From the editors of Penthouse Magazine: “One of the most popular themes of letters we receive is wife watching. It seems there’s nothing quite like seeing your significant other in the throes of passion with another man, or in some cases men.” (Introduction to Penthouse Letters to the Editor, 18th Edition.)
My partner found this collection of amateur erotica in a laundromat, and a brief survey shows the other 30+ editions are similar. About 80% of the fantasies involve getting wives/girlfriends hooked up with other men and then watching or participating. Research by sexologist Justin Lehmiller Ph.D. found that 58% of American men had such fantasies, with 25% saying they “often” had them. Men whose women are not sexually faithful are often called “cuckolds,” seen as weak, not manly. Yet, we can see from erotica and research that many men like that role.
Why do so many straight men find cuckolding exciting? It certainly goes against the established sexual narrative, in which men regard sharing a sex partner as the worst possible injury. Men in many cultures will abuse, leave, or kill a woman for having another lover, or even for looking at another man.
Partner-sharing and cuckolding are not limited to heterosexual men. In a 2018 study, Dr. Lehmiller, David Ley Ph.D., and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage interviewed women and gay men who do it, too, but straight males are the largest group.
Sex at Dawn
One reason for this fantasy and practice might be that partner sharing is a natural, healthy part of human sexuality. If modern, patriarchal, monogamous pairing is not how humans evolved to mate, we probably won’t be happy living that way.
What if people evolved to have multiple partners, and our current system goes against our natural instincts? That would account for cuckold fetishes, as well as the cheating that goes on in more than a third of American married couples, according to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
In their book Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha lay out a strong case that prehistoric women typically had multiple partners, often in one session. Because the paternity of a child was not knowable in this system, tribes collaborated to raise children. Ryan and Jetha say this behavior was normal in societies where land was not privately owned. People moved a lot and so had few possessions; nobody was rich. In a society like that, it was not in any man’s interest to claim a child as exclusively his own.
According to Sex at Dawn, women were not confined to one partner or one household until private property replaced community ownership in the first two millennia B.C.E. According to Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, private property led to the nuclear family, which allowed powerful families to amass vast wealth over generations. To pass this wealth on, strict monogamy was enforced so men could know whose children were theirs. Women were often thought of as possessions; their sexuality was suppressed. Humans have been frustrated ever since.
Female sexual openness: the evidence
Ryan and Jetha provide chapters full of evidence to support the claim of multi-partner pairing in humans. Behaviorally, we see the well-known inability of most heterosexuals to be satisfied with monogamous relationships. Many of us are sneaking around or regretting that we can’t.
Historically, many past and present cultures were and are sexually more open than ours. According to this article in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, some form of spouse exchange was “acceptable in 39% of the world’s cultures as late as the 1940s.”
Zoologically, different species have different mating patterns, but few practice lifelong monogamy. Humans’ closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos (pygmy chimps), couple with many partners.
I find orgasmic vocalization, the tendency of many women to get loud during sex, to be convincing evidence all by itself. Noisy sex certainly seems bizarre from an evolutionary point of view. How could it help a woman survive or reproduce to start yelling “Here I am. Come and get me” when she is most vulnerable to predators? The only explanation that makes sense is Ryan and Jetha’s: a loudly orgasmic woman is advertising for more sex. A desire for more partners also explains women’s ability to have multiple orgasms, a talent shared by few men.
Anatomically, human males have the largest penis size and sperm outputs of any primate, probably to aid in spermatic competition with other men to fertilize eggs. Vigorous sex and a large penis might displace the semen of lovers who came before. Non-scientifically, some prehistoric people believed that a child could have multiple fathers, each contributing their best features to the infant.
More important could be the social peace and cooperation sexual sharing can bring. Most Americans have heard of the wife-sharing practices of the Natives of the polar regions, sometimes known as Eskimos. The swapping promoted peace between neighboring bands and protected men of one band who ventured onto others’ territory. There is much more evidence in Sex at Dawn and in this TED talk.
Why is sharing hot?
Even though partner-sharing has demonstrated social benefits, why is it an erotic fantasy? Why is it hot, and what do cuckolds get out of it? Writing on HealthLine, Adrienne Santos-Longhurst cites research “suggesting that watching your partner with another man prompts a biological response to have longer and more vigorous sex.” It’s a turn-on because it drives a man to compete.
Along with sexual arousal, Santos-Longhurst gives other possible motivations, which would also seem to apply to women open to sharing:
● Some men may gain status or self-esteem from showing off a hot partner.
● Some men enjoy observing their partner’s pleasure, a reaction polyamorous people call compersion.
● People of all genders might find it burdensome to keep a partner sexually satisfied, and might appreciate some help.
Why isn’t partner-sharing more common?
If Ryan and Jetha are right, and monogamy is not natural for humans, why is it so dominant in modern cultures? It seems we can’t do what we evolved to do because our social structures don’t allow it.
As societies changed to value property ownership, our sexual relationships came to resemble property relationships. According to Mind Body Green sex and relationships editor Kelly Gonsalves, “We’ve been trained to protect our mating relationships, and today we’ve organized our entire society around monogamy.” Nobody wants to be thought a cuckold; nobody wants to be called a slut, or suffer the economic and social loss that can go along with those labels.
As large property-owners came to dominate society, monogamy became the only acceptable way to mate. Governments and churches cracked down on alternatives. By now, most people have learned discomfort and jealousy outside of monogamy.
Some in the West embrace multiple partners, but their numbers are low. Studies find that only about 2–5% of Americans admit to being swingers, usually heterosexual couples who swap partners on dates or at parties, or to being polyamorous, having multiple intimate relationships at the same time. Perhaps social disapproval accounts for the relatively low participation in partner-sharing.
Why would society or its rulers so strongly condemn non-monogamous relationships? I believe the intimate connection between private property, male dominance, and monogamy makes partner-sharing outlaw behavior. The big property owners and society’s rulers are overwhelmingly male. They benefit from the status of women as property and the stability of the nuclear family, as long as they can cheat occasionally.
How would partner-sharing change our lives and our societies? Well, for one thing, we’d be happier. Studies of swingers and polyamorous people consistently show that they are happier and report more committed marriages than non-swingers.
More sexually satisfied people might resist the patriarchy in other ways. We might not value the property rights of banks’ owning millions of empty houses over the rights of homeless people to have shelter. We might not accept working 12-hour days in crappy jobs when we have more pleasurable alternatives. Our corporate rulers would not approve.
Sexual relations should not be property relations. We don’t need to serve the patriarchy in bed. We no longer live tribally, but why shouldn’t we live as if our happiness mattered?
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