Cuckolding: the femdom lifestyle

A married woman having sex with a man who isn’t her husband? Yes. A married woman having sex with a man who isn’t her husband--and he arranges it? Yes. And--he watches it? And likes it? Yep.

About two years ago, I wrote a Fetish 101 post on cuckolding. I offered up the basics: a cuckold marriage is one in which the husband selects men for his wife to have sex with. As with all sexual preferences, there are variations. The husband may or may not watch the couple having sex. He may or may not participate.

There are commonalities. Most often:

• The husband is the one who first suggests they adopt the lifestyle.
• The couple has been married for ten or more years and consider their marriage a happy, successful one.
• The couple hides their choice because mainstream society has a harsh, negative view of this lifestyle.

It’s this last point that intrigues me. Ever since I began writing cuckold stories, I have found that many people, even those who consider themselves accepting and open-minded, disapprove of this type of marriage. Errol Gluck, a radio host, did an hour-long radio show,  Cuckolds: Men Who Share Their Wives, on the topic. Although he claimed to be open to the idea of accepting the practice, it is clear that he did not. Questions such as What do they tell their children? show both his lack of respect for the married couples and his inability, or maybe his unwillingness, to take the topic seriously.

To be clear, a cuckold marriage is not an open or a polyamorous one. Those marriages are, in my mind, more fluid in definition and in practice. Specifically, both partners are involved in sex outside the marriage and both partners may develop deep emotional bonds outside the two-person pairing. In a cuckold marriage, the wife alone participates in sex outside the marriage and that sex is for physical gratification only. She does not love the sexual partners as she loves her husband. Her deep emotional loyalty belongs to her husband alone.

In our culture, we value the emotional loyalty of monogamy. Dr. Shirley P Glass, in her book NOT “Just Friends”: Protect your relationship from infidelity and heal the trauma of betrayal , writes in great depth about the new threats to marriages. “In the new infidelity, one doesn't have to have sex to be unfaithful. In fact, secret emotional attachments outside a marriage can be just as great a betrayal as extramarital sex. When sex and emotional involvement combine … the threat to the marriage is more catastrophic-much more so than traditional affairs used to be. In the current crisis of infidelity, men are more likely to fall in love with their affair partners-in the past, they were more likely to have uncomplicated sexual liaisons. Today, women are also getting more sexually involved than they did in previous generations.” Using extensive research, she supports her position that more now than in the past, men are seeking deeper emotional connections while women are seeking greater sexual satisfaction. Given that the cuckold marriage provides for both of these needs, perhaps it is not surprising that the practice of this lifestyle is on the rise.

Who, you ask, are these individuals picking up this not-so-unique habit?  Anneli Rufus may have been the first to dub this particular fetish The Intellectual Sex Fetish, but others have also supported the idea that it is a more common practice of highly educated professionals. The theory is that these individuals are better able to understand the complex psychological dynamics behind the practice and are therefore better able to exploit them to their benefit. One of these dynamics is the element of erotic humiliation.

Theories that seek to explain why erotic humiliation works focus on the physiological and emotional responses to humiliation. The area of the brain that responds to emotional pain, including humiliation, is the same as the one that responds to physical pain. Thus, humiliation is a very strong emotional trigger. That emotional trigger requires a significant amount of mental manipulation as the person being humiliated finds a way to “deal with it.” One method of “dealing with it,” or managing the emotional pain, is to disassociate, to set aside one's normal identity. This break from identity leads to a temporary loss of self-awareness, loss of focus on oneself as seen by others and ultimately relaxation. This combination naturally enhances sexual pleasure and allows the husband to enjoy watching or thinking about his wife being sexually active with another man. And so, when a person is humiliated to the point of loss of self-awareness, and physical pleasure is introduced, the likelihood of ultimate sexual release and satisfaction is achieved.

Do I have more to say about the complexities of the cuckold lifestyle? Such as the intricate differences between male and female orgasms and how women are aroused by different types of men at different points in the menstrual cycle? Yes, I do. But  I’ll save those for next time.

For now, I’ll offer a taste of how this lifestyle can make a hot, fun fantasy. You’ll find it in Salvage.

The hot story Wattpad pulled from top five

Salvage

In Salvage, bull Dan McKenzie satisfies the wives — while their husbands pay for the privilege of watching a more powerful man deliver exactly what they couldn’t.

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