My wife and I have been married for a few years and are expecting our first child. I’m really into the idea of being sprayed with my wife’s breast milk. The other night, she was fretting about when her boobs are going to start leaking. This seemed like a good time to bring it up, so I told her about my newly discovered lactation fetish. She freaked out-her comments were along the lines of “Gross!” and “That’s not what that’s for!” This is something I’d really like to explore, but I don’t know how to reapproach the subject.
Man Into Lactation Kink
Not all pregnant women, however thrilled they are about having children, are excited about—much less excited by—the physical changes that come with pregnancy. So you might wanna keep your mouth shut until your wife has some time to get comfortable with her new boobs, MILK, and their new milk-producing superpowers.
Once the kid is out and the milk is in and your wife has fully recovered from the birth experience and you start fucking again… you should probably keep keeping your mouth shut. The wife won’t have forgotten that conversation, I promise you, and if she comes to see her breast milk as a bodily fluid like so many others, i.e., one of those fluids that adults sometimes share during sex, perhaps she’ll warm to breast-milk splatter play.
But don’t take my word for it, MILK.
“Before I had a baby,” said a new mother I shared your letter with, “I would’ve had the same reaction—gross! I would’ve wondered if my husband has unresolved mother issues. The idea of sexualizing a bodily secretion that’s designed solely for my infant? That seems a bit taboo. But now that I’ve had a baby, my reaction would be somewhat different.”
How so?
“It can be a challenge to feel intimate after childbirth and as sleep-deprived new parents,” said the new mom. “So I’d perhaps shrug and summon my new mom mantra: Whatever works.”
I am a 25-year-old lesbian. I’ve been with men before, but I never really liked it—penises freak me out. My coworker recently asked me to have a threesome with him and his boyfriend using a strap-on. I’m intrigued. They’re both very attractive, and I would like to try it, if only for the story. But I’m worried that TWO penises will really freak me out. I also worry that my strap-on skills, while great for the ladies, would bore two 6-foot-2 gay men. Do you think I should do it? Can you recommend a way to get over my penis fear? Is it a bad idea to try this out with a coworker?
Intrigued But Scared
I think you should do it—and you knew I would think you should do it, which leads me to believe that you wanna do it, otherwise you would’ve written to any one of the hundreds of don’t-do-it advice columnists out there. (Prudie would’ve made some great assfucking puns but almost certainly would’ve told you not to do it.)
Office affairs can get messy—but the messes are likelier when the romantic stakes are high. There are no romantic stakes here, IBS, and as long as you’re both mature enough to separate your work relationship from your strap-on relationship, I don’t see why you shouldn’t satisfy your curiosity, theirs, and mine. (I’m curious what their height has to do with anything.)
As for your fears and insecurities: Tell the boys in advance that dicks scare you, let them know there might be some nervous laughter, and remind them before you start not to point those things at you. Then enjoy, take pics, and send a full report—my readers are going to want to know how it went.
I spent a long time in a relationship with a wonderful man who had a very low libido. I know how challenging it can be when you are not sexually satisfied in a relationship. I have started seeing a new gentleman. After several weeks, he confided that he enjoys being defecated on. I told him I didn’t know that I could accommodate him but I didn’t think any less of him. He seemed relieved that I wasn’t judging him and genuine when he said he wouldn’t want me to do anything I was uncomfortable with. I am wondering if by denying this kink I am being unfair or, worse yet, leaving him feeling unsatisfied in the way my ex made me feel. He has not pushed it, but I want to know if my refusal to do this negatively impacts my GGG assessment.
Clean Sheets Enthusiast
No, CSE, it does not. People should be understanding, indulgent, and GGG—”good, giving, and game”—and a partner’s reasonable fetishes, kinks, and quirks should be accommodated. A thing for feet or crossdressing or bondage? Totally reasonable! Accommodate away! A thing for shit or animals or seitan? Unfuckingreasonable.
It’s wonderful—I suppose—that your boyfriend felt safe enough with you to share this info, and he’s probably thrilled that you didn’t, er, dump him on the spot. (Prudie could’ve come up with something better.) But the internet was invented expressly to remove guys like your boyfriend from the dating pool. Kink personals sites make it possible for people with unreasonable fetishes to find partners who share their unreasonable fetishes. That you’re still seeing him, and calling him a gentleman, is the best he could hope for from someone he didn’t meet on a shit and/or seitan fetish website.
