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Miss Poubelle's straight male friends have often expressed envy at the relative ease gay men have in getting laid. This is not necessarily a tribute to the superior looks or charms of gay men-- it's just due to the fact that they are trying to pick up other men, and men are notoriously easy lays. Getting a straight woman to sleep with you is a lot more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. So perhaps it's to be expected that the whole process of picking up women has become endowed with a certain air of mystery.

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When Miss Poubelle was a young thing, she recalls that this was generally called scoring. But in reading the web sites it becomes clear that another very frequent word is now macking, defined as something like "convincing a woman you've just met to have sex with you." Men who are successful at this are sometimes called macks or mack daddies. Quite a number of businesses prey on straight men's difficulties by promising to transform lonely, homely men into macks who are up to their necks in pussy.

One might guess that mack is a fairly recent invention, but in fact is a very old word that has recently been revived in a new sense. The earliest form in English is mackerel and dates from 1426. (Apparently the similarity to the name of the fish is just accidental homophony.) Our current shortened form mack is first attested in 1872.

In its original use, mackerel refers to a pimp-- that is, the middle man between a prostitute and her custo- mer. Our current image of the pimp largely thinks of him as a parasite on the prostitute, providing al- most nothing and taking a cut of her wages by force. While there have always been pimps of that sort, the historical idea of a pimp is more of the manager who runs a whorehouse or call-girl establishment, matching up customers with prostitutes. In current English, this role is usually called a madame, but there is no reason that it is necessarily restricted to women. A mack was something like a male madame.

Mackerel comes from a French word maquereau (or perhaps more likely from the feminine equivalent maquerelle). The French word, perhaps, is a borrowing from Dutch makelaar (broker), since the pimp or madame is a sort of sex broker, matching up buyers and sellers, in the same way that a real-estate agent pimps for clients looking for buyers.

Although the word is quite old, the modern usage still shows some shifts in usage. Until fairly recently, a mack was only a noun and referred to the manager of prostitutes. It is now being used as both a noun and a verb, and the meaning has shifted from prostitution to casual sexual encounters that don't involve money. This meaning shift is not unique to mack. Ho and pimp are also increasingly used to talk about women and men who engage in a lot of casual sex, with no implication of commercial transactions.

Such uses of the word mack were till fairly recently associated with African-American slang, but there are signs that they are moving into more general usage. Blanche's first recollection of this sense of the word mack dates from about 1991 in connection with a rap group called Kris Kross. Kris Kross was made up of two 12-year old black kids both named Chris, and they rapped while wearing their clothes backwards. One of the Chrises called himself Mac Daddy and the other called himself Daddy Mac.

Calling themselves mac(k)s was part of the typical boasting of hip hop music, where male rappers routinely proclaim the superiority of their rhyming skills and their ability to attract all the finest women. Though gay men certainly have the concept of scoring, there's really very little emphasis in gay male culture on the necessary skills for finding casual sex partners, since there's so little skill involved. Blanche finds it hard to imagine gay men paying for a guide to learn how to mack other guys. The only things necessary for most gay men to mack are determination and a willingness to settle for something less than an underwear model.

Though she wishes her straight friends good luck with their attempts

to mack, Miss Poubelle must confess her relief that casual sex in the gay world requires so little effort. In a world where none of us is getting any younger, it's good to know that there are so many horny and available guys that no gay man needs to be lacking in macking.