Playboy Club

It's a myth that celebrities are interesting. My definition of torture would be to share laundry day with Jennifer Aniston, or Thanksgiving with Michael Moore. I'd have to bring my own doggy bag to that gig, given Mr Moore's evident appetite.

Everyday people have the best stories, because they're not imbued with ego. Tonight, for example, I was chatting to a woman with whom I have been acquainted for a while. For no apparent reason, she decided to tell me her life story, almost the least of which was that she had been a Playboy Bunny.

I'm not certain if 'Bunny' should be capitalized. On reflection, it should.

Gloria Steinem famously went undercover as a Bunny, where she discovered that cocktailing is hard work with false ears or without. My friend Lisa remembered her time there as a great way to learn the bar trade while making gigunda tips. She laughed recalling her big, black Bunny Mother who turned her modest bosom into something more, and taught her how to carry trays of drinks while tottering on five inch heels.

Which reinforces how Steinem's self-serving tale is nothing compared to real life. The celebrity culture has a way of making a point about our lives through the lives of the famous. But to my mind there is often no point to be made. Life is its own reward.

Trophy Wife

A Trophy Wife is:

A. A hunting memento one stuffs and mounts above the mantlepiece.

B. A shiny, hard-won thing that requires constant attention lest the silver fades.

C. The result of excess money and delusions of one's physical attractiveness.

The answer of course is:

D. Your divorce attorney's new boat.

By definition no-one ever marries their trophy wife first, a large oversight to be avoided if at all possible. Once a guy has made a few dollars, he often starts to believe in his own publicity, which is to say that he forgets his responsibilities to existing wife and family, and tries to remake himself in the mold of someone like Michael Douglas.

We all know where that path leads - plastic surgeries between endless rounds of golf.

So why do men with money, status and power seek to express themselves by marrying much younger and/or attractive women? Do they believe that they will lose twenty years by osmosis? Do trophy wives actually have the keys to the fountain of youth?

Maybe they do.

I am Potent

Speaking of douchebags, Ted Turner's a working example of late twentieth century Alpha man. He's a yo-yo, but he's an Alpha yo-yo which means he gets to do whatever he wants.

One achievement that launched Turner toward Alphadom is his accumulation of a truckload of money. Money is the modern, trousered, way of saying "I'm potent."

Actually, it's the modern, trousered, way of saying "I have a middling-sized and underperforming penis, but women don't care because I have lots of dosh."

Turner's an interesting study of Alphadom because he thinks he can change the world. True to his oddness, he chose the most inefficient way of using his money to do so, by giving $1,000,000,000.00 (that's one billion dollars) to the United Nations. If a more idiotic way of doing good with one's fortune exists, I would like to hear about it. That money all went to pay for third-world kleptocratic thugs' rentals of Upper East Side co-ops and high-class hookers.

Turner is an Alpha, but he's clearly smoking something god-awful that's affecting his brain.

More characteristic of contemporary Alpha men is marriage to a trophy wife. Hanoi Jane Fonda was Turner's third wife. She could be the definition of "trophy" for men of his age and ideology. Guaranteed, Turner still thinks of Fonda as "Barbarella" (pictured) and guaranteed she reprised the role in the marital bedroom. And on the jet. And on the yacht. No wonder she found Christianity - it was the only way to limit Turner's incessant dress-up requests. Pity they divorced over it.

Turner might be the most charming and good-hearted man in the solar system, but I doubt it. He is ostensibly at the top of our society's food chain, yet he is an example to no-one, a model for nothing.

They date horses don't they?

Hay and horse-hair intoxicate some women like little else. It's an addiction that begins early in life, and often remains uncured.

Hello. My name is Charlotte, and I'm an equine addict.

Hello Charlotte.

(And from the back of the room, a muted whinny.)

It's possible to ignore the sexual connotation of a thousand pounds of semi-wild muscled horseflesh between young female thighs, but I shan't. On display for all to see is the pleasure women gain from controlling a beast ten times her weight using nothing but a bit, a bridle, reins, her heels, a crop and of course those thighs. Oh, and of course a little whispered encouragement in the nag's ear.

