Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Deconstructing Promiscuity

If you thought that promiscuity was a male centric sport, then you are sorely myopic to the growing participation of females to this activity over the years, because from what I’m seeing, it looks like conservatism is the new dork in town.

Perhaps it’s popular culture finally taking shape around us and western laden themes of decadence, debauchery, violence and a thirst for all things corporeal finally taking our straight-jacket society by the balls and making it cough out wanton adults. There is hope for the future.

I am number 4

AL proudly declared. And no, he wasn’t some telekinesis empowered alien, but if he’d managed to remove anything, it was clothes and I would have said dignity, but I never saw any loss of dignity or pride when it came to consensual sex.

He was after all, the fourth person in the group to have exerted a sexual conquest over the girl. Or was it really the case?

It’s an age old saying, and popularized by Missy Elliot, that when a guy fucks around, he is stag and if a women replicates it, she is a slut. That is society’s myopic judgement on issues they deem inappropriate, like one night stands, self-prostitution and farting in public. For all the feminist movements, why is it that women have less rights to promiscuity than men?

Then weeks later, a fifth by their count, was added to the group. And this was in the full presence of the four and all it took was a little more attention from him and a lot less from them. It was the same familiar story the day after, about how he tried and she caved.

So over a wedding lunch the week after, the four of them recounted about how they did it and how they scored. And then it hit me, perhaps they had gotten it all wrong to begin with. Was it really charm on their part or were they all just part of her plan?

When we look at the rules of dating and one night stands, popular belief and un-written code tells you to “Never fuck within the group”, because it’s bad for image and you are just subjectifying yourself to be tea-time gossip or if you are really good, wank fodder. You might have only dated twice in your entire life, but if it’s within the group, you are deemed as virginal as a Puerto Rican streetwalker with genital herpes as panties.

Me: “I don’t think it’s a character flaw.”

Everyone stared at me as if I had just made a marriage vow to a hooker on bended knees.

Me: “It’s a matter of perspective. Have you ever thought that perhaps she had planned to fuck all of you? For all you know, in a different setting, she could be telling her friends, ‘oh my god, I know this group of guys who are damn fucking easy lah!’.”

We’ve always seen sex as a dominance that men exert over women, but why? It’s not like they enjoy it any less, god forbid, because if all my attention in biology hasn’t gone to waste, I remember distinctively that a female orgasm is far superior to men – if they ever get to it. So why can’t men be the subject of a woman’s sexual needs?

Me: “For all you know, she probably intended on it. It’s called advertising. She fucks one of you and she knows you will tell the others. Another makes a move and takes the bait, and she fucks the second one. It doesn’t look like you are passing her around, it just looks like she is having a buffet.”

Then they formulated a theory about her being scarred and confused from a previous relationship, because heartbreak is the next best excuse to fuck strangers after alcohol. Perhaps she was hurt. Perhaps her previous beau left her such an emotional mess that mindless casual sex is her way of picking up the pieces.

It’s so common to try to justify things we do not know, with reasoning that our moral compasses are familiar with. It seems that the only way most people can accept or comprehend promiscuity is to attribute it as consequence of emotional scarring. But is there really a need to ‘moralize’ female promiscuity? Do people not realize by now that women are very much similar to men?

Perhaps this girl really knows what she wants, and that is to fuck every one of them. Or maybe sex is a trivial sport to her that holds no emotional attachment and does not warrant any trigger of attraction, but just simply a motion she goes through to achieve gratification. Quite simply, she fucks for fun, like men, or if she could breathe underwater, she would qualify as a dolphin as well.

Me: “To us you are number 4, but imagine when she’s telling the story to her friends, it will be called ‘I just scored number 40 last night’.”

Promiscuity was never an exclusive gender right, and it should never be as long as the individual is single and void of all emotional commitments to anyone. Why then should their intent or actions be judged?

It’s a narrow perspective on how we view things and that promiscuity is a man’s right to brag and a woman’s secret to her grave. The fact is that we are too arrogant to believe that sex empowers men, and that we think women are incapable of finding solace, pleasure or even catharsis through any means of temporal profligacy.