Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
Relations with married women. Any situation where that’s a-ok?
Name Withheld
Sure. I have relations with a married woman all the time. I call her “my wife.” (Or maybe not all the time. We are, after all, married.)
But other than the women we’re married to, I strongly suggest leaving married women alone. They already have enough burden to bear, feeling biologically obligated to have sex with men at all. Put yourself in their place. Would you want a big, hairy lunk crawling all over you? I wouldn’t. I’ve read Deliverance, and it scared the hell out of me. Not to objectify or over-generalize them, but women are soft. They are pretty. They smell good. If I were a woman—and I just might be some day at the rate that Trans Fever is catching—I wouldn’t fault myself one bit for going lesbian.
Lucky for us, a large portion of the female population doesn’t see it that way. But no matter what situational ethicists or the cult of Lean-In-empowerment types tell you (“all choices are valid so long as a woman is making her own choice”), rolling up on somebody else’s love shack, and raiding it, is always bad juju. Even if her love shack is loveless, actions have consequences, not all of which can be known until the action is taken. By then, it’s too late.
And that’s putting aside the havoc you’re inevitably wreaking on her husband or children. If you care about her—beyond just the lust pistons firing—aiding and abetting the trashing of the most sacred vow two people can take might not just destroy the people you regard as extras in her life. It might destroy an essential part of her. And if you don’t care about her, well then you probably shouldn’t be having sex with her anyway. Why not just hit Tinder, where nobody cares?
There are, to be sure, a lot of dinged-up, loveless marriages out there. They say half of all of them end in divorce. Still, you’d do well to think of other people’s marriages as you would other people’s cars. Imagine yourself walking past a sadly aging Ford Fiesta, a monument to questionable taste and disrepair. It might pain you to see the rusted fender, the missing hubcaps, the pina colada air freshener hanging from the rearview. But no matter how firmly you’re convinced that you’d make that car hum, shine it up, maybe change the XM radio from the cheesy Hair Metal station to something more tasteful, like The Loft, that still doesn’t give you license to Slim-Jim the door open and drive off with somebody else’s ride. Not without a title transfer.
Dear Matt,
Every time I take a look at the illustrated Kama Sutra that my husband bought me for Valentine’s Day, I feel badly about myself. Not because of body issues or anything, though the models are quite flawless. But because of the near physical impossibility of the sexual positions involved. All of which leads me to confess: I prefer the missionary position. Does that make me a boring person?
Cynthia J.
It would seem your husband thinks so. Not a very subtle one, that guy. Whatever happened to a nice card and a Whitman’s Sampler?
Personally, however, I think missionaries get a bad rap. Historically, they have traveled to strange, exotic lands. They’ve risked life and limb and dengue fever in places where the savages might either embrace The Good News, or cook them in a pot, turning their shanks and flanks into tribal small-plates. This doesn’t sound like a terribly boring lifestyle to me.
The very term “missionary position” has gone by other names. While the Tuscans used to call it the “angelic position,” saltier iterations existed, too. Shakespeare, in Othello, called it “the beast with two backs,” while some Arab cultures christened it “the manner of serpents.” (I’ll take their word for it, since I’ve never witnessed snakes copulating, except for snippets of the Kim Kardashian sex tape, and it was hard to tell what was going on there with all the shaky camera work.)
The more recent coinage of “missionary position” is attributed to sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Who, according to my research elves at Wikipedia, had some fairly adventurous sex habits of his own. In order to punish himself for his homoerotic stirrings, he was known to insert everything from pipe cleaners to pencils to toothbrushes into his urethra. When those no longer cut it, he ultimately circumcised himself without anesthesia. His “research” also included filming co-workers performing sex acts in his attic. He had one of the world’s largest international porn collections. And he didn’t mind interviewing pedophiles to collect data on child sexuality.
I guess what I’m driving at is if Kinsey thought the missionary position vanilla enough to call it “the missionary position,” then maybe the missionary position is a good thing. I don’t begrudge any position that brings two consenting adults pleasure—from The Snorting Wildebeest to the Flying Wallenda. But give me the good old-fashioned missionary position any day over a guy having sex with his toothbrush.
Dear Matt,
I am infatuated with the actress Holly Taylor from The Americans. One might even say in love. To be sure, Miss Taylor is of legal age, 19 years old. But she plays a 15 year old on the hit FX series. So is it wrong for me to have a thing for her?
Yours Truly,
Conflicted
I have not watched The Americans. For the uninitiated, it is a series about undercover Russian spies passing themselves off as Americans in the United States—a plotline that we now just call “the Trump administration.”
My initial verdict is that you’re okay. Better that Holly Taylor is a 19 year old playing a 15 year old, than a 15 year old playing a 19 year old. If it were the latter, I’d be compelled under faux-advice columnist protocol to report you to the authorities. However, not being familiar with the show, I just Googled up Miss Taylor, and she appears to be a 19 year old playing a 12 year old. She’s very young-looking. Which makes you kind of creepy.
As a professional student of human behavior, I assume, from the tone of your letter, that you’re a middle-aged man, or thereabouts. I suggest crushing on actresses closer to your own age. In the very same show stars the eternally appealing Keri Russell, who plays Holly’s mother. She is presently 40 years old. I’ve had a crush on her since she starred in Felicity, the ’90s-era show in which Russell, then around 22 years old, played a 17 year old, at a time when I was 28 years old. Thus proving my moral superiority—I’m no pervy weirdo like you and Alfred Kinsey.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
