Seems a lot of men have trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality....

What is a "mate"?
What is a "bloke"?
What is a "shag"?

An inquisitive mind would like proper definitions using the Queen's English. :confused:

dancingdoc2

DOC, you are looking at English! Pure unadulterated England English. Perhaps not as spoken at Windsor but as spoken by common folk from Southhampton to the River Tweed (with some carryover to the Kingdom of Scotland). It is a bit more crude (and difficult for me to understand) in the industrial cities of the Midlands). Actually, I must admit, that until I went to University in England, I had not heard much English slang. Even if it got to Scotland, it never made it across the Minch to the Hebrides. Today, with two-track roads and all that, we are overrun with English tourists and even some Scots speak it. I'll try to translate from the English vulgate to the American vulgate:

mate = friend
bloke = guy
shag = something men and women do that often results in a wetspot. I am not certain Yanks do this. Oh, I remember = screw

Brandye

Apologies for the vernacular... to be honest I think talking about sex using the correct terms for the bits and bobs involved can make it sound too clinical...

As for the Queens english well... the british royal family are essentially german and greek so maybe they shouldn't be seen as the proprieters of the english language, which I've always seen as a living breathing and evolving entity and not something confined by the pages of a dictionary.

sarah_rsl

Before I get to sarah's subject I cannot resist some comments of my own on the comments about sarah's use of English. Bloke and mate, doc? I thought everyone knew those! Now shag. That's a different one. Everyone who grew up in the American Southeast and vacationed on the coast between Virginia Beach south through the Carolinas all the way down to the Savannah,Georgia area - and especially Carolina Beach, N.C. and Myrtle Beach, S.C. - knows that shag is a dance!!! ---similar to a slowed down jitterbug. My sister upon welcoming a new northern couple to her neighborhood invited them to the local club for "shag night." This really flustered these people who only knew shag from the sense used in the Austin Powers movies; the same meaning that it has for sarah!
Oh yes, and the language used in public by the English Royal Family- Oxford Received Pronunciation- an artificial accent. Except for a certain sector of the upper class, BBC announcers, and university professors no one speaks that way. Standard English yes, the accent no. We Americans over the age of 40 probably remember university English literature teachers who were from places like Minneapolis, but had an affected pseudo British accent.

OK. Got that out of my system. On to the thread.
Sarah, I think that most people have fantasies. Some people's fantasies do not fall within the usual range of fantasies-menage a trois for example- while other people are simply timid or inhibited in expressing or realizing their fantasies.

As you point out many people discover that once a fantasy can be made reality it turns out to be disappointing, or not what they wanted after all. It is that way with many things in life, not only sex. From what you say I believe the idea of a threesome simply doesn't appeal to your husband. If it does then certainly not with the mate in question. I think he hit the nail on the head when he suggested that she is lonely and just wants to have sex with someone because she hasn't in a while. It sounds as if your hubby is a fine bloke. Be glad you have him.

One more anecdote-this one for Brandye. I came home one day to find my son and three friends watching a movie based on an Irvine Welsh novel - Train Spotting or Acid House- and while they are all trilingual or better I noticed they had subtitles on the DVD. I asked why and my son replied that they could not understand the language so they had to read it in English to know what was going on!!!!

dlb

Sorry, Sarah, I'll get there. dlb, I was appalled to learn that the American publisher of Harry Potter insisted on translating many common terms. It was gratifying that so many parents and school officials (at least who did not think Harry the anti-christ) objected to that. English is the lengua franca of the world and we need a true international English. The Dutch and the Scandinavians do that best. The colloquialisms will always live on but the richness of all forms of English is enhanced by everyone's vernacular.

People see me as a UK lass, at least until they hear the brogue, and were amazed at what I could not understand when I arrived at University. Of course my home was in the most desolate and backwards part of the UK. From summers, and a couple school years, with my German grandparents, I was more fluent in German than in English English! My sister (Univ of Glasgow) and brother (St Andrews) had similar difficulties, though less pronounced.

