Sore Losers

Me and my girlfriend have been together for about two years. I have always wanted to make love to her in a hotel room and both of us are ready for it. However, I am worried about hidden cameras in the room and the police. Is it illegal in India to have sex with your girlfriend in a hotel? How should I proceed with this? Will I have to worry about the police
–Love Hotel Rooms

No, it’s not illegal to have sex with your girlfriend in a hotel room. No cops are going to break into your room to catch you in the act, and provided you go to a fairly nice hotel, no front clerk is going to ask if you and your girlfriend are married. What you might want to be more worried about is the whole hidden camera thing. I did a little research and it turns out that various hotels in India have had staff members arrested for installing secret cameras in the bridal suites for a little extra-curricular viewing fun. Yuck. However, in that situation it’s the hotel that’s breaking the law, not you. Either way, there isn’t much you can do about it besides checking your room thoroughly. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

On another note, this particular letter-writer also sent me a rather, shall we say, abrupt e-mail after a few weeks of waiting for a response from me: “Hey, U don’t care to reply to my mail, is it? U sick female. Go to hell.” U too, pal. Let me take this as an opportunity to clarify a few details about my process for selecting and printing letters. I get hundreds of letters a month and I only get to choose two for each week’s column. I try to respond to the e-mails I receive as and when I can, but quite frankly there are too many for me to get to all of them. What this means is that it’s likely that I may not be able to respond to your letter personally. That’s just nature of the newspaper game and there’s no point getting sore about it.

Bringing Drag Into The Bedroom

I am a middle-aged man and I have a serious problem. I like to shave and wax myself, wear false breasts, ladies’ inner wear, saris, and makeup before having sex with my wife. I like to play the female role in bed. I want my wife to dress up as a man and make love to me. In short, I want to be the “wife”, while my actual wife becomes the “husband”. I only want this maybe 20 percent of the time we enjoy sex. For the remaining 80 percent, I am fully happy as the husband. I do not want a permanent reversal of roles. I am not a transsexual. I just want more “masala” in our sex life. I am quite happy as a man, a husband, a father and as a successful person in my career. How can I make my wife understand and cooperate?
–Looking For Some Spice

Um, you tell her. Just talking to your partner about your sexual desires is really not so hard. The challenge is doing it in a way that is respectful of the other person’s boundaries. So my advice is this: sit her down in a calm, private, non-sexual setting and tell her what’s on your mind. Tell her everything you just told me: that this isn’t something you want all the time, that you’re very happy in your marriage, and that your need to explore the boundaries of gender performance does not mean that you are gay or transgender. She may be horrified or she may be delighted. It’s more likely that her response will fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but either way try to keep things calm. If she agrees to go with this then you have to assure her that you want to start slow and then stay true to your word–start slow. Don’t go right into full-on drag. Start out with some role-playing first—a few encounters where you act like a “woman” and she acts like a “man”. You are, of course, dealing in stereotypes about how men and women are supposed to behave and feel during sex, but those stereotypes are powerful and there can be a very real erotic charge to transgressing them.

Anyway, start off with some role-playing, and then you can work your way up to having sex in drag. And also, don’t look at this as trying to make your wife “cooperate” with you. For you to successfully incorporate this fetish into your sex life, you both need to be willing and happy participants. This means that you need to place as much emphasis on making the fantasy pleasurable for her as on making it pleasurable for yourself. Ask her what she needs to make this fantasy a happy thing for her and how frequently she feels comfortable participating in it. In the best case scenario you’ll both be thrilled with this new aspect of your sexual relationship and it will enable you to bring a more nuanced and mutually fulfilling attitude to your more vanilla sexual escapades. Even if this isn’t the fetish that rocks her world, if you’re kind and considerate about putting it on the table she will hopefully at least be neutral about participating in the whole thing. And don’t forget to ask her about her unspoken fantasies are and how you can bring them into your sex life! Remember, sharing is caring.

Balloony Tunes

My friend and his lovely 22-year-old girlfriend have contracted the disease of balloon fetishism. They both enjoy bursting large and huge rubber balloons with their genitalia while making daily love. During idle hours they also burst balloons. They have developed the habit of purchasing big balloons from the market and bursting them in public. He has disclosed this tendency to me, as he gets sexual pleasure out of bursting balloons and therefore masturbates regularly when his girlfriend is not with him. His girlfriend has also contracted the same disease and is always bursting balloons and masturbating when alone. They have a peculiar habit of talking to the balloons before popping them while admiring their huge shapes and colors. They have also become members of different balloon popping websites that feature videos of naked girls and boys bursting large balloons.

I can see that my friend and his girlfriend are suffering from a typical kind of neurosis called PARAPHILIA, where inanimate objects stand in for sexual issues. It is a NEURO-CHEMICAL IMBALANCE IN BRAIN. I have advised him to meet a psychiatrist. But he feels coy in disclosing this habit with the doctor. Should I recommend that he go for NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (NLP) with a psychiatrist? I think this could be a way for him to come out of this paraphilia disease. I hope this is not a helpless situation, since different types of fetishistic tendencies affect a lot of people across the globe. Most of them do not disclose their fetishism to a psychiatrist, and therefore remain a patient throughout life.

