Those darn sexual myths
by Mad Dog

From the Art of War to the Iliad to the Joy of Sex, the one common thread that runs between them is that you’ve only read the Joy of Sex. Well, if you count looking at the pictures as reading.

     Maybe this is because, like most of us, they just don’t understand sex. Maybe it’s because they haven’t had good sex. Or maybe, as in the case of Dan Quayle, he just can’t spell sex.

     The truth is, no one understands sex. This is amazing since we think about it constantly, we lust after it whenever we can, and believe it or not, people actually study it in school. Some as an official major. But for something we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to achieve, you’d think by now we’d have a better grip on it, so to speak. Or at least a better understanding of our opponent.

     Face it, this should be one of our primary goals. From the Art of War to the Iliad to the Joy of Sex, the one common thread that runs between them is that you’ve only read the Joy of Sex. Well, if you count looking at the pictures as reading.

     Yet sexual myths still run rampant. Being the obstinate animals we are, we’ve managed to cling onto these like babies to their mothers’, well.....bottle. It’s time to debunk a few of them.

MYTH #1: Women like to kiss more than men.
     This just isn’t true. Men like kissing as much as women. It’s just that they don’t always confine their kissing to women. You see, men also like to kiss fish. Even I didn’t realize this until last year when Australian fishermen were warned not to kiss fish when they catch them. This is true.

     It started when a popular TV fisherman with a bogus Chippendale name, Rex Hunt, suggested his viewers be kind to the fish by kissing them and throwing them back. This came naturally to most men since it’s the same pattern they use in dating. For other men, it was more like a concerted effort to try to grasp the concept of foreplay, remembering how many times they’d been told to kiss before eating. Either way, the authorities cautioned that some fish have sharp teeth and might bite back. Also that smoking a cigarette and falling asleep in the boat after kissing the fish was unsafe and unsatisfying for the fish.

MYTH #3: Boys will be boys.
     As Myth #2 shows, this is generally true, even though people as far back as Christine Jorgenson have been trying to prove it wrong. Now it turns out that, thanks to our scale and fin-covered friends, boys are not always boys. Well, not in England, anyway.

     It turns out the male roach, which is a common freshwater fish in England, is embarrassed to have the same name as a creepy crawly bug and leftover reefer butts. But that’s got nothing to do with this discussion. What we’re concerned with is that the Brit-fish are changing sex. This isn’t just a few of them—a whopping 100% of the roaches in two rivers are showing signs of feminization. You know, like going to the bathroom in groups, trying on twelve outfits before going out, and constantly worrying about whether their dorsal fins are getting too fat.

     Actually it’s weirder than that. It seems their sperm-producing testes have turned into egg-making ovaries. Of course on the brighter side, halfway through the process they can do things to themselves that we’ve all been told to do but were physically unable to achieve.

MYTH #4: Size doesn’t matter.
     I don’t care what you say, this one’s true.

     A better example would be JoAnn Carlson of Estancia, NM, who lost the mayoral election when she mis-called a coin toss and lost a game of five-card draw against James Farrington. This wasn’t some arbitrary run-off. The city charter dictates that a game of chance be used as a tie-breaker. In fact, this worked so well Janet Reno’s looking to make Pick-up-Stix the official tiebreaker of federal grand juries.

MYTH #6: Men don’t like smart women.
     While generally speaking this is false, unfortunately in some places it’s still true. Like Russia. Where the head of the Communist Party recently announced at an International Women’s Day ceremony that he liked clever women and pretty women but that there was nothing "more frightful" than a clever and pretty woman. In his case that’s very true. It would make her smart enough to stay away from him and pretty enough not to care.

     Stay tuned for Part Two of this, when we explode the sexual myths that batteries are better than men just because they last longer, that men and women are from different planets (hell, they’re not even from the same galaxy), and that men’s shoe size is important. Okay. So maybe not all of these are myths.

©1998 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Even small ones.  After all, size doesn't matter.