Sexual Camels

We all have dry spells. (And by "we" and "all," I don't mean me.) But do you have friends who have not had sex in years? I do. We all do. How do they do it? I really want to know.

Does your memory of it fade over time, so that you become less pent up even though you never sate your desires? Or do you just become so expert at self-love that the loss is barely felt? Or do, as I fear, things shrivel up a bit, retract, slowly grow closed, until their use fades into a pleasant, but distant memory, like the memories of kayaking on Lake Titicaca in summer camp?

I know a guy, a very handsome, 6' tall, blue-eyed, blonde JFK-Jr. Hair kinda guy, who has shocked my friends with his confession that he hasn't had sex in over five years. He claims his celibacy is voluntary and an act of protest, because the world has grown too tawdry, too overt, and just plain too sexual for him. Instead, he yearns for the Victorian times when the mere glimpse of a woman's wrist was enough to set a pulse racing. Wuh?

Clearly, not everybody shares my appreciation for the "Birthday Sex" music video, but even the most devout celibate must occasionally feel the desire to look at the nudey pics on the Greek vases at the Metropolitan Museum.

I would assume that this guy is just gay, but even if he's closeting, he defies logic. Wouldn't a clever closeter fake a nymphomaniac beard to throw people off his trail? Listen, I know that if paranoia meant that I had to fabricate my entire sex life, I'd can assure you that I'd be fabricating threesomes with Clive Owen and Matt Damon in the back of a G5 pretty much every weekend. But that's just me.

In Manhattan, a good-looking guy (with a few shekels to his name) can drag home some kind of woman off the street pretty much whenever he feels like it. Even a guy with an extremely underdeveloped libido must get the urge more often than the corner bodega sells canned sardines, so please explain why a perfectly attractive man wouldn't just tag something (anything) once in awhile, just because he could?

I really can't understand any of this.

At the other end of the Spectrum of Horniness, my other friend had such a long dry spell that his unquenchable thirst overwhelmed him to the point that he actually rubbed one out in the stall of his office bathroom using liquid soap as lubricant. He must have glimpsed a wrist on the way to the bathroom.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.