And Which Head Will You Be Thinking With Today, Sir?

I recently read something that shook me to my very core, something that made every hair on my body stand up in protest; something that made me want to believe in god just so I could then question those very beliefs. I read something that created a terrible trifecta of a mental hurricane, an emotional tsunami, and a physical earthquake within my poor little body. Something that made me, as a sex writer, want to stand atop a soap box and yell "WHAT HAS THIS ALL BEEN FOR?!"

It started innocently enough. One morning I came downstairs and saw one of my mom's magazines on the couch. You know, the kind where women write article after article in hopes that they can join forces to convince themselves that turning 50 is the best thing to ever happen to them. One of my favorite actresses was on the front so I poured my coffee and settled in for the stereotypical cover story where the author starts off by saying how normal the celebrity is, showing up for the interview in just yoga pants and a sweater. Yeah lady, ask your "normal celebrity" how much those yoga pants of hers cost and then try and make me relate to her.

Anyway, I was flipping through the pages when I caught a headline about sex, so of course I stopped. You know, research purposes and such. So I'm reading through this article about how to get yourself in the mood and blah blah blah, and then all of a sudden, I had to stop. There it was, this blasphemous paragraph, leaping out from the page, flushing everything anyone has ever thought about sex down the drain. According to this article (and this particular paragraph was not strictly about sex in your 50's, it was presented as a general fact), there is a much bigger disconnect between mind and body in women than there is in men. In other words, women can get physically aroused without any mental or emotional stimulation, while men apparently need us to HOLD THEIR FRICKEN HAND FOR THEM TO GET A HARD ON. What kind of hysterical post-menopausal bullshit artist wrote this??? Has a hot flash completely wiped all common sense from her supposedly wise and experienced brain? IS EVERYTHING I EVER THOUGHT WRONG???

I set down my coffee and frantically began skimming the rest of the article for some further explanation, some rebuttal or footnote that stated "Haha, just kidding." There was none to be found. Afraid that I would have a complete nervous breakdown if I invested any more time in this debacle, I threw the magazine down and began racking my mental rolodex of sex facts, myths, and assumptions. While everything can be left up to circumstance, I pretty sure everyone- EVER- can agree that 99.99999% of the time, women need to feel some sort of emotional connection with someone in order to have really great, mind-blowing sex or other sexual activity, resulting in an equally eye-popping orgasm. Meanwhile, men are the first to admit that mushy feelings make their sail go down and all a girl really needs to be eligible for sex is a vagina and the ability to never, ever give a rake job.

I'm not crazy for thinking this article is bullhonky, right? I've talked about it with a few people since reading it, and they all seem to agree with me. I mean, this is like saying that the graham cracker is the best part of a s'more, or that the second Becky on Roseanne was far superior to the original. Lies and fabrications!

All I know is this: the day that I turn 50- in 25 years, 1 month, and 8 days- I am submitting my own article to this very magazine. An article about how since the moment I kissed my very first boy, my brain, heart, and cooch have been linking arms and crossing that finish line together.