Why I Gave Up On Men

I had two heterosexual female friends who stopped dating men and became lesbians. These two women were both pretty, had great careers, and were smart and interesting people. One had been married; the other had been engaged. Neither had any regrets about switching teams. They were, to quote one of them, Done with men.

I stopped dating, not to become a lesbian and not because I was done with men, but because the older I get; the more picky I get. So when a man with a cane followed me home one day, and not a hip young guy but a wizened senior hooked up to oxygen and dragging his deathbed behind him, I wanted to turn around and yell, “REALLY?”

What was happening? Did this clearly delusional man think I was a senior, although it’s Los Angeles and anyone over 30 is a senior.

The truth is that sex is no longer a motivating factor for me. I’ve had enough sex. I partied hard in San Francisco, Paris, and New York. By the time I got to LA, I was exhausted, sexed out, ready to hang up my vibrator and look into multiple cat ownership. And I was so tired of faking orgasms which started from the time I realized men couldn’t get the job done in under the three minutes it took them to have their own. And that they needed reassurance they had given me one as if it was part of the intercourse job description found in a 1996 Cosmo they picked up in a doctor’s office. How relieved were women everywhere when Sally imitates a fake orgasm — in public — for Harry in When Harry Met Sally? It’s easy to fake orgasms because men can’t tell the difference. A man will claim he can but he can’t. Play a version of the shell game with three audio female orgasms and a man will lose no matter how many times he plays. But a woman will always pick out the fake one. It’s our gift to the planet.

If only there were other parts of sex I could fake. Like oral. Oh sure, you’re that one woman who loves doing it but you’re lying to make me feel bad. But I don’t feel bad. I feel bad for you because while during intercourse a man brings that event to a quick conclusion, during oral he is trying to remember the names of all the Army men he had growing up. And his hateful parents bought him bags of a hundred every Christmas until his first divorce. Let’s face it; we do oral because we want reciprocation. That dream dies early for most of us because men do it for reciprocation as well but women, in our never-ending desire to make everyone happy, continue to do it after men have stopped. It isn’t called blow fun, blow shopping, or even blow chocolate. It’s followed by that odious of all words: job. With no salary, unreasonable hours, and no paid holidays.

Recently I was at a Divorce party and spotted a guy who appeared attractive from across the room. His opening line was that he was a dentist who had been rejected from medical school. And even though people hate dentists because they can scrape through to the medulla oblongata via your molars, I saw free dental work in my future.

I wanted to be attracted to him. He had traveled extensively, read prodigiously, scuba dived remarkably, played piano exquisitely, and had more adverbs attached to his accomplishments than Leonardo da Vinci. This was not the guy who would take you to El Pollo Loco even if his car ran out of gas as he was driving across their parking lot and he hadn’t eaten in three weeks.

He was tall and balding and his body was soft whereas I had the body of an Olympian if you squinted from across a room or might be losing your eyesight. And as much as I knew that he was the type of man I would like to be attracted to, I knew I couldn’t have sex with someone with whom there was no click, that elusive, indescribable moment when you both recognize the inevitability of sex.

And then he mentioned his wife. Current wife. At a DIVORCE party.

“My wife has Mad Cow disease.” Okay, I was going to walk away after he mentioned his wife, but Mad Cow? I was all in.

“Don’t look so horrified; it wasn’t from eating meat,” he added.

“Well if it wasn’t from meat, how did she get it?”

“They’re not sure.”

“Is it…?”

“Contagious? I don’t think so, she’s been dying for four years, and I don’t have it.”

“How many years does it take to die from Mad Cow?” I asked.

“About seven to eight.”

“Does she recognize you?”

“It’s not Alzheimer’s,” he huffed, as if he was, after the American Medical Association, the big expert on incurable diseases, “but she does wear diapers, so they have that in common.”

“It must be awful to watch someone you love die.”

“I’m over it. I’m ready to get on with my life if you know what I mean.”

Good grief, he was cruising for the future Mrs. Mad Cow Dentist.

Maybe it’s time to look at other teams in the league.

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