Okay, Jules, you (and Mike Essig and Alexainie) have gotten me thinking the last few days, and since this has turned into a long-winded thread anyway…

First, let me mention I have no sex appeal physically. You can ask my wife, who will probably talk about my other fine attributes* and avoid the question.

Except! Apparently I’m a chick magnet with drunk women. Well, a woman who is drunk and…

• severely pissed at her long-time boyfriend;
• just got dumped by her fiancé;
• always wondered what it was like to sleep in a waterbed;
• in the mood to party all night with any available male, only there aren’t many available males;
• just got dumped by her long-time girlfriend (yes, very drunk);
• severely pissed at her fiancé.

All the above** would have been available for taking sexual advantage of (some more than others), except that the first one (“L”) was a special case. She was a long-time friend of my sister, knew me from way back, and she was inclined to tease/flirt with me just to see me blush (it mostly worked). So when L and her boyfriend and my sister and her boyfriend were getting together to see a movie, and L’s boyfriend got a better offer from his male buds, it was no big deal when I paired off with L. And when L got drunk and flirty and acted like she was going to kiss me, ha! Can’t embarrass me this time! So I called her bluff. Then did it again a couple more times.

We had gotten to second base before I realized something was odd. (No, I hadn’t been drinking, since I was driving; this was me doing my usual slow-on-the-uptake routine.) I backed off and stopped calling what were very obviously not bluffs.

So it was a nice evening, I had a good time, and when she invited me into bed with her I respectfully declined and told her I’d see her in the morning. Nothing against L (smart, cute, great kisser), I just didn’t feel right taking advantage of a friend. More than that, though, if this was going to develop into a romantic relationship I wanted some, I dunno… romance?

My sister and L and I met the next morning for brunch at a place my sister wanted to try, and I was curious whether L & I would pick things up from the night before, or take it down a notch.

Or several notches. Or wherever you’re at when you take it down so many notches you run out of stick.

L was apologetic. L was really apologetic. L was really, really apologetic. L was really, really, really —

Okay, got it, making out last night with me was embarrassing. I don’t think the term “coyote ugly” had been popularized yet, but that was the concept I was getting. Or maybe she just didn’t want her boyfriend to find out. (He didn’t, so far as I know. They got married a couple years later.)

So lesson learned: drunken romances last only so long as the alcohol does. And you know that scene in the rom-com movie where the leading lady wakes up in her bed with a hangover and some loser (usually a no-name actor listed in the credits as “Ugly guy in bed next day”) and it’s played for laughs? Turns out it isn’t a lot of fun to be that guy. So if a drunken woman acted like I was sexy and desirable, I knew it wasn’t the case. Or wouldn’t be the case for long.

Side note: I enjoy sex. Mostly. Kinda. On a scale from “stale baking cocoa” to “triple fudge chocolate cake with chocolate sprinkles,” sex would be an Oreo cookie for me. Regular, not mint. (Okay, occasionally mint.) Losing my virginity was… nice. But pretty much the whole time with my first wife, I faked orgasm (which isn’t a problem for a guy with a condom, it turns out). So passing up sex was never a big deal for me. (Okay, sometimes a little bit of a big deal.) But I much prefer love and romance and long slow make-out sessions and all that crap. I’ve never had sex with a woman I wasn’t in love with. (I almost said “never slept with,” but no, I slept with Water Bed Gal; we just didn’t do more than kiss and cuddle, was all. And after she found out what my water bed was like, well, that was it.)

Anyway, eventually I ended up with someone who didn’t have sex appeal on her list of traits for a partner (and had the printed list to prove it), and things worked out. Pretty damn well, if I do say so myself.

My point (which I have gradually worked my way around to) is, what about guys who have stronger sex drives and feel like the woman they’re with is coming on to them? I was never drunk in those situations where the woman I was with was intoxicated; what about the guy whose judgement is impaired, decides why not?, and the next day finds out the woman who was hot for him a few hours ago now thinks he was a major mistake. If she can even remember the details.

I don’t have any answers, just questions, and I don’t know that there are answers. Just thought I’d throw in some of my experience, in case it furthered the discussion.

Footnote: when I talked to my wife about these experiences, she asked if the women involved knew me beforehand. Yes, with one exception (Party All Night Woman, who I met at the Navy Birthday Ball while we were stationed in Korea). Okay, Deb said, maybe they threw themselves at you because they knew you’d catch them and set them down easy? Hmmm. Could be. Not sure how I feel about that, since for women in their 20s a “safe” guy usually equated to “not the kind of guy they ended up dating.” So even when they were drunk I wasn’t all that appealing. <sigh>

OTOH, I have someone now who thinks I have many appealing qualities, even if looks aren’t among them. I can deal with that.

*Not because she doesn’t appreciate me or my looks, but she has other priorities. She started falling for me before she knew what I looked like.

**And a woman who was afraid she had cancer and was about to die alone, and needed someone to be there for her. And then when she found out she didn’t have cancer, it was like waking up the next day, looking at the guy in bed next to her, and realizing, “What the hell have I done?” Had I realized a terminal disease (that wasn’t) had effects similar to long-term inebriation, I would have been less like surprised to find myself being demoted from an object of affection to someone who was broken and needed fixing.