Oh, come on. John Kennedy was reportedly crap in bed, but he had no shortage of pull. Being a playboy has to do with having the money to engage in a playboy lifestyle and treating your guests and playmates to all the stuff that comes before hitting the sack.
I’m not going to derail this further except to say that there are high priced sex professionals all over the world who exactly “push the right buttons in the right order.” They are also adept at faking their own enjoyment and involvement with the customer. Even if we assume Bruce has no personal desire for sex, the skills of a gigolo are certainly not beyond him. It might feel like magic, but there’s nothing magical about sex.
Is he a millionaire playboy or a gigolo? Are we talking alternate universe here?
We’ve got to go with what we’ve got. We have no reason to believe he has any motivation to fake being a good lover. We have lots of reasons to believe that he’s not very interested in being a good lover.
He knows psychology from a professional perspective, not a personal one. He’s a shitty father and a shitty friend; he’s incapable of trusting anyone whose last name isn’t Pennyworth. What makes you think he’d be open and honest and giving in bed?
What makes you think he couldn’t convincingly fake those things? Real life people do it all the time.
Again, why would he fake them?
Possible motivations for fakery:
(1) Keeping up appearances: He’s a millionaire playboy. Millionaire playboys don’t have to be good in bed to maintain their status. Many of them aren’t (e.g., Kennedy). From what I’ve read about Hugh Hefner’s sexual preferences, there’s little indeed that most women would find sexually satisfying.
(2) Maintaining a healthy relationship by keeping a sexual partner satisfied: As noted above, his sole healthy relationship is with his butler.
What?! Since when he is a shitty father or friend? He may have all sorts of issues, but Superman, Wonder Woman, and Dick Grayson have all said good things about him at various points. No, he’s probably not a fantastic friend, but he tries very hard. He cares about people, but his paranoia and control-freakness gets in the way.
As far as the OP, I personally believe that 1) Bruce Wayne (and not Batman) could be a fantastic lover, 2) Batman would be better, and 3) He doesn’t sleep with very many of the supermodels he has hanging off his arms - he’s too busy.
And no, dammit, he’s not gay. (I love slash-fic as much as the next fangal, but canon is that he’s straight. Sorry pervs)
“Shitty father” may have been overstating it. But I can’t imagine that Dick Grayson actually likes him much. LOVES him, yes; like him, no. Have they EVER had a non-tactical dispute in which Bruce WASN’T in the wrong?
He was a bad father-figure to Dick, although he improved in his treatment of Jason and Tim - or at least he improved toward Tim after officially adopting him.
As to friendship…he’s seriously paranoid, and absolutely unable to trust his friends, which is a bad friend, even when he’s not actively hostile to him (see his reaction to their reaction to his potentially lethal take-down plans after Tower of Babel).
Don’t forget OMAC. And the real thing about Tower of Babel is that he never quite got that–while there did, in fact, need to be contingency plans for the JLA going rogue–it was completely inappropriate for him to be the one making them.
He has reason to do so. It furthers the image of Bruce Wayne as the womanizing millionaire playboy. Showing a bedmate a good time is such a trivially easy thing that there is no reason for him not to do so. You may want to complicate this with emotional issues and Bruce being unable (in your opinion) to have any healthy relationships outside of his friendship with Alfred, but none of that is germane. In real life, people have casual sex with people they meet in bars, at parties,at work and all kinds of places. They not only have sex sans any kind of emotional closeness or bonding, they have a mutually good time doing it. Is Bruce capable of such couplings? I see no reason why not. His ability, or inability, to form a lasting relationship is entirely separate. If we assume he cannot form such a relationship, then that actually opens the doo to him being a promiscuous fellow, flitting from partner to partner looking for Ms. Right.
Well, the OMACs themselves weren’t really Bruce’s doing, and Brother Eye plays into the paranoia, not the hostility. But his reaction to their reaction to it, again, is not a sign of good friendship.
In real life, a millionaire playboy has no need to be a good lover. That’s the whole point of being a millionaire playboy.
As I have already said, he seems to have no propensity for indulging in personal pleasures, whether selfish or not.
In real life a lot of people are shitty lovers, even ones that like having one night stands, and even ones who are millionaire playboys. In particular, people who tend towards workaholism are likely to be shitty lovers.
Here’s a tangential question: I seem to remember him having a baby by Ras a Ghul’s daughter in one story arc back in the 80s. Am I right in that memory, and if so, what happened to the baby?
I’m too busy cracking up over my idea of Batman saying “Quickly, deploy the Bat-a-Wang” to post coherently. Woooooo…Bat-a-Wang. Bwaahahahaha…
Try not to think about the Bat-Lube.
That story, Son of the Demon, was out of continuity for a long while (the child was adopted out, in the story), but played into 1998’s The Kingdom (where he was grown up and going by Ibn Al’Xuffach (I probably misspelled that last word…it’s Son of the Bat).
it was brought back into continuity with Morrison’s Batman & Son arc, where the child was revealed as Damien, and raised by his mother (who had drugged Bruce to conceive him).
As evidence, see the Gene Simmons sex tape.
Or, y’know, don’t.
Bruce Wayne is a dad?
He raised Dick Grayson from age 12 to 18, and still has a fatherly relationship with him.
He took Jason Todd in the same way.
He actually adopted Tim Drake after Jack Drake was killed, though Tim initially rejected it.