The Only Worthwhile Advice I Ever Got in My Whole Entire Life

SPOILER ALERT: It involves performing cunnilingus!

Advice is some bullshit. People who come to you for advice aren’t looking for you to share the wisdom you’ve accumulated in life, mostly because if you’re anything like me you haven’t picked up a whole lot of the stuff. And your friends know this. People who come to you looking for advice aren’t looking for guidance, they’re looking for permission to do whatever the hell they were going to do in the first place. And since they don’t already perceive broad Social Permission to do that thing, it means whatever they have planned is almost certainly unethical and could lead to a criminal indictment or arrest warrant with your name on it if you so much as tacitly approved any of it.

Once your friends come to you for advice you have at most a few weeks to prepare for the day the business ends with a toxic cloud lurching from the smoking crater of your friends’ idiotic choices, spreading across the countryside and poisoning the land until no songbirds are left singing, which is precisely the moment your friends will blame you for whatever role you played in the whole tragic mess. You might not have been at the switch when the train derailed, but your friends will sure as fuck tip off the NTSB where to find your fingerprints in what’s left of the control car.

And what in God’s name made you think it was ever a good idea to start doling out advice about how to drive a train? It’s not like they have steering wheels. Just because somebody asks you a question doesn’t mean you have the answer, otherwise every damn one of us would have been valedictorian.

People who give advice are the goddamn worst. Fuck those smug bastards. Look, I’m glad your life turned out so great and I’m sure it had everything to do with your sterling life choices and nothing to do with luck or privilege or socioeconomic factors you had fuckall to do with. Don’t get me wrong — you’ve prolly got good advice to give and I would almost certainly take it if I knew what was good for me. Except happiness itself — the goal of any life well-lived — is entirely contingent and fleeting these days.

Tomorrow never knows. The Fed could raise interest rates. There’s nothing sustainable about anything happening in Silicon Valley. The ice caps are definitely melting. It’s a good bet that after the waters rise and the tides of fortune turn against us all, the rich will be pitchforked into the everising sea, their cries a tuneless requiem for all that we will have lost, at which point, in our collective sorrow, we’ll see no choice but to turn on anybody who was happy or successful before the end of all things, and cast them likewise into the sea, their howls an elegiac dirge for our dead civilization. All of which is to say the line between triumph and regret is awfully, awfully thin and shifts a little each day.

We can argue about whether or not individual people are fundamentally good, but it doesn’t matter because in the aggregate people are objectively terrible, which is why advice is terrible: it comes from people. There was a time, back when we could imagine a better future, when you could Ask Jeeves for advice, which was nice because Jeeves wasn’t a person. Unfortunately, Jeeves has been redirected to the Great 404 Error in the cloud, God rest his code. So now we’re stuck with shitty people and their shitty self-interested advice.

Actually, come to think of it, I did get some really good advice, once, back in 1996. There’s nothing I can say about the nineties that hasn’t already been said, except to say that if we’d known that, by the second decade of the 21st century, people who weren’t grad students would regularly use the word ‘problematic’ in conversation, we would have gone back in time to tell nineties grad students to cut the shit before something terrible happens, something terrible like regular people using ‘problematic’ in conversation. If we managed to get that that fixed, and there was still time left over, maybe we’d prevent 9/11 also, but I’m not optimistic about our chances of doing both. Grad students back then were damn near feral; pack of wild dogs, the lot of them; maybe the best we could hope for is a future where civilians don’t use the word ‘deconstruct’ interchangeably with the word ‘analyze.’ God, the future turned has turned out to be a fucking horrorshow; thanks a lot, former grad students.

Anyway, back in 1996 I was playing the final baseball game I would ever play. I had played hundreds of them over the previous ten years, but at that point I was a few months past my eighteenth birthday and a few months before leaving home for the first time. By the last inning I’d asked our coach to take me out of the game because I just wanted to talk shit from the dugout; it sounds like dereliction but I don’t think a single one of us knew the score by the end of the game. Our coach had been our junior high PE coach and had coached our baseball teams on weekends, he’d volunteered hundreds of hours to be our coach damn near every weekend over the last five years, and interrupted us sharply.

‘Quit fucking around, boys,’ he commanded, then his voice softened, deepened. Even if we didn’t know it he almost certainly knew this would be the last time he’d ever get a chance to speak with most of us; teenagers make a lot of assumptions about the future that simply aren’t true. ‘I got one piece of advice for you and it’s the only advice I’m ever going to give you.’

He looked out onto the field a bit, measured his words. Measured the moment. He spat out some of the sunflower seeds he kept stashed in his lower lip, on account of the fact role models couldn’t chew tobacco, and he scratched his balls. Our attention thus grabbed, he continued:

‘Any man that doesn’t mack his woman’s box has got a woman that can be stolen.’

