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Is there a difference between urban sex and rural? As a city girl who fell in love with a Vermonter, I have had plenty of slow country  afternoons to ruminate on this. For starters, I've noticed that despite ample opportunity to commune with nature, my own fantasies still involve no setting that might remotely be called bucolic: the idea of running naked through a field of wildflowers evokes nothing more than the old Breck commercial. In fact, country knowledge has injected only realism into that image: I now know that such fields contain thistles.
I've wondered, has lifelong urbanity stripped the pastoral from my prurient imagination? Or the opposite: Might I have fantasized that running-through-the-field thing if I were a Madison Avenue ad man in thin-soled Italian shoes who had never set foot out of Manhattan, instead of a semi-transplant in clodhoppers who regularly hops through clods?
The history books -- at least the good ones -- tell tales of widely divergent sexual behavior in city and country. Cities, with their lavish wealth and desperate poverty, commerce, art and throngs of thrill-seeking migrants, have always been cauldrons of sexual freedom and sexual danger; experimentation and exploitation; feminism, fetishes and free love; sexual theater and therapy; promiscuity and prostitution.
Country hamlets, meanwhile, have done their best to keep errant eros in check, under the surveillance of family, Church and busybody neighbors. Nevertheless, the rube has always had plenty of space to pursue his pleasures. (See Bruegel's "Harvesters,") splayed for posterity on the  golden ground after long labor, their wineskins drained and bodice and codpiece laces dangling.)
In the late 1940s, Alfred Kinsey found that "farm boys" did it less than "city boys," either alone or with others, before or during marriage. And rural guys hardly ever got it on with other rural guys, except for some "virile, physically active" and sexually omnivorous Wild West types: "ranchmen, cattlemen, prospectors [and] lumbermen," as the good doctor catalogued them.
Later research on sexual attitudes has confirmed what St. Augustine suggested when describing his own temptations in the Confessions: sooty city air dirties the mind. Or maybe the dirty-minded seek out polluted environments. In any case, the bigger the town, the more sexually liberal its inhabitants. Residence is also related to religiosity -- country people go to church more, maybe because there's no place to go to brunch. And even among the pious, geography and sexual attitude are linked. Fundamentalist Protestants, traditional small-towners, are the tightest-laced; Jews, the most metropolitan, are the loosest.
However . . .
It is a rule of social science that attitudes have little relation to behavior. And a rule of reality that real life rarely conforms to statistics. Thus, I offer my thoroughly unscientific impressions on the mating habits of the city mouse, the country mouse and the migrating mouse (me).
Courtship Rituals
What depressed me most when I came to Bovinia (which is what I shall call my rural Vermont village) was the parties. Even stoned, nobody flirted. I have educed a couple of reasons for this:
1. Demographics. They're all related, or practically. "To me, what's exciting and sexy is different people from different places mixing it  up," said my friend Lindsay, thirtyish and a native Bovinian. "Here, everybody knows my mother."
2. Fashion. They're all dressed in Eddie Bauer turtlenecks, even in summer. "The right people, the right music," Lindsay continued, describing her idea of sexy, "and a leather miniskirt." We agreed: a leather miniskirt on Main Street might earn you a summons.
Still, Lindsay has more dates than anyone I know in the city. Perhaps this is because she is pretty, witty, athletic and capable of drinking any guy under the table. Of course these characteristics describe at least 1.5 million single New York women of my acquaintance. Singles don't stay single long in Bovinia, either: I've noticed that divorcees there are remarried within eighteen months. Which leads me to the less obvious boons to country coupling:
1. Meteorology. One Vermont winter alone in the bed is enough.
2. Demographics, again. Scarcity has a way of focusing the libido wonderfully, while plenty inspires insatiable perfectionism. Thus, as all isolated urban singles know, a large population does not a full datebook, or a committed relationship, encourage.
Unless you're Cindy Crawford, the guy drinking a mocha at the Times Square Starbucks does not seek conversation with you. And now that everybody freelances, telecommutes or stays home pretending to be busy, the urban dating situation has gotten worse. A friend said she thought she'd have a better chance of meeting a man if she left her apartment. In Bovinia, where there is no crowd, one cannot hide in it; and where there is no Chinese food delivery, staying home too long can lead to starvation.
Family Values
Family values are best practiced in families. And since unattached people are more likely to be found in cities, and just about everyone in the  country seems to be coupled, one might assume that marital fidelity is more common in the heartland. Conservative attitudes, as I mentioned above, are held dearer in Smalltown, USA than in Sodom on the Hudson. Country people say, hands down, that infidelity is wrong. But are they more faithful than city people?
Opportunity for straying surely increases with the number of dark bars in a locale -- Hong Kong, Lisbon and Chicago are excellent cheating cities -- and diminishes with the number of close friends and relatives seated at those bars (see Courtship Rituals, above). When a certain woman ran her fingers through the thinning hair of a certain man (not her husband) at Bovinia's only cafe one evening, all his wife's friends saw it, in short order his wife knew it, and the rest (though not the marriage, as it turned out) was history.
If social opprobrium doesn't discourage infidelity in cities, having children might. Talk about parties where no one flirts! There may be nothing like a ten-dollar-an-hour babysitter waiting at home to dampen a potential homewrecker's chance of luring half a couple to the back bedroom.
Now, rural folks have plenty of kids too (according to NARAL, you cannot get an abortion in 85 percent of American counties). But maybe their kids don't require so much looking after.
