Dear Dan: I’m 27 years old and I’ve been married to my partner for two years. I’m facing a conundrum: A relative sexually abused me when I was younger. It happened a handful of times, and I’ve never told anyone other than my partner. I’m now struggling to decide not whether I should tell my parents (I should), but when. The abuse fucked me up in some ways, but I have been working through it with a therapist. The problem is my siblings and cousins have started having their own children, and seeing this relative — a member of my extended family — with their kids is dredging up a lot of uncomfortable memories. I see this relative frequently, as we all live in the area and get together as a family at least once a month. I don’t have children of my own yet, but my partner and I have already decided that this relative will never touch or hold the ones we do have. So do I tell my parents now? My extended family is tightly knit, and I fear the issues that sharing this secret will inevitably create. Am I starting unnecessary drama since I’m not even pregnant yet?
—My Family Kinda Sucks
Dear MFKS: Your kids may not yet exist, MFKS, but your young nieces, nephews, and cousins do — and your abuser has access to them. So the drama you fear creating isn’t unnecessary — it’s incredibly necessary. And since you were planning to tell your parents eventually, the drama is inevitable. But let’s say you wait to tell your parents until you have children of your own — how will you feel if you learn, after the curtain goes up on this drama, that this relative had sexually abused another child in your family (or multiple children in your family, or children outside your family) in the weeks, months, or years between your decision to tell your parents and the moment you told them?
Dear Dan: My partner does phone sex work. A lot of the calls are from “straight” guys who ask to be “forced” to suck cock. (We assume the forced part is because they think there’s something wrong with being gay.) We’re wondering if there is a sex-positive word we should be using to describe these guys. If not, your readers should coin one, so all us straight dudes who love dick can take pride in our desires. Fill in the blank: “_______: a 100 percent straight guy who also loves sucking dick (and perhaps taking it in the ass).”
—Cocksuckers Need Noun
Dear CNN: The kink you describe already has a name — forced bi — and a forced bi scene usually goes something like this: A guy who would never, ever suck a cock because he’s totally straight gets down on his knees and sucks cocks on the orders of his female dominant. Since this totally straight guy sucks cock only to please a woman, there’s nothing gay and/or bi about all the cocks he puts in his mouth. It’s one very particular way in which male bisexuality is expressed — think of it as male bisexual desire after hetero fragility, gay panic, denial, religion, gender norms and football get through kicking the shit out of it. Paradoxically, CNN, by the time a guy asks a woman to force him to suck a cock, he’s allowing himself to suck a cock and therefore no longer in denial. (And, yes, guys into forced bi are free to identify as straight — indeed, they have to keep identifying as straight, since identifying as bi would fatally undermine the transgression that makes their perfectly legitimate kink arousing.)
But what to call these guys?
Well, CNN, some people into BDSM call themselves “BDSMers.” But “forcedbi’ers” doesn’t trip quite so easily off the tongue — so maybe we go with “cocksuckers”? It’s an emasculating slur, one that straight-identified men throw around to get, um, a rise out of each other. (Call an out-and-over-it gay man a cocksucker, and all you’ll get in return is a “No shit.”) But while “You’re a cocksucker” may be fighting words for a straight guy, they’re highly arousing ones for a straight-identified guy into forced bi.
On the Lovecast, a scientific study on gay cuckolding: savagelovecast.com.
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