That’s a direct quote, and worth putting in bold in case you don’t have time to read the rest of this essay, because if you had any sense instead of reading this essay you’d right now be tending to the critical task of not having your woman stolen or otherwise not yourself getting stolen. Or you might yourself be getting stolen as we speak, which is serendipitous and also an admirable bit of multitasking.

Incidentally — incidentally here if not for you biographically — if you’re a gay dude you’re already better at being gay than my old baseball coach ever could have been, and then I don’t really have any relationship advice for you either so just keep doing what you’re doing if it’s working for you, if not change it up a bit I guess, I don’t know, watch some porn if you’re out of ideas.

Naturally we had questions for our coach. So many questions! Like, wasn’t the language of ownership a barrier to intimacy when conceptualizing relationships as a partnership between equals? Did the performance of territoriality not misappropriate a woman’s agency? Moreover, was this not the dehumanizing language of consumerism, reducing gender to a set of asymmetrical transactions mapped onto reifying power dynamics? Did conceptualizing the vagina and/or labia as a literal box not serve to ‘Other’ female anatomy as a prelude to erasing it from the discourse? Did the dialectical logos of patriarchal dominance not dictate codification of specific sex acts as themselves feminine/verbal as opposed to masculine/physical? Could this exhortation not be read as a politically reactionary gesture in defense of masculine hegemonies? Could our coach not immediately recognize just how problematic this all was?

‘Boys, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I think you might be missing the entire point that I’m trying to make. And did one of you just use problem as an adjective instead of a noun? What the hell is wrong with you?’ he snapped, then took a deep breath and spit out some more sunflower seeds and scratched his balls again.

‘Let me clarify what I just said. I know this is very difficult for you to understand. It might be even more difficult to believe, but here it is. Women enjoy getting gone down on about as much as boys enjoy getting gone down on. Might even enjoy it more. That’s a different subject though. The fact of the matter is that most women I’ve ever known you can’t satisfy unless you mack their box on the regular. But here’s the thing. If you’re half-assed about it then she’ll know you don’t want to be pleasing her, and you won’t satisfy her, and she’ll wonder if she even wants to be with a man who doesn’t particularly care if she’s satisfied, and then she’ll start wondering if some other man maybe could satisfy her instead. So if you haven’t already, now’s the time to start macking box or munching rug or eating pusssy or whatever you kids call it, because trust me it only gets fun once you stop thinking it’s not supposed to be fun.’

‘Giving oral pleasure,’ said one of the guys, in Maria de Madeiro’s accent from Pulp Fiction, because literally every other thing out of our mouth was a Pulp Fiction quote in those days. That’s what we kids were calling it.

We had to ask our coach if he particularly enjoyed it, to which he replied: ‘Hell yes, I enjoy it. It’s one of my favorite things. It’s awesome’ and that — the admission that he in fact enjoyed performing cunnilingus — absolutely blew my goddamn eighteen year-old mind. I’d never heard a man say that, and in the twenty years since then I don’t know that I’ve heard any other men say it, for that matter. Partially this is modesty — after all, you basically never ever hear men go on and on and on about the details of their goddamned sex lives, at all, ever, do you? — but there’s still a bit of stigma around being a man who performs oral sex regularly. Well? I enjoy the hell out of it, so there.

I should point out that I’m making no claims for my own competency here. It’s like when I meet someone and they describe themselves as funny or say something like ‘Everybody thinks I’m a funny person.’ You know what? Fuck you. Tell a joke or crack wise or flash some wit. If you tell me you’re an inorganic chemist I’ll take your word for it — for now — but whether or not you’re funny is so eminently demonstrable that declaring yourself such makes me sincerely doubt the claim. Mostly I’ll think you’re a self-serious asshat. I enjoy eating pussy but am I good at it? WHO KNOWS. If you happen to be curious about whether or not I’m good at eating pussy, give me half a reason and I’ll eat your damn pussy and then you can decide for yourself whether or not I’m good at eating pussy already. That’s if you’re a lady. If you’re a dude wondering the same thing, uh, just keep your own house in order and concentrate on not getting your woman stolen. Don’t make this weird.

Men are never born with anything like an aptitude for cunnilingus. If you’re a straight male over the age of thirty you’ve had the formative experience of sensing a lack of enthusiasm from your ladyfriend, at which point you must have stopped, looked up, and asked in all seriousness: ‘Whah? Ahmahh doowah eht wraaang?’ Which is what the phrase ‘What? Am I doing it wrong?’ sounds like when you parachute in north of the delta & end up with a mouthful of pubic hair for your derring-do. Happened to the best of us. And I know you’ve been on the other side of this exchange if you’re a woman over the age of thirty who was with a boy when you were a girl; you’ve had this exchange because us boys were raised to be somewhat comically ignorant of female anatomy. And ever was it so, back to the beginning of all time.