I’m a 23-year-old male who is bi-curious/pan-curious/post-gender-curious. I have recently found myself attracted to penises, but I don’t feel like I’m attracted to any specific men. If you showed me a cropped shot of a hard cock, I’d get aroused. If you showed me a picture of the whole guy, no arousal. Many of my friends are very into the post-gender/post-modern
cultural-studies mind-set. In college, a time in my life when I felt no arousal looking at male genitalia, they mocked me for considering myself straight. I’m wondering if the disconnect of attraction toward the male sex organ but not men is the product of simply training myself to break down the assumed straightness I’ve spent most of my life living. I am fairly picky, but I meet many women I am attracted to. I really like the general idea of having sex with a guy, just not any specific one. Am I just trying to be a sexual tourist? Am I valuing queerness for the sake of it? Maybe my trepidation toward sex with a man is from the general societal constraints put on male-on-male loving?
Cock Observer Laments Disconnect
Or maybe you’re straight.
Lots of straight men like to look at cock, COLD, which is why there’s so much cock on display in porn created by and for heterosexual men. Straight men can identify with those hard cocks and live vicariously through them. But very few straight guys—no truly straight guys, many straight guys would argue—make the leap from admiring and/or being vicariously aroused by cock to actually sitting on one and/or finding other men attractive.
Accept that you’re straight, COLD, pursue the women you’re attracted to, and stay the hell away from heterophobic post-gender/post-modern/pan-sexual cultural-studies majors whose immaturity, self-loathing, and anger all manifest in a refusal to accept that a good guy can also be a straight guy.
Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.
@135: And, no, shit doesn’t have to be dangerous. Eating your own shit is not that dangerous, I gather. And playing with shit is no more dangerous than having anal sex, which lots of people do.
There is probably a slight increase of risk if more shit is involved, but as you say, it’s nothing that justifies declaring it categorically unsafe. Most bacteria in the shit of healthy people will be harmless, but some can cause an “opportunistic” infection if they get in the wrong place. Most of the dangerous pathogens in shit spread by the “fecal-oral route”, so forms of anal sex and shit play without the “oral” part should be relatively safer than those with it.
Something like, say, horse manure would have even less pathogens that are dangerous to humans, but I don’t know if it would be a satisfactory substitute 🙂
IBS: doggy style in jock straps.
If they’re into D/s as well, play it to the hilt and let them know in no uncertain terms that if you see a real penis, you’re zapping it with a taser (or whatever you have in your toybox that won’t be pleasant for them).
That assumes you’re going to go through the minefield of having an office fling.
They issued the invite. You’ve got all the leverage. Set your terms or don’t do it (and if it works out and you can loosen up a little on a repeat, great–if it doesn’t, remember you still have to work with them).
@125 yes yes yes.
Naw Dan, I call bullshit. If COLD had admitted to sleeping with some dudes, you’d call him a closet case.
COLD is either gay or bi – he’s just trying to deal with it…it takes time.
128/ankylosaur, I completely agree with you. Evaluations like “reasonable” and “unreasonable” aren’t appropriate here. People are turned on or off by different things, and there is no particular set of “reasonable” stuff one is expected to accommodate, or vice versa.
I don’t think IBS should do it just because it’s often disastrous to have sex with people you work with. However, it might work out, so more power to them if it does.
MILK needs to chill out and let his wife adjust to nursing and dealing with an infant, before worrying about how her body’s new capacities can be used to his own sexual advantage. Anyone who doesn’t think that a new mother (or parent in general) deserves time and space to manage this adjustment is either ignorant or an asshole (or like #15, apparently both).
Once MILK’s wife is comfortable with nursing and taking care of newborn, I think it’s fine for him to express his milk-related desires, as long as he makes it clear that she is in control of what happens. If she needs to keep nursing separate from sex, that should be her choice entirely, and nobody should be worried about how to talk her into it. Before I had kids, I was a little squeamish about nursing too. And at first it was very difficult, and postpartum sex was difficult and painful. But over time those problems abated, and after a second child everything was much easier and more relaxed.
Oh, one more thing about MILK: I’ve never leaked milk during sex, and when I have leaked it, there was nothing remotely like “spraying” going on. I doubt I could have even accomplished that during sex if I had wanted to. So it might be helpful not to have unrealistic expectations about this in the first place. Might work with some women, and not with others; might be desirable to some women, and not to others.
I’m a 23-year-old male who is bi-curious/pan-curious/post-gender-curious. I have recently found myself attracted to penises, but I don’t feel like I’m attracted to any specific men.
I have a theory that enjoyment of giving oral sex constitutes a major breeding advantage. However, I’m not convinced that the genetic quality “enjoyment of giving oral sex” is tied to a particular kind of sexuality, or to a particular genital organ… Thus, when someone has the genetic quality of being an “oral sex giver” any genital will do, particularly when someone is bored or lonely.
FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, Dan, your advice to COLD leads me to respect you.
Dare I say that THIS is the first viable way I have ever seen proposed in relatively mainstream media to reach a GENUINE gay/straight rapprochement: YOU don’t try to convince me that I’M sick just because I squick at gay sex, brother/sister, and I won’t try to convince you that YOUR preferences are sick; let’s just PLEASE do whatever it is that we do 1) behind closed doors 2) with ADULTS who are consenting and AVAILABLE (not in supposedly-committed monogamous relation with anyone else) and 3) NOT rub it into the faces of others who do not share our own preferences.
Just sign me – kinky as a slinky yet 110% het for the 40 years since puberty…but under NO illusions that this is “normal” or even “healthy”; however I am the way I am so I might as well be fine with it: “How ’bout you?” 😉
I was the opposite of Dan’s friend. I would have thought “okay… maybe” before I had children but now men into that really gross me out and piss me off. Is there nothing about my body that can be for mother and child and not for his fucking dirty ass fantasies? It’s like there was nothing sacred. EVERYTHING I did could be made sexy and it pissed me off like my whole existence was about his pleasure.
Four kids later, I have gotten to where the natural release of milk that accompanies orgasm doesn’t bother me but if he started acting like it was making him hard or moaning about how hot that was I’d probably deck him honestly. He does gently kiss me, and tell me it’s beautiful, and I’m okay with *that* but “fuck yeah baby spray me with that sexy mama juice!” would almost certainly result in perma-loss of my girl woody. I love sex and am rarely more than two weeks after childbirth without desperately attacking him, but I also like him acknowledging I have bodily functions and social functions outside of being his slut princess. For me, lactation fetishes cross that line and blurs a weird incesty feeling (exacerbated by the fact nursing pleasure sensations are physiologically the same as sexual pleasure responses).
“He has not pushed it”
*Giggle snort*!
Don’t worry MILK, but your wife on top and you’ll get some milk in the face. I PROMISE!
here’s a thought: maybe you should try real hard to do whatever your spouse is brave enough to tell you that they really want.
Because otherwise by the time you’re willing to play, they may have passed the point where they’re willing to try with you. Especially if they meet someone else who is not just grudgingly agreeing to try, but enthusiastically begging to.
Here’s a thought: maybe you should just do whatever reasonable thing your spouse is brave enough to tell you that they want.
Because otherwise, by the time you grudgingly agree to try, your spouse may be be over it. And by over it, I mean why should they agree to go with your tortured tolerance, when some one else might be enthusiastically begging to do what they want?
@134 One final comment on this, mostly to clarify my feelings about “boundaries” “privacy” and “manners”: what this really boils down to for me – the essence of these three things – is an awareness of others. They are all founded in the “golden rule” – and they are mostly just a sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others.
I do not really expect that my checkbook register (how quaint), my email, my cell phone, etc., are entirely off-limits to my girlfriend. They certainly were, when we first started dating, but after a year and a half, they’re less so, particularly since we’ve discussed marriage (and I’ve been married before, I know well how this stuff works). In fact, I expect that nearly all aspects of my life are an open book.
However, I want courtesy. I want the courtesy of asking before looking. I don’t want to dig in her purse and if I needed to for some reason, I’d ask first. I asked my (ex) wife of 14 years before I went into her purse. It is an awareness of her and of invading her personal space, and a courtesy about doing that. We split for completely unrelated reasons.
Boundaries are the same thing. You’ve asked some personal questions here, and it’s not really a boundary violation, since: a) I brought up the topic and b) it’s in line with the very personal nature of much of the conversation here. If we were casual acquaintances at cocktail party, it might be over the line.
I’m a bit sensitive to the last issue, and it’s baggage – I was intimately involved with someone who’s relative had no sense of boundaries, coupled with a need to control the people and environment around her. I’ve also dealt with the corrosive effects of insecurity and lack of trust and frankly, after years and years of being the object of unfounded distrust, I have no patience or desire for living with that ever again.
@165 Because otherwise by the time you’re willing to play, they may have passed the point where they’re willing to try with you. Especially if they meet someone else who is not just grudgingly agreeing to try, but enthusiastically begging to.
Wow…spot on!
@166 – agreed. I approve wholeheartedly of being sensitive to people’s boundaries (even if I’m not always talented in that realm myself). And you are completely right about the corrosive effects of hyper-insecurity in one partner.
@165 I agree with this too. But I think wendykh was making an interesting point, which I’d like to come back to.
She noted that her “nursing pleasure sensations are physiologically the same as sexual pleasure responses.” But for her own psychological comfort, she doesn’t want to think about them in the same way – because the nursing pleasure she enjoys with the child is not something she wants to see in a sexual light.