Sounds like sex to me. Not everyday sex I guess, because regular sex doesn't often entail jumping over planks of wood, but who am I to deny chicks in jodhpurs their fantasies?

You can smell this coming, I know, but dating a horsewoman is a losing proposition. The only exception is if you are either a cowboy, or Ted Turner - and Turner's a douche. For the rest of us, the horse is way too much competition. If you somehow find yourself married to a horsewoman - against all my advice - you end up a pauper paying for this creature to give your wife happiness, satisfaction, and orgasms. Plus she will wash and brush it down after a good session.

When was the last time a chick did that for you?

Alpha Male-doom

If Alpha males are defined as the leaders, where does that leave the rest of us?

Alphadom in primates and humans is about having the most opportunities at reproduction for yourself, and minimizing those of all other males. There is evidence from the chimpanzee world that Alphas are less aggressive in keeping related males away from the babes than they are with unrelated competitors. That tells us it's all about the genetics, passing along as much of your DNA as possible, as well as the very similar DNA of your brothers and cousins.

In short, Alphas are Alphas because they want, and get, more babies.

In our world matters are more subtle. The reason we aren't like the chimps is because we have complex language. That has, in turn (or coincidentally, depending upon who you read) allowed us to stop being foragers and settle in increasingly abstract communities, starting with multiple family groups, and ending with Calcutta.

Important point: the reason we can live in cities without the Alphas taking us back to the law of the jungle is because language allows males to work together for the good of the society. One way of imagining this is to think of chimps as having a really steep sex-power gradient between the most powerful Alpha and the lowliest male. In human co-operative societies, that gradient is significantly flattened; the lowest male still has a decent shot at reproduction, and won't likely be cock-blocked by the local Alpha.

So in western societies in particular, we're all Alphas now if you define your 'world' closely enough. In a family of man, woman, and immature children, the identity of the Alpha male is obvious. But how useful is it for this regular guy to think and behave like the biologically defined Alpha?

I contend it's time for a new paradigm, a new way for guys to be Alpha-ish without the conflict and aggression of the animal Alpha that lives in our DNA. I think it can be done.

Men's Riskers

One of many quirks of male thinking (with which I am all too familiar) is our ability to ignore stuff. History is full of famous men who ignored the facts right in front of them and continued to a certain doom. There are famous explorers, like Robert Falcon Scott; famous military figures such as the Japanese hierarchy in World War II; and famous writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn survived, but might easily have not, given the time he spent detained at the Soviet state's pleasure.

In a way, the history of civilization is defined by men who ignored the obvious to the possible detriment of their own life. From the first migration of our species from Africa to Asia 50,000 years ago to the folks who fly the deathtrap Space Shuttle, I suggest that this characteristic of facing the unknown, of taking on danger and embracing risk is embedded in our Brain Operating System, of which I wrote earlier.

The men (and, increasingly, women) who do so are working towards something more than survival and reproduction. Or is it that survival and reproduction actually require us to take risks, even those that might kill us?

We need not look to figures from the past for examples of this, because there's likely not a man you know who doesn't ignore some things. The guy who is a chronic drinker and driver ignores obvious dangers. The man who has indiscriminate unprotected anal sex with many men isn't being rational. The guy who borrows tens of multiples of his net worth to speculate has a relationship with risk (possibly) counter to his long-term liquidity. And yet these activities happen every day, in every way.

I explain the male ignoring mechanism in terms of my compartmentalization theory. Imagine the male mind as a big co-op building, full of floors of apartments of varying size. What we do unconsciously is to simply avoid certain floors. When we are driven to Antarctic exploration, or deadly military action, men prevent the lift stopping at the floors with the apartments containing the facts pointing to likely failure. We block the staircase, and lock the access doors.

Once the downside is quarantined we move to the floor with the apartment containing 'optimism' and 'success despite facts' and 'triumph over adversity'. That's where we can see the light and find positivity to reinforce our blinkered thinking. It will also be the scene of our greatest success overcoming the odds, or the place where failure will make us miserable.

