I agree. I’m just saying, “Let’s not deceive ourselves as to likely outcomes.”
You know of two guys who cheated on someone with a stripper, and that makes the rest of us naive? :dubious: Of course there are some men who will cheat, but going to a strip club != cheating. As someone who admits that he’s never been to a strip club, I think you’re the last person qualified to tell anyone “what goes on.”
Well, I don’t see it as cheating. How is that “rich?”
Now you’re having an entirely different conversation … no one has suggested this.
Bullshit. Trusting your partner isn’t naive, and implying that women are somehow wrong for trusting their partners is ridiculous.
Bullshit. Having a high sex drive does not mean that a man will cheat.
I trust my husband 100% and I KNOW he would never jeopardize our relationship for any reason - ESPECIALLY not for a stripper or a ‘pro’.
Oh, please. :rolleyes:
You mentioned polyamory later in your post, so you’re clearly aware that that sort of thing exists. In my way of thinking, and I think in most people’s, doing something that your partner knows about and does not mind is very different from doing something you know s/he would be devastated by if s/he new. Yes, lap dances are a sexual thing involving another person. But to me, it’s the betrayal of trust that constitutes cheating.
… if you have no interest in strippers and have never seen one, what makes you qualified to tell us “what goes on”? You’ve given us a total of one anecdote so far about how your friend and a groom-to-be engaged in extracurricular activities with strippers in Montreal. Yes, some strip clubs have some strippers that’ll have sex for pay, and some patrons take advantage of that, but taking that to mean that most guys at bachelor parties end up banging strippers, or that a random guy with no known history of cheating is “likely” to do so just doesn’t follow.
My own experience with strippers is limited to talking to a few on the internet, so I can’t exactly give statistics or anything… but they all worked/had worked at clubs where whoring was definitely not allowed, for fear of legal repercussions.
So what do you suggest we “naive” women do, hmm? Go into Mommy-mode and tell our partners where they can go, with whom, and when and assume that’ll keep them from cheating?
I really hate the old “men are wicked and sex-crazed and cannot be trusted” way of thinking, no matter who it comes from, and don’t understand how people can live like that.
As for my own gentleman companion, I’d be very surprised if he WANTED to go to one… but if he did, I’d send him off with no worries and just ask him to be back by dawn if he can manage it.
I suppose I am a prude.
I do not want my man going anywhere to watch naked women dance. He would not like for me to go anywhere where naked men are dancing.
It’s not a matter of trust. I trust him completely.
We’ve both agreed on this so everything is copacetic. We’ve also agreed that any time either of us gets a hankering for naked dance we’ll give each other a show worth watching. 
I’m not the one who determines what my husband will do or won’t do. I don’t “let” him do anything and the reverse is true also. Neither of us wants to screw that up. I don’t anticipate any changes. Life has twists and turns, but I’ve never met a better match or companion for me. And I love him dearly.
I think it’s prima facie naive/clueless to say, “My honey can go to the strip club, and that’s fine with me. And of course he would never do anything but just look.” It’s like thinking that a drunk can go to a wine-tasting and not get loaded.
It’s getting off on the sexuality of a woman who is not you. Looking at a naked woman and getting sexually excited is on the same continuum as screwing another woman. Obviously, the latter is much riskier, but to laugh the former off as just “boys having fun” or whatever is a mistake, I think.
You are of course free to determine what is right and wrong in your own relationship, but, to my mind, the freedom to look at real-live naked women is already Polyamory Lite.
By all means, ask men who are truly in the know and find out if my story represents what is typical.
Sorry, I skipped a few steps in my argument. People here are saying they “asked no questions” after the hub returned from Vegas, etc. Meaning, I suppose, that they felt comfortable A) sending him off to an “event” in Vegas, followed by B) complete trust that he did nothing once he got back. The implication–and I could be wrong–is that they would know if something had happened. I’m saying that the hound can chew on the meat without looking guilty later. Your trust may be misplaced, and you’ll never know it.
