The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie

Amy Schumer is everywhere. Odie and I actually have our first double date in 6 years to see her movie this Friday. In season 2 of her show, Zach Braff plays her husband in a sketch where he and his buddies play cards and talk women. Braff keeps attempting to join in with graphic sex tales about his wife, played by Schumer.  The friends are grossed out.

“What’s with the wife stories? Are you some kind of psychopath?”

Braff keeps trying to join in on the woman-objectifying sex talk, but the friends get more skeeved out with every story. They remind him they know her as she intermittently appears with nachos and home baked cookies. “We all went to college together!” bemoans one.

Schumer nails it, as usual, by talking super dirty to Braff, her husband, in front of the boys, leaving Braff to gleefully declare, “I guess I should eat up. I gotta shit on those tits.”

I’m fascinated by the way people are disgusted by married sex. Not married people, of course, but the public at large. En masse, if you will. Schumer’s sketch encapsulates this disgust beautifully. There are underlying assumptions that there is nothing “freaky” or kinky (or art-worthy) about the sex married people have, and that it is simply not titillating. Or worse, that it doesn’t exist at all.

If you did freaky things when you were dating, what is it about the ring that makes you stop? Wouldn’t people be more inclined to get their kink on in the security of a marriage? I mean, condoms come off, we share a bathroom and a tax return. What’s there to hide at that point? My husband saw the obstetrician cut my taint with scissors. What do I have to be shy about?

While spinning to “Superfreak” when my instructor was in an “old school funk” mood, I wondered what “superfreaks” actually do. What can you “not take home to muth-AH?” Is it butt stuff? Because if that’s what “superfreaks” do, is it really “super” freaky? Or is he talking riding crop on the clit and shitting on her tits? I honestly have no idea.

When I was hanging out with my fuck buddy after high school, he confessed to me that his girlfriend had asked for anal once. It was like this “Can you even believe it?” story. I’ve dated men whose experience was so limited or traditional that a BJ was considered “freaky.” In the series Cathouse on HBO, the sex workers assure the camera that men come into the brothel and ask for things “their wives won’t do.” (In my case, that would be the laundry).

In the film Closer, when Julia Roberts’ character is confessing infidelity to her cheating husband and his double standard, he asks her detailed questions about the sex. After answering a few pointed questions she replies, “We did the things that people who have sex do.” Maybe that cleared it up for Clive, but we don’t know what other people do in their bedrooms. Some politicians and religious organizations are obsessed with regulating it (at least for other people). We assume that everyone is doing what we do, but at the same time, we wonder if we’re “normal.”

I haven’t read 5o Shades, but I’m told it’s supposedly BDSM. Which I had to look up because “in my day” it was just S&M. Most of my S&M experience was pretty tame, I guess. I never had a “safe word.” It was more like, “Can you loosen these? I can’t feel my hands.” I know for sure that pain does NOT excite me, which I learned by getting a full bikini wax from a Dominatrix. No, thank you. I’m not a sadist either because I didn’t ever get turned on by the things that hurt my partners. I just felt bad for them.

Unless it was them tripping and falling. Because that shit is always funny.

I’ve affectionately teased Odie about being “vanilla” and he has lovingly refrained from calling me a skank. You know your husband loves you when he says, “I guess if you really wanted to you could [redacted], or I guess I’ll [redacted]. I mean, I’m not exactly keen on the idea. But, I love you, honey, so… just let me know.” I’m not sure if it was his pained expression or the fact that he was actually wearing a t-shirt with a four-leaf clover on it that reads “Lucky Shirt,” but all I could do was laugh and laugh. And promise never to [redacted] or expect him to [redacted].

So, is the conversation I just described typical, normal married stuff? Or am I a freak? He did take me home to “muth-AH” so does that mean I’m NOT a superfreak, or he just didn’t know I was? Or have we come so far as a progressive society where “Truffle Butter” is actually a damn SONG that you now DO take superfreaks home to meet your parents? Are your parents superfreaks? What exactly are their super powers?

“Am I normal?” is the question that led to the creation of every search engine ever.

I’ve always liked to think of myself as a good time girl. “For a good time call,” as Sia would say. As long as you think binge watching Breaking Bad and eating gummy bears is “a good time.”