There seems to be this crazy idea that when the skirts start to get higher on the leg men become less faithful to their girlfriends/wives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me tell you, even back in the days when it took a hundred buttons just to get at a woman's breasts men were lining up for the opportunity. Men have always been unfaithful and will always be unfaithful. While women are wired to be nest-builders, men have a genetic predisposition to spread their special sauce to any buns that make themselves available.
It goes beyond simple explanation. Men understand that unless their woman just lays there with the enthusiasm of a Thanksgiving turkey getting stuffed or has a defective vagina, if they close their eyes they all pretty much feel the same. Any girl can be the lovely Yvonne Strahovski, even their non-Strahovski-esque girlfriend/wife.
It's not just the physical act of intercourse that we desire and women will never be able to understand that because they are women. You can use any logic you want but at the end of the discussion they will remain stubbornly and steadfastly female.
Conquest is hard-wired into us. It's what makes us men. When Ferdinand Magellan first stepped onto the deck of the Santa Maria (Santa Maria? Forget it, he's rolling) he felt more alive than the people who were sending him over to plunder Incan gold could ever hope to feel. Looking at the horizon, feeling the wind in his hair, I have no doubts whatsoever that he was sporting the biggest exploring boner France had ever seen.
That's why it's a common expression that the sea is a sailor's mistress, and there's never been any sailor who spent his whole life trolling back and forth over the same patch of water. He's erecting his sail and going wherever the wind blows him. Plowing resolutely through the waves of testosterone, plowing onward, seeing every point of light in the sky as some sort of North Star imploring him to plow and plow some more. North, south, whatever the course may be as long as there is plowing involved.
You want to read a short book? Look for one entitled “Great Female Explorers.” That will be the quickest read you've ever had. Why? Because back in the exploring heyday there were no women involved. They stayed in port having songs written about them. (Am I right, Brandy?) It was too risky for women to be onboard ocean-going vessels what with their breasts getting tangled up in the rigging, getting pregnant by pirates and attracting sharks with their constant menstruating and all. It's a shame because while men were capable of making their own sandwiches, a woman would have instinctively added a few orange slices and cleared up that scurvy nonsense in a flash. They're good like that.
While I hate to use the term “manly,” the truth is that exploring is manly stuff. Like plowing. Men are plowers and women the plowed. Men will be forever driven by plowing.
And flag planting. Women kid themselves but there has to be some part of them that realizes that they are nothing more than new land to be captured. And plowed.
Perhaps they look at what typically happens to the indigenous people after men have found their way to a new shore, and begun their inevitable shenanigans, and feel a little queasy about giving in to our more carnal urges. Well, they have a point there. Again, I'm not trying to rationalize our behavior, just explain it. It rarely works out well for the post-plowed.
It all sounds very seedy but in the end there's nobody to blame. Our DNA is the puppet master and we dance on the end of its string. It calls the tunes. And those tunes are baby-making tunes. When a girl in a short skirt bends over Barry White starts singing in our heads and there is fuck all we can do about it.
Frankly now that I give it some thought, I'm a little tired of explaining myself on the topic. Women want some sort of defense for this caddish behavior and no amount of scientific data seems to be able to quell their need to blame some sort of character flaw in men. A character flaw would be never leaving a penny in the little dish at the 7-11. What we have going on below the waist demands that we plow our girlfriend/wife on her Mom's casket at the wake if the opportunity presents itself. Our girlfriend/wife or any other female in the room that gives us a wink. Open or closed lid. We will stare right into our Mom’s cold dead eyes as we ejaculate and think nothing of it. You think we want to do that?
Want has nothing to do with it.
It's a switch that gets flipped and from that point on our penis is on auto-pilot.
While it might be argued these urges may be all that keep a man from cutting off the head of nagging woman, in the end, if she is not available to be on the receiving end of his gooey burden, he will simply find the next suitable candidate and not give it a second thought.
I think a better strategy would be to come up with more realistic coping mechanisms as opposed to constantly trying to change us. We might pretend to change for a few days but in the end our true nature will reveal itself. The salty smell of the sea will fill our noses and we'll be setting sail to harbors unknown in search of sweaty adventure.
And plowing.
Lots of plowing.