No, I say it’s “bullshit” to let, explicitly, men enjoy strippers’ dancing and assume that that’s as far as it will go.
Perhaps, but a high sex drive (common) combined with a man’s innate desire to have sex with multiple partners (ie, monogamy isn’t hard-wired) combined with a wife’s explicit permission to enjoy only thus much is a receipt for disaster.
We agree. People are free to draw lines wherever they choose. If people want to have a completely open marriage, I say, Go for it. But the idea that a man can go and get all het up from a lap dance, but it would then “devastate” a wife if he, say, then got a hummer from someone, represents a system that isn’t built to last.
But let me make my position clearer, because I haven’t really made it clear at all. Monogamy is a pretty unstable and unnatural thing. And being jealous over someone and wanting to control his/her sexuality is pretty small-minded. In fact, I think that our current Western style of monogamy is stupid and restrictive. But if you want to play it that way, then play it that way. Don’t wink at your hub and say, “Have fun in Vegas with the live ‘n’ naked entertainment, but be good.” That’s like saying to an overweight husband, “Enjoy yourself at the Old Country Buffet, but don’t eat too much.” Same deal. Preventing what you don’t want to happen means preventing the stages that lead up to it.
I’m sure your eagerness to know the truth will lead you to do extensive research on the matter.
For people who would be devastated by their husband’s committing one little sexual act, you sure are trusting. Apply the principle of mathematical expectation to the matter. If sex outside of marriage = “devestation,” then “most guys don’t blah blah” /= good enough.
Vegas is crawling with whores and, for that matter, drunk women who are looking for a good time. Sending men out into that environment with the instruction “enjoy strippers but don’t touch nothing” is really, really dumb–right?
Here’s what you do:
- Decide what you want or do not want.
- Take steps to get what you want and prevent what you do not want from happening.
If “sex with other women” is in the “Do Not Want” category, then don’t encourage the behaviors that could lead up to that. I’d call it a simple thing.
Personally, I’d like my wife not to have sex with other men. The idea grosses me out. I’d also not like her to have another man’s child, and I’d like not to get some other guy’s disease. At the same time, I’d rather not give my wife some other gal’s herpes, chlamydia, HPV, etc. I’d also not like to get someone else pregnant. Hence, the practical thing is not to have sex outside of marriage. Call it “practical monogamy.” Hence, I’m not going to encourage my wife to do things that might lead to her having sex with others. The cool thing is that she has no interested in having sex with others in the first place, and has never shown the slightest sign that she has done so or is planning to do so. So I don’t have to go into “mommy mode,” and I’m responsible for my own behaviors.
But lots of people out there are having sex outside of marriage. Women defend their men and make the kind of excuses that we’re seeing in this thread, but then when the lights come on and it’s clear that this guy was doing what a high percentage of men (myself included) want to be doing (ie, banging lots of hot chicks), then it’s, “Oh! how could he do this! What a scumbag! I was deceived!”
Duh. At least the women who didn’t encourage their men to watch strippers will have more of an excuse.
I have news for you: Men are sex-crazed. Deal with it. If you want monogamy, plan for it and manage it. If your man can be trusted, then trust. If he can’t, then keep your eyes open.
Good for you. But just because you can trust yours doesn’t mean that most can trust theirs.
I trust my fiance, and would have no problem with him going to a Bachelor Party. A bit of harmless flirting never killed anyone.
:rolleyes:
I’ve been to three bachelor parties (one in vegas, one in ac, one in LA) and I’m going to another in Vegas in a month. Strip clubs aplenty were visited. Alcohol aplenty was consumed. No cheating occurred.
I’ve probably been to ten or twelve bachelor parties, from Manhatten to Baltimore to Atlanta. Some were in strip clubs with professional dancers, some were in private clubs with prostitutes. Some men cheated on their significant others, most did not.
