‘I have a terrible secret that puts most men off,’ admits the esteemed British scholar seated next to me at a chi-chi restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas. All four members of an earlier conference panel on sixteenth-century gynecology laugh before taking a communal sip of Royal Tokaji. Though I am regretfully far away from my lift and bitch companions, the conversation has taken a familiar turn toward the vicissitudes of online dating. The prize-winning professor who is fluent in ancient languages has been amusing us with tales of senior romance. Those oldsters can be surprisingly naughty, sometimes in groups of three or more! In any case, once she decided to settle down and find ‘the one,’ the doctoress had constructed her profile carefully, running it past savvy friends, before deliberately excluding references to her high level of education, and including visual evidence of her possession of relatively normal limbs and a smooth rather than humped back. ‘After confessing to being an academic,’ she explains, ‘I needed to reassure potential suitors that I was not as weird or freakish as they might have expected.’ At this point you should picture three wise female professors—one in her 40s, one in her 50s, and one nearing 60—advising a younger assistant professor to stop restricting her dating interests to fellow scholars; in fact, we agree that she should avoid them altogether. ‘And what does your partner do?’ the lonely lady asks me. ‘He plays poker and has a sunny disposition,’ I brag. The two other partnered women nod in sage approval but the single one seems dubious. For you see, dear readers, she is naïve, and has not yet been in love. In fact, she has not even been to her first rodeo. I invited her, but she said no. More about that later.

All I did a few years ago at the Calgary Stampede was pet cute donkeys so that doesn’t count. I freakin’ love donkeys.

The phrase ‘it’s not my first rodeo,’ has multiple meanings, and is sometimes invoked as a warning, as in: Do not even think of taking advantage of me jackass! It can also refer to ample sexual experience, usually muttered by a bitter meat sack who is miles away from those heady days of awkwardly eager virginity. However, I am approaching the idiomatic expression literally, and will shortly be describing my recent Continue reading →