Let me put it this way. I once soaked up, along with four or five Jack Daniels, the sweet tales of a long-distance trucker in a cowboy bar in  western Minnesota, and presently followed him to his pickup, where we did our uncomfortable duty on the front seat ("Did you make it?" he asked afterward. I didn't). As he drove me to where I was staying, I inquired about his marital status. He said he was "not exactly" married. I left my green sweater in the truck. The next day, Sunday, my host directed me to the guy's house to recover my property. The instant I drove up, my erstwhile swain lurched through the screen door, hung over and prattling nervously about his wife's imminent return from church. "I was just going to say," I said in the deadest deadpan I could deliver, surveying the toy-littered front lawn. "For a single man, you have a lot of tricycles."
I drove off in my Toyota, the radio evangelists shouting hallelujahs.
Audience Participation
Exhibitionism and voyeurism, the inversions of intimacy, can be mere peccadilloes in the city, but in the country they're viewed almost exclusively as pathology. And if flagrant flirtation requires a measure of strangeness, public sex requires anonymity, which, unless you have a lot of time to travel, means you must live in a densely populated area.
A neighbor of ours in Bovinia suffered arrest and no small shaming for touching his clothed genitals while gazing at the sandaled feet of young women at the public library. His problem might simply have been a dearth of appropriate locales. Without taxicabs, gyms, public toilets or skyscrapers with wide windows, he was forced to satisfy himself under the nose of Marian, Madame librarian!
Of course, enterprising exhibitionists get a lot more buck for the bang in Bovinia. Indeed, a major frustration of the New York sexual show-off must be the unshockability of the city's bourgeoisie. One Sunday morning a Manhattan father stepped out onto his stoop with his four-year-old son. "Daddy, how come that lady is holding that man's penis?" queried little Max. Daddy looked across the street and observed a tryst in progress. It was winter. "Because his penis is cold, sweetie," he said. "Oh," said Max, as they trundled off to get the bagels.
Queer Theory
If you're a gay man, you move to the city. That's what the recent nationwide "Social Organization of Sexuality" study found. If you're a lesbian, you move to a rural wimmin's commune or nest with your honey in the woods, plant a garden and stock up on outdoor sporting gear. That's what I've found. Unless, of course, you are a lipstick lesbian like my working-class sephardic Jewish Londoner friend who moved north to live with her girlfriend and started a support group called Women Who Love  Women Who Love Vermont Too Much. All members of this group have subsequently returned to the city, sans country lovers.
Birds & Bees
Larry McMurtry, writing about East Texas in the 1950s, claimed that horny teenage boys were wont to satisfy their urges with a heifer, rather than weather the social complications of romancing a human female. McMurtry's anecdote was substantiated by Kinsey, 17 percent of whose farm boys had enjoyed "complete sexual relations" with a partner of another species.
Maybe the recent relaxation of the double standard has changed all this. To my knowledge, anyway, livestock-fucking is not widely practiced in Bovinia. Farmers frequently have occasion to reach an arm into a cow's vagina to insert a lozenge of bull sperm or pull out a calf. And though these operations resemble nothing more than fist-fucking, the inserters do not appear to regard it as sexual, or even enjoyable. Generally, dairymen relate to their stock with a solemn utilitarianism that precludes affection, not to mention lust.
Yet, among urbanites, bestiality remains a perennial subject of fetish and humor. Lenny Bruce riffed on fucking a chicken, Woody Allen on deer and sheep. Nancy Friday, in My Secret Garden, revealed a decidedly citified bent when she named her section on bestiality fantasies "The Zoo," and not "The Jungle," or even "The Barnyard." And Andres Serrano infamously photographed a woman tenderly touching a horse's penis.
What does this tell us about urban and rural sexuality? It tells me that wherever you live, the familiar is less exciting than the unknown, and the most desirable object of desire -- whether Michelle Pfeiffer or Michelle the heifer -- is always the least attainable. Country folk know the moodiness and morning breath of a real goat as intimately as you know your partner's, so they wouldn't bother. For a Bovinian, true transgression is a leather skirt on a human flank at midday on Main Street. Conversely, big-city dwellers are so habituated to sinewy bodies encased in tight animal skins that Catwoman herself wouldn't turn a head on a rush-hour A train.
The Eye of the Beholder
Beauty is in it. And in the country, it is not necessarily measured by size. A woman in Bovinia does not feel she has to lose ten pounds before saying hi to a man. Indeed, so laissez-faire is the citizenry on this matter that a feminine condition prevails which my partner calls "Bovinia butt." And yet a predominantly urban beauty prejudice -- the superiority of thinness -- may be making its way into rural America:
Q: Why do they have Astroturf in the football stadiums in North Dakota?
A: To keep the cheerleaders from grazing.
From this joke, heard in Montana, it's hard to tell which is held in deepest disdain: hefty women, cows or synthetic turf.
Crossover Dreams
Finally, it is my informed bicultural opinion that the urban transplant's "contribution" to rural sex -- the small "romantic" inn, typically a renovated Victorian house decorated in calico and redolent of cinnamon -- is of dubious erotic value. I defy you to come up with a more stultifyingly domesticated, erotically numbing combination of words than bed and breakfast.
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For more Judith Levine, read:
Kitty Porn
Crack Addiction
Randy Rubes and Lusty Lawyers
©1998 Judith Levine and hooksexup.com
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