I had deliberately chosen a nondescript restaurant, one nobody I knew ever went to, for my meet-up with a married man. He had texted, “Let’s go somewhere private.”
I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring—I hadn’t since that day of the workshop on consensual non-monogamy. The man I was meeting was attractive—dark-haired and fit—and always attentive. He was smart and handsome and he made me laugh and sometimes I wondered what it would be like to be with someone like him. Or to be with him. Catching sight of him across the room, I smiled, knowing that in seconds I would be able to embrace him. If this sounds like a setup for a story about an affair, it isn’t. It’s far more salacious and interesting than that, because the man I was meeting had a story to tell.
Tim and I had been introduced several years earlier by a mutual friend. A life coach of sorts, though he doesn’t use that label, he had been a trusted confidant at a difficult moment in my life. My husband and I had hired Tim to act as something between a midwife and a therapist as we rearranged our relationship and household along more equitable lines once I decided I needed to work full-time again post-kids. It was a challenging process, even for my easygoing husband, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted, and because the changes we were trying to bring about felt like an inconvenience in the best instance and a terrifying upending of the order of things, albeit an imperfect order of things, in the worst.
As is often the case with relationships forged in times of distress, mine with Tim felt comfortable, almost intimate, very quickly. He is several years older than I am, telegenic, calm, and positive—he once had a high-pressure, fast-paced media job—and by the time we were meeting that day, he knew a lot about me. He knew how I reacted to stress, what triggered my temper, how I worried about my children, what I am afraid of. Soon after our initial phase of working together, Tim moved. I had been nervous, but he assured me we could be in touch electronically. By now, we were no longer working together, but I considered him a good advisor and friend and often texted him for his opinion when I began to write an article or confront a knotty issue in my professional or personal life. Tim would usually respond to me within the hour, modeling composure and humor that invariably set me at ease while showing me how to be a better person. “Now send her a nice email and then move right along, for the sake of your health and your career. No reason to cut off a possible path to more success,” he advised once when I confessed I had told a producer who cut me out of a news segment of my annoyance. Ever pragmatic and optimistic, he said “It’s what writers do” whenever I brooded, then recommended that the second I felt negative, I tell myself, “Right. My brain’s doing that again.” I saw him whenever he was in town, which was every few months or so.
Tim was so generous and centered that it made me curious about how he got that way—seemingly impossible to ruffle, steady, happy. I began to ask him about his work and life and childhood, pressing for details about what he liked to do in his free time, his marriage, and his grown children. He was gracious and answered my questions but let me know that he felt most comfortable when focusing on other people. “People are never boring,” he said with a laugh more than once. I respected Tim’s clear sense of what he did and didn’t want to share with me.
But at this particular meeting, it would turn out, Tim wanted to let me know more about himself. As we sat across from each other with the clatter and noise of people all around, he asked me for some additional details about my book project, which I had described to him briefly several months before. Tim asked a few more questions about my recent work. Then he looked at me intently, leaning forward to close the gap between us over the table, and said, “So here’s something kind of interesting. My wife has two husbands.”
Tim first caught sight of Lily at work when he was in his late twenties. They were both in the news business and in the process of adjusting to the hectic, do-or-die ethos of a daily publication, the need to understand, edit, and communicate a story of consequence in minutes and under pressure of breaking it before other news outlets did. “Lily just had this way of knowing what to lead with, no matter how confusing the news item was. She was so confident and so independent. I found that incredibly sexy,” Tim recalled when I asked him how their relationship had begun. “I had to know her better. It took me weeks, but I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.”
They had what Tim described as “great chemistry,” and one date led to another and another. Soon things were serious, but they agreed to keep it all under wraps at work, apprehensive about how their coworkers and higher-ups might react. “Then we’d go to my place and tear each other’s clothes off,” he recalled with a laugh. Their emotional connection was as strong as their physical one. Lily was direct and honest, more so than any woman he’d ever been with, but she was also a great compartmentalizer, Tim told me. She liked to confront issues head-on, resolve them, and move forward. Lily wasn’t a wallower; she was a realist. She was compassionate and loving and avid about her life and their shared life but also tough and focused on resolutions in all matters, from work to scheduling their time together. She was fun—Lily loved to dance, cook, and spend time with friends and was often the party starter—but also calm under pressure and rational. Tim was smitten. When they announced their engagement after a year and a half of seeing each other, Tim’s boss said, “It was so obvious you guys were into each other and are meant to be,” and that everyone already knew and had been waiting for them to come forward about it.
A few weeks before their wedding, Lily told Tim, in effect, that whatever his dreams were, he should follow them, and that he had freedom to do as he wished:
“She said to me then and has always said to me, ‘Whatever it is that is a dream for you, you will be able to pursue your dreams if you’re married to me. And whether that’s you want to be able to bike across the country, or you need to have a relationship with someone else, as long as it doesn’t endanger the marriage, as long as it’s not distracting, that’s okay.’ Drinking, drugs, all the other things that people do that end up ruining their relationships—I think she was telling me, ‘I want us to have freedom, but not the freedom to wreck our marriage.’”
It never occurred to Tim to offer anything less than Lily had, once she opened up the discussion. Tim knew it was going to be a marriage of equals and, as he explained, of “respect for what we each wanted, tempered by respect for each other’s feelings. Lily was always very independent and that was a huge part of her appeal for me.” They decided to be married by a judge, and they spoke with him ahead of time about changing their marriage vows to remove “forsake all others.”
Their understanding, Tim explained to me, was explicit, and its bedrock was an agreement that their relationship had priority. “If she ever asked me to stop seeing someone, I would, in a second,” Tim said. Lily never asked him to. Tim never asked Lily to. Their system worked—neither knew more than he or she wanted to, or had less than they desired of each other and others. Several years after getting married, they had kids and decided it made sense for Lily to stay home with them for a time. “She loved being a mommy, but she really missed having a career and being with her colleagues” is how Tim described this period. Lily eventually became very down and then clinically depressed. The couple took a step that seemed logical to them, given Lily’s love for her work and Tim’s desire for more time with the kids. He would stay home.
Like their open marriage, their professional/domestic arrangement worked well for them, even in an era when it was rarer than it is now, and at the same time it raised some eyebrows. I asked him what that was like, how they dealt with judgment. “I never really cared what other people thought of us as a couple, whether they agreed or approved or disapproved of our choices. So we ended up having a group of friends that got us and supported the way we are,” Tim explained, shrugging. “The ones who didn’t get it or judged just kind of stepped away.”
Soon after the kids started school, Tim noticed a change in his wife. Lily grew increasingly distant and preoccupied. It seemed to Tim they were talking less—Lily would come home from work, work some more, put the kids to sleep, and collapse into bed herself. Eventually some of Lily’s girlfriends, concerned, came to Tim. They really cared about him and Lily and the marriage, they explained, and were concerned that she was very much in love with a man she was seeing. “You need to tell her she needs to end this! You need to kick her out!” one insisted to Tim.
Another friend told Tim she blamed him for “letting Lily have too long a leash.” He told me, “I found the way they talked about it mind-boggling. Like Lily was my property and I had to control her. Like she was my horse!”
Lily had apparently fallen hard for someone else, and while Tim had no intention of trying to “rein her in,” he knew he had to speak to his wife. So one night, after they had put the kids to bed, Tim asked her what was going on. Lily admitted that, yes, she was involved with someone. She told Tim that things had become serious and intense, and that this man made her happy in ways she hadn’t felt before. Did this mean there was something wrong with her, and with their marriage? She didn’t think so. She sobbed and apologized and said she loved both this man and Tim, in different ways, and that she didn’t know what to do. “What should I do now?” she asked Tim over and over, crying.
Tim recalled, “She was in pain. She was being so raw and honest with me and saying, ‘Now what?’” Tim wasn’t sure either. He fought back his jealousy and a feeling of panic. He tried to be reasonable and thoughtful and considerate, something he and Lily had promised one another to strive for always. “I figured, ‘My job as your husband is to be empathic, to say, “Okay, you are going through a painful thing. It’s painful for both of us. What’s next?”’ And I just realized, Okay, this is probably one of the most important decisions I’m ever going to make. I thought, I trust her, I do. And if I try to shut this down, she’ll just want to be with him more. I knew if I told her she had to cut him off—that’s it. She’d be more in love with him than ever. I would make her long and pine for him if I forbade her to see him, and besides, that wasn’t in our vocabulary.”
To Lily’s surprise, Tim told her that he thought she needed to continue the relationship with her boyfriend. “You need to figure it out,” he advised her, “and think about what this is going to mean for you and me.” Lily was enormously relieved, Tim said, when he reassured her, “I’m going to be cool. It’s all going to be good. And it’s not going to be a situation where I say, ‘Oh yeah, Lily? Well, now watch what I’m going to go out and do!’ No. I felt compassionate toward her, and toward me, and our marriage.”
They had been together for ten years at this point. Reflecting on it, Tim said, “We weren’t having sex that often anymore, because of the kids, and I think I talked to her about the kids a lot because I was the one taking care of them mostly, and we were in a rut in that way. Plus her father had a slow, lingering death that was really terrible for her, for our family. She was hurting.”
Having agreed to weather the challenge of remaining open, they decided it was okay for Lily to go stay with her boyfriend one or two nights per week. She didn’t stay more often than that. She didn’t talk to Tim about him much; Tim didn’t ask. But over time, Tim learned Lily’s boyfriend was everything Tim was not—big and strapping, a physical laborer who also loved to cook. Eventually, after several months, the two men met. Tim was relieved that he did not dislike Lily’s new boyfriend. He described him to me as “Not the kind of person I would seek out, but a nice and basically very decent guy.” Eventually, Lily’s boyfriend, whom I’ll call Rick and who was divorced, began spending some time at their home. Many years later, when Tim was back at work and his career was booming and busy, Lily’s boyfriend moved in to Lily and Tim’s second home, where he became their caretaker, chef, and a kind of “uncle” to the twins.
On his end, Tim has long had relationships with other women. He says that what has kept things going in his marriage is a sense that he and Lily are allies. And he says the most important thing is that in their first conversation when things got difficult, “there was no feinting, no dodging, no machismo on my part. There wasn’t room for it.” He told me that there had been a learning curve to their open marriage: “During those early years, I started experimenting. I started having relationships, just little relationships is how I would describe them, with other people. I would say always with Lily’s knowledge, one way or another. With her approval or her disapproval from time to time. And she’s my friend, and she’s a protector of me and of our marriage, and so sometimes she’ll say, ‘That’s going to be a problem. Don’t do it!’”
Fascinated, I asked Tim about whether he and Lily had ground rules, and he laughed. “The rules have morphed over the years. You change so much as you age, and age together. What’s okay, what’s appropriate or not appropriate. We had a thing about no secrets, and no siphoning time, energy, or money from each other and the kids. That’s basic and has stayed in place. The rules at this point are nobody with children under a certain age. Nobody who has never had a child, unless they are no longer capable of having a child. That could just get way too messy.” Lily’s live-in boyfriend has no children and doesn’t want any, so these rules mostly apply to Tim.
While Lily occasionally “fools around” with other men—she particularly enjoys that she is pursued by younger guys, according to Tim—she has remained committed to her marriage for more than twenty-five years, and to her boyfriend Rick for nearly a decade and a half. “It’s not like she doesn’t come sleep at home every night. She does,” he explains. Meanwhile, although Tim has had multiple relationships, he has never wanted to have anyone live with them. I asked him how his relationships in particular had changed over time. He thought for a moment. “I was fairly inappropriate, looking back on it, because it was like, Oh, this is fun, expanding into some new universe where you can pretty much do whatever you want, within those agreed upon parameters. That’s how you feel at first. But you can’t do whatever you want, because you still have to have respect for every person involved, including your wife and children, even if your wife is the catalyst for all this going on. Then there’s the person you’re involved with. It’s a lot of obligations.”
“Respect” is a word that Tim uses a lot in our conversations. He mentions, at one of our meet-ups, that he has never seen Lily and Rick so much as hold hands. In fact, while the two of them go on vacation together twice a year and enjoy going to concerts together, he has never seen any physical contact between them. He explained, “She’s not a PDA person. So it’s that, but it’s partially out of respect to me, and bigger respect even for our kids. My kids don’t want to feel like they live or have ever lived in a commune. Even though they kind of do! But it doesn’t feel like that. To any of us. He’s a chef. He cooks, he takes care of our house, he drives the kids where they want to go, so for them it’s always been more like ‘Rick is our family friend.’ Whatever goes on between Rick and Lily happens offscreen.
“It’s more a question for Rick, I guess,” Tim muses when I ask how he feels about “sharing” his wife with another man. “Rick has a bedroom; Lily sleeps with me—it’s just the way we do it. There’s a hierarchy there. Our marriage is at the top. He seems okay with it.” The domestic arrangement seems to suit them all, after all this time. Tim describes it as “cozy.”
Tim is well aware that not everyone is accepting of how they live. Gossipy neighbors have plenty of opinions and questions. “They’ll come over to me and say, ‘This is none of my business, but how can you have another man living in your house? I mean, you’re a nice guy. How do you put up with this?’” Tim shrugs it off and tells them Rick, too, is a nice guy. He lets them draw their own conclusions. He once heard someone refer to their home as “that weird orgy house,” which made him laugh. “Our life is boring! We sit on the deck and have friends over. We play board games sometimes! We cook big meals. Well, Rick does. That’s about as fascinating and decadent as it gets.”
The conversations that really matter to Tim and Lily are the ones with their kids, who are now young adults. As soon as he sensed that they were picking up on gossip about their mom and dad, Tim told them that they could ask anything at all about their parents’ living arrangement and their relationship. They said it all felt normal enough to them, and that they understood it just fine and didn’t need to know more. “Do your kids want to know what goes on in your bedroom [with your spouse]? Heck no,” Tim observed. “So what makes you think your kids want to know about your relationship with the person who is not your spouse?” Tim told me he believed that his children felt “Whatever you guys do in there, don’t make us live with it, and we’ll all be fine.”
I got the impression that Tim loves Lily as much as ever, perhaps in part because she presented him not only with freedom but with an ongoing challenge, one that keeps them linked but separate. He agreed, adding, “Lily is one of a kind. She’s the one who taught me that marriage is not being each other’s property. Not in any way, shape, or form. She set that as the platform of our future together, when we got married.”
Tim feels convinced that being open is the right way for him and for Lily. He has little in the way of advice for others, and unlike many people in open marriages I spoke to, he never talks about monogamy as “impossible” or “hypocritical” or even “difficult.” He is beyond that point in the process, and when it came to his marriage, he seems to have very little to prove. He prefers to keep his private life private, to the extent that he can, but he is in no sense embarrassed by it, and he seems to enjoy thinking through what it all might mean and why it works for them.
During one of our talks, Tim told me that he himself was emerging from the very sudden and bruising crack-up of a longish relationship with a married woman. I was surprised; I had never heard about her before. Tim explained that he had entered into the affair believing that the woman’s husband knew about it. He did not. And when he found out, he told his wife to end the relationship immediately via text. She did. “This was someone I spoke to daily for nearly three years,” Tim said, shaking his head. He spoke of feeling tremendously guilty and said, “I can only imagine what was happening on the other side of that text. The anger. The fireworks.” He said he felt this breakup had altered him at the cellular level, and that he would never again be involved with a woman if he wasn’t sure her husband knew. I wondered about the logistics of confirming such a thing, how it could be done. With a permission slip? A conversation between The Guys? Tim wasn’t sure. This breakup was fresh, though, and what upset him most, he said, was that he had caused pain, and that his ex-girlfriend’s husband would hold this over her forever as punishment. “This will be how he controls the relationship,” Tim explained, shaking his head again. “And I bear some responsibility for that. It makes me feel ill.” He says he would rather be open. “I have struggled with it sometimes. But it means that something like this—the breakup of a family over a deception, or a long terrible stalemate in a marriage with kids because someone was dishonest—won’t happen.”
Maybe what those in the self-described “poly community” are trying to achieve is a hedge against these types of disasters. Perhaps their path confers the benefits of pair-bonding to their children and in some cases themselves while shielding everyone from the unrealistic expectations of monogamy and the painful effects when the fragile concept shatters. When I tell Tim about polyamory, how it is a relatively new, emerging cultural practice and identity for people who join groups like Open Love, Polyamory Society, and Loving More for support, I presume he will see them as kindred spirits. Instead, he is somewhat incredulous. “I don’t think of myself or my marriage as polyamorous,” he says tactfully, deliberately. He clearly wants me to understand where he’s coming from.
“That Lily and I decided to be in an open marriage is not an identity for me. What would I have in common with a bunch of people, just because they happened to not be monogamous with their spouses?”
Lily did not want to speak to me. Tim explained that she was very private, that she agreed that Tim could talk about her, and that she trusted his version of events and didn’t want or feel the need to chime in. There is a level of trust between Tim and Lily that struck me as pure. If someone had described their situation to me before I began work on this book—“They’re open. It was her idea. He has girlfriends too”—I might have thought it indicated that something was wrong with each of them, that they had a fear of intimacy or had attachment issues, or that there was something sleazy about what they were doing. In short, I would likely have presumed they were “troubled.” Or had troubled pasts. Now I saw them as creative and committed. And I saw Lily as deeply, thoroughly true.
Lily may be something of an iconoclast, but she is far from alone. The philosopher Carrie Jenkins has turned her considerable intellectual energy and acumen toward analyzing arrangements like Lily’s. Jenkins is a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she holds a coveted Canada Research Chair, figurative real estate that in the academic world packs a punch not unlike having a beachfront property in Malibu or living in the fancy part of town in Anywhere, USA. Her areas of expertise are heady stuff: epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, math, and romantic love. As an undergraduate and graduate student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Jenkins immersed herself in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell. In addition to her teaching and research duties, Jenkins has been an editor of the prestigious journal of academic philosophy Thought. Her 2008 book Grounding Concepts: An Empirical Basis for Arithmetical Knowledge was well received and well reviewed by her peers but did not exactly create shockwaves, gain her a mass following, or earn her many impassioned detractors.
But lately and more often than she can possibly keep track of, Jenkins—who wears her medium-length dark hair in a smooth, well-kempt longish bob, sports round, owlish glasses, and is often photographed in conservative jackets—is as likely to be called a whore, a slut, “a walking sexually transmitted infection,” “everything that is wrong with women,” “a selfish cunt,” and “a fucking cumdumpster” as she is to be addressed with the honorific “Professor.”
These names were first hurled at her—in online comments, emails, anonymous letters to her department, and all the contemporary equivalents of degrading graffiti on the walls of a men’s room reeking of piss—after she wrote a blog piece for Slate, and even more intensely following the 2017 publication of her book What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Jenkins’s crossover work of nonfiction is an accessible philosophical treatise on love, including an exploration of the fact that love is often neither exclusionary nor exclusive. Jenkins was driven to write What Love Is in part because she wants philosophy to be something everyday and in the service of real people, applied to subjects that matter to them: who isn’t interested in love? When we spoke, she told me she is inspired by exemplars of politically engaged philosophy like Socrates (“He’d just walk around and try to get anyone who’d listen to talk with him about philosophical concepts!” she enthuses), Simone de Beauvoir (“She wrote The Second Sex for every woman. She just knew it mattered”), and her beloved Bertrand Russell (“He dared to write not just analytic philosophy but explorations of sex and love. And he really paid a price for it. A very high price”). Jenkins also wrote What Love Is for deeply personal reasons: she herself is in a polyamorous relationship with two men, her husband, with whom she’s been for “about nine years” as of this writing, and her boyfriend, whom she met in 2012. She wanted to engage with the theoretical and lived implications of her own arrangement, one she knew to be gaining popularity, and explore and critique our deep and often unspoken but profoundly powerful cultural expectations around monogamy.
“If the history of popular culture in the last half century is anything to go by, questions about the nature of romantic love are very important” is how she sums up the why of her book in its introduction, alluding to sex scandals (from Clinton to Mitterrand), popular song lyrics (“I Want to Know What Love Is,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?”), and shows like The Affair. Of her own life, she writes:
On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love and the way romantic love is normally understood in the time and place in which I live (Vancouver, Canada, in 2016). Sometimes this starts out in my mind as a replay of an awkward conversation, one of those where someone’s asked me a perfectly innocent question—“So how do you two know each other?”—and unwittingly forced me to choose between giving a deceptive answer and providing what I know will be too much information. If I tell the truth—“He’s my boyfriend”—to people who know me and my husband, it’s inevitably going to cause embarrassment—the kind of embarrassment that comes with suddenly being made to acknowledge the existence of something awkward, something abnormal, something that makes people feel icky. Deceptive answers—“Oh, he used to work in the office upstairs from mine”—are easy and comfortable.
Jenkins told me she spends one night a week with her boyfriend, Ray, and the six other nights with her husband, Jonathan. The three of them are very good with shared Google calendars. Part of being successfully polyamorous, Jenkins told me, is being organized. She and her husband had decided from the outset of their marriage that they wanted to be non-monogamous. But Jenkins, a stickler for accuracy, wasn’t sure, initially, that she wanted to use the term “polyamory.” Then she fell in love with her boyfriend, and it became the right label: poly meaning “many,” and amore meaning “love.” Loving more than one. With her commitment to philosophy being part of the real world, and her commitment to non-monogamy, Jenkins had considered writing about her personal life in a philosophical way for some time, but she’d sensed she should wait until she had tenure, which she figured would help buffer her to some extent from any negative attention she might garner.
Jenkins is an unlikely lightning rod. She describes herself as “an approval junkie” and “Hermione Granger-ish, never in trouble” and says she is “the world’s worst rebel. I always just wanted straight As.” She didn’t know she was drawing a line in the sand until the hate began. Her book came out in early 2017, “Just in time for Valentine’s Day,” she joked when I asked. It was no love fest. The name calling and demeaning, the criticisms and threats, began almost immediately.
Simply going public with her day-to-day life was threatening to the order of things—monogamy for women, if not for men—and incited violent threats, mostly to control her if she won’t control herself. Underneath the attacks is a teeming, roiling sense of entitlement, a feeling that something sacred has been disturbed or desecrated and must be returned to rights. “Get herpes and die, slut. Sharia law looks more attractive by the day” is how some have expressed it, their anger a good indication that her “wayward” or “disobedient” behavior is in their minds an affront not only to Jenkins’s husband, and all of civilization, but to the commenters themselves.
Jenkins has a calm, even, and open demeanor that’s very much in evidence as we FaceTime one summer afternoon: she is equanimity itself when my nine-year-old and his friend burst noisily onto the scene and I drop my laptop and have to switch rooms, and again when a huge truck near her balcony begins its deafening beep-beep-beep backup routine (like nails on a chalkboard to this high-strung New Yorker). Indeed, Jenkins strikes you as the kind of person who can hear just about anything, at any pitch or frequency, and then proceed to make sense of its underlying meaning with the kind of deep, grounded intelligence and authentic curiosity that set your favorite college professor apart from the rest. She does just this with the very public and often histrionic threats and insults she has received since the publication of What Love Is. “The idea that women are naturally monogamous makes it ‘worse’ when we are ‘unfaithful,’” she observes. “That’s why words like ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ are gendered female, of course.” And at the bottom of all that, she says, here invoking Bertrand Russell, “is an historical vision of women as the reproductive property of men.”
But property with a will and volition, I note.
“Yes!” Jenkins agrees, really warming to her topic. Because it’s property with a will, “you must control it, and if it’s out of control, if it’s beyond control, it’s extremely dangerous to you personally, and also socially dangerous. It can basically bring down the world.” I thought of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and the persistence of the legacy of the plough, the wide, deep rows it had tilled in the history of women’s lived experience. The “walking sexually transmitted infection” insult—with its implication that women like Jenkins who cross the line are at once polluted and polluting in their very essence, at once abject and contagious, like lepers, but lepers who want to drag you down into the gutter with them and infect you too—expresses this rage and anxiety all at once, while wrapping it up neatly in a container of fantasized control.
When I ask her whether stigma against polyamory and against women like her who are autonomous and assertive is lessening, Jenkins gives a quick and definitive “No.” Sure, there are shows about polyamory, and terms related to “consensual non-monogamy” are being searched with such frequency on Google that it may indicate a new openness to the idea. But Jenkins isn’t buying it. She’s haunted especially by the overt racism of many of her critics, who have plenty to say about her being with two men of Asian descent. “There might be some TV series about it and a cultural conversation about it, but there are plenty of people for whom polyamory is not okay, especially for a woman to be with two non-white men,” Jenkins notes. She told me she uses comments she has received—taunts like “gook lover,” “Asian fuck whore,” and “Jap double penetration cum bucket”—projecting them in huge letters onto a large screen when she gives lectures to underscore the fact of their intersection. Invoking the work of bell hooks, whose writing she greatly admires, she says, “Anti-poly, misogyny, and racist commentary and beliefs are deeply tied to each other, and to other cultural prejudices.”
In this context, other seemingly willful misconstruings of what Jenkins writes about and believes and how she lives seem almost quaint—or at least comparatively innocuous. Except they aren’t. One article about Jenkins and her book, published by New York magazine’s The Cut, went into great detail about her life with her husband and her boyfriend. The article headline suggested, “Maybe Monogamy Isn’t the Only Way to Love.” Next to it was a stock photo of a triad—a man with his arm around one woman while surreptitiously holding the hand of another. It doesn’t take a doctorate in cultural studies to read that message: “Even when our publication runs a story about a polyamorous woman, we will reassert that having multiple sexual partners is an essentially male privilege.”
These coercive tactics—subtly undermining stock photos, explicitly racist epithets, overt threats—work. Many women told me they avoid using hashtags like #feminism on Twitter during periods when misogynist trolls are out in full force—basically always. Until Wonder Woman and Hidden Figures, studios had little interest in making movies with female protagonists for female audiences—and were more reluctant still to bankroll films with black female protagonists. Indeed, a hacked email from Marvel’s CEO to a Sony exec in 2014 argued that investing in female viewers would be a mistake, cementing the impression that Hollywood likes to bet on teenaged boys and men. Hillary Clinton was defeated by a wave of conviction that we had to “Trump that bitch, crooked Hillary,” or the entire world would fall apart; white women fell in line. Leslie Jones got back to the business of comedy and was tapped as an Olympic commentator after being subjected to viciously racist, misogynist trolling for having the audacity to defend the right of women to an imaginary job previously reserved for men—ghostbusting—but she did take a brief Twitter break, citing the toll taken on her by haters.
Jenkins can deconstruct and understand the rageful words directed at her and others who step outside the narrow lane women are supposed to stay in, whether by refusing sexual exclusivity or by not shutting up about male coercion or by running for president. But the words sting, every single time. “I have wildly optimistic days and terribly dark pessimistic days,” she summarizes when I ask her how she is taking the controversy around her book. “Saying women are people, not property, is deeply threatening, even to people who say they believe in equality,” she observed, mentioning the deep and unexamined current of misogyny among not just Trump supporters but also some Bernie Sanders fans.
“I’m in a position to represent the non-weirdness of poly in that I present as quite a boring human being,” she continues. “And I threaten the slutty stereotype because I write as a philosopher and have institutional creds and prestige, plus look how I dress for my photos! Dowdy!” She pauses for a moment and then summarizes: “The whole combination makes me at once threatening and hard to dismiss. But the status quo reaches so far down. So much is built on top of it. It’s the foundation.” On her best days, Jenkins sees the backlash against her lifestyle, against her book, against women who aren’t monogamous and aren’t apologizing about it, and against women who feel entitled to sexual self-determination and autonomy more generally as a kind of extinction burst event. “Maybe the backlash is this spectacular, last-gasp thing we have to get through. And it’s actually a sign that the prejudices are dying this dramatic death because they run so deep,” she posits.
