A few days into our Argentina trip, we have dinner at Te Matar Ramirez, a restaurant our guidebook describes as “sensual.” The all-red interior and French slow jams suggest a swanky gay club, but for the copious murals of masturbating women. (Closeted swanky gay club?)

We find our table and order champagne, which arrives with dubious pink straws in the flutes. We remove the straws and are about to toast when Bryan notices the sperm-shaped saltshaker. He picks it up and bumps it repeatedly against the round butter dish. This is the TGI Friday’s of sensuality.

The menu has more photos of women masturbating (methinks you doth protest too much, boys), along with some alarming menu descriptions. Bryan asks whether I would prefer to start with the “I smolder with the mist of your most intimate folds” clams, or the “You watch in ecstasy, I pour out and you slowly sip me” Camembert and pastrami. We decide to skip the appetizers.

There’s a stage in front where the pornographic puppet show is set to begin. “There’s a pornographic puppet show?” I ask Bryan. He nods. I pick up the saltshaker and begin to bump it against my head.

Four actors dressed in black take the stage and begin the show. It is plushly explicit, and though my sexual-pun Spanish is somewhat rusty, the basic plots aren’t tough to follow. A a French maid services a bald puppet; two puppet schoolgirls dally together in googly-eyed rhapsody.

Bryan and I are still preoccupied with the menu descriptions. Our waitress arrives, and I order the “Thrusting my desire deep into the temple of your body” salmon. Bryan has the “She played in me with her lascivious fingers, I caressed myself” grouper. Appetites curbed.

Meanwhile, the puppet masters are really getting into the hot puppet action. My eyes water in embarrassment for them as they moan, stretch their faces into expressions of orgasmic ecstasy, and move rhythmically to the action onstage.

As the actors gyrate in the background, Wonder Woman puppet straddles Buff Guy puppet, and they perform various superhuman acrobatic feats together. I wait patiently for the “Golden Lasso” scene, which never materializes. Wonder Woman without bondage? What’s the story, people? It’s like peanut butter without jelly, Anne Margaret without her tights, Julianne Moore as a blonde.

I suggest that we would enjoy the evening much more if we skipped the cocktails and ordered an entire bottle of champagne each. Perhaps they’d bring the bottles with giant novelty penis straws? Bryan declines on the grounds that it would take an eternity to drink them, and they would almost certainly come with giant novelty penis straws.

We push our food around on our plates, pay the bill, and wait for intermission so we can run for the door. Once outside, we gaze at each other, dumbfounded.

“I-am-so-hot-right-now,” I say. “Do-me-right-here-on-the-street.” We pretend to maul each other for a few seconds, then Bryan suggests that we go somewhere for dessert. Now this is a man who knows how to get laid.