I think this is something our society has a hard time with. If we want continued pleasure from sex during the years of child-raising, it helps to be fully aware of our sexual feelings (not constantly repressing things because they’re “bad thoughts.”) But then it’s harder to carve out a zone of “pure” “non-sexual” energy to devote to the children. Culturally, it’s not possible for people to admit to having sexualized thoughts in the vicinity of their children. And for good reason.
@EricaP
Sorry, I hadn’t even read wendykh’s comment when I made mine. My rant was in response to the letter in the column, and in general to spouses who are not game. My marriage is currently in shreds because after two years of trying to get my husband to play kinky with me, and a year of having given up because he didn’t even try to hide his distaste and it killed my ladyboner, I met a guy who is begging to do all the nasty things that I want. and when I tell him the most fucked up shit that I want to do, my husband’s response is disgust and this guys response is a rock-hard dick.
And the whole situation pretty much dropsmy brain in acid. Now that the hubby knows I’m thinking about cheating, or maybe even leaving, he’s like “lets try again with the kinky stuff! I’ll try!” but at this point…. I don’t believe him.
@170, your comment came right after hers and seemed to speak directly to her point… but apologies for misapplying your rant.
Thank you, in any case, for writing about your situation — another data point that sometimes if one tells one’s spouse that one is thinking of going outside the marriage, the spouse doesn’t say, “Oh, you horrible creature, never speak to me again except through your lawyer.” Instead the spouse sometimes says, “Wow, I didn’t realize it was so important to you. How can I step up my game?”
In your case, his efforts may be too little too late, but in general if people make the Seriousness of their Needs more obvious before it gets to a crisis point, they may get (some of) the changes they want met within the marriage.
I refuse to google up seitan. I REFUSE DO YOU HEAR ME??
BEG Before you get squicked out, remember: People pay a lot of money for this at the health food store, and it’s supposed to be good for you. However, you would be forgiven for thinking that it ties in rather neatly with Dan’s shit-play comments…. (it’s food. well. sort of…)
http://bp1.blogger.com/_pIt65Ib-y6w/SGkU…
I was like, “Holy shit, 170-some comments? What’d Dan say now? Toss a terrorist’s salad for Christ?” Then I see it’s all just a big kerfuffle about lacto-sex. Oh, and by the way #173, I did google-bing “seitan.” (I have no standards anymore.) It’s really quite shocking.
Okay, badgirl and others, y’all say all the time you want Dan to post more letters about shit-eaters. So show Dan some love by producing another hundred posts about CSE’s situation. Why shouldn’t she give the idea a try? Her boyfriend is not actually asking her to eat shit… I think she’s halfway there, myself, with all her talk about how maybe she’ll lose her GGG accreditation if she doesn’t give it a try. I think she wants permission to try scat, and Dan should encourage her, not tell her it’s sick and her boyfriend is only allowed to look for partners on scat sites. (How did the word scat come to mean both shit and jazz singing with wordless vocables?)
To add to the MILK edition of this week’s column… with my first child who wouldn’t latch on, and my milk was fading fast, i did ask my husband if he would like a try before it was all gone. His reaction was “eeeewwww, gross, no thanks”. I felt horrible. I never asked him again. I thought it would be one more way to be intimate with him. What i didn’t know THEN was that he was on the downward slope of a fast-declining libido, and in the next few years, there would be little to no sex between us. That answer, plus a few other hints, were, in retrospect, very telling as to where we would be today. Conclusion: the least a partner can do when asked if s/he would like to partake in a new sexual activity is say “yes, i’ll try it and see how i feel about it” and go from there. Saying no without trying it is indicative of a repressed attitude.
@ 171 – i have to totally agree with you about wondering where your husband’s libido is when you ask him to pleasure you in the way you desire, and he totally shuts down. It is only later, only when he KNOWS you are about to leave, he capitulates. As you noted, this just does not work, psychologically speaking. It is a situation where, when one feels they are forcing the partner to partake, the joy and desire goes straight out of it all. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that when the partner deflects the first advances, there is no hope of trying to “convince” them later, and even when they do beg to be taken back and beg to participate in an active sex life, for most, it is already ruined. Their true self is revealed in the first answer, not the second or third.
Sorry, in my previous post, i incorrectly identified the poster as #171, when it is #170 i was referring to.
@128 I think it is unreasonable to expect the typical person to indulge a scat fetish. It’s something that I could easily see making my physically ill – definitely for certain levels of scat play. And there’s a sound biological reason for that.
It’s not unreasonable to ask about it. And Dan doesn’t tell people to freak out and call scat fetishists monsters. Just that they are reasonable for refusing.
