The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
Is
there a difference between urban sex and rural? As a city girl who
fell in love with a Vermonter, I have had plenty of slow country
afternoons to ruminate on this. For starters, I've noticed that despite
ample opportunity to commune with nature, my own fantasies still involve
no setting that might remotely be called bucolic: the idea of running
naked through a field of wildflowers evokes nothing more than the old
Breck commercial. In fact, country knowledge has injected only realism
into that image: I now know that such fields contain thistles.
I've wondered, has lifelong urbanity stripped the pastoral from my prurient imagination?
Or the opposite: Might I have fantasized that running-through-the-field
thing if I were a Madison Avenue ad man in thin-soled Italian shoes who
had never set foot out of Manhattan, instead of a semi-transplant in
clodhoppers who regularly hops through clods?
The history books -- at least the good ones -- tell tales of widely
divergent sexual behavior in city and country. Cities, with their lavish
wealth and desperate poverty, commerce, art and throngs of thrill-seeking
migrants, have always been cauldrons of sexual freedom and sexual danger;
experimentation and exploitation; feminism, fetishes and free love;
sexual theater and therapy; promiscuity and prostitution.
Country hamlets, meanwhile, have done their best to keep errant eros in
check, under the surveillance of family, Church and busybody neighbors.
Nevertheless, the rube has always had plenty of space to pursue his
pleasures. (See
Bruegel's "Harvesters,")
splayed for posterity on the
golden ground after long labor, their wineskins drained and bodice and
codpiece laces dangling.)
In the late 1940s,
Alfred Kinsey
found that "farm boys" did it less than
"city boys," either alone or with others, before or during marriage. And
rural guys hardly ever got it on with other rural guys, except for some
"virile, physically active" and sexually omnivorous Wild West types:
"ranchmen, cattlemen, prospectors [and] lumbermen," as the good doctor
catalogued them.
Later research on sexual attitudes has confirmed what St. Augustine
suggested when describing his own temptations in the
Confessions:
sooty city air dirties the mind. Or maybe the
dirty-minded seek out polluted environments. In any case, the bigger the
town, the more sexually liberal its inhabitants. Residence is also
related to religiosity -- country people go to church more, maybe because
there's no place to go to brunch. And even among the pious, geography and
sexual attitude are linked. Fundamentalist Protestants, traditional
small-towners, are the tightest-laced; Jews, the most metropolitan, are
the loosest.
However . . .
It is a rule of social science that attitudes have little relation to
behavior. And a rule of reality that real life rarely conforms to
statistics. Thus, I offer my thoroughly unscientific impressions on the
mating habits of the city mouse, the country mouse and the migrating
mouse (me).
Courtship Rituals
What depressed me most when I came to Bovinia (which is what I shall call
my rural Vermont village) was the parties. Even stoned, nobody flirted. I
have educed a couple of reasons for this:
1. Demographics. They're all related, or practically. "To me, what's
exciting and sexy is different people from different places mixing it
up," said my friend Lindsay, thirtyish and a native Bovinian. "Here,
everybody knows my mother."
2. Fashion. They're all dressed in Eddie Bauer turtlenecks, even in
summer. "The right people, the right music," Lindsay continued,
describing her idea of sexy, "and a leather miniskirt." We agreed: a
leather miniskirt on Main Street might earn you a summons.
Still, Lindsay has more dates than anyone I know in the city. Perhaps this
is because she is pretty, witty, athletic and capable of drinking any guy
under the table. Of course these characteristics describe at least 1.5
million single New York women of my acquaintance. Singles don't stay
single long in Bovinia, either: I've noticed that divorcees there are
remarried within eighteen months. Which leads me to the less obvious
boons to country coupling:
1. Meteorology. One Vermont winter alone in the bed is enough.
2. Demographics, again. Scarcity has a way of focusing the libido
wonderfully, while plenty inspires insatiable perfectionism. Thus, as all
isolated urban singles know, a large population does not a full datebook,
or a committed relationship, encourage.