Jenkins has lately been thinking a lot about kindness, and the polarity between kindness and cruelty. In a deep, philosophical way. Being poly, she says, means working very hard at allowing someone else to do something that might be hurtful to you: to see someone else. On the other side of the coin, it means being exquisitely sensitive to your spouse or long-term partner with whom you are being open, if you have that type of arrangement. Or being sensitive to everyone’s needs equally if you are part of a “throuple.” Whatever the specific poly arrangement, it requires kindness that is deliberate and painstaking. “You can learn about communication. You can learn about yourself and others. You can learn empathy too. But kindness may not be learnable,” Jenkins muses. Being polyamorous and writing about it, she says, has been a learning experience in many regards. “You have to work at forgiveness, both interpersonally and in a larger sense,” she says. “I think one thing that has really become clear to me is that social change and social justice are not just about large-scale politics. It’s about how we respond to and police one another.”
And how we police ourselves. For in addition to all the threats and roadblocks women like Jenkins are up against when they decide monogamy is not for them and choose to be open about it, or when they decide to be non-monogamous without disclosing it (they might create incredible unhappiness in their home lives, or be divorced, or be harassed as Jenkins was by infuriated total strangers, or be subjected to physical violence, raped, or even killed), they mirror and intensify society’s contempt for the woman who is untrue, doubling it back onto themselves. Subjected to slut-shaming, many women join in and pile on themselves. With the exception of Annika, most women I interviewed were like thirty-three-year-old Mara. She had an older, possessive ex-Marine boyfriend who would not or could not have sex with her and refused to seek treatment for his erectile dysfunction. Eventually, Mara had an affair. “I can’t tell you what it meant to me, to be desired,” she said, as if reading from a script written by Marta Meana’s study participants. It was like a tonic for Mara to be wanted, finally. She was a beautiful young woman in her late twenties at the time, and it struck me as healthy and normal that she had wanted and sought out sexual and emotional satisfaction, that she got the latter from the former. But years later, happily married, the fact that she had “cheated” on her then-boyfriend—who found out because he invaded her privacy by opening her mail—brought her to tears. Her guilt hung in the diner where I interviewed her, and I wished I could wave a magic wand to absolve her of it.
In Alicia Walker’s words, “When it comes to sexual autonomy, women are up against external and internal constraints in ways that men just aren’t.” In some instances, as with Walker’s study participants, the social script about women not caring as much as men about sex led them to believe they were “weird” or “just jacked up” not only for wanting sex so badly that they sought it outside their marriages but for wanting it period. Meanwhile, the proscription against extra-pair sex and particularly female infidelity is so comprehensive that one woman I interviewed, whom I’ll call Michelle, was unable to forgive herself—not for cheating but for having been with a married woman.
Michelle is a self-confident, independent, and inspiring person. She runs a nonprofit and has a prominent profile, speaking often on national news shows and writing for popular publications with huge readerships. She is a thought leader on Serious Topics, beautiful and smart. But she is also approachable and funny and fun, and her sense of humor is vast and wicked. I wasn’t aware she was gay until, at her prompting, I found myself talking to her about my book at a mutual friend’s party. Forthright and wry, Michelle said, “You know I’m a lez, right? Well, anyway, I am and now you know, and at some point I have to tell you about this woman I was involved with. I am still trying to understand it and how it happened and why I did what I did.”
Michelle was soon off traveling for a series of speaking engagements, but we continued to be in touch. We exchanged some emails about her situation and her thoughts about it, but she kept things very general. Eventually we sat down together at a café when I was visiting the town where she lives. Michelle described the woman she was involved with for a time, Delia, as “very married, publicly married, you might say, and sort of a rock star in the lesbian community in my town.” They met at a cocktail party—“the kind that starts off very civilized but becomes a rager,” in Michelle’s words. Delia, whom Michelle found endearingly self-conscious, was there without her wife. When they spoke, they realized they had sons the same age, and after a couple of drinks, Delia told Michelle, “My wife is out of town, and I’m so happy about it.”
“I took that in,” Michelle told me as we sat in the café. “I mean, I didn’t realize yet that she was flirting with me and that I was attracted to her, because it never crossed my [mind] that I’d allow myself to be interested in someone who’s married.” I asked her why, and without pausing, Michelle told me, “Because I want to be more than someone’s affair.” Still, the fact that Delia had dropped an unsubtle hint that she was unhappy in her marriage lodged in Michelle’s brain and stayed there.
A few days later they ran into each other at the playground with their kids. They ended up all going to a family-style restaurant after. Their boys fell in together like long-lost friends. So did Michelle and Delia, with Delia again mentioning that she found her marriage lonely and difficult. She told Michelle she had tried to leave her wife once before but hadn’t been able to follow through. Delia was clearly hurting. She was also beautiful and alluring, with a sly sense of humor like Michelle’s and a taut runner’s body. Delia invited Michelle and her son over to the house that evening for dinner; Delia’s wife was still out of town. “I really wanted to, but I also wanted to be upstanding. So I said, ‘I can’t, it’s not a good idea, because you’re married.’” Delia nodded and said she understood, and that Michelle was right.
They started emailing and texting the next day. They texted about what they were up to, how their kids were. And then, after that first week, about their mutual attraction. “I knew it was wrong. Mostly I told myself that she was married and this would not lead anywhere for me. But the truth is, I just lived for her next text.” Delia’s texts were funny. And honest. And raw. “She really was just so miserable about her relationship with her wife. She said there was zero communication and that her wife was a workaholic.” Not long after their texts took a turn for the intimate, they saw each other at a get-together at a mutual friend’s, and Delia’s wife was there. “The sexual tension was just impossible. It was so thick you could see it,” Michelle recalls. “And it continues that way to this day. Still.”
A week or so after that awkward get-together and continued texting, late one evening Michelle’s doorbell rang. When she opened it, Delia stood in front of her. Her wife was away and she just had to see Michelle, she said. She walked in and pushed Michelle up against the wall, pressing into her, and they kissed, a long, hot kiss. “There was a line there, and I crossed it,” Michelle says in retrospect. “That is very, very me.” She told Delia to leave, and she did, but Michelle couldn’t stop thinking about her—that kiss, the way it felt to have Delia’s body pressed up against hers—and soon they were seeing each other. It was secretive and exciting, but it didn’t feel right to Michelle. “She’d sometimes come over while she was out on a run. Once we met in a park. Other times I’d wait for her in a parking garage and we’d go to a hotel. It was all very covert; it was terrible,” Michelle recalls, shaking her head. “From the get-go I told her, ‘Look, we can’t do this unless you leave your wife.’ I was clear about that. I said, ‘You have to at least be on your way out.’ And she said, ‘I’m doing it.’ And to her credit she tried.” A few months after Delia and Michelle’s first kiss, Delia and her wife separated, and she moved into her own place. She and Michelle spent a few weeks together, though no sleepovers “because of the kids.” They were weeks Michelle still describes as “incredibly sexy but also deep. We had and still have a very real connection and an incredible attraction to each other.”
