Feb
19

The Joy Of Sex?

My cousin Rachel got the Barbie Townhouse the summer we found The Joy of Sex under her parents’ bedskirt. Before this, Barbie had spent most of her time trying on outfits, getting haircuts, and having her ears pierced with straight pins.
Suddenly, Barbie’s ultra-bendable legs had a whole new purpose.
The Barbie Townhouse was relatively unexciting but for the elevator that ran up its center, the elevator that, along with the backseat of the pink Corvette, quickly became the setting for a series of encounters that would have made Barbie’s toes curl, had they not already been stiffly flexed.
In the scenario we enacted most frequently, Rachel’s Barbie was a Divorcee—a word we pronounced so that it rhymed with ‘Horsey’—living in the palatial townhouse that she won in the divorce from my Michael Jackson doll. There had been an ugly courtroom scene with the members of Barbie and The Rockers as judge and jury, and a settlement that left Michael with nothing but a lone spangled glove. Now Barbie had a hole in the middle of her hand where her ring used to be, and her new freedom had gone to her head. She was having an affair with Mr. Heart, of The Heart Family, whose wife was too busy caring for twins to notice the long strands of blond hair that coated her husband after a day at the office.
I remember dressing Barbie for a rendezvous in an outfit called Peaches N’ Cream, a fluffy affair with an iridescent snakeskin bodice. As she brushes her hair with a brush the size of her torso, she is ready for anything. Rachel makes car noises as Mr. Heart pulls up outside.
Several hours later, her dress torn and lying in a heap on the floor of the elevator, Barbie is in her bedroom, alone at her vanity, smoking a tiny rolled-paper cigarette that we have placed in the hole in her hand.

Sex isn’t everything. But it certainly makes life more interesting, doesn’t it? I know it did for Rachel and me.

If I could, I would have sex all the time. Not at work, because that wouldn’t be professional. But maybe once a day, during non-working hours.
For some reason, I have always perceived this as abnormal. Maybe because there are more episodes of Oprah about women who feel burdened by the sexual demands of their husbands than there are about teen prostitutes and middle-school sex games combined. Or perhaps because in high school health classes there was so much emphasis on male desire, and so little discussion of female sexuality. Because everyone knows that girls mostly sit around brushing each other’s hair and talking about their periods, occasionally lapsing into silence to watch An Affair to Remember or cross-stitch bluebirds onto their chastity belts.

But then again, 30 million Oprah episodes can’t all be wrong—there are a lot of women who report they simply don’t feel particularly sexual. And men too—I think the idea that all men are supposed to be in the mood at all times probably does men a disservice as well.

The point of this rambling and only marginally interesting blog post is this: I have always wondered how other women really feel about their sex lives. How important is sex to a relationship? Are you getting enough? Too much? What would you change? If you and your partner have disparate sex drives, is it a source of contention?
These are not rhetorical questions—I want to know. Feel free to comment anonymously. Or, of course, ignore the entire issue and merely mock me for remembering so clearly what I did with dolls nearly twenty years ago.

In upcoming posts: Day one of my new diet, a modified version of The South Beach Diet I am calling The South-by-Southwest Beach Diet. Also, more answers to your questions, recipes, thoughts on “Chick Lit,” plans for another Confabulous, and a discussion with my landlord: Heat—Pro or Con?

p.s. Voting for the Share the Love Blog Awards is open until tomorrow (she reminds you nonchalantly).

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |