Evidently, someone out there is convinced that being single today isn't rough enough; there needs to be more stress and confusion about sex. That's the only explanation I can come up with for one of the biggest fads in pop culture; the idea of a particular sexuality "trapped" in a thoroughly inappropriate body.

While most people of all sexual preferences sometimes feel out-of-sync with their fellows, this notion of "trapped in a body" opens a fairly dangerous can of worms. With "gay chic" being the current media fashion, it makes for a pretty safe yet titillating statement for someone to make to be a woman trapped inside a man's body. How does one prove or disprove crap like that? If I meet some terrific woman, for example, who has a marked preference for anal and oral sex, does that mean that she's a gay man in a woman's body? If so, what does that make me?

Not that things haven't been rough to figure out in the past. Several years ago, I'm sitting at a bar, chatting with the bartender. He's a friend of mine, and I'm telling him about the concert I just saw. A woman and her boyfriend are having a rather heated argument next to me. The woman, on my immediate right, turns to me after her boyfriend goes to the men's room. Without any prompting from me, she begins describing what she and her beau were discussing. He's totally insensitive, she tells me. Before I can bring up the fact that I am neither qualified to do any serious counseling nor even slightly interested in the fact that she's chosen to hook up with a loser, she drops the bomb.

"But, you're gay, and so you understand my side of things, right?"

"What?" I ask, putting as much annoyance into my voice as possible.

"Well, I mean, being gay, you've got more of a female perspective on things than..."

I cut her off with an emphatic, "No. You're wrong. I am not gay."

"Oooh, I'm so sorry, I..."

"No, no no," I try to reassure her, "It's no big deal. just out of curiosity, though, what made you think I was gay?"

"Well," she said, still recovering from the shock, "You're dressed nice, and you have nice hair, and you're not fat."

I turned back to my drink, thinking, "This gal's got a lot to look forward to in life. She's limited her choices for a future mate to obese, poorly-dressed men with scraggly hair." I try to imagine the conversations this woman must have with her best friend.

"Hi, Michelle? It's Nancy. You busy tonight? I was kinda hoping to go out. Oh, I don't know, just some place with music where we could have a few drinks and maybe pick up a couple of fat, greasy pigs. Yeah, you know, real men. Guys who learned to walk erect this morning. Guys who'll abuse us badly enough that we'll know that they're not homos."

So now, not only do we need to find out the results of someone else's most recent blood test before hopping in the sack, and their gender of choice, but we need to find out the preference of the person "trapped inside." What if you're a bi male or female trapped in the body of either gender? Does that mean that if you do it with only one gender at a time that you're actually straight (or gay, depending on the matchup)?

If I have sex with a woman and find out that there's a heterosexual man trapped inside, does that make him gay, or me, or both? If she tells me she's a hetero man inside a woman's body, and I go through with it, I'm gay, but if she doesn't let me know, I'm still cool, right? if a woman doesn't want to go out with me, but dates other guys, do I just write it off to the fact that she's a lesbian trapped in a heterosexual woman's body?

If you're a gay man, and you have sex with a woman trapped in a man's body, does that mean that you're actually straight, or bi? How about just plain gullible? It's not hard to imagine someone right now explaining to his lover that he's a gay male trapped inside a gay man's body, but not the right gay man's body.

Let's hope that the cost of "digital assistants" and laptops goes way down real fast, cause it's gonna take a computer to figure out who and what you're having sex with. What about playing it safe and sticking to masturbation? With my luck, I'd find out that my right hand is actually a left hand trapped in a right hand body. I guess the message is that sex in the 90's is like a pinata at Christmas time; just wear your blindfold with pride, keep swinging and have as much fun as you can with the fallout.

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