They were getting into a groove, talking about how to integrate their lives and what to tell their children when all hell broke loose. Delia’s wife discovered a love letter Michelle had written to Delia and put the timeline together. She realized Delia had cheated on her with Michelle, and she was devastated and very angry. She came to Delia’s job and created a scene that was humiliating to Delia. And then Delia decided to go back to her wife. “She told me she felt so guilty and that she didn’t deserve to be happy when her partner was so miserable. She’s just utterly codependent on this woman she’s desperately unhappy with, but it wasn’t my place to get into that with her.”
Michelle had her son and her work to keep her busy during the days, but as soon as her head hit the pillow at night, she began her guilty ruminations and went over her list of regrets. “Initially my belief was, I’m not married, and this woman’s marriage is broken, and she says she’s leaving her wife so this is fair game. In the beginning when I was blinded by love and lust, I had no capacity to think about the morality of my choices. Now that I’m more awake and not blinded by my choices, I feel bad about having an affair with a married person and hurting her family. I wasn’t the primary source of hurt, but I like her child and I know he suffered.” Michelle felt another, perhaps more abstract sense of guilt as well. “I’m a gay woman who wanted marriage equality because I respect the institution. I desire the right to be married as a gay person and then I carelessly invade another person’s marriage. I feel ashamed about that.”
The love story was not over, though. After months of therapy with her wife, Delia told her that she wanted to date Michelle. Her wife agreed. Michelle was hesitant, but they all sat down and discussed it. “It was a little surreal. But her wife said she understood that there was a lot Delia was not getting out of the marriage and that she wanted her to be happy, that she was on board.” Still, after an initial period of euphoria about being back with Delia, Michelle began to feel increasingly anxious. A few months into their second attempt at a relationship, Delia’s wife “fell apart,” in Michelle’s words, and demanded that Delia stop seeing her. Delia seemed frozen and conflicted about what to do. Michelle, feeling agonized, decided to break things off herself. “It wasn’t good for anyone. But I miss her so much. I am just so in love with her.” She shook her head. It had been over a year since their breakup, and she didn’t feel any less adrift or broken about it. Part of her pain, she said, was that her relationship with Delia began illicitly.
Michelle began to cry as she tried to explain: “You’re a secret when you love someone who’s married. You don’t matter, and you’re under a shroud of secrecy and shame. We had an amazing love, and you have to hide this beautiful thing.” The fact that Delia had eventually been open with her wife about wanting to get back together with Michelle didn’t seem to make a difference. Michelle was shunted to the side again anyway, and it was devastating, even if technically she had been the one to call it off. She had done so to protect herself and do the right thing, not because she wanted to. In a sense, she had been a pawn in Delia and her wife’s relationship, and it stung horribly. Not long before she and I sat down to talk, Michelle told me, she had received a letter from Delia.
“I need you to know, in case I die, or in case I just don’t find a time or a way to tell you, that I think about you every single day,” the letter began. It was a beautiful letter, a letter about love and sex and connection. But after she read it, after she sobbed and wondered whether she had made the right choice, whether she should have fought harder for a chance to make something permanent with Delia, Michelle found herself wondering, Life is so short. Why am I making myself miserable? She ended it for good with Delia in her mind then. She still sees her sometimes at events and makes a point of walking in the other direction. It isn’t easy. She is sure that she and Delia could be happily married. But she senses it’s impossible. After all, Delia wants to end her marriage, but she doesn’t. She wants freedom, and she wants Michelle, but she feels too guilty to demand it, to take it. Michelle wept for a few moments more telling me about it. I told her I was sorry to be dredging up these memories and that I appreciated her sharing this very painful story with me. Michelle nodded. She was busy. She had a speaking engagement, and she had to be going. “I have to thank you,” she said. “Because these aren’t things you can really talk about. My whole issue with what Delia and I had was that it couldn’t be public, it couldn’t see the light of day. And now it kind of can.” Michelle said she wanted to honor the intense sexual, romantic, and emotional connection she felt with Delia. I felt honored to listen.
Some people just happen to love someone who is with someone else. That was the case with Michelle. She fell for Delia, and Delia was already partnered, and it was an inconvenience and a heartbreak to have fallen for her. Michelle didn’t have a history of going for married women—it “just happened.”
But some people are drawn to women who are already partnered, for various reasons—because it’s convenient, because it’s a little dangerous, or because they have a “thing” for married women. I spoke and emailed with a few men for whom these factors seemed to be in play. Robert, sixty, told me the story of being with a married woman when he was younger. It was a sexy story (this anecdote draws from both an email and a phone conversation) with an unhappy ending. “A married woman is responsible for one of the worst scares of my life. Her name was Sally. I was in my mid-twenties, and we had a once a week or so thing going on in my apartment that was quite wonderful…I liked that she was attracted to me, and that she went for it. I liked her independence in that regard. That she wanted to do this, and she did. That was appealing. And there were no strings attached. I didn’t have to take her out, or wonder. It wasn’t a serious thing for me—she showed up and we had our fun. But it got to the point where we were too indiscreet. I was young and stupid…and she was only a few years older than I was. We went out to a bar one time, and a friend of hers saw us…One Friday night I got a call [from a man] at about 7:00 asking if Sally was there. I thought it was an innocent wrong number. An hour later, the phone rang again. Same voice telling me that he knows where I live and if I ever touch her again he’ll know and he’ll kill me.”
A shaken Robert walked into the bathroom and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror. All the blood had drained from his face. He had been reminded—with a death threat—that he lived in a world where women were the property of men and that his transgression against Sally’s husband could be lethal. It worked. He saw himself as a dead man. Like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, he knows a cheating woman is as dangerous as she is alluring. Unlike Neff, Robert got out before he was in too deep. He told me, “I stayed away but good. I waited a few weeks to call and explain what had happened and that we were over. Not long after that she called one night to tell me that she loved me and had planned to leave her husband for me. I explained that she was lovely but I wasn’t up for getting shot. After that I limited my fun and games to unwed women.”
It’s hard to ignore that one of the things that drew Robert to Sally was what he called her “independence.” She was married, and it didn’t stop her. And it was clear that sex was on the agenda. These factors also draw the utterly witting and willing Walter Neff into Phyllis Dietrichson’s orbit and are his ultimate undoing as she (barely) backseat drives him into killing her wealthy husband. “That’s a honey of an anklet,” Walter says to Phyllis at their first, sexually charged meeting rife with double entendre. At the time, anklets were known to connote that a woman was possibly “loose,” having long been associated with courtesans and prostitutes. Thus we know who has the power, and how it will end.
