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orgasms.” That's one of the best things about a myth: once you know it's only a myth, you can say, “Pff, that's just a myth,” and be totally right. And make them feel like real jerks.

     
* And even if we're talking about a highly trained dog—one that can sit there for twenty minutes with a biscuit on his nose until you say, “Okay!”—even that dog is only thinking about the moment when you'll finally let him eat the thing. Some helpful advice, though: I would not recommend training your man in this fashion. If you try to balance some other woman's cleavage on your boyfriend's nose, someone's liable to get hurt.

CHAPTER 3
     
the notorious s.e.x., or abandon
hope all ye who enter here

     
    M any of the myths that women seem to believe about men revolve around the fundamental differences in how the two genders experience sex. (Quick review: The two genders are “men” and “women.” Just making sure that you didn't get lost in all this relationship jargon.) So let's talk about that. Sex, I mean. Ahem… let's do that. Er… is it warm in here?
     
    Okay, clearly I'm a little uncomfortable with the subject, as I am from Connecticut, where we pretend that such things never happen, lest we blush so hard we have to be taken to the emergency room. So you can only imagine how embarrassed I am to write about… ahem… sex.
     
    And clearly I'm not the only one who's a little nervous about this subject. Take, for example, the time-honored sex lesson, wherein some adult coughs and blushes his or her way through a thirty-second explanation of where babies come from. If you ever had any doubt about our society's discomfort with the idea of sex, think about the image they chose:
     

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
    Uh… wha? Even granting the premise that children should be talking about animal sex at all, um, could we have come up with two animals with less obvious genitalia? I'm in my late thirties, and I haven't the slightest notion of what's going on below the belt for either species.
     
    I do know that both of them lay eggs. So far, not helpful. And bees live in some weird configuration in which there's one female for the whole society. And before we start thinking that this might be somehow fun for her, it's not like she gets a room filled with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. It's just bees. Not that she's anyone to judge, being a bee herself. Okay, now that I think about it, that seems okay. But still, it's not going to help any of us primates get laid, so why are we even talking about it?
     
    Anyway, in this section of the book, we'll talk about some of the things that women seem to believe about men regarding sex, and we'll explore just what the truth is about the whole thing. It seems to me that there are four distinct areas of the male mind that we need to cover:
     
Thinking about sex (also known as the “vast majority of the time”)
Pursuing sex (not quite as much of the time as in number one, but still a lot)
During sex (not nearly as much of the time as numbers one or two… for me, at least)
After sex (that ten-minute period before we head right back to number one)
    By the time we get through here, you're going to know way, way more about men than maybe you even wanted to. (Get ready: In the area of sex, we're far more different from each other than you probably imagine.)
     

THINKING ABOUT SEX, OR EXCELLENT
REASONS NEVER TO ASK A MAN WHAT
HE'S THINKING
    Okay, from what I'm told, this is one area in which men and women aren't even remotely similar. And no matter what you think we're thinking, it's probably… worse. Think of what is sometimes considered the cheapest, trashiest version of the female fantasy—the romance novel. A romance novel is related to a male fantasy in the way that a nice cup of coffee is related to crystal meth.
     

The Porn Fascination
    Porn has been involved in every technological leap we've ever made—and probably within about ten minutes of each leap, going all the way back to