How to Have Sex With Someone You Don't Think Is Hot
LatestHave you ever found yourself at a bar, party or other happening place looking to hook up someone, only to realize you are surrounded by people you are not attracted to, even kinda? You blink, rub your eyes, and take another long swig of your wild ale, and take stock again. Long sigh. Nope, there’s not a doable creature to be found in this snakepit. But don’t give up just yet: What if I told you that, with a simple reprogramming, you could turn that frown into a potentially satisfying night of untold pleasure by rethinking your most deeply held notions of what’s actually hot and instead, have sex with someone you merely find intriguing. Start tonight! It’s not like you need a national holiday to do it. And if you do, I propose one: Have Sex With an Intriguing Person Day.
But first, I really should give credit to Lance Manion. Lance Manion is a non-photo-providing man with what I hope is a made-up last name allegedly trying to get his own jokey holiday going called Have Sex with an Ugly Person Day. It’s exactly what it sounds like, where beautiful people stoop to entwine limbs with the least genetically blessed among us, all in the comical spirit of asking “What is beauty” and “Are we too fixated on the media and its obsession with physical attractiveness?” Excellent questions, Lance Manion. How do you purport to address them? Let’s all swim in the shallow end for a moment and ponder.
His Holiday: Have Sex With an Ugly Person Day
The Date: April 2, 2013. Smart, intriguing and therefore sexy people will note that this is one day after April Fool’s, which is, I’m sure, a nod to let us know that it is ALMOST a joke but NOT totally, especially if the person who takes it seriously is a hot supermodel who will fuck him.
His Method: “Colored ribbons” and/or “hosted events” that presumably designate “beautiful people” and “ugly people” who then…pair off by choice? Are assigned to each other? Is everyone chosen in a kind of mock beauty contest? What if someone signs up for a beautiful person ribbon but is ugly? Are dreams crushed American-Idol style complete with blooper reels of ugly people acting beautiful? WHO GETS TO BE THE DECIDER!?!?!?
Who Qualifies as “Ugly”: Lance Manion, self-admittedly no great shakes in the looks department, would like “really ugly” people to get laid. The problem is, Lance Manion is using a totally superficial yardstick to measure ugliness, and gets ugly wrong by saying that it’s purely aesthetic. Ugly people, in his view, are:
Well I’m not talking about marginal people. Everyone has seen someone that’s really, over-the-top, ugly. It started with a meme I saw on Facebook, there was this girl, who, traditionally-speaking, had everything going wrong. Messed up teeth, big nose, hair that looked like she stuck a fork in a socket. But she was laughing and happy, and I guess the duality of that made an impact on me. For the holiday, I’m talking about seeking out people who are really ugly.
The woman he describes sound confident and happy, which I believe would make her seem very attractive, not to mention intriguing. Are we talking about the same people here, Lance Manion? Is this merely a problem of semantics? Isn’t his anecdote proof to him that what’s conventionally considered attractive is a world apart from what you are actually attracted to?
His Reasoning: While he admits that ugly people “absolutely can” get laid, he argues in a phone interview with Nerve, that, “…it’s usually only with other ugly people. If you look at it as a society, it’s very paired off. Ugly people bang ugly people, supermodels bang supermodels. And you can argue all day long about the benefits of banging a supermodel, but I don’t think anyone can deny that there are ugly people out there who are completely under appreciated and who would love the opportunity, for better or worse, to have sex with a gorgeous male or female.”
The Fallacy: Tons of “mixed-attractiveness” couples exist for lack of a better way of putting it. We’ve all seen people where one person seems off the charts hot and the other person seems just meh. We’ve also seen tons of really conventionally hot supermodels with rich ugly dudes (see: the entire hair metal phenomenon) and knockout dudes with average-looking women. But if, as we are told in most studies, most people pair off with their aesthetic equals, then Manion is wrong that there is some kind of injustice in ugly people getting laid by other ugly people, when in fact, that seems to be “How it Works.” Clearly, Manion just wants to fuck someone prettier than he is. While this is not a crime, we suggest he rethink hotness in his favor.