Meanwhile, Robert ultimately heeded the cultural script that married women belong to their husbands. That script remained very much in place when Sally told Robert that she wanted to be his wife. She basically wanted to switch up the players. Robert’s fear made sense to me, and Sally’s husband’s rage is all too familiar, the endless repetition of the same old song. But I was surprised to learn, as I interviewed and read, that there are men utterly unlike Sally’s husband, men who want to be Robert and Sally’s husband at the same time. These men don’t merely tolerate their wives stepping out or look the other way when it happens. They want and frequently beg them to do so. These men have a particular and fascinating fetish: a deep need to watch their wives cheat. They are the antithesis of Peter the Great, who beheaded his wife’s supposed lover, then is rumored to have ordered that the unfortunate man’s head, preserved in alcohol in a jar, be displayed in the faithless woman’s bedroom, where she would be forced to contemplate it every night. No, these men are not possessive, and they are not driven to violence by their women straying. In fact, nothing excites them more than being married to an adulteress. They welcome, celebrate, and engineer female infidelity for their own sexual delectation. I first learned about such men and partnerships via social media, and it was an education.
“You look like a classic hotwife,” the direct message to my Instagram account read. Well, maybe, I thought, deleting it without giving it much thought. After all, who hasn’t received unwanted direct messages, sometimes with sexual content or innuendo? “Are you a hotwife?” another DM from yet another stranger asked later that week. Duh, I thought, deleting that one too. And then a third message: “Hi. Are you into the cuckold lifestyle?” This one gave me pause. The cuckold lifestyle? I looked at the profile of the guy who had DM’d me. Ex-military. Clean-cut. His feed was all about sports. He looked macho. But the term “cuckold lifestyle” conjured up the Chaucer I had read as a student—stories like “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Merchant’s Tale,” in which younger women have sex right under the noses of their unsuspecting older and ineffectual in every sense husbands. In both stories, the wife goes unpunished, and the joke is on her clueless spouse, for whom she, the reader, and the narrator alike have contempt.
After a bit of Googling, I was back in the realm of Chaucer, except in this case, the husbands are no dupes. They aren’t blind like the knight, the husband in the merchant’s story, or hapless like the carpenter, the husband in the miller’s story. Men into the “cuckold lifestyle” or “hotwifing” are fully in the know. In fact, they actively engineer their own cuckolding, because they are turned on by hearing about or witnessing firsthand their wives’ infidelity. Bucking the script of masculine possession, the man into this practice embraces being married to a woman who is untrue—his hotwife—egging her on to “betrayal” after betrayal because he likes it. And it seems there is no short supply of these men—or the men who fantasize about doing what these men do. This fascinating subset of swinging and kink is the second most commonly searched term by heterosexual porn users on English-language search engines, and researcher Justin Lehmiller found in a survey of four thousand men that 58 percent of them had fantasies about sharing their partner with other men, or being “cucked.” Some men like to be present for the act, even participate in it, while others just like to help set it up and hear about it after.
In her Nerve.com article “Take My Wife, Please,” Kai Ma provides a great introduction to and overview of what practitioners call “cucking” and “hotwifing.” She observes that a husband who wants to watch his wife have sex with another man or encourages her to “goes against the grain” of the institution of marriage, the ideology of masculinity, and even patriarchy “in a radical way.” Many of these men, according to Ma—who interviewed several and dove into the world of online cuckold life via websites like Chatzy.com and CuckoldPlace.com—are what we might consider “alphas” in their day-to-day lives, hyper-masculine types who enjoy playing a decidedly beta role in their sex lives with their wives. One couple she spent time with, Kurt and Christina, walked her through their sessions with a “bull”—the term for the other man who has sex with the married hotwife—named Claudio, with whom they “played” regularly. Kurt and Christina found Claudio on Craigslist. They had specified that their bull needed to have a penis that was larger than Kurt’s. Kurt, who is a former Army man, gets very turned on when Christina says things like “[Claudio] is hitting spots in me that [you aren’t].” Even more, he loves watching Christina while she actually has sex with Claudio or any of the other bulls they have invited into their bedroom and their relationship, all of whose penises are larger than his. Kurt says that he enjoys that bulls loom large over him, physically and psychologically, making him feel less than in every sense. “This is the one area in life where I can choose to be submissive,” he told Ma. There is a deep and abiding belief in our society that “a real man controls his wife.” Kurt and his cuck confreres relish ceding that control. Many get off on not being the “biggest” man in the room.
Men who identify as cucks and like to hotwife may hide to watch the action or observe via video camera. Still others are far away when the sex between their hotwife and the bull takes place but are there for the lead-up. These men enjoy helping their wives get ready for their dates: a man might shave his wife’s legs for her, make the dinner and hotel reservation for her, shop for the sexy outfit she will wear on the date, and buy the condoms she will bring along. Still other men enjoy being told about it after the fact, in great detail. And then there are cucks who enjoy performing oral sex on their “cheating” wives or girlfriends after the fact—this is called “clean up.” “What makes it erotic,” one such man explained, “is that my woman is really enjoying herself [with the bull]. Then she comes back to me and humiliates me by saying, ‘Now it’s your turn to have me. You can taste what the other guy left behind.’” To these men, submitting to female infidelity is delicious.
Not all men married to hotwives are cucks, though. On her hotwife lifestyle blog, Alexis McCall, a hotwife and self-described “hotwife lifestyle coach,” clears up what she believes are some misconceptions, describing her relationship with her husband, who enjoys it when she has sex with other men but is not sexually submissive. It turns him on to hear about it, but he doesn’t like to watch, and he doesn’t like to be humiliated like the men Ma interviewed. McCall defines a hotwife as “a married woman whose marriage is open on her end only, so that she can date other men and have sex with them, with both the permission and encouragement of her husband, in order to fulfill his fantasy of sharing her with other men, to the benefit of their marriage.” If the marriage is not open and a woman is having sex with another man, McCall says, she is a “cheater” (it’s remarkable when women who are considered sluts by the mainstream slut-shame women they consider to be “worse” than they are, but that’s for another day), and if the marriage is open on both ends, she’s a “swinger.” Hotwives are something else again. Many hotwives like McCall wear an anklet, linking them to Phyllis Dietrichson and an entire world of women who are alluring and dangerous. The anklets are a way to advertise their availability to other men who are in the lifestyle. They also help hotwives find one another. McCall describes seeing a woman in a grocery store parking lot and knowing immediately that she was in the lifestyle—she could tell from her jewelry, including the way she wore rings on nearly all but her ring finger, and the way she noticed Lexi’s anklet.
McCall confesses in one of her posts she had been miserable in her previously sexless marriage, and considered having an affair, before her husband told her of his interest in hotwifing. That turned things around. “I was committed in my own mind just as soon as I found out it was going to give me a personal sex life outside my marriage, which I had been planning on doing anyway,” she explains. It sounds like a disaster in the offing, but not for McCall and her husband. She says that hotwifing counterintuitively built intimacy and better communication skills in her marriage. Essentially, stepping out for sex with her husband’s encouragement saved their relationship, helping them talk to each other and connect more deeply than ever before. Female infidelity, fetishized and performed, became the glue that held this couple together, requiring them to speak honestly and leading them to desire each other as nothing else ever had.
