Confession of a Woman Who Likes Men Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey 1/1/94 I admit it. I like men. A lot. I wish I'd belonged to the generations of women who didn't have to work for a living (I'm guessing sometime between the rise of urban living and the decline of middle-class prosperity), so I could spend my entire days as well as nights cuddled up in muscular arms and musky-smelling chests. That's all I want out of life, and it's a shame that I have to spend so much of my life cooped up in an office. It's an office full to the brim with women supervisors in every direction, so I can't use my only true skill, the skill of making men like me, to advance my station. Instead, I'm on a floor full of women who think I'm a "slut," not worthy of their respect nor of their friendship. Just because I'm in tune with my physical and spiritual needs, and do what it takes to fulfill those needs, women hate me. I only want to spread more love in the world, and half of my world hates me. I haven't gone after the husbands or boyfriends of the women in the office, at least not knowingly. I have tasted many married men, but they've all confessed to me that their marriages had become arrangements of convenience for the sake of the children or the inheritance; or that they were otherwise frustrated at home and needed some release to make their living arrangments work. I like to think that, instead of breaking up other people's relationships, I've made them stronger. Perhaps if my sex life had developed with less jealousy and competition from other women, I would have learned to like women more. I might even have developed a physical attraction to women. I tried a menage a trois once. I couldn't get into it. The other woman smelled of stale perfume, aloe vera lotion and Nair. Her skin felt weird to me. After years of the only soft supple flesh in my life being my own, it felt like I was giving myself an out-of-body experience. No, give me the sharper angles and variety of textures of male flesh. Give me hairy legs and beard stubble. Give me boxy buns and leathery earlobes. Give me penises that blossom into life at my command, that reach into me. Give me love handles and beer guts for pillows on rainy lonely nights, complete with the purr-like sounds of growling tummies. Give me testicles that look like spongy peach pits, those symbols of toughness that are so delicate. Give me the wondrous, boyish expression of a normally-jaded adult man looking so amazed and grateful to be in my arms. I will love my men all night and even on subsequent nights, until my eye returns to wandering or the inevitable "relationship" issues pop up. Other women try incessantly to tell me how dangerously I'm behaving, picking up men in bars and going back to their houses. It isn't when you're prepared for it. I don't have inhibitions that I'd have to lose with drugs or excess alcohol, and I watch the intake of my lovers; so we're in control of our emotions, and I'm usually in control of his. It's easy to find men who need me more than I need them, men who will agree to anything you say. I never look to men for power. It's the women who gravitate toward lovers with flashy cars and aggressive talk who get fed a line of bullshit, then get fed a line of coke, and then get beaten up. That's my theory anyway. I told this theory to a woman and she said I was just making up excuses for myself. Maybe I am, but I've had a lot of great nights thanks to this excuse. Because I stay away from the guys who look like trouble, I get the guys the other women don't bother with. I get the lonely divorcees, the pre-med majors, the insurance agents, the temp workers, the laid-off assembly workers. All the men who are extremely eager to please me. The men who look like they don't have a woman picking out their clothes. The men who've been told all their lives that they're not rich enough or not cute enough. They're mine for the mining. I take good care of them, I train them to take good care of me, and I send them back into the world stronger and more confident. Don't ask me how many men I've had. I remember all of them, but I haven't counted. Maybe one or two a week, every week, when I'm not in a "relationship," which usually happens once or twice a year and lasts about a month or two. I've been in this basic pattern since I was 19 or 20, about ten years. God, that is a lot! No wonder I have this reputation. I live in a town of 500,000 people. If half of them are men, and half of those are of fuckable age, then maybe one out of every 150 or 200 men in this town have been inside me. Except that a lot of them have moved away, or were students or otherwise were just passing through. Still, it's reassuring to think that no matter where I am in my town, there's somebody who's been nice to me. If I get a heart attack in a store or a truck sideswipes me on the road and I run into a light pole, chances are there's going to be a former lover there on the streets ready to come to my rescue.

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