Sexual Bases For A Socially Challenged World

Forget what that slut Lydia told you in middle school. These days, the sexual bases are starting to look less like a diamond and more like a convoluted maze of Tinder rejections, vodka-Redbull cocktails, and morning-after bedbug paranoia. Here’s your guide to romance in these modern times, as told by someone with virtually no baseball knowledge but a lot of experience staring blankly at strangers in bars.

First Base: Choosing

If you’re using an online dating site, this is the initial message on OkCupid, the pre-date Facebook deep dive on Grouper, or that little green heart on Tinder. If you’re taking the old-fashioned approach, it’s flashing your best come-hither glance—or that arched-brow, squinty-eyed thing, that works too—at someone across the bar. Either way, the message is the same: “I like your face and I want to put my mouth on it.”

Second Base: Liquid Courage

Here’s where it gets tricky. If you’re planning on buying the object of your affection a drink, you’d better learn to speed-read before you ask for a cocktail menu. Way back when, ladies ordered a Cosmo and gents opted, predictably, for a good scotch on the rocks. Now, you’ve got mind-boggling ingredients like smoked jalapeño, sweetgrass vapors, and blowtorched bay leaves, dreamed up by don’t-call-them-bartenders mixologists and running you roughly $8… an ounce.

Third Base: Oral

There’s head-back, toes-curled, over-the-moon oral, and then there’s the oral presentation this guy is giving you on the new app he’s working on with a couple of college buddies. It’s going to be all about the cloud, he says. It’s going to alter the face of social commerce as we know it, he says, and a few major companies are already biting. Can you see it? Well, of course not. It’s still in development.

Home Run: Penetration

I have a friend whose casual fling once admitted to creating a venue called “Pleasure Town” on Foursquare and checking in every time they hooked up. See what he did there? No? Pleasure Town was her vagina. Let that sink in, and then consider this: In this hyperstimulated, multitasking world, the sexual equivalent of the exhilaration you feel rounding the bases may simply be turning your phone off. Turn your phone off! Don’t kiss and tweet. Forget about filters and updates and posts, and take a look at your real-life status: You’re about to get laid. It’s going to be great. Or it won’t. But in any case, a little face time (lowercase f, lowercase t) can go a long way.