‘Yes, of course.’ says Ed, ‘Nice idiom by the way.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Think about it,’ I say, ‘you see a woman you’re attracted to, do you have to love her to sleep with her? No, of course not.’
‘So what does it matter if women don’t choose to distinguish between love and sex?’ Raj asks.
‘Nothing,’ I answer, ‘in fact, I think it’s cool. The problem arises when girls don’t think that they are in bonds with their emotions. When they believe that they can have sex on a regular basis with someone and not become emotionally attached to them. That’s why Holly was pissed off, she had been playing it like a man, but all the time suppressing her true feelings.’
‘Man, women always over complicate relationships,’ Raj concludes.
Guys aren’t just shallow sex obsessed predators but we are more simple in our relationships and possibly more honest with ourselves. It’s not just sexual relationships, it’s any relationship. The amount of girls that I’ve met recently who, at some point, have said to me, ‘You know, I have more male friends than I do female friends.’
I think I’m going to laugh or cry the next time I hear a girl say that to me. It’s almost as annoying as being handed a copy of Ms London every day as I come out of the tube. I always see the same Oriental guy distributing the magazine, I want to roll it up and continuously beat him round the head with it, while screaming, ‘Do I look like part of the fucking readership!’
The ‘male friends’ quote invokes a similar reaction in me. What never ceases to amaze me is how they say it, as if they’re special. I think they believe all other girls hang around in giggling groups painting each other’s nails, while she chills with the guys, sinking those Buds, watching the game. It’s bullshit. Not every girl can have more male friends than female friends or they would never hang out with each other. Besides, it’s not natural. I bet that if you asked her guy friends if she was their best mate that they would look back at you with blank, vacant expressions. It reminds me of the line from that Oscar Wilde play, that between men and women there is no such thing as friendship; there is love, lust and passion but never friendship. Women have lots of platonic male friends, whereas men just know women they haven’t shagged yet.
I sat in the park the other day, during my lunch break. The text from Holly had been playing on my mind. I was thinking about it while partaking in one of my favourite sports – people watching. Next to me were sat a group of three guys who had been joined by one uber-foxy barrister type. One of the men was chatting with the foxy girl in deep, earnest conversation. Meanwhile, the other two chatted bollocks, as guys tend to do together. Our friend here was clearly lending an ear, perhaps being a shoulder to cry on, listening attentively to her problems. After 40 minutes of tutting in the right places, nodding with empathy and clasping her hand in support, the girl thanked him for being there for her. She quickly said goodbye to the other two men and headed back across the lawn. She probably went away from that conversation thinking what a great friend she had in the avid listener. The poor girl didn’t realise that he was just working up to the right moment to launch an assault into her undies. As soon as she was out of earshot, the guy leans across to his friends and informs them that it’s just a matter of time until she is screaming his name in a moment of ecstasy. They congratulate him on his most excellent efforts and slap him on the back in good fraternal spirit.
Perhaps women do know this, that we can’t be trusted. Perhaps this explains the recent craze for women having a token gay friend. Fag hags. But I don’t understand this either. It seems as insane to me as them all having a majority of guy friends and no female friends. If you told me that there was a craze for guys having a token lesbian friend, now that I could understand. Buy one, get one free. But with women it’s not sexual, it’s supposed to be that the gay man understands the woman’s issues, he knows where she’s coming from. I appreciate that the stereotypical gay man is more into the home, into fashion, that he likes shopping etc. but there’s more to it than that, it is this supposed empathy, an unspoken understanding. They are peas in the proverbial pod. But a gay man has more in common with the heterosexual man when it comes to procuring sex, than he does with a woman.
The gay man has one flaw in this revolutionary concept – he is a man. (Guys stay with me here, I have a point I promise.) You watch the behaviour of gay men in a gay club, they are the same as heterosexual men (preferences aside). They are also very predatory, confident, open and, above all, uncomplicated.
There are obviously some differences in the hetero/homo world. A gay man walking into a straight bar must despair. For starters, there is the obvious fact that no one can dance. Particularly us blokes, who for the most part have the hip grinding skills of David Brent. For some reason, it’s not cool to relax and have fun. You can’t do your own thing and let everyone else do theirs. Instead, the blokes stand around holding their pint glasses to their chests and try to look menacing. Eventually, after ten pints and some serious coaxing from various women, we start to dance. I say dance, rather we move like mental patients, devoid of any rhythm. Rather than trying to dance properly, we dance stupidly, probably because we think it’s funny. But if we are being honest it’s because we don’t like to look stupid by trying to do something properly and failing miserably. Also, because all other blokes are in the same boat, we know that we have support from fellow soulless males. It’s only because we’re embarrassed, and we think that, this way, we can maintain our machismo. Having gone through that phase, we finally start to dance seriously, but still badly, as we know it’s the only chance we have of scoring. And there’s only one thing worse than everyone watching us dance like our dads – going home alone.
The thing is, it’s all down to the hunt and the failure of the hunt. The desire to score, and the fear of losing out to another pint-holding skinhead with all the rhythm of a Peruvian sloth. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the greater amount of aggression in a straight bar. That and, of course, the sexual tension. The tension between the hunter and the hunted.
The atmosphere in a straight bar can be so serious and intense, there’s a frenzy to score. It’s not a case of letting yourself go and having a good time. If you start to do your own thing, for example dancing like you’re in the Rio Carnival, everyone would take the piss.
Rather than getting down to the tunes and enjoying themselves, everyone seems to be in deep conversation. Usually it’s about mundane crap, and all with one end in mind – a shag. Everyone knows it. Both the man and the woman. It’s a game of deception. They should be out having a good time, but instead they choose to stand around immersed in serious diatribe. You spend literally hours selling yourself to the other person. The chat up. And, of course, they’re not being honest with themselves, or each other. The man feels obliged to put in the groundwork. The woman convinces herself that if he does this, then he is genuinely interested in her. They both want to go home with each other. Rather than acknowledging this fact, and hooking up from the start, they feel the need to go through this mating ritual of discussing life history, their job and holiday plans. Finally, three hours and five caipirinhas later, just before the club closes, they drunkenly snog and inevitably wake up together the next day.
But it’s not like that in a gay club. The punters at Heaven or The Village can be themselves. They have fun, do what they want to do, dance, don’t criticise and don’t make trouble. The big difference is that there’s no sexual tension to spoil the night.
There is one convention that exists in gay society that shows how all men are the same, gay, bi or hetero. If one gay guy sees another bloke in the club that he fancies, and the second guy acknowledges his eyeing up, they hook up for some sex. Possibly even there and then, vacant cubicles permitting. Nothing more, nothing less. And afterwards there are no demands. What a great friggin’ idea. Gay society has uncomplicated the sexual relationship. Because it’s involving another man they have been able to dispense with all the emotiona
l crap and accept that you can have sex for sex’s sake. There’s no need to stand chatting about your last Christmas shopping trip to New York or feigning an interest in the trading of convertible bonds. Make the approach. Put your cards on the table. And giddy-up.
Needless to say, love can happen as well. You can meet a long-term partner at one of these places. But they accept the fact that this is not always the aim for a Friday night. You can also be attracted to someone and just want to give them a thoroughly good seeing to. No need to feel guilty about it.
Now why can’t we incorporate that into heterosexual life? Think how awesome it would be if you saw a guy or a girl in a club, you were both attracted to each other, on a base level, and wanted to have sex. I think back to my Kiwi prick tease, for example. We could have had the whole full and frank disclosure of sexual interests, gone back to hers, left the family photo albums firmly in the bookcase and shagged like rabbits. We could have got up the next morning, had a civil cuppa and gone on our way. You know what? I would have been much more likely to give her a call and meet up again if I hadn’t had to deal with all that rubbish, all the hypocrisy. Kiwi girl didn’t want to sleep with me because she thought I wouldn’t come back. The irony is that I didn’t go back to her because she refused after making all her ‘promises’. She played these stupid games, she wasn’t being honest with either of us.
Raj was briefly seeing a girl who told him, after having completed three dates, that she felt she could have sex with him. Apparently, she had exercised enough restraint by holding out over the three dates even though she had wanted to sleep with him on the first night. This is sexual intercourse. If you can’t look at it as ‘fun’ and that it is always something meaningful, then it’s a serious matter and holding out for one or two dates is meaningless.
We are adults and we are allowed to enjoy sex for sex’s sake, aren’t we? Isn’t that what the sexual revolution was about?
This great discovery by homosexual society is no discovery at all, they are merely doing what comes naturally, to excuse the pun. They’re guys. It would never work in the heterosexual dating scene exactly because women are still restricted in their sexual exploits by their emotions. The guilt that, deep down somewhere, they shouldn’t really be enjoying sex. And, of course, they are still restricted by that magic number, the one that represents the total number of guys that it is acceptable to have slept with by the time they get married.
This is the fundamental difference between men and women – the number of acceptable premarital sexual partners. Women have a maximum, men have a minimum.
Once again, this explains the angry text message from Holly. I had known Holly for years and always fancied her. Holly’s sex life had deteriorated over the past year. More to the point, there wasn’t any. She wanted to have a purely sexual relationship with a friend, with me. She knew I liked her, respected her, she was my friend. But you see, that wasn’t enough, she had to be able to think, at least, that I sort of loved her. Perhaps she did have such strong feelings towards me, even though they could never have been taken to their natural conclusion. It was not enough that we were attracted to each other sexually and that we could allow ourselves to enjoy the sex together.
It happened one time, as we neared the point of no return in the bedroom, that she suddenly confessed her deeper feelings towards me. This was a bit of a blow. I know you’re thinking that I should have reciprocated in such sentiments and finished the job in hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, she was my friend after all.
It was after this night that the obsessive and neurotic text messages started. I told her that I was happy to have sex with her and be friends, but that I couldn’t go out with her. Besides, she was engaged to be married that following summer. A guy called James who she had met at a university hockey reunion. They had been living together for nearly a year now.
