Just Off Center

Woman is a strange and beautiful animal indeed. Even the world's most devoutly homosexual man should be able to understand why we're such suckers for these enigmatic and lovely creatures. Even if we weren't tied together by the need to reproduce, I still think that men would be utterly bound to the will of women. Perhaps one of the most drawing qualities of "the fairer sex" is their extremely well tuned ability to confuse the living shit out of us. I know many women would say the same of men, but have you ever noticed that women will at least acknowledge how difficult and unpredictable they are?

Men seem to be pretty solid in their stance that we're basically limbic creatures and easily understood. We seek satisfaction of whatever "need" we have and that's about it. We're hungry, aggressive, scared, or horny. Need an example, women? Next time you find your man mad, sad, inattentive, or whatever else just give him a blowjob and see how his mood restabilizes. Of course, that's a bit of an oversimplification. Otherwise we'd still be wearing bearskin suits and dragging our women home by the hair. Modern man has gained nearly full access to that portion of the brain that is responsible for all of those complex emotions; we just haven't read the user's manual. Too many words. But couldn't we all agree that this emotional evolution has been driven, by and large, by women?

Of course I'm sure that it is just that mysterious quality about women that keeps me besting the posted speed limit all the way home every day. If I were single, I'd probably be coming home just so that I can change clothes and head out to a bar/club/library/church to see what chicks I could pick up. They're just amazing and wonderful creatures and I love almost everything about them. But perhaps one of the more mysterious (and annoying) things about women is their reliance on understanding before acceptance. I'll explain.

From my observations, women are constantly trying to figure out the world around them with regards to "why" things happen the way they do. Men, for the most part, seem more interested in the who, what, where and the all-important how. Men have built and destroyed entire nations while women stood in the background pondering why. But those other questions can be much easier to explain for a lot of things. Men aren't quite so driven by understanding why something is before accepting it. Even when we haven't figured out how something works, men can still accept that it does work. Ask a man why a combustion engine works, and he'll most likely tell you how. Why is irrelevant. How is all that matters. Obviously most women don't give a shit how their engines work, and usually don't care why either. But they still accept the fact that they do work, so I'll amend my statement to include only those things which women have an interest in understanding. Men have the engine thing covered basically, so why get involved?

One of the more peculiar exchanges that I remembered having with my woman (Nina) recently was a time in college when I was basically squatting in Nina's dorm room. We were talking about sex and alternate lifestyles. At this time I was fully convinced that because of my open ideas on love and lust that I must be a bisexual. Even though I only had sex or relationships with women, it seemed logical that I could keep my options open should love present itself in another form. This was pretty much the same for several years after we hooked up. Nina never could understand bisexuality, at least not in men, or at the very least not in me. How flattering is that for us? Of course chicks want to be with other chicks, but two dudes? That's just different somehow.

Anyway Nina and I were chatting away and she asked me if I would still want to hang out with her if she were a man. At this point we weren't really "dating" as much as living together and fucking constantly, hence the "hang out". To this I confirmed that if she was a man I would still want to fuck her. Now for some reason she took this as the greatest compliment to date. That boggled me. She knew I thought she was pretty, funny, smart, and independent. I would have thought that any of these would have been considered a greater accolade than my willingness to hit it, vagina or no. But she was impressed and pleased enough to lay down for me again, so I just accepted it and let it go.

After this she began a five-year inquiry into why I was bisexual. And no matter how I explained things to her, she just shook her head and said, "I just don't get it". It seemed perfectly plain to me, but since I couldn't provide her an answer to why, she just couldn't allow it to process completely. After being with just her for nearly a decade, I've pretty much abandoned any idea of being bisexual. Even if I truly were bisexual (which I never actually had sex or a romantic relationship with a man) it wouldn't matter at this point. I'm married and that's not going to change.

So I told her that I'm straight now, and I truly believe that I must be. I was twenty at the time, so confusion may have played a part. Once I told her this, she was immediately able to accept that I could be straight. Why someone would be straight makes perfect sense, so it gets to cross the bridge of acceptance. But then Nina couldn't understand why I could consider myself bi for so long and then just up and change sexualities. And since the why was left unquenched so has the idea been summarily tossed in the "reject and review" pile. It doesn't really ever come up, but I'm sure that if I were to ever reassert this stance, she'd have the same questions.

And this is how I come back to how beautiful and wonderful women truly are. After all these centuries of assuming that women were the intellectual inferiors to men, perhaps it was simply that we were looking for the wrong answers. I was once asked why is it that when a group of women get together they seem to have little to talk about besides their boyfriends or husbands? In my opinion, it's because the details on sustaining their lives have already been worked out. It's boring who, what, where, and how stuff. Work, school, getting the car fixed or backing up the hard drive are topics that produce questions which can be answered easily enough with some simple research.

But boyfriends/husbands? Now there's something to think about! There's a topic with such elusive answers that it deserves a nearly constant and immense amount of pondering. If this is true, then it may also be true that women have always been fully capable of creating the history of men with equal success. They were always as smart as men, they just lacked both the opportunities for education and the "give a shit" factor. But could we men have pushed and navigated humanity's emotional evolution so well? Who knows? I'm just glad we still have that whole reproduction thing to tie them to us.