FRESH YARN presents: The Beast with Two Backs... by Portia Langworthy

FRESH YARN presents:

The Beast with Two Backs
By Portia Langworthy

I've never made love to my husband. We've been together for thirteen years -- married eight of those thirteen -- but still no "making of the love." Oh, we've had lots of sex: good sex, bad sex, funny sex, loving sex, drunk sex, familiar sex and holy-crap-it's-five-minutes-until-The Simpsons sex. But no matter what type of sex it is, it's still sex. While love is involved, calling it "making love" evokes images of Fabio on a romance novel, dressed in a pirate shirt unbuttoned to his treasure trail and flexing his pectoralis majors while cradling a swooning lass in his taut, glistening arms.

To me, making love is as make-believe as movies where a hooker with a heart of gold marries her business tycoon john, where a cranky ogre wins the hand of a beautiful princess, and where actresses with 10% body fat and size D breasts are presented as "everywoman." Making love is what Sandy imagined doing with Danny in Grease. It is the opening scene of From Here to Eternity. It is the reason Rhett Butler carried Scarlett O'Hara up her grand staircase. And it is what Samantha Baker (aka Molly Ringwald) of Sixteen Candles imagined she would do with the Porsche-driving Jake Ryan. Making love is an illusion that keeps us all wanting more and doubting the legitimacy of our own sexual experiences.

My cynicism about making love began in junior high when I read my older sister's diary cover to cover not just once, but ten times. I felt guilty and devious and deceitful but that didn't stop me. I kept re-reading it, partly out of curiosity and partly to decipher the code that kept reappearing like Deep Throat in the Pentagon Papers: ML. What did ML mean and why was she doing it everywhere in the house? My sister would ML with her boyfriend in the TV room, her bedroom, the kitchen, on the sofa, and by the pool. The only place she didn't ML was in my bedroom and that was probably only because of the off-putting number of stuffed animals piled on my bed. Whatever ML meant, I figured it didn't involve homework.

When I finally figured it out, a cartoon light bulb appeared over my head (and I hastily removed my snack plate from the kitchen counter). No, ML didn't mean Make Lunch or Master Latin. ML was code for Making Love. I was now scared to sit anywhere in the house before patting it down for wet spots. But even in the midst of my paranoia, I was struck by the absurdity of my sister partaking in an act that she couldn't even bring herself to spell out. Apparently, she was old enough to have sex but not old enough to call it by name.

At the time, my sister was in high school and quite beautiful and quite popular and quite everything that I wasn't. While she was leading our football team to victory with cheers like, "go fight win tonight, boogie down ALL RIGHT ALL RIGHT," I was stuck with a lingering lisp, substantial baby fat and an inability to stand up to my mother and tell her to shove my well-intentioned violin lessons up her tone-deaf ass. Still, clueless as I was about most things, I could confidently say (or at least believe) that neither my sister nor her boyfriend had anywhere near the Scarlett and Rhett Hollywood glamour that making love requires. Married for eight years, I still don't have it.

My friend Zoë believes that it's all right to call sex making love when a woman is either a virgin or under 20 -- after that point, she should know better. Zoë herself dreamed of making love until she lost her virginity at age 19, at the tail end of an unfortunate first date. While she cannot recollect the name of her prince charming, she does recall that her special night included a dine-and-dash dinner, pot smoking, a roughly textured rug and unforgiving lighting. Midway through the act, she converted her thinking. As her date descended upon her, bathed in the florescent lights of his studio apartment, she knew she wasn't making love -- she was having sex.

Her dreams dashed and expectations lowered, Zoë said that with the next few men she dated, she was only able to reach orgasm if she actually saw her date pay for the meal. No, her first time didn't live up to her Judy Blume Forever fantasy, but it did teach her that sex does not create love. So why not just make it fun? Now in her thirties, she has had sex that is fun, caring, creative, and yes, even occasionally bad. Along the way she fell deeply in love, and now has what she refers to as amazing sex (most of the time). While in love with her husband, she still cannot refer to it as "making love" without having flashbacks to shag carpets, fluorescent lighting and a waiter getting stiffed.

Zoë is right. Certain women can get away with making love, but these love-makers tend to be young teenagers (think of the high school girl who forever doodles her first name and her boyfriend's last name on her spiral notebook). I encountered the quintessential high school love-maker last year when my husband and I went to see a stand-up comedy show. I was already a bit crabby because the venue's seating made me long for the roominess of a sardine can, when a young, bubbly, long-haired girl bounded in with her fifteen-year-oldish boyfriend. Based on their attire, I surmised that their giddiness was a result of their newly negotiated Abercrombie & Fitch sponsorships. They couldn't find seating, so Mr. Abercrombie wedged in next to my husband on the end of the row and playfully pulled Miss Fitch onto his lap. Then, the ten-minute pre-show began -- at least for those lucky enough to be seated behind our row. She was moaning, he was groping and they were leaning on my husband for leverage. Despite the errant laughter, the youngsters just kept grinding, groaning and dry-humping my husband. Finally, Miss Fitch came up for air and cooed, "You know you are so lucky to be dating me and not Emily because Emily would never make love to you."

