So, Stephen Marche has an essay in the latest issue of Esquire called Where Have All the Loose Women Gone? that, er, bravely explores the topic of why the women Stephen Marche wants to sleep with, or expects that Esquire readers want to sleep with, seem to be less interested in doing it than in years past.

I’ll let Jezebel or Heartless Doll or someone make the cracks about how they’re just not into the idea of sex with Stephen Marche, cuz they’ll be funnier than if I do it. Instead, I’ll talk about Lily Allen.

One of the exhibits used in Marche’s case is the song “Not Fair” of Allen’s latest record.

On “Not Fair," Allen rhapsodizes about a man who "treats me with respect" but "never make[s] me scream." For… Lily, the choice has become stark: good sex or respect.

Which sounds kinda convincing, unless you actually listen to the song. When you do, you realize that it’s not “stark” at all: it’s the opposite. The problem isn’t that Allen’s got to decide between a nice, respectful guy or one who “makes her scream”, it’s that the guy who appears to treat her with respect is actually a lazy, selfish shithead who “never makes her scream” because he never bothers to try. Marche’s interpretation is that good sex and respect are at odds – the thing that Allen says in her song, over and over again, is that if you’re not trying to make the sex good, you’re not actually being respectful. There’s a good analysis of the song on the indispensible, anonymous Austin blog Trash Can Age, but the gist of it is that “not fair” that the song is named after isn’t some wistful complaint that the good dudes just don’t turn her on, but that a guy who’s “supposed to care” doesn’t do anything but take.

And all of this kind of renders Marche’s whole premise as moot and ill-conceived. He laments that we’re losing the thing that made feminism so awesome for dudes, which was that “we get to sleep with people rather than ciphers”, by ignoring the complaints of a person and treating the content of her words as a non-entity designed to prove a dubious, shaky point.

Which could lead one to question – maybe the ladies that Marche complains aren’t into sex anymore aren’t into it because of the sort of dude who’ll ignore what she says and twist the meaning until it says the exact opposite of what she was saying is also the sort of dude that Allen was singing about in the first place. Maybe they appear to be bored with sex because that sort of treatment has made sex boring.

I mean, I don’t know any details of the guy’s sex life. He might be very determined to meet and exceed any and all needs of a prospective partner. But generally, I suspect that if you don’t give a shit what a woman’s saying, you don’t care much about what she’s screaming. What Allen’s song says, and what Marche’s essay validates, is that just because you’re the sort of guy who talks about how he’s into “brilliant, funny, and powerful women”, it doesn’t mean you actually care about her in any context outside yourself. Allen’s probably not bored with sex because “the battle of the sexes [is] more or less over”, dude, she’s probably bored with it because you don’t pay any more attention to her experience in bed than you do to the words she’s saying (seriously, like a dozen times in the song) and so she’s tired of waiting for you to finish so she can go do something she likes.