In relationships this is deadly, as you might imagine.

How to think

I don't know about you, but nobody ever taught me how to think. Inside all of our heads is a brain, a squishy weird thing that we only vaguely understand. Sure, it's an electro-chemical device, with different kinds of receptors and processing units. But how it makes decisions is a complete mystery.

I want to propose the concept of our brains having an operating system, similar to the way a computer works. Thousands of lines of code create the pathways for information processing and a method by which external inputs are filtered, distributed and manipulated.

This Brain Operating System came fully installed at birth, but not fully activated. It takes at least ten, and sometimes twenty years for all the modules to work as they should. Importantly, experiences in the world are critical to accessing the full power of the organ/operating system combination. Learning, in other words.

So while experiences, book learning and handed-down wisdom are all part of bringing the immature brain up to full steam, there is little thought as to how to use the operating system once it's up and working. Just like our computer's OS, our BOS can be used in many ways. Knowing how to find these capabilities should be on every school's curriculum, but apparently learning to use condoms and watching "An Inconvenient Truth" is deemed more important.

There are built-in flaws, bugs, idiosyncrasies and even vast unused capabilities in the BOS, and understanding their existence is equally important. I want to focus on these in future posts.

So the question remains, why is there no formal training for even the most basic functions for which we use our brains every day: what we eat, whether we smile or frown, how we choose friends, with whom we have sex.

For example, did anyone give you a good template for making decisions? Have you ever been taught to notice when your brain is ignoring things to which you should be paying attention? Do you know when your brain is using emotions to fool you into a course of action counter to your well-being? Can you recognize when your thinking is taking you in the wrong direction?

Perhaps I am the only one not completely in control of my brain. But I doubt it.

Man versus Machine

Where to start, where to start....okay, let's try this.

When a man starts going steady with a woman, he often dumps his buddies. It's a given that he'll go away for a while to concentrate on her, leaving the guys to note something like :

"Haven't seen Brad for a while."

"Yeah, he's found a new squeeze."

These revelations are met with general assent in the form of knowing nods and grunted agreement. It's an understood flow in the tides of male life.

As a sidebar, this is more evidence that men are single processors. 'Early relationship' requires concentration and singular purpose, and being with guys chews up valuable time and energy. Plus it's distracting. End sidebar.

Why is this the case? Even if the guy is seeing the chick only once or twice a week, he checks out of his male relationships, despite oodles of time to maintain them. And doesn't he want to boast about the new piece of tail in his life?

My amateur/observer response is that we should look at Brad as a reproductive machine, not as the good-guy friend. Because we don't divide to reproduce (a very good thing, given that one Paris, and one Perez Hilton is quite enough, thank-you) we have to find a partner with whom to have sex. If our hero has latched onto the potential bearer of mini-Brads, it makes pure biological sense that he'll want to spend time cultivating (and harvesting) those randy oats.

A more subtle reason might be that Brad is keeping the other males away from a reproductively-minded female. Why give other ball-sporters the chance of gaining vital intelligence about someone who might be interested in someone's progeny other than Brad's? I think that question answers itself.

Priorities, that's what that's all about. First reproduce, then drink beer.






If you haven't read Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I recommend you do so to understand just how innate this drive to fuck and spawn is. It exists at the protein level.

Male Universe - or Universes

The question Doc Annie asked is:

When men DO put women at the center of their universe, why does it not appear that way to women?

I think - and am soliciting ideas from other guys here - that the answer lies in the way I, and other men, compartmentalize our lives in our heads.

We have the work compartment, the recreation compartment, the obligation to family compartment, our buddy compartment and so on. Wives, girlfriends and lovers fall into the sex and romance compartment, which has a possible common door with the family compartment.

Difficulties arise because as men, we can only be in one compartment at once.

If we are in the 'watching sports on television' compartment, that's where we are. Moving from there to the 'being attentive to my girlfriend' compartment requires us to get up off the couch, turn off the teev, put the dishes in the dishwasher, grab our jacket, walk out of the compartment, lock the door, walk along the hallway, locate the 'being attentive to girlfriend' door, find the key, let ourselves in, go to the kitchen, smell the air, look in the fridge, wonder how the game is progressing....and then see about being attentive to our girlfriend.

