Threesomes

by Liz Starbuck
illustration by Shannon Purcell

How many of y’all women out there have not experienced some man or another drooling over some pair of women or trying to get you to bring along a friend? How d’ya feel about it? Personally I find the former case irritating, and the latter, well, it depends on the other woman – if I think she’s cute it’ll elicit a wink from some part of my anatomy or another; if not I’ll chalk it up to my usual impression that men are just hopeless judges of… “character.” Men seem to think that threesomes are the be-all-and-end-all, and all the better if the women they have their eyes on are actually lesbians whom they can conquer and convert with their irresistible manly apparatus.

A friend of mine who put a “women seeking women” ad in the Phoenix got six calls; three from women and three from men, two of which were from men who used as their biggest selling point, “I’m Italian” (not to be racist or anything, cuz I like Italians, but this did actually happen).

Or sisters. Yeah, what could be more exciting than multiple sex partners and incest all in the same package? I have a friend who looks a lot like me, and every time we go out together, we get way more attention than each of do alone, combined. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard the seemingly innocent line “are you two sisters?” sullied with a do-me inflection and drool forming delicately in the corner of the guy’s mouth. Mmmm, sexy.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m gonna do some guy with another woman, she and I are gonna do the choosing. So dry up!

But when a guy really does it, the aftermath is just a lot of whining. It was just so much work, or, most frequently, the complaint is: Rug burn. Of course, there are times when the rug burn complaint is voiced in a shroud of smugness, like the complaint of a loser who finally gets laid…

“I am soooo tired.”

(Ignored.)

“God, I am just soooooo tired, I was up until 6 a.m.”

(All right, I’ll humor you.) “Gee, what were you doing?” etc.

But often the complaint is genuine. Well, what the fuck, you’ve gotta pay to play, ya know? And we all know that whatever toll the activity took upon him, that’s not gonna stop him next time the opportunity arises, as it were.

A friend (we’ll just call him, um, David, okay?) complained to me recently that he was tired of the threesome thing because he often wound up “pinned.” Now, is that better or worse than rug burn, hmmm? On a scale of one to ten, which do you prefer: The pinned position, the rug burn position, the I-like-to-think-you’re-lesbians-letting-me-in-on-it watching position, or the let’s-bond-and-share-her position? Most men complain that when there are two women and one man, generally, the women don’t like to interact with each other. I wouldn’t know about that situation.

Another friend likes to have sex with two women almost to the exclusion of having sex with one at a time. Why? To avoid intimacy. Well, that makes sense! Actually, it does make sense; sex with more than one other person is more like sport than intimacy. “It’s fucking,” said one friend. “I’ve had a good time doing it, but I try not to fuck. I like intimacy. Fucking doesn’t compare to that.”

A lot of women and quite a few men don’t seem to like the idea of two men with one woman. It’s too much like a gang bang. The men who didn’t like it said that even though it seemed like a good idea to all parties (or should I say, members?) at the time, when it came down to it, the situation took on a “male bonding” aspect that was uncomfortable. All that winking and high-fiving was depersonalizing; it felt more like a conquest than a sharing between three people, even though the woman was a willing participant. The situation doesn’t appeal to me much either, although I recently did take an interest when I was with two men who seemed honestly close to each other (but not gay – it seems women aren’t so determined to conquer gay men with their irresistible womanly wiles. The idea seems rather absurd in fact. An interesting difference between the sexes, eh?) I do have one friend who likes the idea because she thinks it would make her feel full. I think it would make me feel plugged. (Forgive me, how crude.) But another problem with two men is they often seem to get that performance anxiety thang. Who gets this and who doesn’t? What causes it? I’d really like to know because I want to make sure I bring my children up right.

Another friend found herself (yes, more frequently than not we just find ourselves this way. Wait a minute, where was I?) in a situation with two men, and when I marvelled at how she could possibly have any form of physical contact with one of them, she said that even though she wasn’t attracted to him, she was attracted to “the situation.” I guess situations don’t attract me as much as men do. Philistine. I am willing to lower my standards a little. But if you “buy two, get the lesser one free,” you still have to be able to wear the lesser one out in public.

I recently went to an event at which I ran into a friend who introduced me to her 12 year old son, noting – and somehow working this smoothly into the conversation in some manner which I cannot now fathom – that the boy had two fathers. “Huh?” I sputtered. “Well, I was involved in a triangle for many years,” she said. I looked agape at the boy, and he just smiled at me, shyly and, yes, definitely, proudly. Now, there’s the way to bring up your kids right!

Note: This report was compiled without any scientific method whatsoever. It was compiled by asking people at parties to talk about their favorite subject, sex, and then trying like hell to remember what they said the next day when the alcohol wore off. All names have been circumcised to protect the innocent. INNOCENT?