If We Don't Have Great Sex, the Mexicans Will Stay Home

Using Cosmopolitan for sex therapy is like trying to learn how to drive a car by reading the owner’s manual. Cosmo seems to think it’s all about pushing the right buttons. 75 Ways to Make Him Cum Through His Nostrils, 12 Sure Fire Techniques for Finding Your G-Spot in a Dark Closet, 45 Sex Tricks of the Himalayan Mongoose—it’s as if Cosmo thinks great lovers are double-jointed, ambidextrous plumbers wielding socket wrenches with 93 attachments. Magic numbers, elaborate maneuvers, hidden secrets that everyone knows but you—in the Cosmopolitan boudoir, that’s what it’s all about.

Above all, the Holy Grail at Cosmo is GREAT SEX!!! If you aren’t having it, did you know the girl down the street is? If you aren’t having it, why not, it’s easy! If you aren’t having it, here’s how to get it. Certainly this approach has been successful for Cosmopolitan; it’s the women’s magazine with the highest single-copy circulation. It makes you suspect that maybe a lot of women out there aren’t having great sex.

Well, if you’ve continued your sex life past the age of 22, you probably have noticed that sex is complicated. If you’re a 19-year-old male with enough testosterone surging through your body to overrule whatever good sense you possess and enough money to rent someone’s service, sex is very simple. If, however, you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, and get up and be able to look a significant someone else in the eyes, and you want to have sex, then things get complicated.

Great sex every time long term with the same person must happen somewhere. It hasn’t happened to me. But somehow in America that’s the expectation. We’re all going to win the lottery, we’re going to vote once for hope and change and it will happen, we’re going to make love like pornstars.

Intellectually we all know that even pornstars (particularly pornstars) aren’t making love like pornstars, but we still buy the Cosmopolitans and deodorant and hairpieces and cosmetic surgery to make it happen. If you’re not getting great sex with your partner there could be five to 15 or 16 factors at work, none of which have anything to do with how you look or smell.

He could need Viagra, she could need a lubricant, he could be emotionally withdrawn, she could have been abused as a child, he could have been abused as a child, she could be scared of performing poorly, he could be scared of performing poorly, she could have a cold, he could have gas, they could be scared that if they perform poorly their marriage could be over, they could be scared that if they perform well their marriage will keep going, she could be worried about money, he could be worried their son on drugs, she could be worried about their daughter’s marriage, he could be mad about Obama, she could be mad about Palin, they could be mad about the oil in the Gulf, the terrorists in our midst, the Mexicans at the border, the politicians in Washington. They could be mad about not getting the GREAT SEX THAT IS PROMISED THEM IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS!!!!

OK. He and she and we should all stop and take a deep breath. Maybe great sex will happen sometime and then another sometime, but isn’t it possible that we could make do from peak to peak with some pleasantly rolling plains? Do we really need to blow each others’ heads off every single time? What if GREAT SEX is happening but we haven’t achieved GREATER SEX?

If we’re going to have sex at all, maybe it would help if we were willing to make do with good sex, OK sex, even falling asleep in each others’ arms—just once in awhile.

Mid-Term Election Rage Reaction Redaction

What’s the difference between a hobby and a hobbyhorse? I think it’s a matter of whether or not you’re able to let the thing go. A hobby is a pastime, a hobbyhorse is an obsession.

People are creatures of habit. Some habits help get us through hard times by allowing us to navigate through the turbulence on autopilot, but it is generally better to try to base behavior on realistic awareness of what is happening around us rather than programmed reactive patterns of thinking.

Unfortunately, few of us escape childhood without developing habits that, while very useful in helping us cope with the peculiar circumstances of life in the home we grow up in, often are blocks to happiness later on in life.

You don’t have to go any further than the comments posted after online blogs to see the effects of people getting gummed up in balls of nasty emotions. What people refer to as the polarization of American politics to me seems more like watching the entire population of the country falling in slow motion down an enormous flight of stairs, tripped up by ropes they’ve wrapped around their own emotional legs.

Frighteningly large numbers of people are nursing habitual anger and resentment, self-medicating themselves with rage directed outward to escape—God, I don’t know what. Lack of love? Overpowering feelings of isolation? Fear of their own feelings of powerlessness? Fear of their neighbors? Fear of their own shadow?

Whatever the origins, the habit ain’t healthy. I say round up these people and get them all into 12 step. What’s the addiction? Are they rage-aholics? Politicaholics? Wing-nutaholics? Anxiety addicts? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t.

In any case, I’ve become convinced that nobody is going to win the mid-term elections this fall. A USA Today poll last week found two-thirds of those surveyed describing themselves as “angry” about conditions in this country, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.

It looks more and more certain that most people will vote no this fall, and that is bad news. If this is a nation of rage-holics, this election will play out as the fullest national expression yet of the classic reaction of angry addicts of all stripes to all of life’s setbacks—“I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”

This country is trapped in addictive reaction. That defines the hair-trigger defensiveness that sends people into a rage at any challenge to the way they’ve been doing things. It’s what turns couples counseling into an argument designed to prove to the therapist that the other partner is the real crazy one, rather than a search for ways to get out of such knock-down-and-drag outs when they explode in the privacy of the home, where there’s no referee around to make the final call.

Therapy—and the coming to serenity and peace that the therapist and client together should be working to achieve—has nothing to do with who gets kicked off the island, who gets fired, who’s the last man standing. Right now in America, nobody’s interested in serenity, and nobody’s playing by the rules. The therapist is nowhere to be seen. The ref has thrown up his hands in disgust and left the playing field.

We’re in the middle of a spastic, thrashing, hysterical free-for-all that will throw a lot of people out of office who may not know what we should be doing about this mess, and replace them with people who almost certainly will not know what to do.

Most people who go to the polls will be there to vote against what we’ve got. Not enough people will be there to vote for what we might have. We’ve got plenty of no votes; what we need are more people willing to vote yes.