I didn’t find it difficult at all to resist, and I don’t think a single guy who intended to be virtuous was “tempted” into cheating. The guys who cheated were the usual suspects, who any of our friends would have predicted to be the most likely to cheat.
Bachelor parties don’t equal cheating, and guys regularly cheat outside bachelor parties, but if a guy has no problems cheating, bachelor parties do make it extremely easy for a guy to pick a woman for no-hassle sex. These aren’t shy women who need to be approached. They are naked and selling their product, themselves, aggressively, asking each guy if they’d like “something extra”. That’s my biggest pet peeve about strip joints, it takes a dollar to get rid of each stripper. It adds up quickly.
As the standard-bearing “Polyamory and Open Marriage Chick” of the Straight Dope, may I hereby request that **Aeschines **NOT be on my side?
Jumpin’ Jesus on a Pogo Stick, Aeschines, where did you get this horrible notion that men are oversexed dogs who need to be socially neutered by their wives for their own safety?
Sex is a continuum of behavior, you yourself said it. Men are not slobbering animals who cannot be trusted to eat one cheesburger but not the whole sack! Some men get enjoyment from looking at women yet don’t get enjoyment from betraying and hurting their wives! Why is that such a revolutionary concept for you?
And, yeah, as QtM said, you being a controlling spouse is NOT going to stop a husband who wants to have sex with a prostitute.
And, as far as the OP goes, I obviously would have no problem with it. NOT because I’m in an open marriage, but because I trust my husband not to do anything stupid that could cause me pain. There are similar situations which could lead him to do something against our “rules,” but I trust him to be able to control himself. (For example, exes are off limits. Yet I don’t have a problem with him going to lunch or dinner with an ex - I trust him not to lose control of his penis and fall into her vagina, because somewhere underneath all those hormones is a mostly functioning brain.)
Aeschines, I think you’re the one who’s being overly simplistic here, not the women who trust their men not to cheat. As WhyNot says, we understand that our spouses/SOs are civilized human beings with a conscience and a brain, not sex-crazed animals. Simply enjoying looking at another women does not equate to cheating, there isn’t an automatic response of, “Hey, that woman is naked, I simply MUST have sex with her!” Just because some men cheat does not guarantee that all or even most will.
You are exactly right. I have worked in strip clubs on and off for 11 years and I’ll tell you this–the “nicest” guys in there are still trying to get a leg up without their wives ever finding out.
I would absolutely never assume that any guy would “be good” in a strip club or anywhere else. And when they have a group of friends egging them on they might do something they wouldn’t normally do.
I’m the kind of stripper you’d want your guy to get at his bachelor party. I don’t do anything that would allow him to break any vows of fidelity. But, about 90% of the other strippers in the club will. They will grind him, fondle him, and let him touch. I’ve seen things in the private dance areas of every club I’ve worked in that would make your head spin. And these are supposedly “nice” clubs.
If you’re cool with your guy coming home and fucking you after he’s had his dick ridden all night by women he thinks are hotter than you, then okie dokie. I wouldn’t give my guy a pass to do it.
Indygrrl, I usually find that you’ve posted my exact thoughts on most subjects, so I was surprised to see your agreement with Aeschines. I’ve known strippers and bouncers and patrons, and have been to a few clubs myself (the nasty kind … back when some of my friends were strippers and bouncers), but my anecdotal evidence doesn’t jive with yours – though I do acknowledge your much more extensive experience. Everything I’ve heard/seen points to the fact that if a guy’s going to cheat on you with a stripper, he would have cheated on you anyway. And of course “nice” guys cheat – I don’t believe in outward signs when it comes to that, I just believe in trusting my partner.
I’m not saying that men are angels, and I’m not even saying that a strip club might not make a man more likely to cheat (if he’s inclined that way to begin with). But the OP asked for individual opinions on letting our men go to strip clubs, and most of us trust our SOs (or, as in my case, wouldn’t have an SO that we didn’t feel we could trust). For Aeschines to come in here and paint us with the broad brush of naïveté – all because he has radically different standards of “cheating” than the rest of us do – is just ridiculous, IMHO.
