It's not often Richmond gets ranked with cities like Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Philadelphia, but River City is rubbing elbows with the big boys, according to a recent survey.
Maybe not elbows. Maybe something else. A recent survey ranks Richmond as the ninth most promiscuous city in the United States — this according to SeekingArrangement.com, an online dating service that hooks up "sugar daddies and sugar babies." No, really. It's a thing. Go check it out. I'll wait.
See?
According to the website's survey, 55 percent of Richmond men have seven or more sex partners a year. Or so they claim.
Interestingly, there was more sexy news out of Central Virginia around the same time. Playboy magazine named the University of Virginia as the nation's top party school, based on three criteria: sports, nightlife and sex. U.Va.'s sports ranking was only a middling 14th, but apparently rampant sex really helped pull up the grade.
It's hard to tell what these goofy surveys really mean, except that you can't spell Shockoe or Wahoos without the "ho."
This, of course, is great news for Richmond. My friends, we live in a sexy, sexy world! We drive sexy cars and eat sexy lamb chops. Even kids are sexy! On a recent train ride, I was treated to a 4-year-old belting out his rendition of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." I didn't know whether to laugh or throw up.
If you are a female over the age of 12, every Halloween costume you'll ever buy in your life will have the word sexy in it. Sexy Killer Bee. Sexy Willy Wonka. Sexy Tootsie Roll. Sexy Leatherface. (Again, real. Look them up if you must.) Even little girls aren't immune. We give them fake boobs, dress them up in Pretty Woman hooker costumes, and have them prance around in beauty pageants for Toddlers and Tiaras, and then we wonder why they turn into insecure women who won't wear a Tootsie Roll costume unless it's a Sexy Tootsie Roll.
Even household products are sexy! If you've ever seen the Liquid-Plumr commercial in which two muscle-bound studs show up at a housewife's door and help her snake her drain and flush her pipes while porn-worthy music plays and a Barry White sound-alike provides the voiceover, you know we don't have to settle anymore for products that just do the job. We can clear our drains and get turned on.
So why live in a city that doesn't turn you on? I am speaking from the disadvantage of having never been single in Richmond and having stayed boringly monogamous, so I've missed out on all the fun I've heard about for years: pick-up night Monday evenings in the produce aisle at the Carytown Ukrop's; "lasagna parties," code for swinging, in a certain tony West End community; and tales from another upscale South Side neighborhood where the swinging doesn't refer only to backhands and forehands.
This has turned my impression of Richmond as a buttoned-down place on its ear. I guess it's more zipper-down.
If the SeekingArrangement.com statistic is anywhere close to true, it means that if you are not a man who is getting it on with seven women a year, just look at the guy next to you, and he probably is. Yes, it can be the hipster reclining in a Galaxy Diner booth with the off-brand cigarette box poking out of his pocket, but perhaps it's the waiter. Maybe it's golf-shirted guy sitting next to the elderly gentleman at your doctor's office. Or it's the elderly gentleman. Or it's your doctor.
The point is, Richmonders are getting busy. Doing the nasty. Mattress dancing. Doing the deed. Making whoopie. Buttering the muffin. Rolling in the hay. It takes a lot of euphemisms to cover all the sex Richmond apparently is having because, after all, Virginia is for seven lovers
