The Sexual Board of Review

"Never give a damn about my reputation

I never said I wanted to improve my station

And I'm always feelin' good when I'm havin' fun

And I don't have to please no one

And I don't give a damn about my bad reputation"


Joan Jett sang that with gusto some 20-plus years ago, and I believe she still means it. But some of us do care about our reputations, particularly when it comes to bedroom performance.


This whole thing popped into my head when I remembered a time recently when I ducked into 30 Degrees here in DC to have a drink. When I was upstairs on the dance floor (when the place actually had decent music), a group I was with nudged his head toward one of the bartenders, a pretty-boy type whose muscular body popped out of tight jeans and a T-shirt.


"I knew a friend who slept with him and he was lame in bed," he simply and brutally announced.


We all looked at the barkeep with a mix of pity and disappointment that Emmy viewers must have had last Sunday for the sucky five hosts. I bet you 50 bucks that if any of the guys in this group was propositioned by the barkeep, they'd demure because of hearing this latest review.


The looming thought I had was the fact that I heard shit about a stranger's sexual ability. He didn't know me, but I sure heard about him. What if there were mitigating circumstances like maybe the barkeep was drunk and wasn't his best? But the criticism was out and it stuck. This bartender had a reputation - fair or unfair.


I had a second looming thought. What did some of my ex-lovers think about me in bed, and exactly how many people did they tell and how positive or negative was the review? Are there people out there I don't know, but who know me, or rather heard of me and what I do or did or didn't do? As much as I like to declare I don't care what people think, I kind of do on some matters and this is one of them.


In one situation, it got back to a friend that one hook-up praised me. Any anger for indiscretion qucikly sunbsided into mental chats of "Yes! I'm Da Man!!" In another case, though, a former friend told a current friend that I must not be versatile based on what he heard from this one guy I was with briefly. As if just one night told everything about me. I was miffed.


I'm not above helping to cast reputations. I told plenty of my friends about one guy who had the tiniest dick I'd ever seen and another guy who just lay there like a sack of potatoes (this one, I pointed out to my friend when we came across him in a bar). Now my experiences with these and a few other guys were not pleasurable, but that doesn't mean they are terminally bad in bed. Who's to say that they haven't hooked up with someone, and there was magic?


I firmly believe in the idea of a unique sexual chemistry between two people that goes beyond body type and looks. I've been with pretty boys where the sex was mediocre and okay-looking ones who knew how to push all my buttons. It's just the vibes and how the stars align. It's not always about pure technique, which can't be completely ascertained in just one session anyway.



Yet we get sucked into assumptions and classifications. And since sex talk moves as fast as the best gossip, we can find ourselves with a reputation - good or bad or alternating between the two.


Is it wrong to tell my friends what happened with that guy last night? Nope. Is it wrong to create a picture of potential and ability from a moment or moments and sell it as gospel. Yep. Perhaps the guy with the bartender was a lousy lay himself and he just cast blame instead of looking at why he didn't have a good time. Who knows?


But the human nature dynamic duo of judgment and pride makes us vulnerable to what people say and believe. We're like those Broadway actors who claim they never read reviews - the comments get back to them anyway and they are affected on some level. And since we men give virility a prominent place and use that to judge our (and each other's) manhood, a little gossip here and there going the wrong way can cast a reputation with an oppressive shadow.


Those who can win a gold medal in sex each and every time don't care because they bring it with confidence and the reputation will be a positive one. And there are ones, maybe in the spirit of Joan Jett, who do their thing and don't fixate on what is said about them, because no one's opinion is more important than their own. In the big picture, both types are rather lucky. A review doesn't matter because they already have decided who they are.