Alphabetical movie – A History of Violence

About sixty minutes into this film, the two main characters have a fight that erupts into rough, angry sex on the stairs.    “Angry Sex,” by the way, is not to be confused with “make-up sex.”

Make-up sex takes place when the fight is over and the couple has agreed that is it time to consummate their (at least temporarily) stable relationship with some nookie.

Angry sex, on the other hand, happens when two people are still angry.  The fight has not ended but they are overpowered by lust just long enough to bump and grind before they get back to the business of fighting.  If the movies are to be believed, angry sex is way better than make-up sex.

I can’t say that I have any first hand knowledge myself.  I keep trying to test the hypothesis but every time I get my wife angry enough to explore angry sex, she just looks at my like I’m crazy.

I’m not sure it would even count anyway, since I’m only trying to get her angry so we can try having angry sex and that means I’m not actually angry.  I could ask her if it was better afterwards but then I’d probably start another argument because she would be angry that I had gotten her angry just to have angry sex.

Obviously, I would completely spoil the sample if I told her about the plan ahead of time.

Which means I’ve had make-up sex but angry sex continues to elude me.

Science, sadly, offers no solutions.  I can find absolutely no research on the difference in pleasure experienced.  Biologists I follow regularly talk about fruit flies and ants and squid but they spend no time at all exploring whether these creatures are more satisfied after angry sex.

What are they doing with themselves?  Don’t they realize that while they are doing all their research on genes and amino acids and stuff, they are completely failing to research what is actually important.

Meanwhile Maria Bello and Viggo Mortenson are going at it on the stairs while moviegoers watch and wonder if there is something missing from their sex lives.

I suppose that there is a lot of danger to this kind of research.  If people discover that angry sex is really better, couples will be in arguments all the time.  Is that the kind of society we want?  A society filled with people fighting on airplanes and then sneaking off to the lavatory to join the mile high club (and most likely having to wait in a long line)?

The downsides are pretty obvious.

That is where the research can help, though.  Suppose it turns out that there is a kind of sex that is better than angry sex or make-up sex.  If science finds, for instance, that bear skin rug sex is the best sex, it would be a big problem for bears but not so much for anyone else.

I recognize the risks that these findings would have but it is important to remember that science is the search for what is true.  If they find out that angry sex is the best sex, they cannot be held responsible for what the rest of us do with those findings.  And if we are upset with them about it, we can just find ourselves a hot biologist and start a fight….