Unless you're Cindy Crawford, the guy drinking a mocha at the Times Square
Starbucks does not seek conversation with you. And now that everybody
freelances, telecommutes or stays home pretending to be busy, the urban
dating situation has gotten worse. A friend said she thought she'd have a
better chance of meeting a man if she left her apartment. In Bovinia,
where there is no crowd, one cannot hide in it; and where there is no
Chinese food delivery, staying home too long can lead to starvation.
Family Values
Family values are best practiced in families. And since unattached people
are more likely to be found in cities, and just about everyone in the
country seems to be coupled, one might assume that marital fidelity is
more common in the heartland. Conservative attitudes, as I mentioned
above, are held dearer in Smalltown, USA than in Sodom on the Hudson.
Country people say, hands down, that infidelity is wrong. But are they
more faithful than city people?
Opportunity for straying surely increases with the number of dark bars in
a locale -- Hong Kong, Lisbon and Chicago are excellent cheating cities
-- and diminishes with the number of close friends and relatives seated
at those bars (see Courtship Rituals, above). When a certain woman ran
her fingers through the thinning hair of a certain man (not her husband)
at Bovinia's only cafe one evening, all his wife's friends saw it, in
short order his wife knew it, and the rest (though not the marriage, as
it turned out) was history.
If social opprobrium doesn't discourage infidelity in cities, having
children might. Talk about parties where no one flirts! There may be
nothing like a ten-dollar-an-hour babysitter waiting at home to dampen a
potential homewrecker's chance of luring half a couple to the back
bedroom.
Now, rural folks have plenty of kids too (according to NARAL, you cannot
get an abortion in 85 percent of American counties). But maybe their
kids don't require so much looking after.
Let me put it this way. I once soaked up, along with four or five Jack
Daniels, the sweet tales of a long-distance trucker in a cowboy bar in
western Minnesota, and presently followed him to his pickup, where we did
our uncomfortable duty on the front seat ("Did you make it?" he asked
afterward. I didn't). As he drove me to where I was staying, I inquired
about his marital status. He said he was "not exactly" married. I left my
green sweater in the truck. The next day, Sunday, my host directed me to
the guy's house to recover my property. The instant I drove up, my
erstwhile swain lurched through the screen door, hung over and prattling
nervously about his wife's imminent return from church. "I was just going
to say," I said in the deadest deadpan I could deliver, surveying the
toy-littered front lawn. "For a single man, you have a lot of tricycles."
I drove off in my Toyota, the radio evangelists shouting hallelujahs.
Audience Participation
Exhibitionism and voyeurism, the inversions of intimacy, can be mere
peccadilloes in the city, but in the country they're viewed almost
exclusively as pathology. And if flagrant flirtation requires a measure
of strangeness, public sex requires anonymity, which, unless you have a
lot of time to travel, means you must live in a densely populated area.
A neighbor of ours in Bovinia suffered arrest and no small shaming for
touching his clothed genitals while gazing at the sandaled feet of young
women at the public library. His problem might simply have been a dearth
of appropriate locales. Without taxicabs, gyms, public toilets or
skyscrapers with wide windows, he was forced to satisfy himself under the
nose of Marian, Madame librarian!
Of course, enterprising exhibitionists get a lot more buck for the bang
in Bovinia. Indeed, a major frustration of the New York sexual show-off
must be the unshockability of the city's bourgeoisie. One Sunday morning
a Manhattan father stepped out onto his stoop with his four-year-old son.
"Daddy, how come that lady is holding that man's penis?" queried little
Max. Daddy looked across the street and observed a tryst in progress. It
was winter. "Because his penis is cold, sweetie," he said. "Oh," said
Max, as they trundled off to get the bagels.
Queer Theory
If you're a gay man, you move to the city. That's what the recent
nationwide "Social Organization of Sexuality" study found. If you're a
lesbian, you move to a rural wimmin's commune or nest with your honey in
the woods, plant a garden and stock up on outdoor sporting gear. That's
what I've found. Unless, of course, you are a lipstick lesbian like my
working-class sephardic Jewish Londoner friend who moved north to live
with her girlfriend and started a support group called Women Who Love
Women Who Love Vermont Too Much. All members of this group have
subsequently returned to the city, sans country lovers.
