Sports As Foreplay

I have a friend who thinks he may have discovered the ultimate aphrodisiac---squash. No, not the zucchini-type squash. The game of squash, the fast-paced, indoor racket sport currently enjoying something of a boom in urban centers throughout the country. My friend had been a squash player since college and when he met a girl at a party who'd taken up the game a few months before, he suggested that they hit the ball around the next evening.

"Something started to happen," he told me, "as soon as I saw her walk out of the locker room. She had fantastic legs and she was wearing this wonderful T-shirt with little flowers and the outline of her nipples showing. And it just kept building. Warming up together, keeping the ball going, moving around, bumping into each other now and then---Jesus, was it arousing. There was never any question in either of our minds how we were going to finish off the evening."

Sex and the Athlete

Is there, indeed, a sexual component to male/female athletic participation? Should we be spending less time at the movies, discos and restaurants with the women in our lives and more time with them on the squash courts, in the gym and on the jogging track? Recruiting the woman in your life into a Sunday-morning touch-football session or a little Tuesday-night three-on-three basketball is unlikely to do much for either of you sexually. But that rule doesn't apply to such individual, noncontact sports as tennis, skiing, golf, ping-pong, racquetball, jogging and scuba diving. What's nice about those in terms of bettering a sexual relationship is that they often place the two of you in a reasonably private situation. And even when you're not completely isolated, the fact remains that the two of you are interacting physically---not to mention staying in shape. Which can only benefit the sexual aspect of your relationship.

What You Wear

It helps, too, that the dress for certain sports---indoor or warm-weather, in particular---exposes areas of the body that wouldn't get exposed if you decided to go to a Mozart concert on your first date. (I know. To get the most out of any sport, you have to concentrate on the ball or whatever; but somehow you don't mind distraction if your tennis partner isn't wearing a bra under her top.) What surprised me was the effect that the male half-clothed body has on women. "What do you think brings so many women to men's tennis tournaments?" explained a woman friend. "It's legs. Muscular legs. Outside of the beach, a girl doesn't really get many chances to see a man's legs at close range. The thing I'll never get used to is watching a man climb out of his warm-up pants. I keep expecting him to be naked underneath."

Physical Activity---The Big Turn-On

A lot of you, like me, were probably taught as an adolescent that vigorous physical activity is a substitute for sex. But exactly the opposite is true. I've talked to several joggers who maintain that one of the benefits of jogging is that once you've finished your run, cooled off and regained your wind, you not only feel like a stud but perform like one as well. And a restaurant owner I know craftily arranges his dates in a way that allows him to pick up girls after a dance or exercise class. "Exercise," he insists, "makes a girl deliciously horny."

There are reasons for this, the main one being that the biological processes that get you pumped up for anything physical---adrenaline flow, blood pressure, etc.---also get you pumped up for sex. But what happens is that once the internal juices start to perk, the brain judiciously enters the scene, seeing to it that energy gets directed to those muscle areas whose involvement is needed to deal with the particular stimulus at hand---a tennis ball, a ski slope or a gymnastics bar. That explains why you are unlikely to raise an erection while jogging, skiing or playing racquetball. It also explains why, once you have presumably exhausted yourself on the courts or the slopes, you can still muster the energy needed for sex. Having dismissed the muscles involved in the original stimulus/response situation, the brain will allow what energy you have left to flow to whichever part of the body makes a loud enough request.

Drawbacks To The Game

Don't underestimate the psychological pitfalls that await you should you decide to use sports as a sexual staging ground. True, there is an art to this "foreplay." What you wear, how you play the game, etc.---each element is important in its own way. But you're not going to be able to be successful at it unless you're comfortable in the situation. Some male egos have a tough time dealing with the idea of a woman being better at a sport than they are. Sports, after all, are supposed to be a man's world. But we're not talking about you, of course. You have your act together. You are sexually secure. You are athletically secure. It's now a simple question of your putting this dual security to its most effective use. Start pitching, tiger!