No, I haven’t gone back to the comedy club for another night of humiliation (Public Humiliation). Since I’m not seeing Bennett anymore (Bennett Bites the Dust), who else would be up for this adventure with me?
Instead, I’m sharing bits of trivia with you that I’ve been saving for just such a night, starting with Oscar Wilde, my favorite Irish writer.
Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.
Oscar was the master at boiling the truths of life down to one or two pity sentences.
Nothing much has changed since Oscar Wilde’s time in Victorian Great Britain.
Here’s another tidbit, with an unattributed source:
On average, U.S. men have 31.9 sexual partners in a lifetime; women have 8.6.
How does this jive with your experience? While my life isn’t over yet and I hold out hope for another adventure or two (otherwise, why would I be trying internet dating?), this number isn’t far off.
The next one is so provocative, perhaps I should have saved it as the subject for its own posting. The mind behind it was Voltaire.
The human mind is not capable of understanding the nothing from which we came nor the infinity which surrounds us.
The thought of that infinity is enough to freeze me into powerless inaction. (Oscar Wilde’s antitode to that frozen state would be a little sex.)
Here’s a random fact that tickled my sense of the absurd.
Prehistoric women had 160 periods in a lifetime; modern women have 460.
The reason is obvious. We live a lot longer than prehistoric women did.
Sex is an expression of Divine energy. The more imaginative and inventive your life, the more sensual you feel. It’s really very sexy to have a creative life. Dr. Christiane Northrup
Can you feel the sensuality dripping from the postings of The Vixen Divorcee?
The hypothalamus controls the Four F’s: fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating.
I have nothing to add to that bit of neuropsychological insight.
A man’s beard grows fastest when he anticipates sex.
I’m all in favor of a bit of anticipation.
A lifetime of anticipation is another matter.
June is the most common month for Americans to lost their virginity.
My experience is at variance with this norm. I lost my virginity my freshman year in college. Snow blanketed the ground and my boyfriend and I studied together snuggled under his blankets to stay warm. One thing led to another, as it is apt to.
What favorite facts or sayings do you have to share?
I do love Oscar Wilde.
Hi Julie: Do you have a preference – his plays, stories or poems?
Georgia:
Other reasons why prehistoric women had fewer periods would be that they had more pregnancies and modern women are starting to have their periods at younger ages. Also, lots of prehistoric and premodern women died in childbirth. How many wives did Bach have? 8? He didn’t chop off their heads like Henry VIII did. How do “they” figure out this number in the first place? I suspect they just made it up.
How is it that men average so many more sex partners than women? Are men lying about the sex of their partners or not recognizing that their sexual partners are transsexuals? Are men just exaggerating the numbers for bragging rights? Are women conveniently forgetting to count their male sexual partners? Or is it that there are some women not included in these surveys who have large numbers of partners. Do men and women count sexual partners differently, a la Bill Clinton? Would a man count a blow job as having a new sexual partner, but a woman not consider it to be sex? The widespread acceptance of this “fact” is an indication of how poorly educated Americans are in the basics of math and statistics, TV reporters in particular. One of the basic starting points of mathematics is that 1+1=2.
Your highly numerate buddy. H.
Well, Harry, wish I could go back to my source to inquire about methodology, but I got these two numbers off of cocktail napkins at a fundraising dinner for Planned Parenthood. They were good for fun conversation at the dinner table, but clearly don’t stand up to the analytical mind of my erudite buddy.
My Irish tends more towards Yeats than Wilde, but I find myself blurting more Mencken, or perhaps Dorothy Parker: “I love to have a martini,, two at the very most, three and I’m under the table, four and I’m under the host.” My inaugural excursion was at age 15, and those numbers mean little unless much higher than you suggested, or much lower than you suggested. My early development of social skills was somewhat stunted by my being a musician in those days – I was cast into the pool and made to swim amidst greater numbers of fish, as it were. And I liked the phrase “He came thundering out of obscurity, and went hurtling into oblivion.” Author unknown, or heck, maybe me.
Hi Robert: I once prepped Alan for a dinner with the late Eugene McCarthy by slipping a copy of Senator McCarthy’s favorite Yeat’s poem in his suit coat pocket: When you are old and gray/and full of sleep/and nodding by the fire/take down this book…… That’s as far as my memory goes. I wonder how McCarthy would have responded to Dorothy Parker?
What was your instrument in your rock and roll band – I’m assuming it was rock and roll? What kind of music did you play?
Georgia, in those days I played bass guitar and keyboards, sang vocals and played some acoustic guitar, and yes was mostly rock’n roll and rhythm and blues. I still play often, my home is filled with musical instruments of various kinds, and I’m lucky enough to live only a few minutes from venues where I can hear exceptional classical, jazz, blues, rock, country and bluegrass. I think Clean Gene would have been scandalized by Dorothy Parker but struggle never to show it. I only saw him once in person – from the Senate Gallery, in another lifetime.
Hi Robert:
Do you still ever play in a band?
Was Clean Gene speaking when you saw him from the Senate Gallery?
This is a bit of my own observations about the sexes: Women marry men thinking that they can change them. Men marry women thinking that they will never change. Neither of which is going to happen…
p.s. I am a docent at the art museum here in town and the Oscar Wilde quote. “Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power,” would make a great tour theme! Any takers?
Oh, dear Lady, you’ve laid down the gauntlet, haven’t you? What paintings would work with that theme? What sculptures or African masks or Oceanic totems? An inventive mind could have great fun. Guess that would be you.
Years ago, I was seated next to an elderly lady on a flight from LA to New York. She only spoke to me once and that was upon landing. Just as we were making our way to the gate, she looked at me and said: “In my long life, I have come to realize that there exist two and only two truths; the seed of the nasturitium can be used to make capers and every poem penned by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson can be song to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas.” She returned to her book and I had realized I had become enlightened!
I loved the captions for the bearded men!!
Thanks for the smile you created.
BF
Hi Big Fan: I pulled down my college American literature text, looked up a few poems by Miss Dickinson and, guess what, your travel companion was right! Then I did a bit of internet browsing and learned that all the church music around her was based on the same meter as The Yellow Rose of Texas. Thanks for setting me off on that bit of adventure.
I recently read that human’s are NOT naturally monogomous. You stat sure supports that supposition. And about the difference between 32 and 9 partners. I think men are just less picky! Ha!
Hi Currious: I think you are absolutely right.