Rob Anderson's Open Salon Blog

The Gymnast and I

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 01:09:15 -0400

Few things about life in high school are more demoralizing than being left out of the dating pool. I think this may be especially true for teenage boys, who are in their sexual prime during those fraught years. Being rejected all the time is bad enough; it is infinitely worse to know that your friends are dating and mating successfully while you must continue yanking your crank just to get a decent night's sleep. If you manage to make it all the way through high school without ever having a serious make out session, nor a stray job - hand or blow - let alone actual sexual intercourse, congratulations - you've just won one of life's most potently humiliating boobie prizes.

My own boobie prize came painfully, at the end of my senior year, when five separate girls turned me down as their date to my class's ball. I had to settle for a sweet but uninterested junior who was a member of my church youth group. Sure I got to go, but unlike so many of my classmates, I got no action. This propelled me to my freshman year in college, where I hoped to at last find a girlfriend, even if I couldn't score.

But never fear, older friends and family members will tell you, you'll find all the lovin' you need in college, where the women are much more interested in your substance than your cool quotient. They will appreciate you for your mind and heart, for the content of your character, unlike those bimbos populating the halls of your high school. That's usually not true, of course, but for me it would come to be at least partly true.

One of my best friends from high school ended up at the same university I did, and in the same dorm, so we spent a fair amount of time hanging out in her room and having the inevitable "deep" conversations one has while trying to define one's intellect. And as we would have them, her roommate would invariably stare and stare at me, burning a hole in my back. Finally one afternoon when she wasn't there I asked my friend if there was something wrong with her roommate.

"Is she nuts or something? I mean she just stares at me constantly. It's creepy."

My friend smacked her forehead and exclaimed, "Jesus CHRIST Rob, does she have to hit you in the head with a 2 x 4?! She wants you, dummy!"

At this I was taken aback, because I hadn't thought of the roommate in that way. She was an attractive woman, a grad student in some obscure technical subject, but also kind of plain, and very quiet. She was also Latvian, and had emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1980. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I decided to chat her up.

I discovered that Irina - what I'll call her - was a passionate woman who literally wanted to jump my bones. We had almost nothing in common save our lust for one another, and ended up nakedly groping ten minutes after the first time I met her in her room alone. The following Friday night - November 19th, 1983 - the impossible happened and she allowed me - nay, ecstatically drew me to - insert my penis into her vagina. I had finally gotten laid. That night I also found out what it was like to witness a woman in the throes of orgasm, which I found I liked almost as much as sex itself. Irina taught me much about a woman's body in those three hours, and much about mine. She drove my 19-year-old libido into a frenzy, and when it was all done she related a bit of information about herself that would, in later years, render this story a totemic quality. She had been an alternate on the 1976 Soviet Union Women's Olympic Gymnastics Team.

That's right - my virtue had been stolen by a RUSSIAN GYMNAST! Of course I would not be able to brandish this fact as a sexual bona fide until the release of "American Pie" 16 years later, but the wait turned out to be worth it, as several much younger men with whom I worked decided upon hearing this story that I was one of the cooler gents they had yet had the pleasure of meeting.

Irina and I did not last long, breaking up about three weeks after our asignation. It was not much more than a dorm fling, but it was without a doubt an auspicious sexual launch for which I will always be grateful.

The (Possible) Truth About Aubrey Reuben

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:04:55 -0400

Today's Salon included a short ramon á clef by a papparazzo named Aubrey Reuben. In his rather short confessional he describes how he was a good Jewish boy who, upon discovering the sexual charms of women, dropped all that and started goofing around with a married woman. Then he found a woman who, by his own description, was a carnally entrancing Latina who bedded him with great vigor. They were married for almost fifty years, and had sex to the end.

Oh boy.

Mr. Reuben is not a made-up character or a persona. As some commenters to the article demonstrate with links, he is a real person with a great deal of presence in the modern media world. Last year he was asked to be a judge for the Tony Awards. The man stands out.

But the question is whether the man is full of it or telling the truth. There's no way of really knowing that, but I think he is telling the truth. And here's why.

Very young men who are introduced to sex by mature women (like your's truly back in November of '83) tend to learn certain...things. If we are also possessed of what Henry Miller called a "lead bar with wings" - and I think Mr. Reuben was and is - then we are more or less set for life. That's it, and there's no accounting of it because life isn't fair.

I consider myself a male feminist and always have, but I've never understood the tendency of modern women (especially "third wave" feminists) to consider every man's desire to be somehow repugnant. Would I want to be like Reuben? No, because he has obviously lived a life without the slightest bit of insight beyond "I like hot chicks." But do I blame him for having such a good time? No again, because that's how men of his generation behaved, and do behave. I think men of my generation should look upon such men as cautionary examples.

Leviticans Are Not Christians

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:04:50 -0400

Just now I discovered a brilliant new way to describe so-called Christians who would deny gays the right to marry one another. I found it in a letter in response to the Salon article "Gay Marriage in the Heartland", about Iowa's decision to allow gays to marry. The letter writer gave credit to Slate Magazine, but whoever came up with it is a genius at nomenclature.

So, these imbeciles aren't Christians, they're Leviticans. Call them that, to their face when necessary.

Alan Dershowitz is Culpable for His Torture Opinions

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:01:06 -0500

More than anyone else, Alan Dershowitz is directly responsible for taking torture out of the realm of the unthinkable and into public disourse. It was he, near the end of 2001, who began proffering the ludicrous "torture warrant" idea. His reputation as a liberal's liberal meant that discussing torture as a viable option was suddenly respectable. And we all know the result.

At the time he made his comments on TV talk shows and during interviews, I was horrified. I knew that because Dershowitz was making the argument, the "only Nixon can go to China" rule was going to kick into gear. Informed people all over the country would say to themselves, "Well, if Dershowitz thinks it's ok...." And, tragically, I was right. Dershowtiz opened the floodgates, and I honestly believe that if there are prosecutions of those who ordered and engaged in torture, he should likewise be prosecuted as an accessory before the fact, an instigator. Justice demands nothing less.

"I don't fully understand why it is..."

Thu, 8 Jan 2009 22:01:33 -0500

Since Salon has seen fit to ban me from its comments section yet again, this time for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I will post here what I was going to post in response to Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith's ludicrous question within his most recent essay.

Smith is forever mystified by how "frightened" and "crazy" people act while in flight. I have a very simple answer for him: It is because everyone is painfully aware that they are hurtling through the air at 500mph in a glorified aluminum can, and that if enough little things go wrong THEY WILL ALL DIE.

I'm not sure why Smith can't grasp this salient fact. Most passengers - including your's truly - fly in a state of barely concealed panic. Those poor souls who succumb to their fears are arrested and jailed for "disrupting the flight", when in fact it was the damned flight that disrupted them. Talk about Orwellian.

I can only hope that one day Smith will gain some empathy for his passengers or, failing that, if and when one of the flights he's piloting fails that it crashes cockpit first.