Ever since hearing you say on your podcast that all men use porn, I have had a burning question: What about us women? If all men get a pass to have this whole other sex life, which is (mostly) external to their partnerships and is sexually satisfying, then all women should have a pass as well. Ideally, it would be a pass to enjoy something universally arousing to all women, something that would sexually satisfy us, but it wouldn’t be something that turns most men on, perhaps it might even repulse them. If there were something that met my criteria, I wonder how it would play out in our relationships? Also, I am not sure what it could be, as women are a little bit more complicated.
Desires Erotic Balance
Something women enjoy but men do not… something erotic… something that repulses most men…
Cupcakes?
The now-ubiquitous cupcake isn’t explicitly sexual, I realize, but our culture does encourage people—women in particular—to sublimate their erotic desires by stuffing their faces with food. And most of those squat, round, and pink-frosted things look, to my jaded eyes, like so many squat little cocks, DEB, so many growers-not-showers with pink sprinkles, and most of those cupcocks are inhaled by women. So, cupcakes.
But if cupcakes don’t do it for you, DEB, then how about a free pass to enjoy, eyedunno, maybe porn?
“We’re actually in the middle of a porn-for-women revolution as millions—yes, millions—of women are loudly, even proudly, proclaiming their interest in porn,” says Violet Blue, author, blogger, activist, and tireless foe of antiporn boneheads everywhere. If you were reading Blue’s blog—www.tinynibbles.com—you would know that one out of every three consumers of internet porn are female, according to a Nielsen NetRatings report released in 2007.
“What’s interesting isn’t just the growing number of women using porn,” says Blue, “it’s that they’re doing exactly what DEB suggests. It’s part of their own private sex lives that are mostly external to their relationships.”
What women have lacked up to now is the same “free pass” men enjoy.
“Guys are encouraged to have this other sex life with porn,” says Blue, “that’s seen as normal and healthy. But despite the numbers, our culture is having a hard time admitting that women like porn. Antiporn feminists ignore the female viewer. The only people, besides Oprah, acknowledging the female viewer are the antiporn Christians who see it (and female masturbation) as a disease they can cure!”
Blue directs female porn consumers to Our Porn, Ourselves (www.ourpornourselves.org).
“On OPO, women are talking about liking all kinds of porn, even stuff that goes too far for some guys,” says Blue. “Women are making each other feel comfortable about their newfound access to porn, openly having their desire to watch sex (and jack off to it) validated the same way that guys do.”
I am a man who has been in an open marriage for 10 years. My wife dates men on her own, and I get to enjoy the occasional threesome with her and one of her partners. (We had no luck dating women or couples.) The problem is, she is clearly more interested in “her” dates than in “ours,” probably because the hotter guys are more interested in her alone than in us together. My wife is GGG, but it is hard for her to persuasively feign interest in the guys who are interested in us both. And it is frankly depressing to watch her go through the motions with one of “ours.”
Does being GGG require her to be a good actress, or does it require me to pretend that I believe her when she claims she enjoys the three-ways we have together?
Is This A Silly Problem?
This isn’t a silly problem. You’re not happy, which means your relationship isn’t working, which means it’s time to renegotiate terms: Tell the wife to stop fucking other people for a while. (And, yes, you should have the authority to do that—both partners in an open relationship should be able to call a time-out.) If your wife balks, concede that you’re asking her to pass up on some opportunities for hot sex. Then remind her that you’re the guy she married, that you’re the guy she’s hoping will stick around once hot guys aren’t lining up to get in her pants anymore, and that there will still be hot guys out there who want to fuck a year from now.
While you’re not fucking other people, fuck each other, fuck a lot, work to reestablish your sexual connection.
Then when you’re ready to start fucking other people again—and you’re not ready until you’re both ready—your wife should agree that over the next year she will fuck only guys who are interested in fucking you both. That’s going to mean passing up on some hot guys who are only into her, of course, but that’s a sacrifice she should be willing to make in order to save her marriage. It also means that she’ll have to work harder to find hot guys who are into you both—do whatever you can to help—but she’s likelier to make that extra effort if it’s the only way she gets to fuck a hot guy who isn’t her husband.
Hopefully by the time your three-way-or-the-highway year is up, ITASP, you’ll have a few regular thirds on deck—hot guys who are into you both, guys your wife won’t have to pretend with—and then she can do some solo adventuring without shredding your self-esteem in the process.
What is your favorite kink? What fucked-up thing does Dan Savage get up to?
Nosy Reader
My kinks aren’t interesting, NR, and my marriage vows specifically forbid me from disclosing that sort of information.
Here’s something interesting: “A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew,” the Guardian reported last week. After the dude “introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship,” the two “had consensual sex in a nearby building.” The woman went to the cops to report that she had been raped only after she learned that the man wasn’t Jewish.
Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fucking the shit out of a guy you’ve only just met (that’s how I met my husband), but I gotta say: When we have consensual sex with strangers—when we go to “a nearby building” with someone we’ve only just met—we’re not just taking a chance on a person we know very little about. We’re taking a chance on our own bullshit detectors. And no one’s bullshit detectors are 100 percent accurate. So someone who can’t bear the thought of accidentally fucking an Arab or a Republican or a married man or a guy who makes less than $250,000 a year really has no business fucking strangers. That person owes it to himself/herself to get to know people a bit better before visiting any nearby buildings with them.
Not because it’s okay to lie. But because people do lie.
In the Israeli rape case, I think there are two different arguments here, one of which is valid, the other which is not.
I think it is fair to argue that lying to get sex should not be a crime because of the difficulty in proving the case, or because the courts would be inundated with frivolous cases.
However, it is a bad argument to say that a man’s actions are not rape because the woman should have been more careful. This second argument is victim-blaming and it is sexist.
IF (and I emphasize IF) lying to get sex is considered rape, then the woman should have no duty to exercise due diligence. In fact, she should be able to be careless or reckless.
It would be the same as a provocatively dressed woman wandering into a dangerous neighbourhood late at night. Her decision is obviously unwise, but if she is raped, the fault is properly placed on the rapist. It is the rapist that is entirely to blame.
@203: “It would be the same as a provocatively dressed woman wandering into a dangerous neighbourhood late at night. Her decision is obviously unwise, but if she is raped, the fault is properly placed on the rapist. It is the rapist that is entirely to blame.”
No, it isn’t the same. Deciding to walk into a dangerous neighborhood isn’t deciding to have sex. It is simply deciding to walk into a dangerous neighborhood.
Deciding to have sex, on the other hand, is indeed deciding to have sex. That is what this woman did: she decided to have sex. She didn’t decide to walk into a dangerous neighborhood with him. She decided to fuck him.
While the principle that you put forward is a good one, this case is not an example of it.
@204:
You have missed my argument. My argument is that looking at due diligence, recklessness and whether the woman was careful are irrelevant as to whether a rape occurred.
If it is rape for a man to sexually assault a woman dressed provocatively late at night, then we don’t need to ask whether she exercised due diligence. Whether or not it is rape for a man to lie to obtain sex, we do not need to ask whether she exercised due diligence or should have been more careful. We only need to ask whether his acts were rape or have negated her consent.
I notice you have dropped the arguments that you made earlier that she should have exercised due diligence or was reckless. Perhaps you agree after all that those arguments are irrelevant?
Hey Dan,
I appreciate that you are a great cheerleader for non-monogamy and alternative relationships. However, I’m starting to get a bit sick of the way you seem to believe that people’s secondary partners are essentially masturbation tools, which can be discarded at the drop of a hat without a single thought. It’s disrespectful and selfish to treat people that way, and I wish you would stop telling people to do it.
cupcakes! try dildos . most guys have about as much animosity towards there girlfriends dildo/vibrator as most girls have for finding out there boyfriends watch porn . not a completely fair comparison but whatever
@205: The reason it is rape for a man to sexually assault a woman dressed provocatively late at night is because she didn’t agree to sex AT ALL. All she agreed to do was walk through the neighborhood. The only thing that is irrelevant here is your dumb example. If you want to talk about whether lying invalidates consent, go ahead, but stop bringing up the walking-through-a-bad-neighborhood-late-at-night-while-provocatively-dresssed analogy. It does not apply.
The woman in the Jewish/Arab incident DID agree to sex. She agreed to it specifically and affirmatively. As far as we know, there was no force applied nor threat of force. As far as we know, there was no chemical impairment involved in her decision. As far as we know, she was in full command of her reasoning faculties. He did not inflict the sex act on her; she decided of her own free will to participate. That is why it is not rape.
Maybe it was fraud, however. So let’s take a look at that. It is hard to treat her claim credibly that ethnicity was a material deal-breaker, given her actions. If it wasn’t a deal-breaker, then consent was not negated. That is what I meant by due diligence. It’s not that she was required to do certain things in order to be beyond reproach; it is that it appears that she didn’t really care all that much in the moment. One cannot reconcile her actions with her concerns stated after the fact.
Let’s be clear: I’m not excusing the guy for lying to her. Let’s just be clear on what his crime was, and wasn’t. If we were talking about money rather than sex, it would be as if I handed over my wallet to some guy on the street based on a lie that he told me, and then later, when I discovered his deceit, I wanted the police to charge him with robbery for taking the money that I handed him. Fraud is not robbery; similarly, fraud is not rape.
For the win, #5!!! Romance novels are, in term of the chemical levels in the brain, NO DIFFERENT from a relationship. As in, if I take chemical samples from a women reading one, she’d have the same the SAME chemical levels in her brain she would have if SHE were actually falling in love. Those chemical are addictive! Hence the term ‘new relationship energy junkie’!
