Sexy Time with the TV

 
      I returned home one night to find my husband sitting in the living room, leaned in close to the TV. As I walked inside my husband quickly tapped a button on the remote and handed me the controller.

     "What are you doing?" I asked, suspicious.

     "Just turning it to one of the shows I know you like," he said, kissing me on the forehead before heading downstairs to his man cave.

     Before he could make it down the staircase I hit the LAST button on our remote. Just minutes before he had been viewing a show called The Wild Wives of Africa.
   
     "You perv!" I said, following him.

     "What? How am I a perv?"

     "The second I leave the house you're scanning the TV looking for something pervy to watch. I know you didn't watch The Wild Wives of Africa by mistake."

     "I'm not a perv and I didn't watch it."

     "No?"

     "No. It was horrible. Not nearly as good as the title. It's about cheetahs who protect their young. And it was on the Animal Planet network." He shuddered. "Not a wild woman in sight."

     I sighed and stomped upstairs.

     This wasn't the first time I had come home to find 'questionable' programming on our TV. Once I returned to see that he had been watching a movie called Passion in the Desert, a movie advertised as as a 'gripping and erotic tale of forbidden love'. I watched the movie for several minutes, confused because there were no women in the movie. Finally, I discovered the object of the protagonist's affection: a large, female lion.

     "Really?" I demanded. "You're watching movies about men who fall in love with lions?"

     "Is that what that was about? I got bored after thirty minutes of watching the guy run around the desert looking for water." I continued to stare at him, dumbfounded. "What can I say?" he added. "The title had promise." He then went on to inform me that Wild Things was a 'cinematic masterpiece' and Bodacious Babes Behind Bars a 'gripping documentary',  and, as luck would have it, both were on tonight.

    "Perhaps I'm being too hard on him," I thought, after several hours of not speaking to him. I mean, it could be worse. I was reminded of a friend whose computer was so infected with viruses after her husband's 'internet activities' that they had to throw the whole computer away and buy a new one. The worst I had ever seen on my own husband's monitor was a bikini clad picture of Pheobe Cates taken in the 1980's. Maybe things weren't so bad.

     Besides," he informed me one evening as we were flipping through channels, "sexy TV can be good for both people in the marriage." He found a channel airing the male gymnasts of the Summer Olympics because he knew I thought they were cute. He then dimmed the lights, lit some candles, and poured me a glass of wine. I almost laughed at the absurdity of what he thought I found sexy, but I shrugged, swilled down the wine, and thought 'what the hell?'


     Maybe I will never understand his desire to watch Wives in Thigh Highs, but I guess I don't need to. It's harmless, and fairly (fairly) innocent. Though I don't mind an occasional Channing Tatum flick, I don't schedule my life around them. I guess men are just more visual.
    
     Who am I to criticize anyway? I have my own version of 'sexy time,' it just happens to be found in the lines of a really good book.

     "What's that?" my husband asks, pointing to my copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

     "Oh, just a book about the class struggles in England shortly after the first World War."

     "Uh-huh. Whose a perv now?" He pours me wine.

    "It's not perverted if it's a classic," I retort, taking the glass.

     "Exactly!" he replies, joining me on the couch and flipping on the TV. "And good timing on your epiphany. One of greatest classics of all time is about to start: Wild Things Two. We can watch it together and then you can read to me from your book."

     And we did; and a new tradition has been born.