And homosexuality doesn’t fall under GGG, in the way you seem to be suggesting, IMO. If you are gay, obviously, you WANT to have gay sex, so why would it be considered “GGG”? It’s not an accommodation, it’s what you want in the first place.
If you’re straight, and your partner wants you to have gay sex, I think you are entirely justified in refusing. I have friends who are a couple where the girlfriend wants her bf to suck a dick. He doesn’t want to. He’s not failing to be GGG by refusing.
I suppose you can say he should give due consideration. It’s not GGG if he refuses by saying “EEW gross, I ain’t no fuckin faggot! You are completely disgusting!”
But it doesn’t sound like that’s the type of thing that CSE said to her scat fetish gentleman. You shouldn’t make them feel ashamed about the fetish – and you shouldn’t necessarily indulge, so to speak, your initial feelings of disgust. Maybe you should make an effort to think about it as something sexy… But with scat and having sex with your non-preferred gender or strangers, etc. are not things that I think you have to actually try before you refuse to do them.
I just googled seitan. Gross Dan!
It’s like I always say, if you can’t get the milk for free, then you might as well buy a cow.
And EricaP, you have left twenty comments! Twenty!
I haven’t read them, but that is too many!
It’s like I always say, If you make too many comments on an internet site, then you might as well buy a cow. And fuck the cow.
@ 133 (ellarosa),
indeed, the number of people, GGG or otherwise, who would be sort-of OK with foot fetishists is much higher than the number of people who would be sort-of OK with scat play. But I don’t see that as an argument — unless you’re saying that being GGG means accepting anything. People have a right to dislike certain things, even ‘reasonable’ things, for all kinds of reasons (bad experiences, traumas), without having their GGG cards cancelled. Hell, a person could be ‘otherwise GGG’ and not like oral sex; so s/he says to potential partners, “I’m good and game, but oral sex is out of the question”. This person is still being reasonable, isn’t s/he?
So: I simply don’t believe in the idea of “a fetish too far”. I only see that the number of people who wouldn’t run away screaming if someone said he was a scat fetishist is larger than the number of people who would have the same reaction to a gay person or a foot fetishist. That’s true, but this does not change the moral status of the scat fetish itself. It is a fetish like any other fetish; it can be played safely like any other fetish; it doesn’t mean that the person who has it is “a pervert” who should be avoided or run away from as quickly as possible.
What you say simply means: life is harder for scat fetishists because they’re few, and many people, even otherwise liberal people, really have a problem with their fetish. That’s the situation gay people were in a few decades ago, isn’t it? It was wrong for gays. It is wrong for scat fetishists too.
Again: I’m not saying you have to agree with scat play to be GGG. GGG is not about you “having to agree” with anything. GGG is about being ready to hear what your partner’s needs are respectfully, without going automatically into eeeww mode, and giving said needs the benefit of a real, thoughtful cost-benefit analysis. Would I go that far for this person, is s/he worth it? If I wouldn’t but would still otherwise like a relationship with this person, am I OK with him/her having this particular need met elsewhere?
It’s all about respect, I think.
shw3nn (@140), I’m not saying you don’t have the right to refuse scat play (or anything at all — even oral sex) and not be GGG.
Now, your point is that perhaps this is what Dan says. Maybe his concept of GGG does involve a list of “consensus reasonable kinks” that any GGG person is supposed to accept (even if s/he isn’t thrilled by them) — say, foot fetish, light BDSM, you name it.
Maybe so. In this case, then I am diverging from Dan’s concept; it seems I’m proposing a new definition of GGG. (Dan, in case you’re reading this, would you agree? What do you think?)
GGG means (to me):
1. I don’t say “eeeww! you’re a pervert!” no matter what the kinkster says.*
2. I seriously think about whether or not I could accommodate that if I think the person is worth it.
3. If I can’t, I say so respectfully, without implying that the person is bad for wanting that, but simply asserting that I can’t help him/her there
4. If I still want to pursue a relationship with this person, then I must be OK with the idea of this person getting that kinky need satisfied with someone else.
I don’t consider statistics here, because I don’t see GGG as depending on a standard list of “acceptable fetishes”. It shouldn’t matter to a GGG person how frequent a certain fetish is or isn’t; what matters is whether or not I can accommodate this particular fetish, and how I react in case I can’t.
—–
* One might think of exceptions to the ‘all kinks deserve respect’ rule: say, serial killers who get off on killing people are definitely out. Pedophiles often are, too, but remember what Dan once wrote about ‘good pedophiles’, i.e. the ones who don’t act on their desires because they don’t want to cause suffering. In fact, here’s a generalization: even when a person has a very dangerous fetish (pedophilia, or the desire to kill people), the point is not the desire itself, but whether or not the person acts on it.
