Make-out noises

They’re very strange when you don’t see the physical act creating them, when the room is dark and you haven’t the vaguest clue as to whether there are others around you.

The short, wet smackings that occur between the deeper, thick-juice pops and the slurping, the eerie bubble gum chew like rhythm. All of it could easily be mistaken for an octopus wrestling a sweaty sausage.

These are undoubtedly the sounds we associate with our deepest moments of intimacy, yet there’s a trend in nearly every sex or heavy kissing scene in nearly every film where these sounds are either edited out or barely audible.

Turn on Netflix and watch the first sex scene you can find. You won’t hear make-out noises or grunts or watch the man fiddle with a condom for 10 minutes. You’ll probably hear orchestral music and see two people float all over each other in perfectly white sheets.

Do not be mistaken. This is not sex. This is two heroin-induced opera fans rolling on one another and making strange faces.

Real sex has all the musical finesse of a ketchup bottle being emptied onto a wet platter, all the dancing grace of dropping a ham on a waterbed again and again and again.

How is it that every character on TV has the ability to have sex with all of their clothes on? Sure, the mechanical motion of it all is relatively simple, but you can’t just vaguely open a skirt and smoosh everything together. There’s a little more to it than that.

Or how about the fact that every female character doesn’t go straight to the bathroom afterward? These girls must be getting urinary tract infections on the daily and that’s disgusting.

Real sex can be smelly or painful. It can involve lots of stains or the release of gas and fluids. Mechanically, it’s a piston-based pleasure engine made of flesh and determination. And all that may make it sound a bit awful, but ask anyone who has had it, be it your parents, neighbors or cat. They’ll tell you it’s great.

So, we don’t make love like swans in front of a sunrise. Who cares? Let’s hump like the stupid apes we are and enjoy it.

­— ktgragg@indiana.edu