It's all about the unchangeable fact that I, we, can only think about one thing at a time. It's a limitation, right there in the handbook "Men: Your Operating Guidebook".

Here's a way for women to think about it. Men's minds are like a multi-story apartment building, with many levels, and many apartments. Each apartment is an abstract 'compartment' in our mind. Crucial to understanding this (sorry to belabour the point) is that we are only occupying one apartment at a time.

Now for the critical idea: because we are landlords overseeing a whole bunch of apartments, there is no unification of them. We cannot amalgamate all of these separate parts of our mental multi-story into one. All the walls are load bearing, so knocking one down creates problems for us processing stuff. It's like a clash of disparate universes; Lord knows how matter from one will react with another. Nuclear meltdown is entirely possible. For an example, see the previous post.

So when we say "You're the centre of my universe" what we mean is that you are at the centre of the "girlfriend/sex/romance" universe, not the one universe that is a woman's mind.

Women (again, I think) have minds like one of those atrium-style hotels with a big, big internal space into which all the rooms or apartments face. Y'all can have one centre of it all, with all the constituent parts (apartments) working together to create and view the shiny disco ball out there in the atrium. Onc centre, one focus.

Men have a building with corridors, hallways and back passages, linking many apartments, with no way of (easily) combining them into a whole.

That's the difference. And that's why when men say a woman is the centre of their universe, it doesn't mean the same thing. We're talking about two different and separate universes.

Even Einstein would be confused.

The Last to Know

Earlier this week a friend told me about two male acquaintances of his. They both had the same experience of finding out their marriages were over.

The men were in their thirties, with young children. They arrived home from work to find their wives sitting at the dining table with a strange man.

"I have something to tell you," the wives said. "This is (the other man's name) and we have been together for eighteen months. Our marriage is over. I'm with (him) now."

One of the guys related that the next time he remembers anything, it was three hours later, and he came to standing in the same place. That sounds like a classic symptom of shock.

I'm not interested in the fact of the infidelities. That is an equal opportunity sex failure. What does interest me is the reactions of both of the cuckolded guys. They (predictably enough) sought solace in booze or drugs or both. One of them didn't turn up for work for three weeks, and when he did, told the boss to Get Fucked. When asked what was up, he burst into tears and spent four hours telling his story.

The other guy went to hard drugs, and took a lot of dead-end jobs. After a few months he left his town, and went to California. My friend hasn't heard of him in ten years.

These are unremarkable tales, sad and dispiriting. Unfortunately they are played out every day, everywhere. So I wonder why men so regularly make the women in their lives the centre of those lives. Because relationships go wrong, having a sense of perspective about onesself and the people in one's life is an important skill. Shit happens. Finding a way to understand and deal with the bad days is an art foreign to many men, including me.

We're supposed to be the strong sex, but I think not. What we are is the delusional sex, often living in a bubble of make-happy of our own creation. The world can be cruel, and having a way to deal with that without drowning ourselves in whisky or dope or sex would be a big step forward.

Men, facades and talking

The fact is that men can be divided into two groups: the men who talk, and the men who mask.

The men who mask form the majority. They are facadists, suppressing the real person behind by creating a false front which the public sees. I know these men exist because they are pretty much impossible for me to talk to, and they contrast so completely with non-facadist men. They could almost be another species.

If you don't like the word 'facade', we can use the word 'cloaked'. Cloaked men hide beneath bulky filler-type stereotype male junk that passes for manliness. That means sports, talking down their intellect, and almost always expressing themselves in cliches.

Not making waves appears to be their only goal.

Men not shackled by the need to stay below the radar - the non-facadists - stand out like the proverbial dogs' balls. I have known a few such gentlemen, and with the perspective of time, wonder why we aren't all like them.

Their defining characteristic is an ability to be themselves, and men, and communicators. They talk, and they listen, and they can synthesize abstracts. These skills almost guarantee success in life.