@135 (EricaP), @157 (Suzy), thanks for your support.
In case people were wondering, yes, I do have a little of a scat fetish. It’s not the main thing for me, but I do find it… intriguing. Never acted on it, though (in fact this message is the first time I even admit it in public…).
@181 (ForkyMcSpoon), I think there are different issues here, and we (and even perhaps Dan himself) have been confusing them.
I don’t simply think it’s unreasonable to expect the typical person to indulge in scat play — considering how prudish the American population still is, I think it’s unreasonable to expect the typical person to indulge in any fetish, no matter how ‘reasonable’: the number of people who still think a foot fetish is icky and pervy is probably way higher than the people who think it isn’t.
In other words: the (overwhelming?) majority of Americans is not GGG. I hope this is not a surprise?
So I take it when Dan (and you) talk about being GGG, you’re talking about how people should be, but mostly still aren’t.
I see you’re making a difference between homosexuality and kinks, and I think you’re right. Let me rephrase my comparison: the point is that “people in general” are often disgusted by certain fetishes (that they don’t have) in the same way that homophobes are “disgusted” by the homosexuality that they don’t have. When posing a list of “reasonable” fetishes, I think Dan was being influenced by this feeling of disgust, in the same way that homophobes are influenced by their feelings of disgust about the idea of “gay sex”. This is of course independent from the idea of accommodating or not accommodating the sexual needs of your partner; but to the extent that the feeling of ‘disgust’ or lack thereof often influences a person’s decision on whether or not to accommodate said needs, I still see a similarity.
So I am after all in agreement with yours: what is not GGG is saying “EEWW gross”, and CSE didn’t do it.
But what I’m saying now — the ‘new GGG’ as it were — is that GGG doesn’t mean “accommodating a specific list of ‘reasonable fetishes'”, but accommodating what you think you can accommodate. There are no ‘unreasonable’ fetishes, there are only frequent and unfrequent fetishes, or fetishes that have better or worse PR. And the fetishists who have them are, I am sure, well aware of how rare the people are who can ‘accommodate’ them (let alone share the same fetish).
I think we all should make efforts to try new things, but boundaries are boundaries are boundaries. I don’t think you need a justification like “oh, this is a really ‘bad’, ‘unreasonable’ fetish” in order not to want to accommodate it. If you can’t accommodate it, then you can’t accommodate it, and it doesn’t matter whether or not most (GGG) people could, or couldn’t.
ankylosaur,
I agree with your comments and your definition of GGG. Well done. I have a bit of a blood fetish and that freaks people out.
Also what you said about the act itself rather than the desire to act is definitely something I can agree with. I have desires which I know I’ll never act on for various reasons. But there are ways to do things in a way that isn’t too damaging if you think logically about your desires before you act on them. Like having a desire to kill people but instead settling on mutual exchange of pain where nobody gets hurt beyond what’s expected (i.e. nobody dies). I’m talking nonsense now. I just meant to tell you that I liked your comments. :o)
“There are no unreasonable fetishes”
I concur, anklysaur. No fetish should be considered reasonable or unreasonable. That’s just silly. And most people, like you said, are not GGG at all.
@184 “I haven’t read them, but that is too many!”
And here’s one more, just for you. Kiss kiss.
@189-190 (mommyduck), indeed that is what I think. Most fetishists of all kinds, even the so-called ‘reasonable’ ones, have to deal with all kinds of negative feelings about their fetishes (I do have a lot of submissive fantasies, and I did go through that awkward phase of thinking ‘Is there something wrong with myself?’ ‘Do I for some reason hate myself?’ ‘Is this the result of some childhood trauma that I should get professional help about?’ etc. etc. etc.; even now, when I know for a fact such desires can be safely indulged on in a healthy, loving way, I still sometimes wonder where they come from, and if there is something self-destructive in them at all that I should be concerned with). Fetishists with the kind of kinks Dan would call ‘not reasonable’ have reasons to feel even worse — why, even Dan, the father of GGG-ness, thinks they should ‘stay in the closet’ (as he said once, they should discretely look for partners in some website in order to remove themselves from the ‘outisde world’, so that ‘reasonable people’ who are dating each other don’t run the risk of running into said ‘unreasonable people’ and being grossed out…)
For instance, I would have problems with a blood fetish (it does freak me out a little). But if you proposed that to me, I would treat you with respect, and I wouldn’t think any less of you because of that. Blood fetishists aren’t serial killers in the making, just like submissives aren’t cowards or, who knows, future self-hating suiciders, or cuckold fetishists aren’t just men who want out of their marriages and are just looking for an excuse.
