Selfish wankery and other age-defying feats

Today smacking: The assumption of adulthood

For the last six years or so, every single time I have told someone my age, the response has invariably been something along the lines of: “No way! I thought you were a lot older than that!” Since I was young when this started, I thought it was cool to be older. But now? Not so much. Now it’s verging on insulting. So recently I have begun to ask people if what makes them think I am older has anything to do with the fine wrinkles around my eyes brought on by a long youth under a southern sun without sunglasses or semblance of an effective ozone layer. “No,” is always the response I get, and while I know that this is obligatory politeness, I cannot ignore the many responses which go on to say, “It’s nothing to do with your face and how you look; it’s the way you present yourself and the way you speak.”

These days it’s generally agreed – certain religious customs notwithstanding – that there is no set age at which one can decide, “Yes, now I am an adult.” To earn the title you have to act like one, and to keep the title you must continue to act like one, all your life. But far too many adults think that by virtue of being older than 21, 31, 41 – whatever age determines it for them – they are certifiably responsible, card-carrying ‘adults’ whose word is now wiser and more informed than that of people who are younger. This seems to give people license to be the biggest fuck-knuckles on earth; they feel they’ve earned that right by reaching an arbitrary age. Yeah, congratulations; you didn’t die yet. Just like it is cakewalk to conceive a child (for Pete’s sake, you can even do it by accident) but a mammoth undertaking to be a parent, it similarly takes no intelligence at all to grow older, but an enormous amount of self-checking and introspection to be an ‘adult’.

I have a friend, let’s call her Vivica because, well, Vivica is a pretty cool and unusual name – and why do I have to justify my friends’ aliases anyway? – who right now is suffering the kind of mistreatment that makes me righteously indignant. Her suffering is all in the name of, “I’m an adult so I can say and do what I want.” I’ve talked before about good parenting, most notably that a good parent should not be afraid to stand up to their offspring. I guess what I forgot is that a good parent should also act like they were born well before MC Hammer was crab-shuffling across the stage in ballooning pants and Baby had not yet stammered to Johnny Castle that she carried a watermelon.

My friend Vivica is under a lot of stress right now because her mother is, in one particular respect, acting more like an adolescent than her twenty-something daughter. You see, Vivica’s parents divorced about a year ago now. The reasons for the divorce were pretty horrible: apart from her parents not having gotten along for many years, Vivica’s father is an alcoholic, and the emotional and financial strain this was having on the family and the parental relationship finally caused it to break. When the divorce was finalised, Vivica’s parents sold the family home, her mother bought a house not far away, and her father moved back to his home country on the other side of the world.

Understandably Vivica’s mother harbours a lot of anger towards the man who, in her view, broke the family apart and gave her some twenty years of frustration and pain. But equally as understandably, Vivica’s father is still Vivica’s father, and she still wants and needs to be in contact with him. Every woman is, after all, still just a little girl who needs her daddy. But Vivica’s mother’s bitterness towards him and emotional fragility over the whole issue makes it impossible for Vivica to have any semblance of a relationship with her father, even from 17000 kilometres away. Vivica cannot talk about her father, and is forced to call him in secret. This is because at the mere mention of him, Vivica’s mother either spews unresolved rage about him or regresses into emotional infancy, unable to accept the things that have happened.

I realise that divorce is a horrible, horrible thing to happen to anyone and that it takes great emotional toll on all involved. And I also have great, heaping piles of respect for anyone who does make the decision to divorce, knowing that to stay in an unhealthy relationship does nothing but harm to parents and children alike. But when the dust settles, there is still a parent-child relationship here, and despite the fact that both Vivica and her mother are adults, it is still Vivica’s mother’s responsibility – nay, obligation – to show her children that their father is still a man to be respected and remembered. He was, after all, always a loving father to them, and he should not have stripped from him the right to continue to be that loving father.

Vivica’s mother has every right to still be bitter, angry and not-even-close-to-over-it. But to inflict this upon her children is immature, impulsive and a touch selfish. She has not considered that it’s not her daughter’s role to listen while she reflects on how much she both loves and hates her ex-husband. That’s what her fifty-something, married, divorced and everything-in-between friends are for.

Even the impassioned, wilful, watermelon-carrying Baby in that greatest of eighties movies, Dirty Dancing, learns that adulthood has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with how you act and how you deal. There are many subtle tells which indicate to the world that you are an adult, the least of which are those forehead furrows and the grey shadows in the lines beside your mouth which L’Oreal wants you to banish to the seventh circle of hell. Adulthood comes on with subtlety, but you know when it’s there. And you definitely know when it isn’t, or when it has temporarily lapsed like in Vivica’s mother’s case.

