The battle of the sexes rages on. I realised this when I was left wallowing in that Freudian cusp of libidinal frustrations by a woman with as much ethics as a beer bottle.
Like two inebriated adolescents after a matric dance ball, my partner and I got into heavy petting and necking on the first night. Her wanton moans and cacophonous groans would have given credit to any wench auditioning for a part in a hardcore porn film.
Then, out of the blue, she told me to keep my octopus hands to myself because I was not going to get laid.
I did not flinch, as it is an open secret that this ”sudden” change of heart just before the final act is nothing but affected virtue — in deference to that antiquated concept that a woman’s virtue is proportional to the size or diameter of her vagina.
Anyway, the locker room quacks had impressed on my sex that whispering mushy, sweet incantations into a woman’s ear would get one past this inimical feminine hurdle. But this time my efforts were like trying to cut a baobab tree with a razor blade. Sex was not — and perhaps, never was — in the equation.
Talk about being so near, yet so far. It was like being dismissed one run short of that coveted cricket milestone of a century. I felt cheated, humiliated, emotionally violated and the blow to my ego could be measured on the Richter scale.
Being wronged in this manner was worse than being (unfairly) labelled a virgin at 17 in front of girls by a bunch of ”kiss-and-tell” louts. Anyway, in that moment of rejection, I thought of the bearded Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, who perhaps first uttered the vexing question ”What do women want?” when he was cheated out of sex. For only the denial of sex can take a philosophic bent. Yet I quivered to think how my Neanderthal sex would have responded at this rejection.
Thank heavens, I am a modern man who completely fits the bill of a liberated African all-rounder. By definition: I am tapped into my femininity, have no qualms about going down on a woman (an act that has been deputy-presidentially decreed ”un-African”) and am well conversed with the subtle differences between light and heavy flow tampons.
It is granted that there are no hard and fast rules or statutes of limitations on sexual intercourse. I am convinced that trying to preserve your quaint honour with your clothes on is noble and admirable, but doing it when you are down to your birthday suit qualifies as the bawdy tease of a temptress.
This must not be construed to mean that a butt-naked woman is under obligation to have sex. No. I know that women’s rights should never be subverted for the whims and desires of men.
Still, without delving much into the engineering of consent, when a handshake goes beyond the elbow we all know it has turned to another thing. In the same vein, when a prostitute kisses you on the lips we all know that the sexual tryst has ceased to be a business transaction! And, unless I am very much mistaken, being denied at the last hurdle led Demi Moore’s character to sue Michael Douglas’s character for sexual harassment in the film Disclosure.
Thus you can imagine how I felt that I had been deliberately led up the garden path to be left hanging dry.
An older and wiser friend corroborated this suspicion during our dialectical moment of libidinal frustrations. Apparently my experience was an induction into the club of victims, nay, survivors of ”the ball-busting experiment”, which is the latest offering from the House of (Woman’s) Fickleness.
This experiment merely aims to reduce men to size at the moment when we are at our maximum vulnerability (read: horny and foolish), and further make the salient point that power and superiority rest with the sex that can temper their carnal desires as they are always in control of their faculties.
To this effect, Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her seminal book The Second Sex (a book that should be prescribed reading for all men) that ”in bed the woman punishes the male for all the wrongs she feels she has endured, by offering him insulting coldness”.
Essentially, this confirms that women are no longer content with the frenzy of diatribe or provocative insults and have notched up the petty, never-ending battle of the sexes to the realm of psychological warfare.
Perhaps this ball-busting experiment is duly deserved as part of our male collateral damage for being intent on our sexual relief, thus giving sex the hue of a surgical operation. Surgical operation? Yes, how do we explain the lesbian rant that ”penetration is violation”?
In the end, what promised to be an epiphany turned into a requiem for me as I ended up scoring an own goal.
Anyway, wasn’t it the obstreperous feminist Germaine Greer who said ”masturbation is easy, relationships [read: sex] are difficult”? And I can take cold comfort from knowing that my partner is not an easy lay — a factor that has left me fawning after her like a lapdog.