I agree that being turned on by the idea of killing people doesn’t mean you’re going to become an obsessive serial killer — just like being turned on by the idea of spanking or whipping someone doesn’t mean you’re going to become a cruel, insensitive person (like the old Batman supervillains). It is true, however, that any death fetishists must understand that s/he is never going to have ‘the real thing’, and s/he must be OK with just simulating it at best. (I once met a guy who had somewhat of a castration fetish, and he also was aware that he didn’t “really” want it to happen, it’s just something he liked thinking about, or at best simulating.)
Some fetishes require ‘extra care’ (breath play? electricity play?), i.e. double-extra strong feeling of duty and responsibility for those who want to indulge in them. But they don’t imply that said people are morally bad (they may be irresponsible, like everybody else also may be, but not necessarily and not because of their fetish).
I’m getting to old for this. “bi-curious/pan-curious/post-gender-curious”. What the fuck does that mean? Seriously.
I don’t understand why openness to anal sex is considered a standard part of being “GGG”, even if one ultimately decides it’s not desirable. However, anything involving poop is “unreasonable”? Look, if you’re putting body parts in there next to the poop, what is so unreasonable about poop? Is it somehow worse than pee? It’s not something I particularly care to try, given my alter-ego as Ms. Lysol USA, but at least it seems as reasonable as anything else people do with their bodies and the bodily products.
I could not disagree more with the advice above (I think maybe from Bluejean Baby?) that once you ask a spouse to do something, they refuse, you threaten to cheat, and then they try to accommodate you, that the sexual benefit is ruined and the “true self” was only found in the initial refusal. Why so essentialist about people, their desires, and what they’re capable of? People change, learn, grow, and their desires are to some degree mutable. If anything ruins the subsequent attempt to do what the partner wants sexually, it’s the threat of being abandoned unless you comply!
sylvia browning, you asked: “why should they agree to go with your tortured tolerance, when some one else might be enthusiastically begging to do what they want?” The answer is very simple: because you married them, and your promises are supposed to mean more than shit. If you had made demands of your husband and he categorically refused, and after lengthy soul-searching you decided that sexual satisfaction in this area was more important than anything else in marriage or your commitment to your vows, then yeah, I guess you have to tell him you’re going to cheat or leave. However, if at that point he tries to comply, why should you scorn his efforts? He obviously values being with you more than you value being with him, because he’s willing to do what it takes to save your relationship, and you’re content to remain skeptical. I don’t know if your marriage is salvageable or worth the effort, as it’s obviously more complex than this, but you definitely owe him the chance to learn what you want and try, without being dismissive of his reaction. Just like you’d expect him to be accepting and tolerant of your different desires, you should also give him the same consideration, which means time to get on a learning curve about satisfying your desires.
Ankylosaur, I commend you for your bravery in making your scat intrigue public, as even among Savage Love readers you might run into a lot of knee jerk reactions. (Although not too much yet, it seems…) I agree with your re-definition of GGG with one caveat — that people not allow their internal conception of what things they could potentially accommodate balloon in such a way as to wrap what is really just an “ick” feeling into some more noble-sounding sense of predestination. For example, thinking to oneself that one feels averse to performing oral sex because one is in fact immutably UNABLE to accommodate that action due to the imagined risk of damage to the psyche (in cases where there is no trauma precedent.) I think that is why it is important to be willing to try something at least once and/or at the very least, in a committed monogamous relationship, willing to discuss in detail one’s sensible, intact reasoning for not being willing to do so, without stonewalling the issue. I also want to go on record as saying even though I personally don’t find scat a turn on and wouldn’t be willing to play with or eat it, I’d have no issue with defecating on someone who I was comfortable enough to have anal sex with. It takes some time to get to that point of biological comfort with a partner, but it can be done. Every individual makes a choice as to how much he/she is uncomfortable with bodily functions, and that choice is not destiny. It can change over time and in the right context.
Dan: “stay the hell away from heterophobic post-gender/post-modern/pan-sexual cultural-studies majors whose immaturity, self-loathing, and anger all manifest in a refusal to accept that a good guy can also be a straight guy.”
Amen. But why can’t we just shoot them?
@194/195 Yes! poop fetish is not so far removed from anal fetish. And, Yes! whatever it takes to give your spouse the “wake-up call,” once they get it and try to give you what you want, give them a chance, for the sake of the love that brought you together.
(And corollary: MAKE SURE THEY KNOW, really really, how serious this is to you, long before you start hating their guts.)
