Women & Sex

A man's life is defined by the women who inhabit it. Some will be angels. Some will be devils. And some will be a little of both.

By: Thomas Beller, Photographs: Greg Williams
Published: September 2005   [ Updated: Jan 11, 2009 - 10:05:44 PM ]

One: Awakening
You see her all the time and she means nothing to you, but then one day you ring your best friend's front door and she pulls it open wearing panties and a V-neck T-shirt. All of a sudden your friend's older sister is the most important person in the world. You stand there rocking back and forth at eye level with about an acre of cleavage—it's a word you've never even heard before, but now its meaning, purpose and consequence you comprehend completely.

She lets you in without a second thought. You don't count, you're only 11. So she thinks nothing of wandering around her little brother's room in panties and a frayed T-shirt pondering the mysteries of her life and babbling absentmindedly to her Little League audience.

There she sits pouting at her desk, staring down at a textbook. When you ask what she is studying, she brushes you off with "You wouldn't understand," followed by a more confiding "Ninth grade is really hard."

When she is not around, your friend regales you with tales of her outrageous behavior with her boyfriends. Either this girl, Betty—long, red hair framing a pretty, pale face; small feet with toenails painted bubble-gum pink-is a nymphomaniac, or her little brother has a feverish imagination. Looking back at these tales, it almost sounds as if your friend were simply channeling pornography and projecting it onto his older sister. But it's not likely that he had seen much porn at 11 and furthermore, it was 1976. Porn was just being invented. There wasn't cable, really; no videotapes or DVDs and certainly no Internet.

At the time, however, reality doesn't even matter. Your imagination has been primed. The girl herself is often inches away from you. You are in love, but you don't exist. She gazes out the window with a faraway look, while you stare at the promised land—her cleavage. Its geography occupies so much psychic space in your head that when in its actual presence, you feel as though you could at any moment dive into it and simply disappear.

Instead it is Betty who disappears; her mother has declared that it is no longer appropriate for her to share a bedroom with her younger brother and her younger brother's horny little friends and so the house is rearranged and Betty disappears behind a closed door, only to be seen fleetingly stomping out of the house in frayed jeans and clogs, on the way, no doubt, to a date who will treat her badly.

Two: Torture
You are struggling with the concept of niceness and sex. Rationally, being nice should lead you toward the promised land of sex. But looking around, it seems that a lot of jerks are getting girls and you, who try to be nice, are not. The concept that girls may actually be attracted to guys who are callous, blase and inconsiderate is very hard to comprehend.