X Is Greater than One

One is not statistically significant. The sample must be greater than one.

The Depilitator was one. He could have been an outlier.

Stranger than I could have imagined it, Datomantrix just returned from an all-expense-paid vacation in Jamaica with a story. She was invited by a band-mate-girlfriend - who has a gentleman friend who owns a hotel or two on the island. Free lodging, and maybe more. The band-mate brokered an exchange of photographs between Datomantrix and the hotelier. Said hotelier is an American man, in his early 50s, and by some accounts, an attractive and cultured individual. Single. According to the band-mate, he thought that Datomantrix appeared attractive. And vice versa. Thus expectations were fostered.

A love connection was not made. Datomantrix learned the following from the 50-something, scuba-diving hotelier. He was married once, for three years only, long divorced. He claims to have experienced all manner and nature of the single life in the city - dating back to the 1970s.

He told Datomantrix that she seemed to conservative for him. No, it wasn't the private nude sunbathing on the roof of his hotel. No. It was his interest and active practice in sado-masochistic rituals, complete with leather outfits, zipper-masks, whips, handcuffs, and all manner of accoutrement involved in the artifice of submissive-dominant sexual practices. Something about him on all fours, getting whipped on his bare buttocks by a whip-wielding dominatrix.

Dominatrix. Not Datomantrix.

I wonder if he shaves everything. Or if he's into clipping himself and applying Nair to where it should never go. Better for the whip to strike naked man flesh?

The Depilitator once ran his fingernails up my legs, but I stopped him before he left a mark. Leave no marks. He, however, claimed to like being scratched hard. He said something about rough sex too - before he revealed that he had a girlfriend.

The hotelier copped to having a serious girlfriend too. Makes you wonder why he invited Datomantrix to his place on the island in the first place. What an ass. But that piece of information is little more than a postscript.

Come to think of it, another fellow I could have dated, but elected not to - for a whole raft of reasons, all that made me itch - a year older than I, had asked me to scratch him. Again. Hard. Good grief. Scratch your own fucking self/selves.

Okay, that's three. Three. Now we're edging onto the periphery of significance, in statistical terms.

So I'm thinking, formulating a question. When a man reaches a certain age, let's say an age approaching fifty, give or take a few years' margin of error, and he's opted not to marry, settle down, and make a family, what happens? Does he become so jaded, so numb to intimacy, that the only way he can feel, to believe in intimacy, is to subjugate his physical person to some kind of external pain?

Are the layers so accreted that these kinds of men have no idea anymore how to strip themselves down, bare their emotions, lose control, allow their instincts to overtake the thinking brain, succumb to a deeper sense of being present with one other (female) person?

Have they forgotten how the mere sight of a woman can make their hair stand on end, their skin run hot, make their pulses race?

I remember a young man, younger than I - he worked for me years ago. The winter was passing - as it is now - and we women were shedding the layers of winter clothing, happy again to slip on wisps of dresses, flippy skirts, strappy sandals. Ahh.

He told me that coming up out of the subway on an early spring day, looking up at the women from behind, as they stepped up to the street, to the daylight, how he gasped, and how he had to sit down on a planter to take a moment - because the sight of that woman caused him to feel actual, physical pain.

I remember smiling at him. It was a gutsy thing to admit.

I thought, now that's a man. 

Comments

[La Latina]

OK-call me freaky but I do like biting, scratching and a little spanking and I don't mind the marks. Maybe these men never got a chance to experience different things in their youth and want to get it in before it is "too late".

[Datomantrix]

I have to say....he was a perfect gentleman! Exposing me to a world I never knew existed, both in Jamaica and in NYC. To each his own I say.....live and let live, but leave me out of anything painful! Ahhhhh....no tan lines!

[GVWonder]

Scary good questions HH.

A wise woman once told me, you shouldn't let the freak flag fly too early. Apparently, these 50 something dudes are one with their inner freak. I can't really comment on it though since I don't have any male friends in that demographic.

I gotta agree with the young man you wrote about. Springtime in New York is the best. The girl-watching gene goes berserk.

In fact, 68 degrees, I'm going outside NOW to give my eyballs a work out.

Yippeeeeeee.....

GVisual