Wednesday, June 25, 2008
(2:01 AM) | it:
Wednesday Sex: Americans Aint Getting None!
[This shameless attempt to generate irritated comments is brought to you this week by Infinite Thought, who is currently a sexy vampire, like Drusilla in Buffy, having recently been diagnosed as being allergic to the, er, sun].
Despite Elvis, despite all your bleach-blonde hardcore, and despite all that geo-political muscle-flexing, it is quite clear that Americans aren't really having sex at all, or, if you are, aren't doing it properly. You also can't flirt very well and don't understand insinuation. I blame one thing: the CV. The constant demand to sell your very being in every possible social situation leaves no room for any other mode of address than 'Hi, I'm Chuck. I've been with Shell for five years and before that I was with Evil Arms Corp Inc following my MBA from Harvard.' I imagine sex between Americans, when they ever do manage it, is interspersed with one or both partners getting up at various points to sit at their laptops and work on their employment history.
The economic precariousness of American life combined with the post-puritanical imperative that all work is good and that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough is not entirely the fault of its good citizens. Indeed, there is much to be said for the pioneering expansiveness of hard-working Americans, with their no-nonsense friendliness and direct modes of address. Don't misunderstand me: I like Americans. I just don't know how one would sleep with one. Would it be a business-type arrangement? A form of exercise? A short-cut to a job offer? Something to put on the CV?
Part of this sexlessness involves the decision about what a body is for. Half of you seem to have decided that it is a machine for processing fat and have turned yourselves into lard-factories for that purpose alone. The other half seem to be on a bid for immortality with levels of health-fanaticism that make Arnie in The Running Man look like Homer Simpson. Neither of these corporeal cults are sexy. I mean, I'm not claiming that British folk don't eat too many pies and look like pasty, rotten-toothed minor Dickens characters, but after a couple of pints we are pretty sexy, at least we think we are, and therefore probably are, a bit.
Americans, because they are remarkably consistent as characters whether drunk or not, are less able to create the excitement that arises from a previously rude person becoming friendly, or vice versa. Your frat-boy stripper-raping jocks would do exactly the same horrible things after twenty beer-stands as after three (besides, your beer has no alcohol). Your whiny, inappropriate-sense-of-self-deserve women would still bitch and moan in bed in the same way as they would outside of it: 'he didn't even bother looking for my G-spot! Lo-ser!'
Still, perhaps the impending global economic crisis will create great roving hordes of desperate, ambiguous sexy Americans who'll do anything for the kind of approval no longer available in the job market. It's the only way to break the tyranny of sex-as-work, you crazy puritans!