7
Staying single is the solution
My efforts to find an intelligent, attractive and, most importantly, sane woman had started to plummet to desperation point. In fact, it is nowhere near desperation; desperation is lurking around the corner. It’s the new year, and it’s always said that the new year is the perfect excuse to try something new. That was Jones’s argument anyway. Jones is a girl I work with; a tall lass with auburn hair. She only likes to be known by her surname, I think it’s because she loathes her given name, Daisy. Over the Christmas break, a friend of hers had told her about a singles night, which aimed itself at successful city types, the supposed beautiful people. If she got in there now, she might even have a date by the time February 14th arrives.
Over the past few months, singles nights had become the preferred party night. Everywhere you turn, there are adverts for this or that singles gathering. Billboards, the sides of buses, men and women’s magazines or on the tube, even in flyers with your sandwiches. The X million single people in London had been identified as a consumer market. Most of this group have a high disposable income and spend the majority of their free time looking for a partner; why not help them on their way and relieve them of some that cash in the process? No longer are the classifieds and the ads for singles parties confined to the back of the Metro. A new bread of singletons is being born – the ‘I’m Single and I’m Proud’! It seems that these party nights are as much ‘coming-out’ parties as they are an evening designed to help you find Mr/Ms Right. It’s single pride.
But a part of me could not totally sever my prejudice towards such events that had built up over the years and which society told me were ‘sad’. I could picture it already; 30-something rah girls in pink pashminas pulling up in their Z3s on the hunt for sperm donors. And then there would be the male of the species, if you can call them that. The men who think they’re guaranteed a pull, men like the computer science graduates in drip dry shirts or spivvy law clerks with ties knotted so fat they defy belief. But Jones had been single now for the longest time she could ever remember (about six weeks), she clearly needed the proverbial ‘some’, and hearing her go on about it just reminded me of my own futile position. In fact, I had decided that our office had become like a carbon copy of the ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ apartment in the cringingly hilarious sitcom of the same name. The only difference being that Jones isn’t a fat repulsive ginga and, despite my recent propensity for baking cookies, I am not gay. So in the hope of finding Jones a man, I am game.
Following Jones’s instructions, the first thing I have to do is go onto the Single No More website and sign up for one of their events. Single No More is the name of the organiser and, as you will see, it is totally misbranded. I hate signing up for things on the net. There are endless drop-down boxes to select from, boxes to tick and private details to enter. The first hurdle, in this instance, is the selection of a username. When you sign up for one of their events, this is the name that will appear on the guest list, the idea being that other guests can check out each other’s profiles online. Luckily, I realise that you have to be careful in what you plump for, otherwise I could instantly label myself a twunt, along with ‘Mr10incher’ and ‘Mad4itMan’. I check out the girls who have signed up. Many of their names are just as bad, with women in their 30s calling themselves ‘discochick’ or ‘legal bird’. It just makes them sound too calculating, trying to perpetuate the myth of their youth, like they think it’s the kind of image guys will find attractive. It’s really not what men want to hear, well Mr Drip-dry might not care and the ones in it for a quick bit of how’s-your-father won’t give a toss but, trust me, the rest of us just cringe.
And when I thought I had racked my brains hard enough, searching for some cool and witty name that you think the other sex will find so alluring they’re dropping their knickers at the mere thought of you, the bastards ask you the mother of all questions – ‘Tell us one funny thing about yourself.’ My mum used to dress me in skirts when I was four. Well that’s funny but not exactly what my date, pull or potential future girlfriend will want to hear. The thing is, somethin
g that is funny to someone know me will, by its very nature, be embarrassing. It’s also unlikely to be the kind of thing that you would normally say when trying to endear yourself to a member of the opposite sex. And, of course, if you put nothing then you will be condemned as being boring. So now I have to reveal some innermost secret to a website, which will be used to sum me up, used to rate me against all the barristers’ clerks and IT geeks. I have to be able to think of something better than ‘I designed Lara Croft’s breasts’. Perhaps I could put that I used to live on a Caribbean island. Women always want to go to paradise – if I can’t manage it in the bedroom I could take them on holiday. It would, at the very least, provide a good conversation topic, wouldn’t it? I could also let them think it’s like my second home (which, in a way, it is) and that if they date me they will get to go there. It had worked before. But no, I decide to put that I used to live in a castle. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, it was part of my college at university. This would also go on to explain my username, ‘Castleman’, which I had thought was fairly innocuous and yet supplied an essential element of mystery. It would also make the women think I had oodles of cash (pathetic, I know). I should have stuck to the Caribbean idea.
London is drenched in the typical January weather; wet and cold and windy. People are rushing from one shop to another, or from various modes of transport to the shelter of their destination. A woman who passes us is berating her boyfriend for not covering her with a sufficient portion of the umbrella; apparently her hair is getting ‘fucking wet, and then it’ll be all wispy,’ and she won’t want ‘that cow Andrea’ seeing her like that, because ‘Andrea will be looking immaculate like she always bloody is.’
The event is being held in a bar, just off Piccadilly, called the Sugar Reef. If it wasn’t raining, the huge neon billboards would look like casino lights against a Vegas sky. Jones seems to have high expectations, while I have very little. I still can’t get the prejudices out of my mind.
Single White Failure Page 9
