1. It turns me on when my husband fucks other men. It pisses him off when I do. His proposed “fix” is he gets to fuck other men (because I like it), but I don’t get to fuck other men (because he hates it). This hardly seems fair.
If unfairness turned you on — if you were a cuck — you might be able to make this work. But unfairness doesn’t turn you on, so you can’t make this work. I don’t mean you can’t make your marriage work; I mean your husband’s proposed “fix” won’t work. So, your options are a mutual agreement to close your relationship (no one gets to fuck other men) or agreeing to a one-sided DADT relationship (he doesn’t hide fucking other men from you, you hide fucking other men from him). Your husband getting the fuck over himself is also an option.
2. How do I get my libido back after my house burned down in the L.A. fires?
“You don’t get your libido back — at least not yet,” said Claire Perelman, a Certified Sex Therapist who lives and works in California. “You sit in the grief, you let it wash over you. When you’re ready, you turn towards pleasure and comfort, however you find it — naked cuddling, drawing yourself a bath, sensual touch. You can even invite grief into your bedroom: a threesome with you, your partner, and despair. Acknowledging the pain is the first step in moving through it.”
Follow Claire Perelman on Instagram and Threads @sexclarified.
3. Tips or tricks for orgasms on SSRIs?
Throw absolutely everything you’ve got at it — genital stim, nipple stim, anal stim, brain stim (aka dirty talk) inert toys, vibrating toys — and enjoy the ride/getting ridden whether you have an orgasm or not. If you feel yourself getting close, push a little. If you don’t feel like you’re gonna get there, appreciate the pleasure you created and experienced instead of succumbing to frustration over the orgasm you didn’t have this time but might next time. (Also, talk to your doc about adjusting your medications.)
4. What’s the craziest sex you’ve ever had?
Bent over in an East German guard tower on November 12, 1989, looking down through the orange-tinted mirrored glass windows at a delirious crowd of Berliners tearing the Wall apart with their bare hands directly under us.
5. How can I have sex when my 18-year-old stepdaughter is home? It makes my boyfriend uneasy!
Instead of going without when your stepdaughter is around go fuck in a park or your parked car or the bathroom of a sleazy bar or an abandoned East German guard tower! Then instead of resenting your boyfriend’s daughter for preventing you from having sex, you’ll be grateful to this kid — secretly grateful — for all the exciting, crazy, adventurous sex you’re having all over town with her dad.
6. What’s the best way to let a new partner know I’m inexperienced in the bedroom?
You can show ‘em or you can tell ‘em. And since there’s nothing more deflating than the look on someone’s face as they slowly realize you don’t know what you’re doing, telling is the better choice. Remember: low expectations are easily exceeded.
7. My boyfriend expressed interest in butt stuff while drunk but denied it when sober. Should I drop it?
Make sure there’s always beer in the fridge and trust that your boyfriend will bring up butt stuff when he’s ready/drunk. (Couldn’t hurt to keep some lube and a brand-new silicone butt plug in your nightstand.)
8. Do you need to disclose that you slept with someone that used to have HPV?
No.
9. Do guys come fast on purpose if they’re not attracted to the person they’re having sex with?
I get at least one letter every day from a woman — and it’s always a woman — who’s worried some guy (a hookup, a boyfriend, a husband) isn’t attracted to her because he couldn’t get hard or he took a boner pill or he took so long to come. Maybe instead of adding something to the long list of things women who fuck dudes feel insecure about, we should encourage women to assume that guys who wanna fuck them are attracted to them.
10. Wife and I have been poly for about four months now. She doesn’t want to meet my new partner. Help!
Help for Wife: You’re under no obligation to meet your husband’s new partner — and that goes double if you’re poly under duress. (I’m making assumptions here, I realize, and if this doesn’t apply in your case, please disregard.) You don’t have to make nice with your husband’s new partner to alleviate the guilt he may feel about the “open or over” ultimatum he issued. (If he issued one — again, making assumptions here!) When you’re ready to meet your husband’s new partner, you can. If you’re never ready to meet her, you don’t have to.