Aeschines, I’m going to agree to disagree with you. I argued when I thought you were just being a jerk, but now I see that your standards and morals are so completely different from mine (and those of most of the participants in this thread) that I no longer think this is a battle worth fighting. Plus, most of the other replies to you have said what I would have, anyway. But I will add that I think you went a little overboard when you compared men in strip clubs to drunks at wine tastings…
Cool?
[QUOTE=Aeschines]
I have news for you: Men are sex-crazed. Deal with it. If you want monogamy, plan for it and manage it. If your man can be trusted, then trust. If he can’t, then keep your eyes open.
If this thread had been asking, “Ladies, You’ve been assigned a randomly chosen man as a husband and he wants to go to a Bachelor Party…” my answer would have been significantly different. If a woman I didn’t know had asked me if she should be comfortable about her partner going to a bachelor party, I would have to know an awful lot about him and about the relationship before I’d be able to give an answer, and even then I don’t think I’d be comfortable giving a blanket “Yes, it’ll be fine.” I’m quite aware that there are a lot of men who can’t be trusted within a hundred feet of a stripper - I’ve dated one.
But this is asking about our particular situations with our current partners, not about generalities. You said “If your man can be trusted, then trust,” and it seems like that’s generally what people have been saying in their replies. The ones who, rightfully or not, don’t trust their partners probably don’t really want to say anything.
I’m being misunderstood here, and it’s my own fault for not expressing myself clearly enough.
So let me restate my position from first principles:
-
Monogamy is an artificial device of our society designed to restrain male and female sexuality so that children can be produced and raised in an orderly fashion. It is not the way of Nature or a thing handed down from God; although it can be portrayed as either to bolster the myth that it is the “way it is.”
-
Men chomp at this bit more than women, although women do too to a certain extent. I would estimate that 85% of straight-up heterosexual men in monogamous relationships want to have sex with multiple women. Maybe 15% don’t feel restricted by monogamy because that’s their nature.
-
Of that 85% who desire to have sex outside of marriage, there is a continuum of actions that they are willing to engage in. Some will look at porn, others will go out to strip clubs, still others will engage in various levels of sex. What they will do is determined by their own personal systems of ethics, or lack thereof, their levels of risk-averseness, and what turns them on or off sexually.
-
These same men, as this thread demonstrates, have wives whose tolerance stops somewhere on that same continuum. Some women would be “devastated” to find their man jacking off to porn. Some of you, as we have seen, would not mind him watching strippers but would be “devastated” if he fucked one of them.
So far so good? Now let’s review where certain posters are going awry:
- Winking at behavior along the sex-outside-of-marriage continuum is de facto encouragement of behavior on either side of that point, including in the direction that one does not want her man to go. The reason is that stopping at any given point is an arbitrary thing and determined by the factors listed in point #3 above.
If you wink at his going to strip shows, his level of risking your wrath for doing so has now gone to zero. He now stands risk-free at the threshhold of doing something you don’t want him to do.
This is poor psychological strategy on your part! It is much better to frown at porn and things heavier, so that he must overcome control and assume risk to achieve even that level of “disobedience.” It’s the buffer concept.
-
Ah, but you don’t want to control your man. You want to be all modern and trusting. First, I ask you, Why did many women 30 years ago frown upon porn, feeling “devastated” and “betrayed” if their man took a peek. For the answer, I’ll refer you to back to point #5 above. It may have been unconscious, but it was a smart strategy for sexual control. And monogamy is a system of sexual control. See point #1.
-
As far as trust is concerned, I see this as stand-by-your-man-ism. I may only know one story about a friend going to a bachelor party (actually, I know lots of prostitution stories from Japan–basically a huge percentage of Japanese men have been to whores), but I know tons and tons of stories about female friends and relatives who were shocked, shocked! when they found out that their men had been–gasp–cheating!
