"He really needs to get laid." This smug assessment really annoys me, but perhaps not for the reason you think. Long a mainstay of the boys' locker room put-down, now one hears this from the lips of women, too. What's put me over the edge was hearing the adolescent Becky say it in the excellent "Ghost World" comic (admittedly a man, Daniel G. Clowes, wrote her words) although it's the grown-up women who say this that really burn me up - because this crude expression misses the point, and they know it. Check me on this, I may be wrong, but what I think they really mean is "He should be in a relationship" - so why not express this judgement honestly, without the jock-male vulgarity? Say "He should really be in love" - but I guess that's a faux-pas in our cynical, ironic, pre-millennial age. (And realistically, I guess a lot of people about whom this comment is addressed haven't much chance of finding love - but then why say it all? It's just being mean.)

To be specific in my own case (a single guy who's been in love, and wouldn't mind being there again) - "getting laid", in my experience, hasn't been a solution; but usually the beginning of more problems. I've lost some of the enthusiasm for the cherchez la femme because I've lived the following excerpt from the first James Bond novel <1> too many times:
With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola - sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears, and the final bitterness - was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise-en-scène for each of these acts in the play - the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis, and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.
Seems to me anybody can "get laid" (it just won't be in a truly acceptable manner) - but the point I'm trying to make here is the socializing aspect of being in a relationship doesn't just happen because one has a sexual experience. Plus, admonishing people to just "get laid" encourages them to think of sex partners as sex objects - surely that's not the goal. Therefore this comment make things worse - so knock it off!

Winston Churchill quote of the day: "The British and French Cabinets at this time [1938] presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel."