No free passes
Savage Love
My boyfriend and I have been monogamous for three years. We consider ourselves open, we enjoy different kinds of sex, and our toy collection is extensive. A couple of months ago, he brought up the fact that he has fantasized about me with other men. The term is cuckolding, right? Anyhow, at first I was slightly weirded out that he would even suggest it. But I'm starting to find the idea intriguing. After all, it's a free pass to have sex with another man and it would turn him on.
Now the questions: Are there any rules for this particular fetish? How do we know if we can handle it? And if I have sex with another man … does that mean I have to let him have sex with another woman?
New Experience Really Valuable Or Ultimate Screwup?
"It's interesting that when your boyfriend shared his fantasy with you, you jumped right to the term 'cuckolding,'" says Tristan Taormino, columnist, pornographer, and author of the new book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships. "By definition, a cuckold is a married man whose wife cheats on him behind his back. A cuckold fetishist, on the other hand, not only knows about his wife's dalliances, but often enjoys the humiliation of being forced to watch his wife bang the other dude or dudes."
Only your boyfriend knows for sure if it's cuckolding he wants, NERVOUS, and there are no assumptions in successful open relationships — and no "free passes" either.
"Nothing about responsible nonmonogamy involves a free pass of any sort," says Taormino. "It's absolutely possible for you to transform your monogamous relationship into one that's nonmonogamous. But you need to sit down and hash out the details, including what's OK and what's not." As for him sleeping with other women, it may well be that your boyfriend wants to give you permission to sleep with others without being able to sleep with others himself; that kind of power imbalance is a huge turn-on for most cuckolds.
And a final word from Taormino: "The more you hash this out beforehand, the better you'll both feel."
I wonder if you have any familiarity with my particular twist. I'm female, early 40s, and I really like to watch. Seems pretty straightforward, but I'm not the classic voyeur. Everything I've read on voyeurism really emphasizes the eroticism of secretly watching others having sex, with the possibility of being discovered as part of the thrill. I'm not turned on by any of that. It sounds stressful to me. I want to watch, but I want the person I'm watching (always male in my fantasies) to know I'm watching. I want him to be looking right at me. I want to look into his eyes while he's getting banged into next week, or masturbating like a fiend, all undone and out of control, and have him know I'm sitting there witnessing him fall apart into orgasm. Mmmmm. (I suspect this may be some expression of a power issue. Just maybe.)
But looking for someone to play along with me has been fruitless thus far. The one boyfriend I did bring it up with sat there and stared at me for so long that I dried right up and never mentioned it again. I ran an ad in the local online personals (M, M-F, M-M), outlining what I was interested in, thinking that with all the exhibitionists out there, surely someone would bite. Nothing. I did get a response, but it was from another woman. She wanted to know if I'd had any replies, and to ask if she could sit in if anyone took me up on my offer. Any ideas, Dan?
Opera Glasses
You told one boyfriend, you placed one ad. And then you gave up. Gee, here's an idea: The human race would quickly die out if people into "normal" sex asked one person, took out one ad, and then, if they didn't get a positive response, stopped asking and stopped advertising.
Look, OG, you told one person, he reacted badly, and … the conclusion you seem to have drawn from this experience is that you should never, ever risk telling anyone about your kink ever again. May I suggest an alternate conclusion? You told the wrong person. When you told him about your kink — your charming, harmless, intriguing kink — and he sat there like a stone, the correct response was not to wither under his gaze. The correct response was to flip him off and walk out.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2008.