Q: I’ve been with my guy for almost eight years. He wants sex way more often than I do, but I don’t want it because I’m not attracted to his 80-pounds-overweight body. The one time I gently broke it to him why my libido was low, he acted really hurt and didn’t sleep with me for a few weeks. He didn’t go on a diet either. I can tell he feels occasionally guilty by the way he orders diet soda to go with his greasy fast food.
I’ve tried convincing him that I want him to be “healthy” so he’ll feel better and live longer, tried cooking healthy food at home, tried getting him interested in exercising several different ways. It’s not working. This isn’t vanity weight, he is clinically obese.
The next time he chides me for having no sex drive or not initiating sex enough, do I tell him bluntly? —Wanting A Hot Husband
A: Women! You’re all alike! You judge men on our bodies alone! You see us as these pieces of meat that exist only to turn you on. I mean, take WAHH here. Did she fall in love with the person who is her husband, or did she fall in love with a body? Does she love him for what’s on the inside or what he is on the outside?
You know, WAHH, it’s women like you that drive men and boys to stick their fingers down their throats. In malls all over America you can see teenage boys who are literally starving themselves to death — walking skeletons! — because of attitudes like yours. Having their looks constantly and critically assessed by females causes young boys to confuse their self-worth with their waist sizes! For shame!
Hee-haw, just kidding. But that’s the raft of shit straight men get when they dare to complain about their wives blowing up like cement trucks in Tikrit. My position has always been this: We marry people because we’re attracted to them emotionally and physically. When a person, male or female, chooses to radically alter his physical form, he can’t complain when his spouse’s feelings for him alter radically.
My advice, WAHH: Level with your husband. You have a right to expect, even demand, that your husband won’t double in size every 10 years. He needs to know that he’s succeeded in making himself repulsive to you, and that’s why you’re not interested in sex. Cruel? Perhaps. You can take some of the sting out of it by using those magical “I” statements. “It’s not you, honey, it’s me. I find you repulsive and I would like you to lose some weight. Or I ain’t putting out.”
Q: I have a co-worker who appears to have some type of padding in his trousers. Not in the front, so as to make his penis look larger, but all around — front, back, sides. Some days he comes to work appearing slim and trim, but on random days he comes in wearing much larger slacks, which appear to be “stuffed” with something. It is obvious to everyone at the office.
The padding doesn’t appear to be an adult undergarment. Recent improvements have made those much more difficult to detect. The stuffing or padding is bulkier than a Depend. Over time (several years) the padding has gone up and down in size. There are female co-workers who have complained that he tends to try and rub against them when he’s wearing his padded or stuffed trousers. I know that many adults enjoy wearing diapers, but I’m wondering whether you know of any other fetish that involves stuffing or padding trousers. —Need Answers Pertaining Perverted Yearnings
A: He’s wearing diapers under his trousers, NAPPY, without a doubt. The varying degrees of bulk, or stuffedness, that you’ve noticed is most likely the result of his wearing different types of diapers. A Depend may be more discreet, but no ambitious diaper fetishist is going to be satisfied wearing only a Depend day after day. Some days he may not wear diapers, some days he may wear something discreet like a Depend, and some days he apparently comes to work in bulkier diapers. There’s also the disturbing possibility that on some days his diapers are empty and other times they’re full.
Oh, and speaking of disturbing: Folks who were upset to learn in a recent installment of Savage Love that some people like to “leave behind” erotically charged ephemera for others to stumble across — like, say, the guy who leaves a smidge of his come on his friends’ toothbrushes — might want to skip the rest of this response. It seems that a man in Dallas, Texas, was arrested for ... for sprinkling — oh, Christ, I can’t bring myself to type what comes next, so I’ll just copy and paste from the Team 4 News report: “A Dallas cab driver is in big trouble for getting caught on tape sprinkling dried feces on pastries. Forty-nine-year-old Behrouz Nahidmobarekeh is on trial for allegedly throwing fecal matter on pastries at a Fiesta grocery store. Police said they found a pile of human feces by his bed. He would dry it [and] grate it up with a cheese grater and then sprinkle it at the store, officials said.”
It’s the bit about the cheese grater that lifts this story out of the horror camp and plops it down in the mind-numbingly-horrifying-puking-nightmare camp. Will any one us ever be able to shake the mental image of Behrouz sitting in his apartment contentedly grating his dried crap? And, more importantly, will any one of us ever eat from a self-serve pastry case ever again?
Straight rights update: There were two disturbing developments in the battle over straight rights last week. First, we know that Target fills its ads with dancing, multi-culti hipsters giving off a tolerant, urbanist vibe and runs hipster-heavy ad campaigns positioning Target as a slightly more expensive, more progressive alternative to Wal-Mart. Well, as John Aravosis revealed on americablog.org last week, Target’s politics are as red as their bull’s-eye logo. The chain allows its pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control and emergency contraception to female customers if the pharmacist objects on religious grounds. What’s worse, the company claims that any of its employees has a right to discriminate against any of its customers provided the discrimination is motivated by an employee’s religious beliefs. Read all about it at americablog.org and plannedparenthood.org.
Second, more troubling news from Tucson, Ariz., where a 20-year-old rape victim called dozens of pharmacies in town before she found one that stocked emergency contraception (EC). “When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections,” reported the Arizona Daily Star. Emergency contraception, the story continued, “prevents pregnancy by stopping ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg. The sooner the emergency contraception is taken after intercourse, the more effective it is.”
Don’t just sit there, heteros. Defend your rights! Don’t shop at Target, and write ’em and tell them why you’re going elsewhere. (Go to target.com and click on “contact us,” then “Target Corporation.”) As for Fry’s Pharmacy in Tucson, the shop that wouldn’t dispense EC to a freakin’ rape victim, the fundamentalist pharmacist claims it’s her “right” not to do her fucking job. Well, you have a right to free speech. Call Fry’s at 520-323-2695 and ask them why the fuck a pharmacy that won’t dispense EC keeps the drug in stock. Do they do it just to torment rape victims? (“Oh, yeah, we’ve got EC — but you can’t have any. Don’t you know that Jesus wants you to bear your rapist’s child?”) Rise up, straight people, and demand your rights!
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