What Valley Women Want...

"We want to cuddle after sex
because we're fucking freezing..."
- Anonymous woman

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - Gina Vasquez hated her husband for years before she finally told him it wasn't the fact that he watched porno on the Internet that bugged her; it was that he hid it, or thought he did it behind her back. "I'm okay with porn," she finally told him during dinner at a local taqueria, when the sight of a taco had spurred her husband, Milo, to mention sex. "I just hate it when you go online and think I don't know what you're doing."

"So, you're into it, too?" Milo asked.

"Oh, absolutely," she went on. "I get off on it, but from the other perspective, the woman's."

Milo had smiled and then nodded. He was cool with it. It was an innocent escapism for him. He watched a bit of male-on-female sex and then went hunting in his own bed.

Women are funny that way. They know more than men give them credit for, including the idea of being chased in bars. "Even though I won't give you the time of day, I'll still feel good about being hit-on," Gina explained. "I'm married, but it's cool. You can buy me a drink, or ask me to dance. Ask. It's okay. You may not get anything out of it, but it's okay to do it."

Rio Grande Valley men have long had the reputation of being cruel and uncouth lovers; that is, of being men who know little about sexing a woman other than the insertion part. That reputation is accurate, although some pop-psychologists say the problem is that RGV men are insecure bastards. "They will lie and cheat and do everthing they have to in the mating game," said one observer. "But they never look beyond the act. They're not like real men elsewhere. They would never arrive with a dozen roses or a box of primo chocolates. Sadly, that's not the romantic mindset down here, and so women pay the price."

Don't look for a Valley man to hang around and take long-term responsibility; they are quite comfortable doing nothing on the couch for a few hours of TV and then rising to walk to the unemployment office. Their dreams are brief and narrow, if they have them at all. You ask a local man, for example, what his plans are for the weekend and what you'll hear is something like this: "I'm up for anything, vato."

Women have lived needy lives for years. They hate to hear bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo at the dinner table, like "At the end of the day." Sentences prefaced by "Tell you what, honey..." funnel cold water into their veins.

But what do they want? It is an age-old question that goes back to Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. The answer has eluded Man for centuries, and today's Man is simply not interested in offering a reply. Here, in Brownsville, home to some 140,000 love-starved denizens, women have learned to take it, to lump it, to endure the moment in the sack, and to live to starve for love another day.

By her estimation, Gina Vasquez has made love more than 5,000 times.

"Only two-three-four of those did anything for me," she says, laconically. And then, she continues: "I would like a man to take me, to do me in a way that'll make me remember the moment, the color of the sheets, the movement of the mattress, the lightbulb coming off & on while I am being taken, my eyes feeling as though they are about to explode, my nails buried in my man's back, my legs unable to control their muscles, my butt on fire, my loins feeling the coming eruption, my very existence threatened to the max..."

- 30 -