Molly and Dollop: Conversations with the Master

Three Times a Week

MOLLY:

A nice old man saw me in the park and he said he wanted to marry me.  But I can’t even cook, let alone buy groceries!

DOLLOP:

Be careful.   It was only recently discovered that old people in America have sex.  It could be true, if you believe science.  Some of the folks are not even married.  Someone should tell them that they will die die die!

The sad part is, older men are faced with a terrible situation.  They are going to die sooner than the women.  Their libido, however, is still twice more lively.  Appropriate libido-bait their age has joined a book or a knitting club. The men have lost their looks.  Younger women cannot help but see the fleshy bits, falling hair, yellow teeth, pot belly.  Daylight is harsh, unless they are billionaires.

It is too bad that Viagra was invented to enable older men.  It is the older women who need it!  The tremendous sympathetic support from health plans for solving the problem of lift leaves the liftee whistling in the wind. The women are satisfied eating pie and reading a good book.

That’s why that man is in the park. 

The French have less of a problem.  They have a long tradition of lusting for older women and somehow the women keep their heat.

All the attention has been on the abstinence of the young.  Meanwhile, the elders have retreated to reservations where a raging bacchanal is disguised behind well-tended lawns, muzak playing in large lobbies, huge easy chairs, tame water aerobics, and putter golf.  Has anyone gone into their “recreation and entertainment centers” to see what is really going on!??  Are the rules of allowed sexual orientation being obeyed?  Karaoke, my foot.  Perhaps we should rethink the idea of keeping old people out of sight.  They should be watched!

And take away their pills.  We don’t give pills to the young; we take away pills and protection from the young, especially the girls.  And here we give pills to old men.  Who then lust after unprotected girls.

One solution is to put the pills in control of the women.  This actually happened.  A Brazilian town found that giving away free Viagra to the elderly was very popular idea all around, until the men began to stray.  The city decided to give out the pills to the women, who could decide when to have a nice hot bath or a grope in the dark.

The drug companies are going for a daily dose.  In the name of spontaneity.  Not to mention 50% profits.  Ever-Ready Man.  They say that the typical four to six times a month takes too much planning and makes for awkward timing.  The price per pill exceeds the cost of a condom, but health plans, and, in general, everybody, is behind erections.  That 30-minute window from lust to ability is just too darn much.  Especially if you used to be a 1-minute popper. (Hummm.  How to pass the time with a willing lady??)   Ever-Ready Man may have to find multiple partners, however, since three times a week is the usual limit.  Quick FDA approval is expected.  There are people who do not, no! no! no! do not, want to think of themselves as impotent.  They are ready to embrace the idea of a daily pill for “high blood pressure” that gives good buzz in the nethers.

Unlike RU-486 or Plan B, viagra is freely available.  Erections are an important national resource.  Apparently the pills work even when men are in an altered mental state (alcohol, ecstasy, power), when they are less likely to make wise choices.  Who cares about wise choices?    Medicaid even reimbursed the cost of Viagra for 198 convicted rapists and high-risk sex offenders in New York.  OK -- all erections are NOT good.

The drug companies are concerned that sales are falling off, in spite of over $400 million in advertising in 2004.  Rumors of blindness, not so much hairy palms.  Could we be reaching an erection plateau?  Are people not getting the ads?  Did Mr. Rogers ever explain “erectile dysfunction” to the children watching?

Unhand That Beast!

MOLLY:

I went to the zoo the other day and a monkey was very friendly, making sign language to me.  I gave him some cookies.  Was that all right?

DOLLOP:

It is a very good thing to be kind to other species, especially as we are destroying so many of them in order to support our lavish lifestyles.  We have taken away their land, soiled their water, sonic-blasted their brains, bull-dozed their nesting areas, shot their mothers, put their babies in little cages to amuse our babies, and harvested their body parts.  A little kindness is warranted.  Even respect.  Love would be all right too.  And just hope to earn some back.

If it were not for the love, God knows where our genes would be right now.  It is not very well known that inter-species love is not unknown.  Probably as likely as love with aliens, and look how I turned out!

A zillion years ago before man built concrete and steel barriers between himself and natural life, and found himself barefoot in the forests much more often than once a year on vacation, there were fruitful unions that shaped our gene pool.  The early explorers were most likely Desperate Housewives, who had to walk hours away from home in order to fetch jugs of water and got a little fed up about it.

We can only imagine which side made the first overtures, about six million years ago.   It is common, of course, for creatures seeking “to make sexual selection” to present their assets in a good light.  This was hard to do before wonder-bras, thong underwear, and speedos.  We can assume that both sides assumed the cross-species come-hither posture of sticking the chest out and flapping arms.

