strata of society, where the Very Important Men come home from work and find themselves unable (or at least reluctant) to perform their husbandly duty. I am lately come to suspect that this is because of excessive clintonizing with their female subordinates at work. After all, scientists have found that in higher primates including humans, male status is a powerful aphrodisiac. And where is status displayed most clearly? At work! Certainly not at home.

Therefore, in order to preserve marriage as the foundation of society, the logical solution would be to have male bosses work in cubicles identical to those of the common office worker, and encourage the same dress code for all layers of the workforce. This should help save their stamina for home. To further improve the domestic performance, the husband should preside from the ornately decorated High Seat during dinner and such occasions, and by nightfall retire in solitude to a large, comfortable, curtained and canopied majestic bed, to which he might at his leisure summon the wife from her pallet. This should evoke the suitable primate response ... provided, of course, the wife was still to be found within the domicile. Not an obvious thing at this day and time, I suppose.

Hey, don't look at me that way. I am merely suggesting a way to deal with the Executive Abstinence Syndrome. I dare say it will never be relevant to me, no matter my future marital status (which is also pretty much decided at this time, I believe).

Well, I hope this was a bit enlightening, or at worst entertaining. Now, back to my anime and computer games ...

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(It may be necessary, at this time and age, to inform young readers that the title is inspired by the comedy movie No Sex Please, We're British. Evidently there was a stage comedy even before that, but by then even I was, er, too young to know.)