I can excuse ML with teenage girls; perhaps it truly is the vernacular for the young and in-heat, but I have a hard time accepting that some of my otherwise worldly friends continue to make love to their partners, insisting, just like the 15-year-old Miss Fitch, that it is different from sex. These women are the idealistic dreamers, the hopeless romantics. Much like the newly christened vegan peddling her "cruelty free" tofurkey dogs to the carnivorous partygoers at my 4th of July barbecue, these women possess neither a skeptical nor practical bone in their bodies.

They call me jaded or immature when I talk about doing the humpty dance, knockin' boots, hiding the pickle (or in some unfortunate cases, the gherkin), riding the express train to O town, or any other number of colloquialisms. I would ask my husband to make love to me but I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. (I also wouldn't want to find out what his interpretation of making love would be -- what if it involved Meatloaf softly playing "I Would Do Anything for Love -- But I Won't Do That" in the background?) I understand why teenage girls might be starry-eyed about what, at their age, is really just quick, unfinessed sex, but how can my female cohorts downshift from an intellectual debate on PETA (heroic organization or misdirected zealots?) to doling out unsolicited advice on making love that includes white zinfandel, ostrich feathers and a supposedly romantic position called "El Burro."

My friend Shelly was a virgin until her 29th year. She had been steadfast in her quest, patiently waiting for the right man to make love to her and spent her abundant free time dreaming of her wedding day. I always chalked up her idealized image of marriage, love, and men to the fact that she worked as a marketing executive for Barbie and was literally looking for Ken. Considering that Ken's sexual preference is suspect at best, I assumed that her search would continue in vain forever, her Barbie Fun House growing dusty and unkempt.

I knew her cockeyed optimism had waned when she told me that she thought Ken might be gay. This revelation coincided with a drunken one night stand in Vegas, which resulted in Shelly's lost virginity. I was both thrilled and disheartened when I found out that Shelly had finally given it up -- thrilled that she was now freely throwing around the term sex, disheartened that her Sin City encounter didn't live up to her 29 years of romantic dreaming. Fortunately though, she has been able to move past her impractical fantasies of making love and have some exceptionally fun sex with men who look nothing like Ken.

Some women, of course, will always make love, and chances are you, like me, are related to one of them. Perhaps she is your melodramatic cousin who just returned from understudying Ophelia in the Reno, Nevada summer stock performance of Hamlet. Or she is your newly divorced aunt (or quelle horreur, mother) who is experiencing men for the first time since ending her 23-year marriage to "that asshole I gave the thinnest years of my life." These are the burgeoning soap opera queens, nurtured by one too many lonely viewings of All My Children, and an abiding love of Jackie Collins novels. The Dramatic Diva views sex as "passionate, soulful love-making," much as she proclaims the guy who cut her off on the freeway is "a hateful, demonic little man who will burn, burn, burn in hell for what he did." In short, these are the women you will never change. They are the women you love despite their histrionics. And while these women will never climb down from Mt. Love Making, they will break into fits of hysterical theatrics when, at the family reunion, you refer to sex as "the beast with two backs."

At least some of my girlfriends are starting to acknowledge that it's hard to hold onto the idea of making love when you're on all fours trying to figure out why your date wants to know "who's your daddy." I still harbor hope for Mr. and Miss Abercrombie & Fitch. Perhaps one day, they will go their separate ways, and the ingénue who inadvertently dry-humped my husband will realize that it is all just sex. Once she has this epiphany, she will be free to have years of sometimes meaningful, but always fun, sex. I hope she has sex with someone whom she loves deeply and who shows her love both in and out of their bedroom, even if the word "love" only comes up while they are clothed. I hope she fulfills her sense of adventure by having sex in exotic locales all over the world -- anywhere but my husband's leg.

I have lost all hope for my sister. She still MLs, although she has told me that she no longer abbreviates it in her diary. I try to believe her when she calls it making love -- I honestly want to believe her. There is a large part of me that wants to be just like my big sister, naïve enough to believe each time I give it up to my hubby the earth will move, the heavens will part and Fabio will appear, dressed as a Greek Adonis, ready to pour me a glass of white Zin, tickle me with feathers and ride me, his faithful burro, into the sunset. So occasionally I attempt to make love to my husband. We tried it last night, in fact, and ended up giggling so much that we just went back to our good ol' slap and tickle. After calling out to the good Lord above, we rolled over, spooned each other, and flipped on The Simpsons.