TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

A recent NYT article on female sexuality, What Women Want, has been getting mad attention on the blessed WWW. The piece centers around a study of male versus female arousal.

When viewing gay or straight pornography (as well as footage of bonobos doing it), both straight and gay men self-reported the levels of arousal you would predict: het dudes got hot and bothered by women and fags by men. No one got off on monkey porn. Cockrings (um, sort of) measuring blood flow around their junk corroborated these self-reports.

The women in the study, however, fucking lied. According to the moisture monitors stuck betwixt their legs, ladies get sweaty for basically anything, monkey porn included. But contrary to the physical response, bitches LIE LIE LIE when self-reporting: straight women say their dicks get wet for dicks and pecs, dykes go cray cray for vajayjay, and everyone said the National Geographic shit was like watching ice melt.

So what do women want? In honor of this study, Ima lightbulb this one for you.

But first, Why I Am An Expert On The Subject….

There are very few men in my life. Wait, I take that back. There are very few men in my life outside of bartenders and/or the bar patrons beside me. I like men fine, but I’m only close with a couple and one of them is so femme I don’t think he really counts. In my phone, for instance, only 34 of the 214 numbers I have stored belong to men, and one of those is Google and another is a pizza place. Out of those 34 numbers, the only one I dial on a semi-regular basis is my dad’s. Honestly, I don’t think about men that often and when I do it’s sort of anthropological, like, “Hmmm. Do men have feelings? Do they cry? When do their balls drop? I should wiki this.” And now that Omar Little is gone, I essentially spend all of my time with women. Also, I’m bonafide queer bait. This enough for you? Whatevs. I know women. Believe.

So what do women want? Drugs.

Because my life is so lady-centric, I spend a fair amount of time engaged in discussions about the curious sensation of the uterine wall shedding its linens.

Last night, for instance, a few of us were talking about how even when you’re a grown woman and you’ve been bleeding for many unwilling, uncomfortable years, you are still completely unable to attribute the bottomless depression you feel every month to hormones. Every month, a friend said, she feels like this is finally it; it’s finally time for the lobotomy. The loss of cognitive function? Worth it. And then as soon as she starts to bleed she has that “Ah ha!” moment: Oh, riiiiight. It’s just my hormones beating my capacity to reason into submission.

I get it too. A few days before my period starts, I feel like everyone I’ve ever made out with has left me at the altar. At these times, I forget that I’m single because the thought of another person’s DNA on my pillow case gives me hives. I forget that I’m a self-acknowledged terrible girlfriend and become convinced that I’m the victim, I’m the one who’s been wronged time and time again. I believe that I’m shit at my job, shit at school, shit at life. Dear Abby makes me seize. Hugh Grants brings me to the depths of despair normally felt with the death of a puppy. And then, miraculously, I realize that I’ve ruined another pair underwear, cotton up, and get on with it.

Not to get all victim on you, but I’m pretty sure perioding is a little more hateful for those of with a sausage allergy. My ex-girlfriend and I spent four years trying to alpha each other on the blood train, but the sync never happened and we essentially spent half of our relationship with a hot water bottle in our bed. There was the time I walked from the bed to the kitchen minus drawers. My ex got out of the shower and stepped in a puddle of menses. And there was the mattress we borrowed from a (male) friend that we returned a year later with a large burnt sienna stain in the shape of South America. It’s even worse for those of us whose chance of reproducing is about as good as Spencer Pratt replacing Blagojevich as governor. We can’t get married but we do get to suffer the same bloody mess as our straight counterparts. NOT FAIR.

There is the occasional fool who will tell you her monthly is a blessing from the moon goddess, that she loves spending the week taking long raspberry leaf baths, finger painting with her blood, and communing with her sisters in her backyard menstrual hut, but she is FULL OF SHIT. The reason you don’t see this type during her week of red is because she is too busy popping pills and sitting on her toilet like the rest of us because shitting is the only way to mute the scream emitting from your internal organs.

The only advantage of the devil period is convincing your fiance that you’re a virgin if you time the wedding right.

So what do women want? PILLS. Pills to ease the cramps and pills to quiet the hyena in your brain and pills to make it just. fucking. stop.