Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #2

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

I must also note that all opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Welcome to the second installment of Dr. Efficient's guest column on my blog. This time, we managed to snag a few minutes of his time at three different airports as he flew around the world in search of new secrets of the Tantra to share with you. In those precious moments, he answered three more of our reader questions for him. All came from U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

As long as you keep sending in questions, more answers will follow in later installments.

How does one entice a partner who has apparently given up sex into wanting to fuck again?

You're really not giving me a lot to go on, here. Did it occur to you that my advice might differ depending on whether you're an obese odoriferous octogenarian burn victim married to a woman who just can't stomach the nightly horror show anymore or you're a shapely twenty-five-year-old bit of skirt dating a man who's suddenly realized that he was born to be a sausage jockey?

Still, some universal rules do apply, the foremost of which is: You can't change other people; you can only change yourself. The lover of your reality is not going to become the lover of your dreams. The best you can hope for is some accommodation that leaves you marginally more content than you are now. You have three options:

1. Get over it. Find some other outlet for your sexual energies. Consider some alternatives: Exercise. Dance. Porn. Painting. Dressage. Porn. Writing. Suicide. Porn. Maybe if you can find more fulfillment elsewhere, getting your itch scratched will seem less indispensable to you.

2. Mix-and-match. Clearly your partner satisfies some of your needs, since you're still together. He--for simplicity's sake I'm going to assume that you're a straight woman because (a) it makes no difference and (b) no man would ever ask me this question. If you're a woman dating another woman, refer back to reason (a). Anyway, as I was saying, your partner merely doesn't satisfy you sexually. So find someone who does. If your partner is sufficiently open-minded or sufficiently oblivious, there's no reason why you can't have your cake and eat it too.

3. Manipulation. If you're too inhibited to tend to your own needs or find someone who can, your only hope is to try to manipulate your current lover into providing some trouser action in spite of himself. Good luck with that. The key here is to find activities that your partner likes and try to gradually redirect them so that they end with your getting shagged. Would he like a back rub? Start with that and try to turn it into a front-rub. Does he like dessert? Invite him to lick chocolate off your nipples. Does he want to bone someone else? Invite that person to join in! Etc.

Why is love so important to a woman and not so much for a man? And, no, saying "I love you" just to have sex doesn't count.

Like most differences between men and women, this one has its root in basic biology. An act of sexual intercourse requires only the slightest investment of time and attention on the part of the man. But it may leave a woman pregnant with a child that she has to bear for nine months and (unless she abandons it) until it's old enough to fend for itself. Male reproductive effort is an abundant resource. Female reproductive effort is a scarce resource. Hence women are likely to be more selective than men.

As with our cravings for salty and fatty foods, the desires shaped by hundreds of millennia of evolution are hard to overcome. The neolithic men who survived to pass along their genes had lots of children by lots of different women. The neolithic women who survived to pass along their genes secured the commitment of men to provide for themselves and their children. These instincts, obviously, make little sense in the modern world. Conditions have been altered by the advent of birth control and the availability of abortion as a more palatable alternative to the traditional infanticide. It's no longer expected that children will be raised exclusively by their mothers or that women need men to provide for them.

In sum, love is obsolete. It's a vestigial sentiment that hangs on past its time like an emotional appendix. But you still want it because you're basically a Neanderthal at heart.

What is it about big breasts that makes men go catatonic?

The American male's fascination with breasts is about ten percent intrinsic behavior and ninety percent cultural.

Men are naturally going to pay a certain amount of attention to distinctive sex characteristics. In an eye-tracking study, men looked at the breasts, face and crotch of a bikini-clad woman, but men also looked at the crotch of a bathing-suit-clad man. Presumably men quickly focus on distinctive sex characteristics because it was important for our caveman ancestors to rapidly classify strangers as threats (male) or reproductive opportunities (female). (Women in the same study didn't pay much attention to breasts or genitals. Presumably identifying a stranger's sex is less important to women because all women are to some extent inherently bisexual.)

So men are going to pay a certain amount of attention to breasts and crotches. But the amount of attention paid covers a pretty broad range. The pages of National Geographic are filled with pictures of bare-chested aboriginal women surrounded by aboriginal men who are neither staring nor fapping furiously. Yet those same pictures are all the inspiration teenage boys in America need to stroke one out. And walking down a street in Riyadh wearing a halter top is likely to get you more unwelcome attention than walking down a street in San Francisco without one. This wide range of male reactions to what women do or don't expose suggests that what's interesting to men isn't so much breasts per se as a chance to see bits of female anatomy that, in their particular culture, are usually kept hidden.

So if you want men to stop going dumb at the sight of your breasts, start going topless. I promise we'll get used to it and stop treating it like such a big deal.

Eventually.

There might be a certain amount of wanking before we get there.

Dr. Efficient will return soon! To get him to answer your questions, email them to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.