Mike Alvear

                YOUR ODDS.  ——->

You chatted online or talked on the phone almost every night for weeks.  You really fell for him even though you never physically met.  Then suddenly he stops all contact.  He won’t return your emails, texts or calls.   You’re crushed, and you just can’t rest until you know why he ended it.  How bad is it to ask for closure from someone you’ve never met?  If you’re talking every night for weeks doesn’t the other guy owe you something?

He owes you nothing.  N-O-T-H-I-N-G.   How can somebody you’ve never met owe you for something that never happened?   Besides, what if he’s hideous?  What if he’s a toxic waste dump who disguised himself as oceanfront property?  You’d end up getting closure from a foreclosure.

Yes, you’re hurt.  Who wouldn’t be?  But you’re the one who allowed it to happen.  The point of online dating is to hook up or date-not to have endless phone conversations and weave chat threads into adorable little sweaters.  The next time you meet somebody online cut to the chase.  Tell them you’re not here to type; you’re here to meet.   If he’s dodging all your invitations he ain’t just hinting that something ain’t right-he’s skywriting it.

Everybody who’s single goes through the “Dead Cat Bounce.”  Wall Street uses the term when the stock market plunges, bounces up, and then continues dying.  Dating’s like that.  There you are, in a date-less free-fall, when you suddenly meet somebody great, bounce up, and think your industry sector is on the rise.  But then it doesn’t work and you plummet like the Dow Jones Average after news of a big oil spike.  

Never confuse short-term hope with the Dead Cat Bounce.  Otherwise your diary is going to look something like this:  

Thursday

Met a dreamy guy named Jake.  Problem is, he’s giving me that classic “come here/go away” vibe. He introduced himself at the bar, said he’s wanted to meet me for a long time and then 10 minutes later he leaves without saying goodbye.  I saw him a few days later at a party.  He sneaks up behind me, whispers “How are you, handsome?” and gives me a hug.  And 10 minutes later he leaves without saying goodbye.  What am I missing?  He always acts so interested but he never stays put long enough to get my claws in him.

Friday

Jake emailed and asked me out for Saturday night!  Or at least I think he did.  I swear, if he were the editor of a fashion magazine it’d be called Vague.

Saturday

My plan:  Charm the pants off him.  I’m taking him to three different places.  This will create energy and a quick change of scenery as his ambivalence moves from lusting after me to forgetting my name to wanting to marry me. 

 Jake’s loft.  8:00 p.m.   Awkward as hell.  Greeted me by shaking my hand.  Shaking my hand!

 Drinks.  8:15 p.m.   I made sure our hands touched at the bar; I made sure our legs touched under the table.  I tried to make sure my signals were unmistakable.  No dice.  He pulls away.  But he seems to moon over me, his wide-set brown eyes seemingly incapable of looking away from me.

 Restaurant.  9:00 p.m.  Better.  When I touched his hand on the table he didn’t pull away.  Incremental steps in a restaurant make for great leaps in the bedroom, I always say.

 Dessert.  10:30 p.m.  We walk over to the place next door and get ice cream cones.  Come on, Jake, ask me for a taste, I think.  I want to see you lick my cone.  I offer him some.  “No thanks,” he says.  Rats.

 Jake’s loft.  11:05 p.m.  We’re sitting on the couch.  I make my move.  He makes a counter-move.  I give up; he moves in.  I respond; he pulls away.  

Shit.

 I guess I could have tried my best to seduce him, but I don’t want to feel like I manipulated somebody into bed.  He yawns and says he has to get up early in the morning.  At the door I went to shake his hand.  He pulls me into him and gives me a deep, soulful kiss.  Then he nudges me out the door and shuts it.

 Monday

Good news:  Jake called me after our “date.”  Great news:  He wants to go out again.  Bad news:  He wants to do it in 3 weeks.  

Well, I don’t think you have to know algebra to do the math on that one.  In a few weeks I got a text saying the worst three words you can hear in the dating world:

*  Let’s

*  Be

*  Friends

And in that order, too.  

When it comes to love and sex, guys have so many problems with the truth they should have business cards that read, “Professional Liar.”  

Take a look at any city magazine’s “Most Eligible Bachelor & Bachelorette” feature and you’ll see what I mean.  Here’s a typical answer a guy gave in a section called, “What I look for in a woman:”

“Someone with a good sense of humor who likes to have fun, is confident in who they are, likes to travel, and is honest and goal-oriented.”

Oh, Please.  Ireland’s pastures long for that kind of manure.   We men are visually-oriented sexcentrics, yet we will never, if asked what we look for in a mate, say what we really want:

“A hot babe who can tent my jeans and suck a softball through thirty feet of garden hose.” 

Now, the truth is, that’s not all we want.  We also want mates with a sense of humor and other positive personal characteristics, but we want them wrapped in a package that Austin Powers best described as “Pure Shagability.”  So why do guys lie?  Because we want to get laid.  And honesty is of no service to our goal.

Women often ask me why men lie and I always answer the same way: “Because you punish them when they don’t.”  For a guy, the true, honest, priorities-in-line answer to the question, “What I look for in a mate” would look something like this:

 ”I want a gorgeous woman who can freak the chrome off a Buick.  She also has to be smart, kind, have a good sense of humor, like to travel, and be honest and genuine.”