It’s a never-ending struggle, to continue to be an adult, and at times we all want to regress back to the halcyon days of childhood, if halcyon they were. But with age comes obligation, and when our immaturity and selfishness is hurting others, it’s time for most of us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. And a few turns with a good therapist wouldn’t go astray, either.

Wanted: male sensuality. Last Seen: Mills & Boon book cover

Today smacking: The loss of the sensual male

I really hope that Justin Timberlake is, in fact, "bringing sexy back", as he claims, and not just teasing us in that velvety rumbling undertone of his. Fact is, there's a great big, vagina-shaped hole to fill in pop music, which is in dire need of some sexual healing from all the lithe-tongued, firm-handed men out there – and JT is a man alone in his mission to do it.

In my second year of university I took a class in writing contemporary to the country in which I studied. My lecturer in the subject was an author with a couple of published novels under his belt and so, I suppose, had some authority on the subject, or could at least warn us away from all the terrible pitfalls of the writing business, thus scaring us off forever and widening the overcrowded profession by a crack so as to forge a little more elbow room for himself (which all the writing lecturers seemed to do; fuckers). He once said something about male sexuality that to this day I can't forget.

Those of us with a twig-and-berry combo and those of us with frilly pink orchids are just altogether different on seemingly every level, and we know this. Thus, it is exceptionally difficult to get inside the mind of the so-called 'opposite' sex in order to write from that point of view. My lecturer – let's call him Philip Whatshisface, since I genuinely can't remember his surname for the life of me – pointed out to us a few of the aspects of the respective genders which we might just miss, in our own research, but which should be considered when writing a character.

One such observation that stuck with me was that we give all the rights to the label 'sexy' to women, and give no such rights to men. We let women be the sensual ones, and we expect little in the sensuality department from men. We portray affection and innate attractiveness and beauty as female traits, leaving most men out – as if it's their birthright to be beaten witless by the ugly stick. Naturally I sat there, my feminist brain catching fire as I mulled over all the ways in which The Patriarchy had brought this about, and worked myself up into a right tizzy in the all of three seconds it took Phil to finish his sentence. But my curiosity was piqued as he went on. It was detrimental, he said, to men more than it was to women. He said there was something of a void where our nation's male sexuality should be.

I was hooked at this point. He was right.

All these words he was bringing out: 'sensuality'; 'sexiness'; 'affection'; they all seemed so, well, female to me – and for the first time I was given pause to see it. To my eyes it was wrong. It was an injustice to our straight men and quite a few gay ones, too. Why should they be conditioned to think that a good sense of sensuality, and familiarity with one's own sexuality was forbidden territory? Why should they be deprived the wonderful feeling of knowing fully the innate sensuality of your own self; using your hands and tongue and teeth and feet and thighs and every part of your body to understand the body of someone else?

Suddenly it was clear to me, too, why sometimes it is so easy to spot a certain type of gay man. It has nothing to do with them trying to act like women, and has everything to do with embracing their raw sexuality, their inner sex kittens (lions?), their unabashed lust – in a way that has usually been reserved for women. There's a certain undeniable freedom we women feel in executing an easy hip swagger, a careful flick of the wrist, a sultry pout. And it seemed our gay men had caught on to it, knowing that they, too, could play. They didn't have to conform to the expectations a straight male has placed on him: to keep his arse puckered, his cards close to his chest, his upper lip as rigid as the cock he thinks is the only representation of his sexuality.

Where was our straight male sensuality, I wondered? We had lost it somewhere, and I, for one, had no idea where to find it. Until now. Justin Timberlake seems to have found it for me.

See, all it takes is one straight man with a falsetto voice and a frame that oozes sex to spontaneously moisten the panties of millions of girls worldwide. And the best part? To do it in the most misogynistic genre of all: R&B. Twenty years we've been listening to rappers waffle on about how many bitches and hos they be playing, and how fun it is to mistreat them (my personal favourite lyric is courtesy of Ludacris: "Move, bitch, get out the way / get out the way, bitch, get out the way." Mmm, eloquent.) and here we have a skinny whiteboy from the Mickey Mouse Club making our hearts all aflutter. How? Well, a cursory look at some of Justin Timberlake's latest lyrics turns up dozens of references to pleasing a woman, doing things how she wants them done, maintaining her desires and, um, using his tongue. A lot.