@DEP: Erotic fanfiction.
You can find *anything you want* there – any kink, any characters, any level of sex including the illegal, immoral and completely impossible, and definitely any level of quality. It’s all right there for you to choose from! And it’s sexy and hot and the women writers know all about turning on women and hitting their buttons because they are women and they are writing for themselves.
I never knew how much I was into gay BDSM before I met fanfic, and it’s not like I could get any in real life is it? Fanfic is even better than gay porn videos, because it’s ME who creates the images and sees the action – there are no so-so actors with real appearances that don’t completely match my desires to get in the way of my fantasies.
And if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, after a short time wandering around the genre you’ll be able to write your own!
@14… I know that this is late, but that’s because I never checked back for a reply until now. Um. Where did you get yaoi nonfiction? I was talking about fanfics.
And, rethinking the matter, I have a sampling bias because all my good friends are really big nerds, and so am I… But still, fanart and fanfiction of anime, manga, even books and movies (but mostly anime and manga) are the most consumed in my friend group. Romance novels are thoroughly mocked.
Now I’m just going to head off and not read any further in the comments.
Aha. I just did a quick ctrl+f for “fanfic” and found that there are quite a few people talking about it! That’s great. I’ve been a fan of fanfiction ever since I hit puberty, for exactly the reasons described by @210. It’s nice to know that it’s not just my in-group. The sheer volume, of course, suggests that…
And @199, I just wrote an essay on BL (Boy Love) works and fandom in Japan and the US. (Most interesting research I’ve ever done, I’ll tell you that.) In Japan, ‘BL’ is the more common term, but ‘yaoi’ is still popular in the US. ‘Shounen ai’ and ‘slash’ are also in use, depending on the fandom.
Also, as for the people confused by the overwhelming volume of bad fics out there, well, there’s always going to be a lot of junk to get through when searching online. This is true for research, porn (fanfics included), what have you.
Okay, now that my curiosity is sated, I’m off. If anyone is interested in any of the BL articles I found, let me know! Fascinating stuff.
http://www.butchbakery.com/
I’m skipping over most of the comments to avoid getting into pointless arguements with people, but I wanted to add myself into the YAY!PORN side of the arguement.
I’ve been reading fanfiction smut for quite some time, and also love looking at porn. I lean towards gay porn because I find that most hetro porn does nothing for me. It’s not the “objectification of women” or whatever that gets to me, and I like naked women a lot, but I just don’t get off on it.
A bit late to comment now, but a suggestion for the woman looking for female porn-type habits; while my husband watches porn on his computer I read horny stories on http://www.literotica.com and then we both rush off to the bedroom to enjoy the fruits of our browsing 🙂 Only problem is I seem to have developed a bit of an addiction to feeling this way and spend waaaay too much time reading those damn stories. He says he really doesn’t mind though, and now is happy to make dinner just so I can read another one. Try it!
Never too late to comment. To the woman who wrote in whining about wanting equality (since men have porn), I have the ultimate response…
Men get to have porn. Final.
Women get to have multiple orgasms. Final.
And if that isn’t leveling the playing field, I don’t know what IS.
Never too late to comment indeed:
The Jewish woman was, in fact, forcibly raped, and went to the police with bruises immediately after. The story about her only flipping out upon finding her rapist not to be Jewish was a lie told by the rapist’s defense lawyer. The court filings were actually that he pled to a lesser charge, and prosecutors felt that having a public court case would be worse for the victim, especially since she had worked as a prostitute and had been previously raped by her own father.
@ 35 – Please buy a dictionary or look up one online for the definition of the word “rape.” Are you seriously comparing someone having a different sex drive to you as “rape?”
Your post is chilling and it’s astonishing that no one else picked up on it.
Better yet, go and learn what rape actually IS and you will never write such a flippant comment again. Or, maybe you will but that would just make you a dumb fuck.
Sort yourself out.
You’re one of those people who compare “foreplay” with buying flowers and I’m willing to bet that you bitch to your buddies about “women are this” and “women are that” yet never take responsibility for your own actions.
Asshole!
Regarding the Palestinian Man who was Convicted of Rape for having consensual Sex w/ a Jewish woman. This is just another way that Palestinians are considered 2nd class in a Jewish Supremacist society. I guarantee you a Jewish Man would not go to prison for doing the same thing to a Palestinian woman. In Israel it is illegal for a Jew to marry a non-Jew. It is even Illegal for a Jew to marry a gentile who converted to being Jewish. For Israelis it comes down to having ‘Pure Blood’. It is amazing how similar Israel is to Nazi Germany. From having minority ghetto’s, pure blood laws, ethnic cleansings, etc. It’s like the abused child who becomes a child abuser syndrome.