Birds & Bees
Larry McMurtry, writing about East Texas in the 1950s, claimed that horny
teenage boys were wont to satisfy their urges with a heifer, rather than
weather the social complications of romancing a human female. McMurtry's
anecdote was substantiated by Kinsey, 17 percent of whose farm boys had
enjoyed "complete sexual relations" with a partner of another species.
Maybe the recent relaxation of the double standard has changed all this.
To my knowledge, anyway, livestock-fucking is not widely practiced in
Bovinia. Farmers frequently have occasion to reach an arm into a cow's
vagina to insert a lozenge of bull sperm or pull out a calf. And though these
operations resemble nothing more than fist-fucking, the inserters do not
appear to regard it as sexual, or even enjoyable. Generally, dairymen relate
to their stock with a solemn utilitarianism that precludes affection, not
to mention lust.
Yet, among urbanites, bestiality remains a perennial subject of fetish
and humor. Lenny Bruce riffed on fucking a chicken, Woody Allen on deer
and sheep. Nancy Friday, in My Secret Garden, revealed a decidedly
citified bent when she named her section on bestiality fantasies "The
Zoo," and not "The Jungle," or even "The Barnyard." And Andres Serrano
infamously photographed
a woman tenderly touching a horse's penis.
What does this tell us about urban and rural sexuality? It tells me that
wherever you live, the familiar is less exciting than the unknown, and
the most desirable object of desire -- whether Michelle Pfeiffer or
Michelle the heifer -- is always the least attainable. Country folk know
the moodiness and morning breath of a real goat as intimately as you know
your partner's, so they wouldn't bother. For a Bovinian, true
transgression is a leather skirt on a human flank at midday on Main
Street. Conversely, big-city dwellers are so habituated to sinewy bodies
encased in tight animal skins that Catwoman herself wouldn't turn a head
on a rush-hour A train.
The Eye of the Beholder
Beauty is in it. And in the country, it is not necessarily measured by
size. A woman in Bovinia does not feel she has to lose ten pounds before
saying hi to a man. Indeed, so laissez-faire is the citizenry on this
matter that a feminine condition prevails which my partner calls "Bovinia
butt." And yet a predominantly urban beauty prejudice -- the
superiority of thinness -- may be making its way into rural America:
Q: Why do they have Astroturf in the football stadiums in
North Dakota?
A: To keep the cheerleaders from grazing.
From this joke, heard in Montana, it's hard to tell which is
held in deepest disdain: hefty women, cows or synthetic turf.
Crossover Dreams
Finally, it is my informed bicultural opinion that the urban transplant's
"contribution" to rural sex -- the small "romantic" inn, typically a
renovated Victorian house decorated in calico and redolent of cinnamon --
is of dubious erotic value. I defy you to come up with a more stultifyingly
domesticated, erotically numbing combination of words than bed and
breakfast.
afternoons to ruminate on this. For starters, I've noticed that despite
ample opportunity to commune with nature, my own fantasies still involve
no setting that might remotely be called bucolic: the idea of running
naked through a field of wildflowers evokes nothing more than the old
Breck commercial. In fact, country knowledge has injected only realism
into that image: I now know that such fields contain thistles.
golden ground after long labor, their wineskins drained and bodice and
codpiece laces dangling.)
up," said my friend Lindsay, thirtyish and a native Bovinian. "Here,
everybody knows my mother."
country seems to be coupled, one might assume that marital fidelity is
more common in the heartland. Conservative attitudes, as I mentioned
above, are held dearer in Smalltown, USA than in Sodom on the Hudson.
Country people say, hands down, that infidelity is wrong. But are they
more faithful than city people?
western Minnesota, and presently followed him to his pickup, where we did
our uncomfortable duty on the front seat ("Did you make it?" he asked
afterward. I didn't). As he drove me to where I was staying, I inquired
about his marital status. He said he was "not exactly" married. I left my
green sweater in the truck. The next day, Sunday, my host directed me to
the guy's house to recover my property. The instant I drove up, my
erstwhile swain lurched through the screen door, hung over and prattling
nervously about his wife's imminent return from church. "I was just going
to say," I said in the deadest deadpan I could deliver, surveying the
toy-littered front lawn. "For a single man, you have a lot of tricycles."
Women Who Love Vermont Too Much. All members of this group have
subsequently returned to the city, sans country lovers.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