In his remarkably comprehensive and readable Insatiable Wives, clinical psychologist and sex therapist David Ley made similar discoveries—couples who were into the cuckold/hotwife lifestyle, he found, varied in how exactly they practiced it, but what the successful ones had in common was impressive levels of connection and intimacy, enviable communication skills, and high levels of desire for each other compared to couples in monogamous unions. When he first stumbled across this lifestyle while reading responses to an online sex survey he had sent out, Ley (who is also the author of Ethical Porn for Dicks, which demonstrates that he really has a way with titles) thought people were having him on. There was virtually no academic literature on the topic. But exploring further, he connected with some hotwifing and cuckold-life practitioners and interviewed them at length. What he discovered surprised him. “I initially thought, This can’t be healthy,” he told me when I interviewed him via Skype one morning. “And then I had to stop myself. Why did I assume that these couples, often in decades-long marriages, were necessarily unhealthy for engaging in sex behaviors outside the norm? I was allowing my social biases around monogamy, promiscuity, and female sexuality to intrude into my clinical judgment.” Instead, Ley decided to listen. He found more participants to interview and was further surprised to learn that, like Alexis McCall and her husband, many of these couples had quite extraordinary levels of commitment, showed deep mutual respect, and communicated skillfully. Not a few also reported very high levels of marital satisfaction and sexual satisfaction after decades of being together, a rather unusual state of affairs.
According to Ley, there is variation within the lifestyle. For example, a couple he saw named Bobby and Richard don’t even really discuss Bobby’s extracurriculars, which she conducts on her own, with people they know, for safety’s sake. But Ley also interviewed couples in which the man participated in his wife’s sexual experiences with other men, and he told me that “quite a few men into this lifestyle have bisexual leanings.” They wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a gay club, but they might give a man oral sex in the context of cucking, if their wives directed them to as part of their play, Ley explained. One man Ley interviewed—married for twenty-two years and deeply in love with his wife—identified as bisexual and said he enjoyed “silky seconds” with her after she had had sex with another man because “his presence lingers in her.” In cases like this, men in the lifestyle can explore their sexual fluidity, though Ley told me they don’t always admit that to themselves. In this respect they are not unlike Alfred Kinsey, the father of American sex research and founder of the famed Kinsey Institute. Kinsey reportedly enjoyed sharing his wife, Clara, with other men, including his mentee Clyde Martin, with whom he may or may not have been involved sexually.
Meanwhile, in a study of gay men into cuckolding that Ley undertook with Dan Savage and Justin Lehmiller, the researchers discovered that the lifestyle is also popular with gay men in the age of marriage equality. It may be that, once gay men can get married, they are increasingly interested in being cucks and hothusbands. “It seems that when your relationship is codified and legalized, it is more erotic to cuckold within it, because it becomes more taboo,” Ley explained. As one of the straight couples he interviewed put it, “For the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence…there has to be a fence…If there’s no fence it’s all just grass.” Marriage creates a fence or line to cross. For some of us, crossing that line is a sin; for others, it is a fetish, a transgression with tremendous erotic charge.
On many cuck websites, including MySlutWife.com and Blacked Wives.com, it’s evident that race often plays a disquieting role in the cuckold and hotwife lifestyle. There is an almost overwhelming fixation on “Mandingos,” or well-endowed black men. One might argue that in these scenarios everyone is getting something out of it. But if hotwifing is radical in the agency it gives women, who seemingly have free rein to fuck with abandon, it is reactionary in its reliance on and reification of stereotypes—of the “hypersexual” black man and the “BBC,” or big black cock. One bull told Kai Ma he refuses to respond to white couples’ ads because they have “rigid” and stereotypical and just plain racist criteria. “To some of these people, a black guy is necessarily a corn-row-wearing thug or a basketball player…the big black Mandingo.” Sighing, he mentioned an ad that said, “We want you to look like Usher.” “The typical bull on Craigslist is not going to look like Allen Iverson or Usher, so get over your stereotype and deal with it.”
Mireille Miller-Young, the historian and porn scholar, has a nuanced take on the figure of the Mandingo and what she calls “cuckold sociality.” She and her co-author Xavier Livermon emphasize the importance of acknowledging that there are “mobile desires at play” in the racial fetishism of Mandingo cuckolding, which they say is on the one hand full of “productive possibilities and queer potential” for all the actors in the triad. At the same time, it demands the sexual labor of black men, turning them into stereotypically menacing beasts of burden. Miller-Young and Livermon suggest that pornography in general and Mandingo cucking in particular “are among the few places where our most privately held societal views about race are most revealed.” In “eroticiz[ing] the sexual powerlessness” and humiliation of the (usually) white head of household and performing the threat that the black man, with his sexual prowess, will displace the white husband, this genre of cuckolding also allows for the possibility of white men being sexual with black men by proxy, reframing anxiety and threat as thrill. Meanwhile, the white wife’s body acts “as a conduit of white male desires for racial purity and also for the black man’s body.” In this sense, she is less a woman coloring outside the lines and more an actress in her husband’s complex, racialized, and heteronormativity-bending passion play.
If being a hotwife sounds enlightened and perhaps even empowering, it might not be. Some men into the cuckold/hotwife lifestyle give the impression that when it comes down to it, they are a whole lot less interested in their wives’ sexual freedom and much more into rigidly choreographing their own pleasure. In some instances, a wife may not enjoy being a character in her husband’s scripts. Or the partners may find they have agendas that are no longer in alignment. “You sometimes get these situations where the guy is very upset that his wife is doing it wrong,” David Ley told me wryly. “They’ll say, ‘No, no, no, this is the way you need to do it, this is the kind of man I fantasize about you being with!’” Ley seemed flat-out amused, gunning for the girls, when he further observed, “What I saw was a number of women who, as they start initially to engage in this to fulfill their husband’s fantasies and needs, gradually they themselves begin to develop more sexual autonomy and independence. These women will say, ‘I’m interested in doing this, in developing relationships’ or just in doing it their own way, without the men’s controls placed on it.” To paraphrase a saying among swingers, be careful what you wish for when you yourself are a guy who can have perhaps several orgasms per day but are married to a woman who can have many times that per hour. The fear and the fantasy is that one’s wife will be “set loose.” As Alexis McCall puts it, “Once your genie is out of the bottle, she’s not going back in.”
Ultimately, Ley thinks that the cuckold and hotwife relationships he studied may be about many things for men: bisexuality, an interest in being submissive, wanting control, wanting to cede control, being masochistic. Miller-Young might add: accessing the black male body while warding off “gayness.” What strikes Ley most, he told me, is the incredible resourcefulness and creativity of the arrangements he witnessed. “It’s like these guys understand the very real sexual power of the women they’re partnered with,” he marveled, “and so they’re saying, ‘Okay, female sexuality is “insatiable” in ways male sexuality is not. So let’s ride this engine together.’ They get vicarious fulfillment, these men, from revving the engine of female sexuality.”
The cuck elects to join forces with his hotwife, knowing that her capacity for pleasure, unlike his, is nearly limitless. Standing apart from the tradition of men who have tried to contain or exterminate or diminish the female libido, or force it into the confines of fidelity, he knows better. He embraces it, because it can take him everywhere.