Scientists have discovered that the average man thinks about sex about once every 30 seconds.

I don’t know about you, but the first thing that crossed my mind was this: Geez, that’s not very often. Who are these low-libido guys they surveyed? Monks? Accountants? Alliance MPs? The clumsy, dumb kids on Mr. Darwin’s hit list who were standing a little too close to the band saw in shop class?

Then, of course, I thought about sex and , when I came back, I considered that I screwed up in my choice of careers because, all of a sudden, science sounds pretty good, what with getting to wander around asking people how often they think about sex. I bet they’d give you a white coat and a clipboard and everything, but when I figured out that, given that I’d be asking other men about sex, it didn’t sound so good. And then I saw something shiny and forgot what I was thinking about, but that was OK ‘cause another sex thought came sailing through the vast, empty spaces of my cranium and I smiled at it, and my wife said, “Nuthin’.”

And she bought it because she knows me so well that she knows that, at any given moment, there’s at least a 50-50 chance that I actually was sitting there thinking about nothing, even though I had the newspaper open to the story about how often guys think about sex.

“You read this?” I asked. “you buy it that guys think about sex every 30 seconds?”

She peered over my shoulder, scanned the story and smiled. “Knowing you, it seems low to me,” she said. “Frankly, it’s a wonder any of you ever get anything done. For guys, everything’s about sex.”

“It is not…,” I started to say, but I couldn’t finish my sentence because my kid was watching Teletoon and Archie’s Weird Mysteries came on-and hot damn!-isn’t that Veronica a babe? Then I figured the kid would be glued to the set for a half an hour, and  I looked at my wife and she said, “Yes and no.”

“Huh?”

“Yes, we can slip away for half an hour. No, I will not permit you to call me Veronica.”

“How ‘bout Betty?”

“Certainly not.”

“Will you call me Archie?”

“Oh, all right,” she sighed.

“Cool.”

But, later, I got to thinking-actually thinking, not just staring into space or wondering what it would be like to roll around in a giant mayonnaise jar with Pam Anderson and Mary Tyler Moore (circa 1970, before she started looking like Jack Nicholson as The Joker)-and it occurred to me that my wife was wrong.

Not that I’d ever mention that to her. Tell a woman she’s wrong and you’re not going to hear the words, “Oh, Archie,” too often, let me tell you. But she was. Not that men aren’t obsessed about sex. We are. We’re probably lots worse than we let woman know. But she’s wrong in thinking that obsession keeps us from getting anything done. Sex may turn out to be the only reason any of us get anything done at all. Because, from Shakespeare to Donald Trump, boys are just trying to get some.

Why did Shakespeare write poetry? Why does any guy? ‘Cause we like it? Not hardly. I’m pretty sure old Billy S. would have preferred to kick back watching bear-baiting or jousting or whatever the Elizabethan Age’s version of football was, and hammering back Buds with his buds.

But, nope, when his pals went to watch bear-baiting at Ye Olde Hooters and flirt with the waitress, Shakespeare was wearing out his quill writing verse. Because, when you tip a Hooters girl, then as now, what you get is a smile, maybe a little wiggle action as she walks away. But you get your poetry groove on, you feature the girl’s name in it  up high, and you’ve got yourself some serious  “Oh, Archie” action going.

Early cavemen days, I’m pretty sure the most sophisticated hunting technique involved trying to knock a monkey out of a tree with a rock. But when we figured out that chicks dug guys who could put a haunch of mastodon on the fire every night, we invented the throwing stick, the spear, the bow and arrow and the Remington seven-millimetre, bolt-action magnum rifle with a scope.

And when we figured out they like being warm and clean, we invented houses, central heating, modern plumbing and the hot tub.

All in all, it’s most about showing off to getting chicks.

You think Janet Jones would have looked twice at Wayne Gretzky if he hadn’t been one of the best hockey players to strap on blades? Wayne’s a lot of things. Handsome is not one of them. I’m sure she’s deeply in love with him…but, if it wasn’t for hockey, if he’d been the guy who changed the oil in her car and wore a shirt with Wayne embroidered on the pocket instead of a jersey with GRETZKY on the back, would she have bothered to get to know him? Hah!

Would Donald Trump, he of the AWOL chin and thinning hair, get to hang out with high-maintenance women with big hair, big accents and big…well, you know, if he wasn’t richer than Scrooge McDuck? Uh-uh. He puts up those real tall buildings in New York because it’s his way of saying to the world, “Mine is bigger than yours.”

Remember when Christie Brinkley married Billy Joel? Billy Joel looks like you crossed Ringo Starr with a hobbit. Christie Brinkley looks like Christie Brinkley. You figure if he didn’t play the piano like a sonofagun and wasn’t rock star rich, that Christie Brinkley would have noticed him? Uh-uh.

And even when we’re trying to impress women, male perversion and sexuality obsession pay big dividends.

We invented condoms to avoid pregnancy. Then we invented the Pill so we could avoid condoms, and then we invented penicillin so we could cue the diseases we got from not wearing the condoms. Nobody said sex was uncomplicated.

Look at the Internet, one of the greatest educational tools of all time. It makes the planet smaller. It is one of the greatest mediums for communication the world has ever seen. And it was created by a bunch of guys wearing pocket protectors for one reason and one reason alone.

To move porn around.

Oh, sure, they will tell you they invented it to trade scientific information. They’ll tell you that they created it to metastasize outside government control so it could survive nuclear attacks. They lie.  The reason they built a system capable of  functioning, even if you nuke major cities, is because maybe they could face a life without Chicago…but they couldn’t face a life without  www.spankme.com, even if that future’s radioactive.

About 10 minutes after some Frenchman invented photography, you can be sure he was trying to talk some sweet young thing out of her clothes. You look at pictures in the National Geographic of some of those ancient temples in south Asia, they’re covered in carvings of people doing the nice and nasty.

Of course, because it’s ancient and all, it’s not pornography. It’s art and culture and stuff. Face it, though, you’ve got to be seriously committed to being a deviate to spend 50 years carving naked chicks out of stone.

You think guys invented cool labour-saving devices, from the vacuum cleaner to the microwave to the cuisinart, because they wanted women’s lives to be better? Not a chance. We invented all that stuff so women would get housework done faster and have more time for going, “Oh, Archie!”

I’m also pretty sure when Orville and Wilbur Wright chose Kitty Hawk as the first place to try out their brand new invention, the airplane, it wasn’t just ‘cause it was close to the house. I’m pretty sure there was a topless beach around somewhere.

It’s all about sex. And without it, we wouldn’t be flying airplanes and making our food with cuisinarts or watching Archie’s Weird Mysteries and trying to get our significant other to call us “Archie.”

 By Ian Robinson  

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