Halle-fucking-lujah. Finally there's a man out there not so frustrated by the vice grip that restrains his sexuality that he resorts to taking it out on women-in-general through ill-conceived lyrics and film clips consisting of pure tits and arse. Finally there's a man who knows how sexy it is if he can show confidence in exactly how flexible he can be in the sack. Finally there's a man alone who is not afraid to dance a trail of fire across the floor. Finally, this kind of man is popular. And by god, do I hope other men follow suit. The truth is, if they don't follow JT into to the den of awakening sensuality, they're really missing out. Because even if you didn't think you liked the man or his music before, when Justin Timberlake croons at women in his trademark creamy tone, “I'll let you whip me if I misbehave,” we kind of, uh, really want to.

Sexual chemistry and the compulsion to puke

Today smacking: That one guy I dated in the year 2000

Most of the time it’s really obvious when you don’t have chemistry with someone. This is why I became a little flabbergasted the other day when a colleague told me she was unsure whether to continue dating a guy because she wasn’t convinced the chemistry was there. My colleague is about to turn thirty this year, and while she’s not exactly so panicked about settling down that, like Charlotte from Sex and the City, she’s about to marry the next British-descended, emotionally castrated, mama’s-boy socialite who comes her way, she has expressed that she feels a certain sense of urgency; something akin to being strapped to some railroad tracks by a mustachioed maniacal bandit, I suspect. Nothing too pressing.

“So why are you even considering it?” I asked her.

My colleague made an apologetic smile that made me wonder if she keeps her balls most of the time firmly hidden at the bottom of her purse, along with her self-respect and her ‘No Means No’ badge. “Because he’s really, really funny and I quite like him as a friend,” she replied.

“But you said you don’t have the right chemistry there. Do you mean you’re not attracted to him?”

“Well, yeah. Like, I can’t see myself kissing him, let alone…” She couldn’t look at me by this stage, clearly very suddenly becoming aware that what she was saying amounted to lunacy. I suspect she might also have been avoiding my eyes because they were shooting white-hot lasers at her, but I can’t help that; it happens voluntarily when my Disappointment-In-You-o-Meter skyrockets.

“Then what are you doing?” I asked incredulously.

“I just didn’t want to be too picky, you know, because sometimes you can develop feelings for someone.”

“Feelings, maybe. Sexual chemistry? No. Listen, you’re not on Seinfeld here; you’re not rejecting him because his toes are the wrong shape or something stupid like that. Chemistry is the most important thing you could have at this stage! Who has time to dick around waiting to find out?”

Within days my colleague had decided not to follow up on that relationship, much to my approval, but it did indeed give me pause to wonder that if good-looking, sweet women like my colleague who own property and have good jobs find themselves wondering about settling for second-rate around the age of thirty, what the hell are their ugly step-sisters doing? Is every woman who has begun to worry about her romantic prospects so pragmatic about finding someone? 'Well, I don't want to kiss his slobbery mouth, but he does have an upwardly mobile career, and he really gets along with my dog...' Do we no longer lead with our hearts? I despair, I really do; no amount of balancing the ledger of pros and cons of a potential partner can overcome a lack of chemistry.

I am reminded of a fellow I was dating at sixteen. He was nineteen, and used to insist on paying for everything when he took me out, which was often, and this was so novel to me at that age that I dated him for longer than I really should have. We had lovely conversations and connected on a philosophical level, but when we kissed, and when we sat silently on park benches and fed swans together, there was something just slightly amiss.

Obviously, he felt it, too, but being the typically emotionally constipated 19-year-old male, he didn’t quite know how to express it. One day as we were sitting close together in a park, gazing at nothing in particular (and I was feeling a slight buzzing in my soul that I have since learned means things are not altogether peachy) he turned to me with an earnest expression upon his face, and, “So,” he asked casually, “are you feeling comfortable in the silences yet?”

You know how it’s really hip right now to say, when something unsettles you, that you think you just vomited in your mouth a little? Well, I’m pretty sure I actually did. And this was way before it was even remotely funny or cool. Even at sixteen I knew that if you have to ask, you won’t be walking down a flower-strewn aisle to the tune of Shania Twain’s You’re Still the One anytime soon.

So, as soon as I had reasonably convinced myself that I could keep my lunch down on the train journey home, I high-tailed it out of there. My erstwhile date, lucky boy, earned the moniker ‘Puke’ (a super-clever twist on his actual name, durr hurr hurr) and didn’t hear back from me. Because if the thought of going any further with your current date inspires the bile in your gut to develop the desire to defy gravity, then you’ve got chemistry problems that have nothing to do with stomach acids.