We hope the species involved showed some good taste.  Not like those shameless Bonobos.  We imagine that the species mutually recognized where the other’s organs were located.  Indeed, early humans could have looked like chimps and could have seemed quite attractive if you were an ape.  Neanderthals of Europe – stocky, large-browed, with sharp teeth and jutting jaws – might have hooked up with modern humans from Africa.  We think they were equally smart.  There is evidence that more than a few felt they were soul mates, in spite of being dirty and smelly at the time.    

There is a researcher seeking to explain why Ecuadoran male manakin birds, using their wings, can pop like firecrackers and make wooshing noises while courting.  After filming them in action, and locating exact feathers and muscles involved, she is planning to clip certain wings to prove her hypothesis.  “I should be able to completely silence the bird,” she said.  The manakins are planning to capture her on her next visit, and test which bodily clippings will render her dateless. 

Contemporary female chimps have been observed “mating furtively outside their social set.”  It could well be that our proto-Desperate Housewives were corrupted watching them.  Thanks to DNA analysis, we the people can tell when the chimp babies come from baby-daddies who are not the boys at home.  Meanwhile, the male chimps go through a lot of vicious fights and humiliations to become the alpha-male and chief procreator.  Good thing they don’t know about DNA.  A respectable female researcher has questioned the benefits of becoming an alpha male, but her speaking tour has not reached the male chimps yet. 

Thanks to bird studies, we know that it is the low- or mid-level males who are doing the siring.  The flashy, powerful alphas are being snookered.  Mission Accomplished, indeed.

Serengeti cheetahs (the name is such a give-away!) have more than one father per litter 43% of the time.  And then, the very next year, the “mobile” females move on to a new set of fathers.  The frightening conclusion that females are the ones in control comes from a close look at lizards.  Those hussies will go for the larger males who have the best territories of nice shady rocks.  If you give a scrawny lizard some nice digs, they will consort with him, but sneak a visit to the big guy on the side. 

A research project trying to bring diversity to a wolf colony found that introducing strange-boy wolves into a new neighborhood did not work because they could not compete with the established alpha- and high-ranking guys, and they would end up joining the rest of the males who got no action at the bar.  The way to go was to introduce strange-females, and boy, was that a successful diversity program!

Apparently the smell of a woman’s armpit gives away her fertile time.  At the same time, the woman feels pretty lusty for new genes, and tends to dress better.  Don’t fetch water from long distances at this time!  Or, if you go, take Inflatable-Man with you.

We know the trysting didn’t last.  DNA evidence points to only 1.2 million years of fooling around before the species went their separate ways.  That is a lot of Desperate Housewives, nevertheless.  Scientists say that the number of species that deviate in this way are very small, and it is only a few that would engage this jungle adventure.  The scientific observation concurs with the Virginian map of “orientations.”  The esteemed Virginia legislation recognizes 8 different sexual orientations.  I think they must be:  hetero, homo, bisexual, transgender-gynephilia, transgender-androphilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and Virginian hypocracy-philia.  In the latter case, respectable citizens claim “hetero” and impose it on others, but practice all the other ways in secret.  They might have overlooked the orientation found in an actual living crab, which was actually biologically bisexual, and is suspected of having had sex with itself (at least once…).    Most of the orientations are, of course, forbidden.

By the way, this means the Virginia legislature gets to spend a lot of time arguing the distinctions among sexual orientations, with details.  In the great religious traditions of debate such as those of Tibetan monks and Jewish Talmud scholars, VA legislators must explore whether anything “not-hetero” is the same as “bestial.”  If Kinsey were still alive, I am sure he would be busy helping them regarding degrees of deviation.

We imagine the ancestral chimp to be a brash opportunist.  Maybe one of those middle-level bad-boys tired of hanging out in the bar and ready to advance humanity.

With the advancement of civilization, the problem of inter-species and regular promiscuity has been addressed.  Especially by people who are very much into family values, and more particularly, family honor.   For example, Molly, your elders could drive a big nail into your head.  I am not speaking figuratively.  (Really, look up “lobotomy.”)   A famous case is the fate of one misbehaving daughter belonging to an elite American family.   It is a form of “honor maiming.”  Honor killing is done a world away, where an incident of errant kissing can get you stoned to death, and by your own family.  Everyone, let’s keep perspective!

By the way, in that same family of the misbehaving daughter, the misbehaving famous sons carried on a multi-generation family tradition of promiscuity because that was an expression of power and privilege, and an entitlement.  Same libido, wrong gender…

For a period of nearly 40 years, the Swedes (and Swiss, and Austrians, and Belgians, and Germans, and Danes, and Norwegians) sterilized their young, rebellious, promiscuous females, especially those of “mixed blood” and alleged feeble minds.  Little did they know then, that there were chimps in our forest, long ago.  Besides, sex reduces stress – lower blood pressure, more bonding hormones – up to a week.  Those mellow Desperate Housewives possibly carried a lot more water and lived longer.