Help for Husband: If your new partner is giving you grief because she hasn’t met your wife, your new partner — consciously or subconsciously — is trying to sabotage your marriage.
Help for New Partner: If you’re demanding to meet with your new partner’s wife before she’s ready, you need to drop it. If your new partner is trying to force this meeting on his wife, you may need to drop him.
11. I’m a cishet 40-year-old single woman who dates using apps. I am overweight, and I have full-body photos on my dating app profiles that show this. However, so many people only look at the first photo, which is just one of my face. I had a guy come over for a hookup the other day, and two minutes into sex, he stopped because he wasn’t into it, implying my weight was an issue. This bruised my ego, and I’m hoping to prevent it from happening again. How do I smoothly ascertain whether someone knows I’m overweight on a dating app before agreeing to meet up?
“Just wanted to make sure you looked at all my pictures and not just my face pic before we meet up.”
12. Should doxyPEP be taken after condomless oral sex?
Do we need to qualify oral sex with “condomless” since no one has ever used a condom during oral sex — no one except me, and I only used a condom for oral one time. Anyway, doxyPEP is a medication taken after sex that offers significant protection against chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other bacterial STIs, all of which can be spread through oral sex. So, doxyPEP is recommended — for gay and bi men — after oral. And given how things are going in this country (the CDC’s information page on doxyPEP is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders” and the CDC’s information page on PrEP is gone), gay and bi men might wanna stock up on doxyPEP while we can.
13. Do you think that medical professionals posting memes/photos of “foreign objects in the rectum” is kink shaming?
If losing a lightbulb in your ass and winding up in the ER is your kink, the medical professionals who have to fish out that light bulb have every right to kink shame your ass.
14. I’m a semi-hot, well-preserved straight woman aged 70, married, and I went out and found an exquisite lover. I’ve been lonely in my marriage longer than I can remember. My lover is in a similar situation. I feel like I live between two worlds. I’ve always admired and learned from your caring common sense, and I’d like to know if you might recommend therapy to help me figure out how to live from here on.
“Like this letter writer, I came alive in the throes of an affair,” said Rebecca Woolf, the author and essayist. “So, while I think therapy might benefit her, it sounds like this affair has been more therapeutic than anything else could possibly be. So, to the letter writer I would say this: your pleasure, your vitality, your life force matters — as does its relationship to your loneliness, so if you choose to work with a therapist to help you navigate this moment, please make sure you find someone who will validate your exploration as well as your departure from the loneliness you have felt in your marriage. Sending you love, validation, and solidarity.”
Follow Rebecca Woolf on Instagram and Threads @RebeccaWooolf and subscribe to The Braid, Woolf’s newsletter, at www.rebeccawoolf.substack.com.
15. Vanilla straight 25-year-old cis woman here whose boyfriend of almost six months just confessed that he’s into being peed on. I think that’s disgusting and I’m not doing it for him and I don’t want anyone else peeing on him either. He’s agreed to give this up for me. Will that work?
Kinks are not sins and consensual kink is not a crime, so your boyfriend did not confess to you. He disclosed his kinks before things got too serious, which was the right thing to do. If you’re repulsed by his kink and require monogamy, choosing to be with you means your boyfriend won’t get to act on his kink. But if being with you means being made to feel terrible about himself — if you’re going to keep heaping disgust and shame on him — your boyfriend is eventually gonna choose being single (and not being made to feel terrible about himself all the time) over being with you.
P.S. We don’t choose our kinks, our kinks choose us — and after a pitcher of beer, piss is just hot water.
16. Do cis men — gay or not — ever use a Hitachi-style “wand” vibrator on the prostate or is it too intense?
I’ve seen them do it with my very own eyes.
17. If my boyfriend’s husband isn’t my type, should I feel okay declining a threesome request?
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