What’s at Stake?: If you’re the hot person having sex with an ugly person and you act all regally humbled by doing this person a huge favor, it could be a huge turnoff, not to mention too hilarious to have sex with. If you’re the allegedly ugly person it might seem random that this preening asshole is trying to bed you, and you will just be offended and confused. Also, the person could just be really bad in bed — since when are good looks a guarantee of good sex?
My Holiday: Have Sex With an Intriguing Person Day.
My Date: Duh, April 3, 2013. The day you try to Have Sex With an Ugly Person and fail miserably when they slap you across the face or find the whole thing to be deeply insulting is going to be huge bummer on the getting laid charts of your life. Good thing the very next day is your chance at redemption, when you can Have Sex With an Intriguing Person. This person is a more generous lover, and will find your ugly-person anecdote amusing, and return that anecdote with something relevant to the subject matter because that person will know how to have a conversation with you.
My Method: Have Sex With an Intriguing Person Day will involve nationwide reprogramming workshops during daylight hours, with classes such as “He’s Not as Hot As You Thought,” which involves a bar simulation where you have dreadful conversations with your “first choice” in hotness. Another class features speed dating in complete darkness to show that chemistry is beyond visual. Come nightfall, it’s time to prowl the streets in search of smart, funny people who may or may not be technically hot.
My Reasoning: Hot is overrated. Look for someone who is sexy, and by sexy I mean intriguing, which is sexy. Intriguing people are hot, but not all hot people are intriguing. Sexy is almost completely unrelated to looks and has everything to do with the way someone carries themselves. Hot people tend to sit around doing nothing and cultivating nothing because they know they are hot and have been told this ad nauseam. Their jokes have no punchlines, their stories have no fucking point. Interesting people are sexy, because they have lived actual lives and can probably talk about those lives in complete sentences, sentences that turn you on. If you get this premise. you will automatically quadruple your potential pool of people to have sex with.
Who Qualifies as “Intriguing”: As previously stated, intriguing can be someone who is exceptionally good looking, but it can also be someone who is exceptionally offbeat looking. Someone who would win zero beauty contests but who is off the charts in vibes, allure, mystique, what have you. This is a hundred percent presentation and personality. In fact, even ugliness can be sexy — such as the term “sexy ugly,” introduced in the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, where a guy is ugly but hot, like Mick Jagger, Lyle Lovett, James Woods, Harvey Keitel. Irony alert: The sexy-ugly concept comes courtesy of Jessica Westfeldt, a woman who happens to be dating one of the most conventionally attractive men in the universe, Jon Hamm. Go figure.
What’s at Stake: Having sex with an intriguing person could possibly be emotionally risky if you find their intriguingness to be so intoxicating that you suddenly want a relationship when it was clearly supposed to be a hookup. Intriguing people can also be pretentious assholes too who are bad in bed, so, you know, dice. Rollin’.
In conclusion, Have Sex With an Ugly Person Day is a poorly thought-out addition to our roster of national holidays that hardly fosters healthy answers to “what is beauty,” while the holiday I spent just as little time devising clearly advances all of humanity for all time. Try again, Lance Manion. (P.S.: If you had taken the exact same premise, only where neither party had any idea whether they were the hot one or not, I’d be down.)
To conclude, a series of dumb things Manion said in his Nerve interview:
Do you think ugly people are better at having sex than attractive people? Well I think that’s true of females. I think ugly guys, because we don’t have experience, are worse at it. I mean, we go in with great intentions, but between premature ejaculation and not knowing how to work the female plumbing, I would say that’s a myth when it comes to guys. Girls are probably more eager to please.
“I don’t think beautiful women realize the impact they could have on an ugly guy by banging them.”
“In fact, I think most ugly guys or girls would throw an attractive person out of their bed and tell them not to call anymore just for that fleeting moment of ego.”
“I’m saying I would want to throw her [beautiful person] out [of bed] to feel superior. What I would probably do is revert back to nerd status and beg and plead while she crawled out of my life. But the hope is, by the second Annual Have Sex with an Ugly Person Day, I’d get my stroke down, and by the third or fourth, I’d be comfortable enough to enter those waters wherein I could throw a Victoria’s Secret model I had banged out into the street without a second thought, knowing that my next encounter is only 364 days away.”
Take those lolz all the way to the fuck bank.