Army life brings with it many temptations. You're out there, on your own, with very few people to answer to outside your professional circle. Without pesky financial irritations such as “rent” or “food money” to worry about, it's all too easy to spend your entire paycheck on home electronics and pizza. Hell, I once purchased two hundred dollars worth of DVDs featuring (a) Arnold Schwarzenegger, (b) Jackie Chan, or (c) Sharon Stone's breasts, in one outing.
Perhaps the greatest temptations to the single soldier, however, are the temptations of the flesh. Sex is a huge commodity in the towns surrounding any army base, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is probably a frustrated lawn-tractor salesman whose revenues have fallen off since the local dirt merchant opened a club called Tits Ahoy! next door.
I try to live a relatively moral life. Thus far, I have resisted the siren song of the strip clubs, probably aided by the fact that I don't find anorexic women dancing listlessly around a pole that sexy. Not that I have any firsthand knowledge that they're anorexic. Or that they dance listlessly. I just know this guy who - look, never mind.
Anyway, even though the lure of prepackaged sex has not yet caused me to fall, I do not want to yield to temptation in a moment of dire extremity, such as when none of my DVDs seem worth watching and Scrubs is a rerun. To avoid this eventuality, therefore, I recently made a solemn pact with myself. I decided that the best way to conquer the baser instincts was to hold myself to a rigid standard and never deviate from it, to instill in myself, through hard work and careful attention, an iron discipline that no wind could topple. I decided that the best life is the pure life.
To wit, I have decided to take a vow of celibacy, a vow that I absolutely will not break until the day comes, as come it must if I have faith, when I meet a woman who wants to have sex. And not just any kind of sex, but sex with me.
At first I thought that this vow would be difficult to adhere to. Actually, it has turned out to be far simpler than I imagined. This is because, surprisingly, there don't seem to be that many women out there who want to have sex with me. Oh, I know plenty of women, and I'm sure all of them want to have sex at some time or another, but when they do they simply go home and have sex with their boyfriends or husbands, all of whom seem to have names like “Brick Slabchest” and biceps that are each the size of an entire Backstreet Boy.
Now, I'm not a shrimpy - or even an unattractive - guy. I'm actually pretty large, but I'm an army journalist, which means that in the biceps department I fall way behind the infantry guys all my female acquaintances seem to date or marry. These guys have Lance Bass riding under the skin of one arm and Nick Carter under the skin of the other, while my biceps are, at the very best, the admittedly unimpressive Joey McIntyre from the New Kids on the Block. Actually, even this is exaggerating. In fact, if we continued with this rather tortured entire-human-being-as-muscle metaphor, and compared my biceps with Hervé "Tattoo" Villachaize from Fantasy Island, we would be edging much closer to the truth.
Yes, the sad fact is that here at Fort Bragg, men outnumber women approximately seventeen to one. This wouldn't be so bad, since at least there are women out there somewhere. However, I outnumber women who want to have sex with me one to zero, which as any mathematician will tell you - and he'll tell you even if you don't want him to; if mathematicians didn't just spout off statistics uninvited, they'd never get to say anything, because let's face it, they're stuck in a job for total wankers - represents an infinite decrease between me and women who want to have sex with me, which, in case you forgot during the whole mathematician digression, was the point of this sentence.
You see, guys, women like sex - hell, they love sex, just like we do. I know this based on my exhaustive research on the subject, which consisted of asking a woman I know. It's just that women are a whole hell of a lot more selective, as a general rule, about who they're going to be having sex with. See, whereas men want to nail pretty much any woman who respirates and doesn't strongly resemble Jar-Jar Binks, women take into consideration minute details which we men would find insignificant, such as a prospective mate's personality, compassion, and intelligence.