Of course, the signs had been there all along that the guy was a real asshole. Everyone knew it but the woman in question. I have little doubt that this is plain ol’ genetically programmed mentality, further exacerbated by the lack of good men in today’s society. You find the best you can and hold on for dear life, naivety be damned.
But don’t take my word for it, look at the stats:
We’ve all read stats like this before. Doubt them if you wish. Even if the numbers were 20% for men and 10% for women, those would be huge numbers!
The fact of the matter is that a certain percentage of the men you deem trustworthy are not. If all the women out there standing by their men were correct about how much they can trust them, then there wouldn’t be such high levels of cheating, and, consequently, such high levels of divorce.
That’s why I say, “Naive!” That’s why I say, “Don’t encourage behavior along the continuum whose further side includes behaviors that would ‘devastate’ you.”
- But let’s return to the topic of control. I hear in this thread that you want to trust, that you don’t want to control. But please refer to point #1: Monogamy is a system of control.
In the good/bad old days, the deal was pretty simple: Men, you have to stick with just one woman, but we’ll let you have sex; we’ll even celebrate the union, the children you produce, etc. Indeed, the system is primarily designed to control male sexuality. But the system had even harsher punishments for women, since they could have other men’s children. But even in the bad old days, there was a safety valve for men who couldn’t stick with the program: prostitution. And in certain societies (think Japan again) that safety valve is still in use.
Nowadays, however, “control” is bad. Monogamy, instead of being the way that the gods/Jesus want us to act (or else!), is a beautiful, New-Agey thing bestrewn with sweet-smelling flowers and accompanied by smiling teddy bears. It’s all about love and trust and soulmates and autonomy, while control and threats are strictly out of style.
Or so we kid ourselves. Here’s the big question for you: If his watching a stripper is fine (not subject to control), why is his fucking a whore out of bounds (subject to control)?
Monogamy is about control. But control and restrictions are required for every worthwhile endeavor.
I’m nonplussed by the statement that my morality is different from most of the people in this thread. I don’t think my morality is different; I think my view of human affairs is different.
I hold myself to high standards of ethics, but, no, I am not trusting. Not generally. One of my mottos is, “Dark forces are always at work.” I am also steeped in the thought of the east, including the 36 strategies of Chinese thought. All is psychology, all comes down to the management of persons.
Again, my overall advice is, “Decide what you want and take steps to get what you want and maintain it.” Most of you in here say you want monogamy somewhere along that continuum, and most here say that you can trust your men. Statistics would indicate that one or more of you is probably wrong. Trust if you must, but, like Reagan, please verify.
There’s nothing simple about it. Human relations are always complex and unpredictable. That’s why control is necessary.
Men, of course, are animals in the literal sense, and many are highly sexed. One strategy for dealing with these facts is monogamy, with all its individual and social controls.
Actually, you’re wrong. A man watching a stripper, assuming that she appeals to him on an individual level, is going to give him a hard-on and put him in the mood for sex. Now, he may think, “She’s hot, but she’s a slut and probably has cooties, so on a rational level I don’t want her,” or may just want her outright. But the desire has been brought to the surface. Is that not a dangerous thing?
Apparently, the stats say that 60% will cheat. On average, a woman is in danger of having her man have sex with another woman.
Kudos to you, Aeschines. I mean it.
I want my future bride (whoever she is) to know that she can trust me. Not only will I not fool around with strippers, I will not put myself in a situation where I might be tempted to do so.
If you’re trusting your man to walk close to the edge without falling off, then I think that’s quite naive. Some may indeed be able to resist the temptation, but the most trustworthy men will avoid the temptation altogether.
My husband isn’t the type to go to strip clubs. If his best friend were to have a party as described in the OP, I wouldn’t have a problem with him going. My only stipulation would be he take a shower before getting in the bed.