Just why is it that the majority of guys so easily fall into the role of 'guy' and not 'communicator'?

Female Orgasm

A rabbi, a priest and an imam walk into a bar.

The bartender says "Do you guys know the one about the female orgasm?" to which the rabbi replies "Do you mean the oral orgasm, the vaginal intercourse orgasm, the digital orgasm or the anal penetrative orgasm?"


Apparently even religious men are aware that The Big O is something that women achieve in different ways. It's kinda disappointing when squares are hip to the squishy stuff: what can we shock them with next? Perhaps there is nothing, so it might be time to examine what we have in more detail.

For instance, more than 40% of women do not climax from vaginal intercourse. One imagines this is a source of trepidation for some men, specifically those for whom the clitoris is an unknown entity. Fear not, chums, talk to your friendly clitoris owner and ask what she likes. Then practice. You'll be suprised what happiness you can bring.

One problem with the female orgasm I have experienced is having women describe it to me. Observing is one thing, but communicating what's happening inside your head clearly isn't easy.

I thought of flippantly suggesting that women could tell her man the type of automobile that most closely represented her orgasm. This might work because cars are something we guys understand, with great nuance even.

But then I realized that telling a man he'd just given you an '87 Nissan Sentra might not be the best idea - even if you think a high-revving, clutch-slipping, noisy, jack-rabbitting, multi-geared, spring-popping, wave-riding, skidding to a stop orgasm/Nissan is the best thing EVER.





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Higher Purpose

In this week of July 233 years ago the British Army arrived on Staten Island. It was the beginning of a build-up of force that would see George Washington and the Continental Army turfed out of New York by the end of November.



The painting depicts the Battle of Long Island.

If the history of the United States' independence has a common thread, it is that so many of the fighting men believed they were there for something greater than themselves.

Membership of Washington's corps "...lead to...low pay, often rotten food, hard work, cold, heat, poor clothing and shelter, harsh discipline, and a high chance of becoming a casualty."

On Long Island and in Brooklyn in the summer of 1776 those men had no idea how bad matters would become before they improved. Years of fighting would pass before the promise of the Declaration was made real, yet they persevered despite the privations, the hardship and the death.

They saw something bigger.

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Let's Debate About It

There is a difference between argument and debate that splits them neatly down the middle. Argument is a debate using emotions, and a debate is an argument using facts.

Important to note is that both argument and debate can be passionate, but only in an argument does a passionfruit get thrown. That's emotion getting to someone.

Sometimes a debate begins as a debate, and degenerates into an argument. Someone forgot they were supposed to leave their emotions outside, and then allowed them in, like a dog being let in from the rain.

Likewise, arguments can begin with emotion and end with fact, but it's a rare trick. I think that would be called dispassionate, and probably means there are neither dogs nor fruit present.

Beginners at this game often have difficulty distinguishing between a debate and an argument. A rough rule of thumb is that whomever is arguing will shout - or at least raise their voice - and whomever is debating will remain steady of voice, or even lower the volume.

The reason I raise this is because everyone needs to know in which activity they are engaged. If you're in an argument, you can't debate and expect a satisfactory outcome, and if you're in a debate and start arguing, you'll look silly.

Just ask me.

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Less Obvious

As a kid, one of my favourite pastimes was lying on a blanket on a clear night, staring at the stars. In the unpolluted skies of the southern hemisphere, it seemed like the whole universe was right there for you, like an untouchable gift.

Once your eyes have accommodated to the low light, more and more becomes visible. The best game was to play 'spot the satellite'. Complicated, this is not. The idea is to find and point out as many satellites - dots of moving light - as possible. This provided hours of amusement, especially if it delayed bed-time.

Like many simple games, this one has a trick. The way to identify a moving object in field of stationary objects is to not look directly at it, but a few degrees to one side. It's counterintuitive to start, but once you get the hang of it, spotting the satellite gets way more fun.

I don't know why, but I think this works in life, too. Shift your gaze a few degrees either side of whatever's on your mind, and you might see it more clearly.


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