Q: Your advice to Femme Teasing Mask, the woman who wrote in about her cross-dressing, female-latex-mask-wearing boyfriend, was bullshit. You told her to break up with him, “[but] don’t tell him the real reason why you’re leaving — let him think that it’s not the cross-dressing and the latex masks, but his breath or his fashion sense. … Leave him ... only leave him with his newfound sense of pleasure in his fetish, OK?” Why the hell should she do that? This guy needs to know that some people aren’t into his elaborate fantasy life and that if he pushes it to the exclusion of other kinds of sex then there may be consequences. Let’s try to keep honesty on the same level of importance as sexual fetish. —Disgruntled Reader
A: This doesn’t happen too often, ladies and gentlemen, so you might want to mark this date in your journals: DR is right, I was wrong, and I’m taking it back — not all of my advice to FTM, please note, just the bit where I advised FTM to lie to her soon-to-be ex. The boyfriend needs to know that his insistence on cross-dressing and mask-wearing during sex to the exclusion of other kinds of sex will, as DR points out, have consequences.
However, ladies and gentlemen, while I agree with DR on this point, in no way should this rare reversal be interpreted as a blanket endorsement of “honesty.” A nice idea in theory, honesty is not always a workable one in practice. There are times when a lie is the loving option and the right thing to do. But this isn’t one of those times: As he looks for a new relationship, FTM’s ex-boyfriend needs to know he can be a cross-dressing, latex-mask-wearing perv but he can’t be a selfish, cross-dressing, latex-mask-wearing perv.
Q: Your advice to FTM was incredibly hypocritical. In virtually every instance, you counsel people to indulge in their partners’ kinks as a way to solidify their relationships. But in a case where you actually find a sexually open woman, you tell her that she fucked up her own relationship and that now she has to “take some responsibility for the mess [she] made.”
So her boyfriend’s kink disturbs her — it disturbs me too. On the other hand, a lot of women are probably disturbed by anal sex, or pretending to feed their husbands a stranger’s semen, or any number of the other things that you suggest to your readers. If they weren’t disturbed by these things, they would just do them and not ask for your help in the first place. —Viva la Vulva Libre!
A: FTM wasn’t being sexually open, VLVL, she was being sexually dishonest. Not merely disturbed by her boyfriend’s sexual interests, FTM was disgusted by them — and not just by the masking. She was disgusted by the cross-dressing, a fetish she actively encouraged her boyfriend to explore. Like I said last week, it’s one thing to indulge your partner in a fetish that you enjoy or you’re willing to play along with. It’s quite another to indulge your partner in a fetish that you can’t abide.
All sex partners should be good, giving, and game, as I’ve written, and living up to the GGG standard makes certain demands on us. First and foremost, I believe, being GGG requires us to ask ourselves if we’re disturbed by our partner’s fetishes/sexual requests because they’re disturbing, or if we’re disturbed because we’ve never really thought about it before. With a little time and experimentation, a little thoughtfulness and patience (from both the indulger and the indulgee), people who were disturbed by cross-dressing or anal sex or humiliation find that, hey, they enjoy it too. But it’s foolish to encourage your partner to explore fetishes that disgust you, VLVL, and cruel to let him think you’re digging it too, and then dump his ass for being kinky. That’s all I wanted FTM to take responsibility for.
Q: I look at spanking pages on the Internet and it is becoming a bit of an obsession. My husband knows but I don’t think he has any idea how much I like being spanked. I asked him to spank me and he has spanked me a couple of times. I’m afraid that if I tell him how much I like it, he’ll think I’m weird or freaky, but I am also afraid of not getting the spankings I crave. How do I tell him? I tried asking him what his fantasies are but he says he hasn’t got any. Is this possible? —Please Answer This
A: It’s entirely possible that your husband has no fantasies, PAT. The sexually frustrated kinky person in a straight relationship is not always the husband or the boyfriend, despite the impression my column may have given you. Sometimes it’s the girlfriend or the wife.
So you want the spankings you crave but you don’t want your husband to think you’re weird or freaky. Sorry, PAT, but that’s impossible. Until you take responsibility for your fetish — until you let your husband know just how weird and freaky you are — you’re never going to get the spankings you crave. So how do you tell him? Like this: “Remember those few times you spanked me? It was great. I loved it. It turned me on so much. I love being spanked. I want you to spank me on a semi-regular basis. And whenever you bend me over your knee and call me a bad girl and tan my ass good, I promise to fuck your freaking brains out. Is it a deal?”
Q: My boyfriend had a fantasy about watching me have sex with another (unsuspecting) man from the closet in my room. Per your advice of fulfilling partners’ fantasies, I went through with it. After my good-looking friend left, my BF came out of the closet (no pun intended) and freaked out because the guy was cute and one of the things he wanted to see — the other guy come on my face — actually grossed him out. Then he said he didn’t want to be in the room with me, didn’t want to lie next to me, and didn’t want to think about what had just happened. I begged him to stay but he refused. There I lay, all night, alone, feeling totally rejected. This whole thing backfired and now I have no idea what to do. —Damn Experience Backfired
A: Look, DEB, there are risks to not fulfilling your partner’s fantasies, from festering resentment to your partner getting his needs met elsewhere. There are also risks to fulfilling your partner’s fantasies, from losing your partner over latex masks to your partner’s sudden realization that his fantasy should have remained a fantasy. Your boyfriend, DEB, may claim that he falls into this last category — that seeing you with some other guy’s come on your face was too much for him — but something else is at work here. If the fantasy wasn’t working for him, he could’ve called it off or refused to watch. But he didn’t do that. Your boyfriend watched the whole thing — he watched you do everything he asked — and then he emerged from his hiding place and put the zap on your head. Why would he do that? Because sometimes a psycho who wants to play mind games will use “fulfill my fantasy” as a means to torment his poor, unfortunate partner. You’re GGG, DEB, but your boyfriend is a sadistic piece of shit. Dump him, DEB, and do it soon — don’t give this sadistic little fuck the satisfaction of dumping you.
Contact Dan Savage at [email protected]
