The Innocent Freak

Clarisse Thorn has a new post about cheating, and her reactions to it. Worth your time, but made even better by the series of Post Secret postcards she uses to illustrate it. I liked Ms. Innocent Freak and her mad ransom-note collage skills:

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Watching Porn Is Not Cheating
• Brutally Honest Talk From A Married Man
• A Fetish For Commitment
• Hypocrites With Guns And Badges
• Fullfilling His Ass Fantasy (Not To Mention His Ass)

A Guide To Casual Sex

I’m not single. I’m not a girl. And I’ve never been socially smooth enough to arrange casual sex. So I am uniquely disqualified to opine on the advice in Adaya Adler’s Awesome Casual Sex For Single Girls. However, I’ve read the advice contained therein and I have to say, it sounds like good advice. Especially this bit, which matches my own prejudices and experiences (and isn’t that always the sort of advice we like best?)

No Cheaters — EVER!

All the websites listed above do, unfortunately, contain a large number of boyfriends and husbands who are looking to play around behind their significant others’ backs. These men are to be avoided at all costs. Cheating is highly disrespectful behavior, and if they’re willing to be that disrespectful of the person who is suppose to be the closest to them, they will not hesitate to disrespect you. (This can be any type of behavior to lying about their STD status to surreptitiously removing a condom during sex.)

Fellows, the guide wasn’t written for you, but it doesn’t take a genius to de-gender and re-gender that advice to suit your needs. A word to the wise is sufficient…

Watching Porn Is Not Cheating

Watching porn is not cheating. Of course it’s not. But as GirlOnTheNet says, it’s hard to formulate actual arguments in support of this proposition that don’t boil down to (her words) “What the ACTUAL MENTAL FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT?”

I once wrote:

Some women object to porn the way wives object to the idea of prostitutes, and for the same reason: it means they have to use actual sex, rather than their erstwhile monopoly over the possibility of access to sexual stimulus, in order to maintain and enjoy the sexual attention of their men. Women who want to have that attention without having the actual sex for which most men will cheerfully trade it are teases, in all the negative and none of the positive senses of the word.

GirlOnTheNet suggests it’s more about jealousy:

But it’s cheating in the mind, right?

No. Because what you’re describing there is a thought crime. If watching porn is cheating then writing slashfic is a form of rape.

I think this comes from female (and it is usually female — I’d like to see how men react to the idea that their girl watching porn is ‘cheating’) worries about not being adequate, and their partner being sexually interested in other people and things. It’s ‘cheating’ because he’s getting off to something that isn’t you, and that taps into a fairly primitive female jealousy about boys leaving their girlfriends for younger/prettier/thinner/more-willing-to-do-anal models.

Well, it probably sucks for these girls to hear this but he is interested in other people. Sexually. No matter how stunning or sexually adventurous you are, you are not the only thing that makes your man’s dick hard. Nice though you might think that would be, it’s not practical, nor even desirable. Many of his best moves have probably come from things he’s seen while doing some one-handed browsing during an idle moment.

She also points out something I’d never noticed, which is that the visual nature of men’s arousal processes makes us much more open and vulnerable to having our fantasies discovered and judged:

But what he watches is so disgusting and degrading

Hahahaha.

Haha.

No, seriously, stop it — you’re killing me.

It’s so much easier to demonise men for the porn they watch because men tend to require more visual stimulation than women do to get off. In short — you can watch theirs too whereas yours is probably locked away inside your head. Saying that their fantasies are ‘degrading’ and ‘disgusting’ is really easy to do when your own fantasies aren’t exposed for all to see, at the click of a mouse on the 3 a.m. section of your Chrome history.

Ain’t that the truth?

Thanks to Adele Haze for the link.

Social Networking Trouble

Facebook has been on my personal list of Things Infamous ever since they crushed Violet Blue’s porn-free, ToS-honoring “Our Porn, Ourselves” discussion group out of existence, so it was with some pleasure that I was able to note a column by Sheril Kirshenbaum up at Bloomberg today entitled “Blame Facebook for Your Divorce.”

Divorce is apparently declining among most age groups of Americans, but it has more than doubled for people over 50. There are many possible reasons for this but at least one researcher thinks that social networking might be one of the causes.

Nancy Kalish, a professor of psychology at California State University, Sacramento, suspects that online connections may lead to growing numbers of what she terms “accidental affairs,” meaning they involve people who don’t set out to have a physical or emotional relationship outside their marriage. Kalish studies couples who reunite after years apart.

Before there was an Internet, when someone wanted to track down a past love, he or she had to go through the effort of locating a friend or relative to make contact. “Unless they were single, divorced or widowed, they just didn’t typically do that,” Kalish told me.

But now there’s the possibility of better living through technology.

But now the ghosts of romance past are alive and well online, popping up on chat services and sending greetings on Facebook. In the 21st century, old friends are virtually at our fingertips, and a seemingly harmless email sent to someone with the innocent intention of “catching up” can quickly go further. Many of those who engage in accidental affairs tell Kalish that they had happy marriages before they strayed. “They still bear responsibility for the affairs, of course; no one made them write, call or meet in a hotel room,” Kalish said. “But these are probably people who would not have cheated years ago, even with a lost love.”

The column then devolves into some pop-psychological speculation.

Facebook might not care if it annoys Dr. Faustus, and probably they’re right not to care. But now I guess they’re going to have the the bloodhounds of family values snappin’ at their rear ends.

They’d have been better off siding with the angels to begin with and leaving Violet Blue’s group alone, so I say.