The Vagenda

Ladies: We’re Not as Good as We Think

This week, Esquire gave us what for, under the title ‘Ladies: You’re Not as Good as You Think.’ The summary is: all women everywhere think they’re good in bed, but they’re not, and I want them to give more blowjobs.  

If you’re not familiar with his boundary-pushing work, Chris Jones is the author who managed to start a column ridiculing his wife for describing roof repair men coming as a ‘birthday treat’, and then wrote a further 500 words on the vastly different benefits of roofs, a history of his last roof, and how much he was willing to pay roof repair men, culminating in a level of gleeful hysteria on the benefits of a skylight. In other words, I can’t imagine why he reports himself that a sexual partner once said to him, ‘Let’s just get it over with.’

‘There is a spectrum of female lovers just as there is of men,’ whines Chris Jones, after admitting that he himself is no lothario extraordinaire. ‘The trouble is, most women act as though they’re sexual Olympians, as though they’re doing the men in their lives the greatest of favours merely by presenting themselves like a downed deer strapped to the hood of a car.’

What great lengths Chris has gone to in order to deliver such breath-taking imagery! What’s particularly awesome about it is how it so accurately reflects my own sex life: violent, bloody, and essentially a cheeky game of roleplay with myself playing the part of dead animal. Chris moves on from this phrase as if dead deer regularly pepper his conversation, but let’s put the brakes on it for a second. Because he didn’t use that phrase to mean ‘so uncommunicative that she’s like a dead animal.’ He meant it because he was searching for an illustration of a prize – ‘presenting herself like the best thing since sliced bread’ – and instead he came up with ‘hunting trophy.’

It’s grammar that betrays him here, and gosh Chris, I love grammar almost as much as you love roofs. Can you present yourself like a strapped-up deer? Well, no, because  animals that you killed and tied to your car don’t present themselves – they are prizes because they’re cool-looking objects. That powerlessly have things done to them. By people who enjoy bloodsports. So they can boast about it.

Yummy! This language is so mundane to Chris that he doesn’t think once about the heinous grammatical implications of his sin, nor the less important issue of shitty gendered language blah blah blah. What more from the master? ‘Sex is not like pizza. Only blowjobs are.’ Oh, cool. It’s not like sex is made for two or anything, so this shouldn’t get in the way of my sexual enjoyment at all.

Chris ends on an anecdote: ‘I knew one poor girl who wouldn’t have sex from behind because she thought it meant anal. Like, maybe grab a mirror and spend some time working out how your body works…. You’re not a slut if you like sex. The freaks are the frigid ones who confuse their vaginas with their anuses.’

Like, maybe grab a mirror and CRY ABOUT SEEING A REFLECTION OF THE PATRIARCHY. Just sayin’, lolz. I’m so glad that Chris has told me I’m not a slut if I like sex, because before now, I was under the impression that it was a purely functional act performed of necessity for my husband before complaining about how awful it is to my friends. Also, I heard there’s a second world war about to break out!

How special that the girl that ‘he knew’ (carnally?) is now enshrined in the pages of Esquire as a ‘frigid freak.’ And when she told you that she didn’t want to have anal sex, did you not tell her you meant doggy-style? Or was your grammar slipping on that day too? Funnily enough, Chris, I’m pretty sure that if she’d been having sex with you, she realised there was a difference between her vagina and her anus. There’s all sorts of stuff that those body parts do outside of the bedroom, usually privately, that allows one to appreciate the differentiation. It could be difficult to imagine, but entertain the idea that women do exist outside of when you have sex with them. They do all this revolutionary shit like use tampons and go to the loo. I even saw one once on a train. In clothes like she was going to work and everything.

So Esquire has subscribed to the increasingly popular ‘recycle from the 1900s’ style of women-facing journalism: it’s OK to enjoy sex now; you can even do it in this fancy new way from behind; and whoops – here’s a cheeky destructive one just to throw you off – don’t be ‘frigid’! I kind of thought we stopped using that word back when we collectively decided to report on sexuality normally and less like complete fuckwits, but hey. What do I know? My function is just to present myself like a dead deer on a car.

You may have noticed that I haven’t actually even bothered to deconstruct the central message of this piece, which is, as aforementioned, ‘all women think they’re great in bed and they’re so not.’ That’s because I see it as the equivalent of a ‘your mum’ joke and even less worth actually replying to. Quick overview of how I might reply if someone put a gun to my head and told me I had to: it’s generalising bollocks and Chris clearly has no female friends. (And by the way, C-Dog, when you complain that you hate sleeping with women because they’re ‘uncomfortable and uncommunicative’ – it’s probably because you spent all that time tactically destroying their performance confidence at the pre-drinks stage, wittering on about how they shouldn’t think they’re any good in bed.)

How can we ever satisfy Chris Jones? Low self-confidence, lots of blowjobs, and apparently, not treating his semen like ‘it’s battery acid.’ As the geniuses at Gawker suggested, would it kill you to rub it around your face every once in a while?

Esquire’s comments on sex are like Hershey’s Kisses. All the advertising in the world wants to convince you that it’s a big candy kiss, but when you really look at it, it’s just a chocolate turd.

Image courtesy of sippakorn

3 thoughts on “Ladies: We’re Not as Good as We Think

  1. What a knob. He makes the point that “if your sex life is bad, you bear at least some of the blame — maybe even an entire half of it” – does that not mean he’s responsible for the crap sex he’s having? If he treated women with respect, affection, and honesty, and perhaps communicated with her about what he wants, what she wants, etc., then maybe he wouldn’t have this ‘problem’. Great sex is about communication first and foremost, getting each other to relax enough to enjoy themselves and feel comfortable with letting you know when they are and aren’t having a good time. Sounds like the women he’s talking about are rightly repulsed by him, and that’s his own bloody fault for being so… repulsive.

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