My mother, who knows a thing or two about sex and men, is the most liberated person I know. She teaches me early on that women are as good and usually better than men. That most women are tougher, smarter, kinder, gentler and more generous than men.

We almost never hit people. We almost never kill people. And we certainly don’t rape people. Instead, we nurture, nourish and support people.

My mother even has an explanation for why women and men still don’t understand each other after all these centuries of sharing beds, offspring and lives.

It’s because women are so complicated — and men are so simple.

Women, she says, grow up in a complex, almost entirely female world of mothers and grandmothers and aunts and best-friends-for-life girlfriends who all understand that because we’re female we lack male upper-body strength. So, to compensate, we have to concentrate on forming complicated protective relationships which help us survive as we learn to manipulate the dangerous world around us.

Men, on the other hand, grow up in a simple, almost entirely male world in which fathers and grandfathers and uncles and buddies place far more value on physical force and sport and oneupmanship than on relationships. Something called backchecking is far more important than the scary something called love. In fact, men almost never discuss relationships with each other. Relationships are for sissies.

The result, says my mother, is that men don’t understand us women because, to merely survive and protect our wombs, we’ve had to become incredibly complex, complicated and manipulative.

And we women don’t understand men, she says, because we just can’t believe how incredibly simple they and their lives are. In fact, she claims, men are exactly what they appear to be. Nothing more. Nothing less. What you see is what you get. Men think relationships are what women have with each other in Sex And The City, in between bedding men.

In the end, says my mother, female survival all boils down to understanding male simplicity and taking advantage of it with the most powerful, complicated and manipulative combination of assets we women have  — the female mystique and pussy power.

My mother’s words made sense to me when I was young and they make even more sense to me now that I’m a grown woman.


(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)