EricaP, zell_zyte (@196, @198), indeed. It’s interesting that it’s our common disgust for poop itself that transfers to our judgment of poop fetishists (we do feel angry when we realize the dog pooped where he shouldn’t have, and we do feel disgusted by having to pick it up and throw it away, don’t we?). I note that Dan, when he talks about anal sex, makes sure to note how he tries NOT to think about what the anus is for, to forget that it’s an exit and think of it as an entrance, etc. (Similarly, remember how many homophobes are grossed out by anal sex because they think, as that person — who was it again? — put it, that they’re ‘wiggling their penises in excrements’?)
Yep, there’s a disgust feeling associated with faeces. I feel it too; I don’t like picking up dog faeces just like any other dog owner. I do feel intrigued by scat play (I have some vivid scenarios in my mind), but since I’ve never tried it there’s a good chance that if someone ever said ‘OK, let’s try’ to me I’d chicken out and run away or, if I went as far as trying it, I’d still feel disgusted and grossed out by ‘the real thing’. I don’t know. As I say, I just find the idea… intriguing. (One thing I did try once was, well, playing with a partner’s farts. Allow me the shyness of not describing the details… But I’ll say I enjoyed it even more than I had expected. It was very… intense.)
Dan mentioned once — and I agree with him — that he thought sex itself in all its forms is ‘icky’ if you think about it, and if it weren’t so much fun nobody would understand why people would actually do it. (As a friend of mine put it, why is saliva so disgusting when someone spits it on our face, but so delightful when we’re kissing? Isn’t it the ‘same’ saliva?)
Men not only have nipples, they have fully functional mammary glands. Look it up. Have MILK work on it for a while and do it himself.
Men not only have nipples, they have fully functional mammary glands. Have MILK work on it for a while and do it himself.
As a scat fetishist I think it is awesome that so many people are supportive. I went through some terrible experiences in my life related to this, and tried to kill myself after being outed by a hateful person. After that I got counseling from psychologist who focused on paraphilias, and thank god for that. It took a while, but he was able to help me come around and accept that it is okay for me to want love and sex this way, and it is reasonable to think I can find it.
One thing people are missing about Dan is the language he uses when talking about scat. I know he isn’t the sort of columnist to be “nice,” but his writing really suggests scat fetishist shouldn’t be tolerated.
one thing he iterates over and over is using the internet to “remove guys like your boyfriend from the dating pool.” The verbage used indicates Dan is more concerned with cutting scatsters out of the love lives of other kinksters. He has consistently used variations on the verbage “removed from the dating pool” in the past, which indicates to me it isn’t just an unfortunate choice of words.
It is silly to expect someone not to pursue a partner without knowing their kinks first. Maybe very useful and practical, but often times we find the people we love through more organic interaction.
It may be more compassionate for Dan to focus on scat kinksters to use the internet to increase their chances, and broaden their dating pool.
Other points on his verbage:
Using “suppose” to undermine the fact that it truly is wonderful that CSE’s boyfriend confided in her.
reasonable vs unreasonable as already discussed by many already. Unreasonable is clearly used with a negative connotation, no need to look further than “unfuckingreasonable.”
If he truly meant unreasonable as in high-risk, socially taboo, or even statistically unlikely to happen, he really could have used different language.
I’m sure it seems silly to focus on Dan’s language, when a portion of his success is due to the sharpness of both his tongue and wit. Though rhetoric has power, and Dan clearly carries a significant influence with his rhetoric. It really sucks to turn to someone looking for hope and help, to be faced with disdain. The only thing that sucks more, is to know that person is actively using his power to plant that seed of disdain in others.
@186 anlyosaur I don’t think your definition of GGG contradicts what I think Dan’s is. I don’t think that what you describe is GGG, I think it’s just being a kind person and a loving partner.
But, I think you’re missing my point.
I never said it should matter to a GGG person how frequent a certain fetish is or isn’t. If you can accommodate the poo, you should. We aren’t talking about that.
If you can’t accommodate the poo, does the other person have a right to be annoyed? The answer is no. If it were a request for spanking, the asker would be in a position to be annoyed at the refusal and question how GGG you really are.
That’s the difference I’m talking about and that is what is informed by statistics.
Statistics totally inform your partner’s right to be annoyed and question just how GGG you really are.
But, absolutely, if your partner refuses and calls you pervert and is just generally a dick about a fetish you have that exclusively involves consenting adults, fuck that POS.
I mean, maybe they are GGG and maybe they aren’t but they are definitely callous and self-absorbed and inconsiderate and DTMFA and all that.
@205: If a spanking fetishist asked off-the-bat for a scene at a public party, with you wielding a hairbrush on his naked ass – that would put most people off. So the spanking fetishist starts small.
If a scat fetishist starts small, only asking you to leave the door open a crack when you sit on the toilet, or to read a couple of stories about sexualizing poo… is that different?