Dear Dan: I’m a 22-year-old straight male dating a 23-year-old woman. This is by far the most sexual relationship I’ve been in, which is great, except one part is freaking me out: I recently “caught” my girlfriend masturbating with her roommate’s panties. (She knew I was coming over and wanted me to catch her.) It turns out she has a habit of sneaking her roommate’s worn underwear, masturbating while smelling them (or putting them in her mouth), and then sneaking them back into her roommate’s laundry basket. She has also used her roommate’s vibrator and dry-humped her pillow to orgasm. I got turned on hearing about all this, and she jerked me off with her roommate’s panties. My girlfriend says she gets turned on being “naughty” and most of her fantasies involve being her roommate’s sex slave, me fucking the roommate while my GF is tied up, etc. Our sex life now revolves around the roommate — my GF has stolen a few more pairs of panties and even worn them while I fucked her, and her dirty talk is now almost entirely about her roommate. This turns me on, so I don’t really want it to stop, but my questions are: 1) Is this bad? 2) Is this normal? We’re conditioned to believe women are less kinky and less sexual than men, and I don’t want to buy into that. My girlfriend says she isn’t “that weird.” I don’t know what to think.
—There’s No Acronym For This
Dear TNAFT: 1) It’s bad.
2) When it comes to human sexuality, TNAFT, variance is the norm. Which means freakiness/naughtiness/kinkiness is normal — science backs me up on this — and, yes, lots of women have high libidos and lots are kinky. Your e-mail came sandwiched between a question from a woman who needs sex daily (and foolishly married a man with a very low libido) and a question from a woman who is into BDSM (and wisely held out for a GGG guy who’s getting better at bondage but can’t bring himself to inflict the erotic/consensual pain she craves).
But “variance is the norm” doesn’t get your girlfriend off the hook — or you, TNAFT. You and your girlfriend are both violating this poor woman’s privacy, potentially her health (unless your girlfriend is sterilizing her roommate’s vibrator after using it), and — perhaps most importantly — her trust. Honoring each other’s privacy and showing mutual respect for each other’s belongings are the social norms that make it possible for unrelated/unfucking adults to share a living space. We trust our roommates not to steal money out of our purses, eat our peanut butter, use our toothbrushes, etc. And even if your roommate never catches you, it’s still not OK to use their fucking toothbrush. It should go without saying that we trust our roommates not to shove our dirty panties into their mouths, use our sex toys, hump our pillows, etc. We can’t control who fantasizes about us — people can fantasize about whomever they care to — but we have an absolute right to control who handles our dirty underpants. (My God, think of all the times you’ve run out of clean underwear and fished a dirty pair out of the laundry and worn them a second time!)
Your girlfriend should make an honest, respectful, naughty pass at her roommate. And who knows? Maybe her roommate is just as pervy as you two are and would jump at the chance to have a sex slave and full use of her roommate/sex slave’s boyfriend in exchange for a few dirty panties. Or maybe she’d like to move.
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