Free Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello

know that the Intelligent Woman’s Husband is more attractive (and also more successful) than the Beautiful Woman’s Husband? I think it is. You see, without that knowledge you might assume (rightly, you’d think) that the Intelligent Woman has grounds to be threatened by the Beautiful Woman. You might reckon that Beautiful People have better lives. Don’t they? Well, sometimes they do. But in this case, the Intelligent Woman has the Husband that all the Friends she and the Beautiful Woman share agree is the better of the two Husbands. Incidentally, all the Friends prefer the Intelligent Woman to the Beautiful Woman, too. Maybe they are jealous of the Beautiful Woman. But, to the Intelligent Woman, each other, and themselves, they simply claim to find the Beautiful Woman “nice but boring.”

    The Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman have been on vacation together before. They have been Friends for a long time (they are now thirty-one), and when they were eighteen, they went together to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break. Afterward, they did not speak for nearly a year. Then the Beautiful Woman’s Boyfriend broke up with her, and the Beautiful Woman was rumored to be suicidal. She had been witnessed causing a scene at the top of Bascom Hill on the way to class. The Beautiful Woman ripped the Boyfriend’s shirt while screaming. What she screamed had something to do with the Boyfriend thinking the Models in Vogue were prettier than the Beautiful Woman. The Intelligent Woman did not particularly desire to renew her friendship with the Beautiful Woman (they had never been that close), but to refuse would have seemed heartless, given what the Beautiful Woman was going through, and as the Beautiful Woman was now considered Unstable. So the friendship was renewed.

    The Intelligent Woman’s Husband is, of course, an Intelligent Man. They are, in fact, Academics, which verifies their intelligence to the world, along with raising all kinds of assumptions about their sex life, some of which are true and some of which are not. One might assume, for example, that they have very cerebral sex, which is not the case. One might assume their lovemaking to be on the prudish side—also untrue. In the ten years they’ve been together, their sex has consisted prominently of the Intelligent Man tying up and spanking the Intelligent Woman, and the Intelligent Woman giving her Husband head. For variation, anal penetration occurs. Escapades outdoors and in cars and in the bathrooms of parties. Once, when abstaining from intercourse for a month before their wedding, the Intelligent Woman and the Intelligent Man hurled pornographic threats at one another for an hour while masturbating each other on the Best Man’s sofa. The year following the wedding, they fucked a minimum of five times a week.

    The Beautiful Woman’s Husband is a Macho Man. The cruise was his idea. For all the reasons you might assume—yes, you would be right about all of that.
    In Ft. Lauderdale, the Intelligent Woman and the Beautiful Woman had another traveling companion, the Aggressive Woman. On their very first night at the neon-signed bars, which the Intelligent Woman found embarrassingly contrary to the Bohemian image she wanted to project (though there was, as of yet, nobody to appreciate this projection, so the minimal lure of cheesy bars won out), the Aggressive Woman met a man. A boy, really, they were all only eighteen. He and the Aggressive Woman made out on the dance floor to a song that went: Boom Boom Boom, Let’s Go Back to My Room. Afterward, he walked the Aggressive Woman to the hotel, where she did not invite him to her room because she, the Beautiful Woman, and the Intelligent Woman were sharing quarters. That, and because she was a Virgin, though this was as embarrassing to her as attendance at cheesy bars was to the Intelligent Woman, and so she used her roommates (really straight girls who need their