This past week the internet was all abuzz with the trailer
for Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie
version of the number one best-selling “adult erotica” book ever, written by a
previously unknown British woman. It’s basically the Harry Potter of sex books. Never have so many housewives been so
openly and publicly (I hope I spelled that correctly) excited about a porn
movie coming out. Anne Rice could be heard saying, “Aw, come on, man!”
My guess is that married men accounted for at least half the
book sales, although not a single man was actually reading the book. Men were
buying the shelves clean of Fifty Shades
on the advice of buddies, who were reporting major upticks in bedroom activity
while their wives were reading the book. No one knew what the book was about,
and frankly, no one cared. The results seemed fairly universal, and no one was
going to question it.
To date, I believe Dave Barry is the only man to have
actually read it, and that was purely for research, since his wife had not read
it (yet). My wife hasn’t read it (yet) either, and I am just not willing to duplicate
research, so I just read Dave’s take on it to get the gist. Apparently, women
like poorly-written stories about hot single billionaires who like kinky sex. As
average-looking, married, non-billionaire men who are just fine with regular
sex, we all had no idea this was the case. If we had known, we all would have
sat down and penned our own poorly-written stories like that to give to our
wives.
You see, a man’s interest in sex stays at the exact same
level his entire adult life, and that level can generally be described as,
“high” and “ever-present.”
Whereas, women’s interest in sex seems to take a rather
dramatic downturn when children are introduced into the picture. This may be -
at first, anyway - because children are usually introduced through one of the
fun parts and then claim immediate ownership of the others. After that initial
phase is over, but still not helping the situation at all, the kids tend to hang
around. This leaves all of us married men wondering what the hell just happened
and how to get things back to the way they were. None of us have come up with any
good long-term answers yet, mainly because asking the kids to leave the house and
not come back is frowned upon for the first eighteen or so years. So we swarm
to any temporary solutions we hear of, and the aforementioned best-selling socially-acceptable
book full of smut seemed to be one of those temporary solutions.
While my wife is well aware of our differences in what is an
assumed good time for “it” - meaning she understands the difference between anytime
and not tonight - I was recently able to really highlight the difference
through a deft and rather humorous analogy with a household appliance.
We have a Shark steam mop for our hardwood floors. Operation
of said steam mop over the last year has fallen to me in my capacity as Mr.
Mom. It had been almost a year since she had used it when she fired it up to
mop the floors last month. She was halfway through when she started to get
frustrated.
“This thing keeps stopping!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It stops steaming every once in a while and you have to
wait for it to start again.”
“I know,” I said, “it always does that.”
“No it doesn’t! It never did that before.”
“It’s done that ever since I started using it,” I said.
“It’s broken. How can you stand it?”
Hahahahaha, snort!
(sound of me laughing hysterically)
“What’s so funny?”
“Well,” I laughed, “I guess I’m just used to having to wait
for things to get steamy, whereas you are used to dealing with things that are
always ready to go.”
I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the humorous and incredibly
insightful analogy as much as I did. Or was it a metaphor? Who cares, it was
funny. And I’m fairly sure she took it to heart, too, because for our wedding
anniversary a few weeks ago, she got me a brand new Shark steam mop.
Oh, yeah! You know what that means! My wife is very, very
interested… in clean floors.
Oh, well. At least she has a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. She hasn’t read it yet, despite the many,
many times I have moved it to the top of her stack, but it’s only a matter of
time.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen
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