Accepting Sex

Just once, I would like to experience sex the way a woman experiences sex.

What a lesson that would be. It would also be hugely informative for a woman to have the opportunity, just once, to experience sex the way a man experiences sex. I have a feeling about what would happen. The woman would run full-speed back to the pleasures of the woman’s experience, while the man, after his one sample, would feel reluctance about returning to his gender’s ways.

I introduce the idea as one whose time has come. Last week, New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley wrote a piece about ABC’s growing success with programming she described as “the television version of chick lit.” The shows include “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Brothers and Sisters,” and a new one, “October Road.” They are all about sex, and women, Stanley writes, prefer to watch shows “about sex: couples who talk about sex, then have sex, lots of it, and then talk about sex some more to each other and to their best friends.”

Men, she writes, “click off in droves.” The average man wants to watch “sports, politics, strippers, car chases and crashes, have sex and go to sleep.”

There is some truth about me in that. I once saw about 20 minutes of a “Desperate Housewives” episode, which is my total exposure to the shows Stanley mentions. I do like to watch sports, and having sex and going to sleep seems like a reasonable activity to me. I don’t like to watch sports that much, though, because sports are now too much about money, as are politics, car chases, and crashes, and I didn’t know you could watch strippers on TV.

Maybe I am not an average man. Yet I feel tarred. Reading Alessandra’s piece, I developed the impression that sex, for a man, is a picture. For a woman, it’s an experience. That would explain why “Playboy” is a man’s magazine, and “Sex and the City” was a woman’s show. I want to know if I’m missing something that maybe I would really like.

I have no way of knowing, without experiencing sex as a woman, just once. I would have to know the experience of slipping out of a Chanel suit and into something short and silky, of running a brush through my hair, of joining him in the bed, of receiving him in stages of relaxation, first with my eyes, and my lips, and my skin quivering under his touch, and my arms, my hips, acceptance slipping deeper into me until finally I feel my legs, parting for him.

I guarantee that the man, meanwhile, is having a good time, but it’s all about drive. Men provide the piano; women are all about the music. Men are compensated with a huge payback, but still the damn piano gets heavy. No wonder we want to go to sleep.

What would an experience of sex as acceptance, instead of moving a piano, do to my life’s experience? I imagine it would be a discovery like the physicists sometimes announce, so profound it will force us to change the way we think about the universe. What would receiving sex be like? Would living the woman’s experience, just once, get the piano off a man’s back? Would the man even want to go back?

I’ll never know, but wondering about it is one of the most intimate things I’ve ever done. That is a man's view. Alessandra, from the woman's side, says, "It's not so complicated. Like Ben & Jerry's, which includes Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream among its most popular flavors, these shows dish out exactly what women want in lavish quantities that they cannot quite believe anyone would allow them to have." So the man is also the complicated one. I do think that I have known that, all along.