Nowadays I can’t say much definitively for people under the age of thirty and what those first forays into cunnilingus are like, for a few reasons. First of all, despite the overarching horribleness of the Bush Years we seem to be living through what I’ll describe as a gross overreaction to them. Either that, or nobody has pubic hair anymore because of pornography. Straight men under thirty know everything there is to know about sex, minus the part where a woman’s pleasure gets anything like equal consideration. On the upside, we have managed to raise an entire generation of amateur proctologists. Congratulations everybody. Great fucking job.

I do feel compelled to offer an important caveat, mostly as a Public Service to any teenage boys reading this. Please keep in mind that receiving oral sex is like receiving tacos, insofar as everyone likes tacos, except of course for people who don’t like tacos. They have their reasons. Whether it’s because tacos can be a bit messy, or they have an aversion to delicious things, or they’re vegetarians, or they just don’t like Mexicans, the particulars don’t matter; you’re not going to be The One who suddenly changes their mind by shoving tacos in their face and insisting they’ve never had a proper taco, even if that’s technically true since they’ve only ever had tacos from Jack in the Box or Taco Bell. At a certain point you’re the one being weird, man, so drop the goddamn taco and back slowly away from the table, Jesus, they’re just tacos.

It’s a fair question whether or not a woman who dislikes receiving oral sex can always be stolen from her boyfriend, but as usual Science can offer nothing but worthless Speculation and Innuendo until the relevant experiments have been conducted on Dutch and Icelandic populations.

This is all very specific, though, and I want to hold onto what is, generally speaking, most valuable about my coach’s advice. It wasn’t that he was exhorting us to become proficient with oral sex. See, I already knew that I needed to get good at going down, and nobody had told me so. Well, nobody told me in so many words; a year earlier I’d stumbled into a threesome and found myself about as useful as a not-all-that-experienced seventeen year-old in a ménage a trois; it was like if you were pretending to conduct a symphony by standing up in your seat and windmilling your arms from the nosebleeds. To somebody who knows fuckall about classical music — other seventeen year-old boys, for instance — it certainly sounds like you were doing something, but trust me when I say that nobody actually sitting in the woodwinds was even a little bit impressed by your contribution. No; clearly, I needed to stick my nose in it if I didn’t want to be playing air guitar the rest of my life. That much was already clear.

I said earlier that advice is worthless and that it is bullshit, so it’s useful for me to think about what made that one piece of advice from my coach stand out as the one bit of good advice I can pick out from all the other advice I’ve ever received. And I get thrown a metric fuckton of advice, for a variety of reasons. First of all, he wasn’t making any noble attempt to improve me or make me a better person. ‘Better person’ suggests a best possible person, meaning some ideal self he imagines for me rather than the person I aspire to myself become. It also helped that the advice wasn’t directed at me personally, and that it was prolly a little irresponsible of him to ever have given it in the first place.

If that means the only worthwhile advice doesn’t quite sound like particularly good advice might just be the point. He was only sharing, us in all honesty, something of his personal experience. It was a generous gesture from a man who’d already spent hundreds of unpaid hours coaching us over several years. Most advice you get from most people amounts to a bunch of hot tips on what in your opinion has made you so happy and so successful, and you dole this out to people who in your opinion need your hot tips, which when you add it up is pretty selfish of you. Advice wouldn’t be bullshit all the time if people just shared their experience, let each other know that this is what’s given me pleasure in this situation and that is what’s broken my heart in that situation; if the knowledge was hard to come by firsthand then certainly others would benefit from being made aware that such things are already known in the world.

It’s good to know up front, for instance, that if you’re a straight dude and you like eating pussy there’s not a goddamn thing wrong with that; conversely (obversely?) I imagine there’s some benefit to letting girls know they have a right to expect reciprocity in these matters and that it’s more than natural to seek out a new partner if their own expectations are not being fulfilled, which I think you’ll agree is a great thing for boys and girls to hear at eighteen precisely because it’s prolly damn near impossible to learn it after, say, thirty-eight. At a certain point you have to accept that not everybody gets to be good at everything, which means if your man won’t mack your box yet it might be time to think about getting stolen. Which sounds like I’m giving advice to any ladies who’ve made it this far, but I am not. That right there is advice for us all, amigos. Now let’s go grab some tacos.