Nobody Does it Better

A couple of years back (in Madrid), I had a British man with a Spanish mother who'd divided most of his adult life between those two countries and the U.S., tell me something quite edifying. As faithful readers may recall, I've written about how we from the New World have more energy, somehow, a sort of can-do/will-do attitude that contrasts with European inertia. After all, quite a number of our forebears left Europe probably for just that reason: the crushing weight of so many centuries of history. My general approach here in Europe is to raise an eyebrow in quizzical amusement when confronted with the all-too-present fatalism of this place. And then just forge on ahead in my typical American way, which endears me to some (often of the female variety) and sends others (often of the penile-bearing persuasion) running in the opposite direction.

Ah well, I was trying to tell you what this British guy said.... [drum roll] ... "when it comes to sex, Americans are the best". That caused my jaw to drop, I can tell you, when I heard it. And of course I immediately started to turn over all of the frustrations of so many past years in Berlin and Madrid. I´ve known quite a number of Latinamericans in both places, and the energy level to which I was so accustomed back in the New World is strikingly absent.

Why is this? There are a number of possible factors, of course. Latinamericans in Europe don't tend to have easy lives or much spare time. And in Berlin they are quite exotic and sought after.  In Madrid, where I am theoretically exotically fair-skinned and willowy (as in Latinamerica), Latinamerican men seem adopt all too easily the extreme languor with which I would characterize the Spanish approach to sex. I don't know why this is. Maybe it's what happens when one immigrates to heartland of the former colonizer. [If I were to move to Great Britain, would I become instantly obsessed with Royal Family millinery and spend my weekends eating fish-n-chips at the local pub?]

Getting back to the question at hand, plenty of American states (14 to be exact) up until ten years ago still had bizarre laws outlawing biblical "misdeeds" that practically everyone does, like sodomy. And their right-wing wackos continue to battle a U.S. Supreme Court decision annulling those laws (see this report). Gays are still fighting for the right to legally marry in most of the U.S. In contrast, Spain, previously a Catholic dictatorship for many decades, was the third country in the world to legislate gay marriage, eight years ago, a decision that was recently upheld by its Supreme Court.

OK, then, it´s not the U.S.'s judicially backwards attitude to sex, so it must be ...  [drum roll] ...  the fact that nobody does porn better than the U.S., in particular, world porn headquarters: California's San Fernando Valley.  Except wait, now anyone with a webcam is making porn...

Hmmm, I still can't say what it is that is special about us...  And in truth, I can't really say that American men in Europe are doing all that much better than Latinos here.  So perhaps it would be interesting to explicitly seek New World men who are equally unnerved by the unsexiness of the locals.  But then, dear readers, I swore off Craigslist a couple of years ago.  Still, I guess it's my super-charged American sex drive that can't seem to keep me peeking again every year or so....  It's incumbent on a blogger to keep current on things, after all.