Q: I’m an early 30s hetero woman in a monogamous relationship with my mid-30s hetero guy. We’ve been together ten years, married seven, no kids. We have a lot of fun—traveling, shared hobbies, mutual friends, etc. We have sex fairly regularly, and it’s not bad. However, his primary sexual fetish and main turn-on is furry porn—namely, cartoon images. He doesn’t self-identify as a furry; he doesn’t have a fur suit or fursona. To his credit, he was up-front about this with me once we started getting serious. However, I think at that younger age, I conflated the emotional openness and acceptance of his sexuality with actually being satisfied with the sexual component of our relationship. He seems only marginally attracted to me, and it bums me out that his more intense sexual drives are funneled into furry porn. I feel somewhat helpless, as his fetish doesn’t allow me to meet him halfway. Real-life furry action (fur suits and the like) does not interest him (I’ve offered). We have sex regularly, but I always initiate, and his enthusiasm is middling until we get going, at which point I think we both enjoy ourselves. But I’ve found that this turns into a negative feedback loop, where his lack of initial interest leads to me being less attracted to him, and so on. I consider myself a fairly sexual person, and I get a lot of pleasure out of being desired. We’re talking about starting a family, and I’m scared that the pressures that come with parenthood would only make this worse. —Fretting Under Relationship Shortcomings
There’s a far greater degree of risk involved in your going outside the relationship to feel desired, of course; you seeing another man or men comes bundled with emotional and physical risks that wanking to furry porn does not. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. But if your shared goal as a couple is mutual sexual fulfillment—and that should be every couple’s goal—and if you want to avoid becoming so frustrated that you make a conscious decision to end your relationship (or a subconscious decision to sabotage it), FURS, then opening it up needs to be a part of the discussion.
At the very least, WATER, don’t marry a man to whom you can’t make simple observations about sex and ask simple questions about sex. Like this statement/question/statement combo: “You joke about peeing on me, and I want to know if you would actually like to pee on me, because I would like to be peed on.” Pissing on you doesn’t make him R. Kelly, a man who has been credibly accused of raping underage girls and sexually and emotionally abusing—even imprisoning—adult women. If R. Kelly had raped numerous women and girls in the missionary position, WATER, all the other men out there who enjoy sex in the missionary position wouldn’t have become rapists by default. Where there’s consent—enthusiastic consent—then it, whatever it is (missionary position sex, peeing on a partner), isn’t abusive. Sex play involving pain or degradation often requires more detailed conversations about consent, of course, but jokes and hints are a shitty way to negotiate consent for any kind of sex. Always go with unambiguous statements (“I would like to be peed on”) and direct questions (“Would you like to pee on me?”). v
