I was out over the weekend and a woman asked me to come home with her.
There’s a theory that scarcity makes sex more desirable. The harder a person is to attain the more we yearn to possess them. We catch glimpses of what their sex might be like; the smell of warm skin on the first hot night of the year, the darkening shadow in the space between the breast and bra, the teasing line tossed out without thought for the strained urges it might inspire.
I don’t believe in it. Having sex is not an achievement. Finding someone you’re attracted to feels good, but it doesn’t make you a better person. I tend to lose interest in people when they present themselves as unattainable. (That line is probably eliciting groans from a few friends who, having followed along the underbelly of my romantic life for the last few years, would argue that the opposite is true.)
Conspicuous consumption has become intuition for many of us. I grew up watching my brother feed his belts through the label on his jeans so that everyone could see he was wearing Calvin Klein’s. Value is created on the supply side. We can be made to want something because the label tells us it’s something worth wanting. Few could tell the difference in the fabric, threading, cut, and dye, but we let the label assure us that the jeans are worth $150. It’s an act of faith or self-perpetuating intuition.
In the same way, an unattractive man in a shabby suit might suddenly become intriguing if he walks into a bar with a beautiful woman. Or the woman might become dramatically more desirable because of make-up, body type, or a style of dress that mimics something upwardly mobile. We want people to believe that we’re better than them to bait their pursuit, which blots out our own insecurities for a moment or two.
But so there I was, drunk and talking to a woman running her index finger along the small of my back and suggesting I crash at her place instead of trudging 30 blocks uptown. I knew from the minute I saw her that I didn’t want to sleep with her. She was pretty, had a nice body, and was personable. I also felt that our personalities were at loggerheads. There was no sexual grist, no foreboding. Like her sense of humor, everything about her seemed earnest and deliberate. We would have bad physical chemistry.
She could have been as aloof and unattainable as she pleased, I wouldn’t have felt any greater need to be with her.
When the proposition came I had to reconsider everything. The fact that she was so forthright and deliberate about stating what she wanted made her more attractive. Her attainability was an aphrodisiac. I didn’t feel any more or less attracted to her physically, but I felt more willing to take a gamble. I didn’t especially want her but knowing that she wanted me made me wonder if I hadn’t overlooked something. For a few minutes I was more attracted to her than I would otherwise have been.
I didn’t go home with her. It was late, I was tired, I felt nauseous from too much booze, and I knew, from past experience, that things generally go poorly when I jump into sex with someone without an animal yearning. But I was dangling by a thread for a few minutes, a sex deer in the come-on headlights.
Previous Posts:
Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?
Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars
Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor
Date Machine: Long Distance Lovers
Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman