Hookers ‘N’ Things–Men’s Sexual Playthings After Their Pull-By Date

Bob X, a legislator from a large Western State had long passed his sexual pull-by date. Neither his sexual interest nor ability had gone, only that male allure that had made him so attractive to women for so many years. He was at the beginning of a period of enforced geriatric abstinence. 

“Have you thought of an alternative?”, asked his physician when Bob lamented his sexual fate. 

“More like flypaper”, said an angry female legislative assistant about his attractiveness. She, unlike Bob, had no luck with either men or women.  There was something particularly repulsive about a man who could so easily charm women.  What was so special about him, she wondered? He was not particularly handsome, had no pedigree or sharp clothes, and certainly no long-term prospects.  He had spent years as a minor figure in the legislature, content to serve his time and his constituents, and take advantage of the perks of office.

State government was the minor leagues.  Some found it a privilege and honor, others a stepping stone, and still others like Bob, a decent sinecure.  So, despite his diffidence and lack of political ambition, every Betty Lou, Jennifer, and even LaShonda wanted his company; and this is what incensed the aide.  Here she was, desperate for attention, not bad looking, a good body, and willing to please but with nothing to show for it while Bob was sleeping with ever woman from Edmunds to Sioux City.

Bob’s state was one of the most progressive in the region, and the legislature was as liberal as any, so when Bob decided to try diversity with LaShonda Robinson, a black woman on a colleague’s administrative staff, his dalliance was overlooked because of its mature racial intent. 

LaShonda was nothing in particular – a big, high-shelved woman without intrigue – more wrestling and little curiosity – but she was as good a place to start across the color line.  The affair was incidental.  He was hoping for some drama – pimp pulling up in tricked out Rolls, fedora, ermine fur – but  she was only a red dirt farmer’s girl who had made it to government through diction, hard work, and persistence.  So the affair went as it came – without fanfare or notice, some burnishing of his progressive credentials but little more.

In any case, LaShonda was but one of Bob’s many adventures, so many in fact that they defined him more than his service to the people of his state, his long marriage, or his support of good causes.  He was one of those men whose modesty and self-deprecation were attractive in their own right.  He had no poetry, and no piece of legislation carried his name. His work was secondary to his other pursuits, and it was only much later that he gave accomplishment a second thought.  Yet la dolce vita had been a good enough marker in an otherwise ordinary life.

So when he came up hard and fast on his pull-by date, that inexorably final moment when he felt sexually discarded, one more of life’s supernumeraries not quite ready for the trash heap but close enough to smell the smoke, he decided that he had to act; and so it was that he lamented his fate to his internist who, surprisingly but not entirely out of character, suggested a commercial solution.

Dr. Sherman was a man like Bob, a mensch, Jewish boy made good, up from the frizzy-haired princesses of Far Rockaway to his blonde trophy wife and five-star medical practice.  A man of practical advice and patience for the timid among his patients.  Lines formed for appointments with him because he showed understanding along with professionalism.  Women were quite willing to leave their wedding rings at the reception desk, but Sherman was too ethical and professional a doctor to even consider such overtures; and besides, he had had no fewer lovers and assignations than Bob, and life was full enough without Chevy Chase matrons to add to the mix.

“Seriously”, said Sherman.  “Have you considered the alternative?”, meaning of course not street-walkers but the high-priced call girls of his capital city’s K Street.  Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, was caught in flagrante delicto in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel with one of Washington’s premiere ladies.   When challenged about his infidelity, he said that he didn’t have the time for a prolonged affair; and in this new world of virtuality, what was wrong with a woman at the top of her game, able to create brilliant fantasies? 

 “Men don’t pay prostitutes for sex”, the Phillip Roth character Faunia Farley explains to elderly Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, “they pay them to leave”; and so it was for Spitzer.

“The days of AIDS are over”, Sherman went on, “and besides at your age you’ll die of something else.”  

The doctor’s jolly irony covered for what might or might not have been a legitimate prescription – such a respected physician could not possibly suggest something so abhorrent to the MeToo generation of the day let alone its illegality, and not to mention its public health concerns; but Bob took it to heart.  

The doctor reminded him of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Lothario and former French presidential candidate who, when caught in a naked, drunken orgy and accused of soliciting prostitutes for the affair said, “How did I know they were prostitutes.  All women look the same with their clothes off”.  Sex was a normal human expression, and the only tragedy was that God created men with a lifelong sexual interest in women only to force them to close up shop after only a few decades. 

So Bob decided to do it, and only the unfamiliar procedures of procurement stood in his way; but a few well-placed phone calls did the trick and soon he was plugged into the Northwest’s biggest and most reputable agency for women. Choosing from a cornucopia of offers, from blonde to brunette to a thousand other combinations and permutations, was at first a challenge – old age had not only compromised his sexual proficiency but left him far behind electronically – but he finally settled on a Marilyn Monroe lookalike.  Studied and hackneyed, he knew, but who was there to judge? The world of commercial assignations, he was finding out. was like his children’s virtual reality.

Accommodations, said the agency, would be as generous as that for Governor Spitzer, and privacy and security guaranteed. No one in the Washington, Oregon, or Idaho legislatures had been found out, nor would they ever be.

A December-May affair is the holy grail for all men.  Sex with a younger woman is like an elixir, the fountain of youth, a delightful, unexpected gift under the Christmas tree.  The soft skin, pliant body, full lips, sweet breath, and longing eyes of a beautiful young woman will evermore be the be-all and end-all of a man’s life. And if such delights no longer come naturally, then what was wrong with buying them?  It amounted to the same thing, the same inexplicable, undeniable pleasure of young sex – who really kept a tally of the woman’s pedigree?

And so Bob X began his second coming, was as virile as a satyr, and as happy as a clam.  What had been a long look down a dark tunnel with fading light at the end was now sweetness and light. 

That Christmas Bob gave Dr. Sherman a case of single malt and a  box of Cuban puros.  His only wish was that the two of them could go to Havana together. 

A Little On The Side–Men’s Birthright From White House To Walmart

Men have always had a little on the side – everything from hookers to arm candy to escape the humdrum of the same bed, the same woman, and the same, dutiful, ordinary sex.

Women have always put up with men’s meanderings – it comes with the territory of a good provider – and despite the hi-octane fury of a woman scorned, nothing much ever has come of it. 

Abject apologies, diaphanous explanations and promises have been enough.  Women are simply happy that their man comes home.

Of course the seas of men’s dalliances have become choppy of late.  Women are willing to put up with less; but a good marriage is simply good accounting.  It makes no sense to give up on sound investment.  Suspension of disbelief is the meme, and lipstick stains on the collar notwithstanding, men get a bye. 

Betty Arlen’s girlfriends had told her that ‘diffidence’ – a catch-all phrase that meant men’s faux fatigue, inertia, and ennui– was a warning sign.  A diffident husband in his prime would not settle for indifference, and would get his little bit on the side.

So Betty set out to see if they were right.  Her husband, thank God, would never be so tacky to use the ‘working late at the office’ excuse or the unexpected business trip to Dubuque, so it would take much more sophisticated sleuthing to catch the thief – errant emails, tell-tale scents, unexpected incoherence, a change in timbre or tone – but she would find out sooner or later.

Her husband, however, was not the careful, abstemious type.  He knew that denials made within the context of suspension of disbelief and female sexual fatigue would be enough.  In fact, without the intrigue, the trailing scents, and the left luggage, sexual indiscretion would be no fun – it would, in fact, become the lowest common denominator.  

Let her suspect, Bob Arlen said, all the better; and when she finally did discover a smoking gun, he would admit it without shame.  Yes, he said, but it meant nothing,  It’s you I love.

John Kennedy was the nation’s best example of male sexual tomfoolery.  Jackie knew that he was bedding every young woman from Marilyn Monroe to Slovenian beauty queens, but being First Lady was worth every misstep of her gorgeous husband; and the very fact of concluding a marriage with such a Lothario – getting him in her bed more often than not – was a feather in her cap.  

As importantly, the image of the patient, long-suffering wife of a sexual troubadour was one that suited her.  Who cared for love and romance when no sooner had Jack’s dead body cooled than she went off with Onassis?

Point being that men do their thing and women put up with it as it suits them.  The movie Welcome to New York is Antoine Fuqua’s story of a fictitious Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a womanizer of mythical proportions who, denying the accusation of consorting with prostitutes, famously said, “How did I know they were hookers?  All women look the same with their clothes off”.  

The Strauss-Kahn character in the Fuqua film is an unapologetic sexual adventurer.  He knew quite well that his wife would stick by him despite his well-known sexual libertinage because he was in line for the French Presidency.  Regardless of social position men and women behave in the same, predictable ways.

Henry Kissinger once said that power is the strongest aphrodisiac,  and this doughy, misshapen, gravelly-voiced, overweight Jewish schlub found that he could have any young shiksa that he wanted.  It didn’t take suave Kennedy looks and charm to get women into his bed – only access to the President. 

Although it is much harder for a Walmart clerk to have his cinq-a-sept liaisons, it is still possible and common.  Henry Glennis worked the paint and trim aisles of the store, and Margie Fallon the lingerie and housewares department, and both were in desperately unhappy marriages.  Too many children, too high a mortgage, too clingy in-laws, and too low home sale prices restricted their choices.  A little on the side was about all they could hope for.

They first met in warehouse storerooms, then cheap motels, and finally in her house while her husband, a freight supervisor at Target was called for pro-temp duty in Oklahoma City.  The affair – if you can call it that, so bland and limited as it was – lasted only a few months but while it did, offered the breath of fresh air that both needed.

Nothing is new in these stories, for cheating has been a feature of human society forever.  Clytemnestra, no shrinking violet, was  not one to remain alone and celibate during the long years her husband Agamemnon was at war with the Trojans fought over ‘another man’s wife’.  Her exiled son, Orestes, returns to avenge his mother’s killing of his father, and the incestuous, unholy sexual congress of his mother with another man, and murders her and her lover.  

Agamemnon, of course, freed at least temporarily from a loveless, power-driven marriage, has his way with Cassandra, a Trojan princess and brings her back to Argos as his sex slave.  Of course Clytemnestra is angry, not so much because he sacrificed their daughter for favorable winds to Troy but because of ‘that woman’. 

Everyone in literature has been unfaithful.  Connie Chatterley, Emma Bovary, Hester Prynne are just a few of many hundreds who have cheated on their husbands; and the number of husbands who went astray are innumerable,  Zeus had countless offspring with gods and humans alike.  He was father to Helen of Troy, Apollo, Athena, and countless others.  Polygamy or serial sexual congress was the rule of Olympus and the meme ever since.

So no one should be surprised at the mistresses of Jefferson, Bush I, FDR, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton or even Nixon.  Former President Sarkozy of France kept his mistress in the Elysees, and his predecessor’s mistress, his children by her, and his wife all grieved in unison at his funeral.  Martin Luther King had more illicit sexual encounters that even J. Edgar Hoover could count.

No one however, grieves at the funeral of the Walmart clerks or will grieve at the thousands of graves of serial adulterers.  Male infidelity is par for the course.  A little on the side is not an aberration but a pattern.  Women are catching up, but sexual ‘inconsistency’ is still a man’s thing – and praise be it in this, our current abstemious, censorious, prudish, Puritanical MeToo age.