› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I have a small penis, and I want my wife to have sex with a man more endowed than me, but I don’t know how to approach her regarding this.
Any suggestions?
Love,
Small but Fearless
Dear Fear:
I’m trying to re-create in my head the conversation from the other week which culminated in my suggesting that someone could really clean up at Cafe Press with an "Ask Me about My Small Penis" T-shirt. I can’t, but suffice it to say that nobody disagreed.
If you don’t really need her to do this but just want to enjoy thinking about it, you don’t have to approach her. You can just … close your eyes. If it’s the humiliation you’re after (and you wouldn’t be the first or the thousandth), you can clue her in so that she can bring it up at (in)opportune times. There are few women, it is true, whose personal chimes get rung by panting, "Oh, Charlie, your dick is so small … and kind of limp. Oh, do me with your small, limp dick!" but there are certainly some who would gamely follow the script if it made you happy, especially if it isn’t even particularly true. (My dominatrix friend reports that men who announce their tininess ahead of time, hoping to be berated for it, are nearly always perfectly normal-size; it’s the customers who never mention a thing who turn out to be hung like a grape, and not one of those big grapes, either.)
Be very, very sure of what you want before you go asking your wife for a favor of this magnitude. Unless you already have reason to believe she’s amenable, she will likely be terribly shocked and wounded and wonder what she ever did to make you think she’d agree to such a thing and if you love her anymore. Or she may agree way too eagerly and rush out without so much as a "see ya" — and you probably wouldn’t like that much, either. Show her this column, and see what she says.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I love ticklish women. How did I develop this fetish?
Love,
Elmo
Dear Mo:
Oh, who the hell knows? Early sexologists such as Alfred Binet and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and later theorists and researchers such as Sigmund Freud and the behaviorists have tried to explain how we make associations or get imprinted or conditioned (or whichever theory was in at the time) and end up getting weird about rubber aprons or white gym socks or used Kleenex. None of it’s very convincing. It doesn’t seem as though early (or "premature") masturbation in the presence of the object, nor possession of a congenitally low and criminal character, nor symbolic substitution ("The shoe, it is a vagina! The foot, it is also a vagina! Um …"), nor lovemaps, nor any other attempt to explain why we are attracted to things and parts as well as to people is ever going to emerge as the one true explanation. In fact, I would venture to say that they’re all wrong, as is the question itself. We can’t determine how or why fetishes develop when the category itself is such a catchall.
There are individual, idiosyncratic fetishes but also societally determined ones, which are also subject to the vagaries of time (the well-turned ankle, anyone? teeny-tiny feet?), and there are fashions even more ephemeral. There are drives so powerful they seem bred in the bone, and there are fancies adopted and forgotten like Paris Hilton’s Chihuahuas. There are objects that are not really fetishes at all but props or costumes necessary to someone’s fantasy scenario, and there is Fetish, which is the sort of tight and shiny stuff that many people fetishize but others wear or covet merely because it looks bitchin’.
You don’t really have a fetish for ticklish women, anyway, do you? You have a thing for tickling, but you don’t know which women are ticklish (and most of us aren’t about to tell you), and you probably don’t find their ticklishness arousing as much as you are aroused by tickling them. OK, I’m nitpicking, but still. Tickling is usually a power thing, of course, and many incidents of seemingly harmless tickling are acts of aggression in (flimsy) disguise. Being tickled can be particularly dismaying to the victim, because unlike, say, a sound kick in the ribs, tickling is supposed to be all in good fun, so a ticklee may feel like a party pooper or a crybaby for insisting that is in fact neither fun nor funny — she (it’s usually but by no means always a she) really wants it to stop right now. Are you one of those ticklers? Because if so, well fuck you, sir, very much. Cut it the hell out. If you are the other sort, of course, the tickler who tickles only willing ticklees or stops as soon as the recipient cries uncle, well good for you and carry on.
I really hate the first kind, in case that wasn’t clear. And ticklish? Me? Certainly not.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.