Different ways to pass the time

Okay, I confess: I’m too much of a wimp to post about polyamory. So you guys go ahead and screw whoever you want, I’ll just be over here talking about performance art.

You know how sometimes, something is so quintessentially itself that you have to wonder whether it’s a satire?

It’s not a satire . It’s “a slow crushing dance with a pig for one person at a time." According to the artist: "The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess, unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness."

What I particularly love about this piece is that viewers of the art are only allowed in one at a time, for up to ten minutes. This is ostensibly in order to create a sense of intimacy and rapport between the performer and artist. Now I'm not an art critic, but it seems to me that the only thing created by standing in silence for ten minutes and watching a woman cuddle a dead pig would be a bad case of the church giggles.

An undercurrent of pigginess. I mean, Jesus.

In other news, men from different countries have different perceptions of themselves as lovers. That’s not what the article says, of course, but it’s the only thing that I can glean from it. 60% of Italian men make their partners climax every time? Okay then, I’m sure that’s absolutely true, because after all it’s not at all an accepted fact that most women fake sometimes and most men can’t tell*. British men spend the longest time on foreplay, and Filipinos, in a beautiful turn of phrase, are “world-beaters” at masturbation.

Australian men are ‘amongst the most faithful’ in case you’re wondering why they reported this in an Australian newspaper.

See, to me these sorts of surveys raise more questions than they answer. For example, what counts as foreplay? Does the clock start ticking at the moment you roll over in bed, plonk a hand on her breast and say How About It, or at the point where, dressing for dinner, you choose the aftershave that renders her unable to form multisyllabic words? Where does it end; is foreplay any act but penetrative sex? That presupposes a certain…linearity to a sexual encounter, if you see what I mean.

It’s as if sex is a formal dance, with a defined set of steps and figures. Partners make indirect eye contact from across the room before approaching one another. They move through the steps considerately, careful not to rush through one figure to the next. And at the end they thank each other politely and retire.

But what if the dance starts from that first lidded glance across the room and continues through the night? And what if it shifts from Viennese Waltz to Foxtrot to Lambada until the steps merge into something new, something without a name? What if the dancers were so lost in the moves that they couldn’t begin to guess how long they’d been dancing?

I suppose then we’d have no way of comparing ourselves to others. And where’s the fun in that?

*Incidentally, guys, the female orgasm, like the male orgasm, has some fairly distinct physiological characteristics which can’t be faked. If you can’t tell, you’re not paying attention, which might be why she’s faking in the first place. I’m just saying.