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Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:00 AM

Men on eHarmony seem obsessed with women who are "clean"

Doesn't everybody shower? Sixty percent of the men I meet on eHarmony say, "I can't stand someone who is not clean."

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  • Tuesday, September 25, 2007 07:02 PM

    Dirty women/clean women

    I have had oral sex with numerous women, and I am fairly confident that this "clean" women thing has nothing to do with that, for a very simple reason. You don't just grab women off the street and go down on them without both of you have a darn good shower first, whether it be together or singly. You just don't.

    And you brush your teeth and preferably use mouthwash to avoid infections in those delicate nether regions, because the human mouth is a positive cesspit of germs.

    However, if I was desperate enough to be looking on e-harmony I might still check the box for clean women.

    Why?

    Well, first of all this would rule out any smokers. Yes, it would, because I can't stand women whose hair, clothes, and homes smell of rancid smoke.

    Secondly, because I recently had an experience with a very dirty woman. Not that kind of experience, though! She was one of my tenants, and when she left the house it stank. The spare shower had been used as a cat toilet, the carpets smelled of cat piss, the kitchen was crawling with roaches, the oven was beyond recall,and the refrigerator was the proverbial biochemistry lab.

    The reason she left was that her husband had been promoted to a new job as assistant store manager in a well-known Dow Jones Index company that occurs late in the alphabet, and I found myself asking "how on earth could that man marry such a filthy woman?" (I should mention here that the wife was home all day and did not work outside the house. She did not appear to be depressed, though she complained that she thought her husband might well be gay as they had not had sex in three years.)

    OK not every one has had this experience, but most of us men do prefer a woman who keeps a clean kitchen, does not leave dirty dishes out overnight etc. We do not wish to shack up with a slattern.

    So my bet is that many (not all) of these men have had a bad experience with a woman who was not a good housekeeper, and that it has nothing to do with oral sex.

    Another possibility though is that "clean" is a code word for not sexually promiscuous. The late Princess Diana was quoted as saying, with regard to her virginity, that she was keeping herself “tidy” for someone special. The words "clean" and "tidy" seem to have a special affinity for each other and often occur in tandem.

    And finally, to people of a religious bent, the word "unclean" may also have special connotations, especially in connection with menstruation and skin diseases. So with these god-fearin' guys, you definitely don't want to be getting menstrual blood on the bedsheets or zits on your face.

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