OK, Sarah, my sister to the far South, my answer: We all, men and women, have difficulty separating our fantasy selves from ourselves known to others. This is especially true with sexual fantasy because our sexuality was the last of our major personality traits we were able to act upon and its'formation is so dependent upon outside (and sometimes unknown) forces - religion, schooling, parental hangups, mass media. As individuals, we had to sort all this out and figure out who our sexual selves are. Then, we experimented and those early groping, regrettably violent for some, experiments started to form our behaviour. I think men's sense of self is more wrapped up in sex than women's. Male hangups on penis size are really anxiety about how women will view them and feel about them. Our female hangups on breast size are about our own bodies and, more often, how other women see us. Men never figure out that when we "dress-up" it is more to impress other women than to impress men. But, in the process, we are both trying to meet our fantasy ideal rather than face reality. Few men are the bedroom studs they wish they were and few women approach Christie Brinkley (age appropriate for me) in our public presentation. But, by god, I TRY!!

Last point to dlb: We Scots think the English are absolutely daft to be sitting in the rain recording locomotive numbers and will never understand Train Spotting as a hobby. At least bird watching ..... I think.

Brandye

Two of my sexual fantasies are fulfilled in my current relationship. I'm in an interracial relationship with a lady 24 years younger than I.
My lady's a nutritionist whose knowledge helped me and my late wife through very difficult times at the end of my wife's life.
A few years after my my wife's death, I began dating her and soon had her in my bed. We have a boy and twin girls together. We enjoy each other and are very sexual. It all feels good.

ALR

All men can differentiate between fantasy and reality. Sadly, insufficient reality is injected into the education of human sexuality (and I use the term "education" as broadly and as loosely as possible). I think once a man / boy has sex with real human females, they quickly learn what reality is.

My question is with respect to those women who have the fantasy that sex is only for reproduction and inflict that fantasy on their husbands. Sheesh! What kind of torturous fantasy is that?

wet_suit_one

WSO - it is the fantasy taught women by most religions - as you know.

In answering the question: not all people are mentally well and not all people are courageous or adventurous. You have to allow for this when thinking about fantasy versus reality and who can handle what.

Yes, some men simply cannot differentiate between what's real and what isn't. Neither can some women.

Having been taught "this is how women are and you're to behave this way" - it is no wonder some men's nerve goes when being asked to act contrary to their programming. Some women have the same issue.

And you can all can the inverted snobbery, thank you.
I tend to think people don't use the proper sexual terms for their activities because they cannot spell them correctly.

EvilEvilKitten

All that is true but still, a man pestering a woman to have anal sex and then when she agrees changes his mind just as he starts?? I think that was blatantly down to him having a mental fantasy life that was completly unhinged from real life.

Likewise with the threesome and this is something that's happened to a lot of my mates as well, they organise threesome for their boyfriends then their boyfriend loses his nerve as soon as the third person appears (I've been that third person). I think the answer is more down the individual makeup of the bloke and how he forms his views on sex from porn and his mates boasting. It's like he's been told that he should want anal sex and threesome or rough sex or whatever.

So the fact that I choose to use colloquialisms when I'm talking about my sex life is down to poor spelling? Well even if it is, sometimes the civil thing to do is to recognize when a person makes an honest attempt to articulate something from their personal life and respond with something other than condescension.

sarah_rsl

No, but your backhanded slur about your royal family wasn't called for now was it? Don't dish it out if you cannot take it in return, sister. And yes, I did understand everything you wrote being conversant with some British slang. I did enjoy dlb's shag being a dance however - which is the problem with using slang since it can mean different things to different people.

So, the man lost his nerve? BFD - it happens. Some things just are better in pornography or as a fantasy then they are in real life. Just move on to something else.

But he should not have badgered you and you should have not given in to his badgering. If a guy won't accept you telling him no then it is time to get a new guy.

EvilEvilKitten

Sarah, I don't think EvilEvilKitten was talking about your colloquialisms. I am pretty sure she is as good at colloquial speech as any of us. While she can be evilly condescending I don't think she intended to be condescending to you.
I'll allow her to clarify that herself.
EEK. I didn't see any backhanded slur. Sarah made the observation that the Royal Family is German and Greek-actually they are German since Phillip's branch are also Battenbergs - and that they have no special claim to the language. It was a corollary to G.B. Shaw's statement when discussing Pygmalion that Liza Doolittle's vocabulary and accent would have been more genuine and nearer to Anglo-Saxon than Prof. Higgins' English would have been.

dlb