I have long enjoyed your advice, humor, and politics. But I never thought I would need your advice, being a well-adjusted hetero chick. All that changed a few months ago when I got married.
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The answer to your question, MMM, is right there in your letter. Why would your husband hide his sexual fantasies from you? Perhaps because he knew that if he shared his fantasies with you–his boring, predictable, and perfectly natural heterosexual male fantasies–he would be tried, convicted, and condemned along with the rest of the “fucking culture.” And for what? For the sin of wanting to fuck the kind of females straight men everywhere want to fuck.
Fact is, MMM, there’s more than culture at work here. The reptile part of the male brain is wired to find fertility insanely attractive, and when women are teenagers they’re fertile as fuck and their offspring are likelier to survive. And it’s not just men that are subject to the forces of evolution; the reptile part of the female brain is wired to find tall, strong, powerful, and successful men attractive. Why? Because these are the guys who can chase down, kill, and drag mastodons back to the cave.
I suppose there’s a first time for everything, and this may be a first for me: I’m actually ordering someone not to have sex.
It’s dangerous to talk about implied consent when it comes to married couples or long-term sex partners. Even if this man’s wife would consent 99 percent of the time, if he tries to have sex and it’s that 1 percent of the time when she wouldn’t have consented, there is no consent. I agree that his fantasy would be OK if they talked about it ahead of time, as you recommended. I just wanted to caution you against advocating “implied consent.” I work with domestic violence victims (mostly women), and I’ve heard many times from them of being forced to have sex because their abusers believed marriage implied lifelong consent. –Ana in Pennsylvania
