A fascinating hypothesis from sex & intimacy expert Shan Boodram to Bill Maher at 2:23 mark: “If somebody said to me ‘if there are 100 men that you are physically attracted to, how many of those would you have sex with?'”
Imagined HE response: The initial answer is “the wealthy funny ones who seem to have a soul.” The second answer is “you know going in that most men won’t stand up to any kind of serious emotional or psychological scrutiny…one way or another 75% to 80% will disqualify themselves by just talking…by focusing mostly on themselves or failing to be sufficiently gracious or show sufficient respect to the woman or whatever.”
To borrow from Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat, “With grade-A, quality-level, creme de la creme women there are 50 different ways you can fuck up, and if you can think of 35 of them in advance you’re a genius.”
Of the remaining 20% or 25% of the men who seem smart and palatable and emotionally secure with a little dough in the bank, half will eliminate themselves with some kind of obsessive quirk thing…a pet rhesus monkey, being a workaholic, smart-phone obsessed, being a sports fanatic or a terrible dresser or…whatever, wearing plaid pants.
Maher response: “Great question for a woman. And here’s a bit: I’ve never known a woman who hasn’t shared some version of this story. ’I met a promising guy…’oh, he’s cute, seems hopeful, doesn’t look like a psycho’, and then he opened his mouth and I lost interest’. Every woman has a version of that story, and no men [do].”
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Here’s the full hour-long discussion.
Boodram is “an intimacy expert who’s spent the past 15 years discussing sex, relationships and attachment on the Internet and in the media. She has 70 million YouTube views and has served as an expert on projects on all major streaming/ TV networks (Netflix, Hulu, ABC, Fox) and has had write ups in The New York Times, Forbes and Time Magazine
Sidebar: There’s a 2007 book called “A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance” by Jane Juska. As you might expect, it’s about a woman in her mid 60s who decides she wants to try and have good sex with a good guy, and how she tries to find that guy through singles ads.
All well and good, but the truth is that many women of a certain age tend to be more gun-shy than not about intimate relationships. Even with the right kind of strong mutual attraction and good vibes all around it can take a long warm-up period to get to any kind of receptive or synchronous place.
Seasoned older women are the greatest, but even after they give you the green-light look (which there’s never any mistaking) you sometimes need the spiritual serenity of Sri Krishna and the patience of Job to get going. They’ve been through lots of bad relationships in their youth and they don’t want to get hurt, and this, of course, is fully human and understandable. Everyone becomes a piece of work after 40, I guess. Conventional wisdom tells us that many things in life get easier (or at least are easier to understand) as you get older, but the finding the right kind of spiritual and sexual engagement isn’t one of them.