But how would most women respond to that?  Not well, and men know that.  So they lie.

Sometimes I wonder if my feelings about women would be any different if I were straight.

Would I really think they couldn’t run a Fortune 100 company because they weren’t bright enough?  Would I really think they shouldn’t be on a battlefield because they’re not tough enough?  Would I be part of an old boy’s network that would keep them out?

A long time ago, Roseann Barr told lesbians in her audience,

“What do you know about hating men?  You don’t have to fuck them!”

Is that the missing piece to understanding misogyny?  Sexual attraction?  Does sexual tension create that love/hate ping-pong?   If I wanted women the way I want men would my opinions of them change?

I doubt it.  If sexual tension was necessary to create opposite feelings about the object of your desire, then why isn’t it a phenomenon in gay circles?  Few could say there’s a woman-hating fog in lesbian life or a serious man-bashing theme in gay life.

Whatever the answer is I often think about how I’d treat women if I were straight.  Would my attitudes change?  I doubt it.  I think I’d just be a pro-woman horn-dog.  You know, the feminist in the tittie-bar.

Check out NBC’s “Ab Fab: Guess the swimmer” game, where you can see torsos of Olympic swimmers and match them to the right face.  Funny, there’s no female version of it.  NBC wouldn’t dare. Showing headless bodies of beautiful women would make, well, heads roll. 

http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/photos/galleryid=156776.html

Is it a double-standard?  Why is it okay to chop up men’s bodies for women to look at but not the other way around?

Well, for one, men LIKE to be objectified.  We WANT to be seen as sexual objects, we want —OH GOD *YES*– to be used for base, endless sexual purposes.  But more importantly, we’re not going to suffer the consequences of objectification, since we pretty much own everything and run most of it.  If women truly shared power with men, objectifying them wouldn’t be objectionable.  But they don’t, so it is.  

Using the headless bodies of men works in NBC’s “Ab Fab” game because it adds a welcome recreational layer to our power and self-esteem.  If they used women’s headless bodies all they’d do is perpetuate the widespread perception that a woman’s worth starts from the neck down.  

Let us all keep our heads about us and leer with respect.

The Three Stages of Clay Aiken:

1. Teen Girl Crush

2. Desperate Closet Case   

3. Loving Dad?

Aiken visiting a North Carolina summer camp affiliated with his charity.

Clay Aiken got his gal pal producer pregnant. Jewelry may have been involved but a pearl necklace was not.

I’ve always dismissed “Gay” Aiken as a lightweight. His singing made me long for a shot of insulin.  His flaming gay denials made me long for a can of lighter fluid.

But his pending fatherhood changed all that. He could have faked a girlfriend to throw people off his scent. He could have gotten married to cover his tracks. He could have gotten his “wife” pregnant to make the hounds go away.

But he didn’t.  Instead, he artificially inseminated a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend or wife and got two for the price of one:  He came out without any speeches and lived out a dream without living through a nightmare.

Good for him.  I still don’t like what he’s done to music but I love what he’s done to his character.  You can just tell he’s going to be a great parent.  Anybody who goes through the hellish machinations of IVF to bring a child into the world is doing it because they want to devote their lives to something bigger than themselves.

It’s the one where you lay on your back, put your arms above your head…

…and let your partner do all the work.

Sorry for the jab, Michael– not really talking about you, but people like you. Beautiful people with beautiful bodies. And what they’re like in bed. Anybody lucky enough to bag somebody way out of their league knows what I’m getting at:

Gorgeous guys make lousy lays.

They’re like restaurants in great locations–they don’t have to give good eats or good service because they don’t have to–the line’s out the door. Every session with a gorgeous guy is a three-way—you, him, and his ego. One girlfriend told me she went home with guy so high up in the beauty chart she got nose bleeds just looking at him. But he sucked in the sack. “I might as well have masturbated to his picture, for all the attention he gave to me,” she said.

You’d think Boys Burdened with Beauty would be great in bed just from the sheer volume of sex they have. But practice doesn’t make perfect if all you’re practicing is being adored. Or serviced. In my own experience of bagging the burdened, I could sense the expectation of the status imbalance:  Since I was at the bottom of the pecking order I was to do all the pecking.

There’s one exception: Guys who grew into their beauty–the fatties and nerds who bloomed later in life. They experienced the sting of rejection, the pain of being sexually invisible. And through their suffering they learned an open secret about great sex: Giving pleasure is often hotter than taking it.

This is what John Edwards said about Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky saga:

I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.

Can you imagine Clinton’s “I feel your pain” consolation phone call to Edwards?

“Hello Pot? This is Kettle. You’re Black!”

It’s like real estate: It all depends on the location.

Anywhere else–good luck.

In editorial meetings for our TV show, The Sex Inspectors, we decided it’d be easier to teach guys how to screw than to kiss. Maybe because men would rather be sexual than romantic. Or maybe because women consider kissing to be more intimate than sex and really, how do you teach intimacy?

Either way, this *hilarious* video of my co-host Tracey Cox with England’s version of Stephen Colbert, “Keith Barret,” makes the point: There are some thing you just can’t teach a guy:

“Teaching a man how to kiss” (sorry, the BBC won’t allow embeds)

Exactly what is Jenna Jameson going to say to her child when she grows up?

"This is Mommy when she was trying real hard to get pregnant with you, honey"