Kindly advise. I wish to play the doctor, if possible.

–Name Withheld For A Genuine Cause

I have officially declared this letter the Greatest Letter Of All Time. Or at least until a better one comes along.

Let’s review, shall we? Our concerned letter-writer decides to write to me on behalf of his “friend” and his “lovely” girlfriend. This “friend” has given the letter-writer many intimate details about his sex life and his odd fetishes, namely popping large balloons before, during, and after sex. The friend even sends the letter-writer off to investigate various websites that feature assorted deviants rubbing balloons all over themselves before popping them. The letter-writer is shocked—shocked!—that his friend would be interested in such shenanigans and decides to do some research into what psychopathology this friend might have and where to get help for it. And at the end of his letter, he adds the one sentence that throws the entire letter into question: “I wish to play the doctor, if possible.”

???

I already had my suspicions that there was no “friend” involved in any of this, but that last sentence just put it over the top, and revealed this letter to be a masterpiece of mendacity and self-deception. But before I get to the task of deconstructing it, let me first do the responsible thing and de-bunk Mr. Name Withheld’s assertions about balloon fetishes and paraphilia. First of all, it’s true that there is a fetish out there about balloons. Balloon fetishists like to call themselves “looners” (ha ha) and generally fall into two categories: those who like popping the balloons during sex and those who don’t. I personally think that as far as fetishes go, balloon are rather amusing and whimsical, provided that you’re not some kind of psycho clown. There are even parties that get organized in New York City on a fairly regular basis for balloon fetishists (man, you can get just about anything in New York), and it all seems rather sweet and silly, not scary and sick. For all those of you reading this, I give my thumbs-up to balloons in the bedroom. Just don’t twist them into any stupid animals.

Second of all, it is also true that the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM (generally considered the Bible of psychiatric disorders and treatments), lists paraphilia as “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors generally involving (1) nonhuman objects, (2) the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one’s partner, or (3) children or other nonconsenting persons that occur over a period of 6 months, which cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” That’s all very well and good, but one problem that many psychiatrists (including the well-known sexologist and physician Charles Moser), feel that the diagnosis of paraphilia psychopathologizes sexual desires that are not necessarily indicative of mental illness—for example, the DSM categorizes both pedophilia and bestiality, as well as transvestism and, well, balloon fetishes under paraphilia. I’m sorry, but you can’t put balloons, and kiddie raping under the same category. And lest we forget, masturbation used to fall under the rubric of paraphilia until the 1960s, and homosexuality was its own disease in the DSM until the 1970s. I guess what I mean to say is that using psychiatric guidelines to “diagnose” a sexual desire is always a dangerous game, because those guidelines are often informed by prejudice and bias and can be hugely discriminatory towards larges populations of people. Science, particularly when it comes to sexuality, is rarely neutral or objective because people are rarely neutral and objective.

Okay, on to the letter, of which every sentence merits further examination. This dude has no “friend”, and my guess is that there’s no girlfriend involved, either. He’s writing this letter about himself and himself alone. How do I know this? Well for one thing, people generally don’t reveal the aspects of their sexual lives to their friends in such excruciating detail, particularly if it involves something strange or unusual. Secondly, why would the letter-writer make note of the fact that his friend has a “lovely” girlfriend, but not think to mention that he’s a doctor until the last sentence, especially after spewing all that psychiatric jargon? (The detail about the couple talking to their balloons is especially creepy.) And come on, he wants to “play” the doctor? This perv (and I mean that affectionately) is talking about role-playing in a very serious way. Now, there are two possibilities here. One is that Name Withheld is just some lonely guy with a strange fetish and he concocted this elaborate lie in the hopes that I would contradict the entire jist of his letter and give my approval to popping balloons—which I have done. The other possibility is that homeboy has two simultaneous desires: to rub balloons all over himself and others, and to have some kind of threesome with a friend and the friend’s girlfriend, and he’s hoping to combine these two things into one extravaganza of circus love. Either way, he’s probably popping balloons on his hoo-hoo as we speak. To which I say, go for it, my twisted friend. I mean, really, there’s nothing very wrong with any of your desires here, except your need to cover them up in this crazily jury-rigged lie. But if it makes you feel any better, you’ve definitely got my vote for best letter of the year. Now go forth and pop away.

Ow

I am a 42-year-old very healthy woman, and have been so all my life. Currently, I work in the IT field. My partner and I go on regular holidays and we are more than happy with our respective lives. However, just when it seemed that there was nothing else that I could possibly want for, my libido began to ebb. I personally feel that there is no other feeling either man-made or nature-made which could surpass the feeling of the big “O”, and believe me, I have been to some super fantastic places and taken part in some mind-blowing adventure sports as well. So I should know. Could you kindly tell me the reason why this is happening? Is it marking the onset of that time when one would, realistically speaking, have to bow down to the way things spiral downward and accept that the big “O” will elude me for the rest of my life? That is owgasmically painful to even think of.
–Owgasmically Dissatisfied

Call me crazy, but there’s something a little, well…odd about this letter. And given the kinds of letters I get, that’s really saying something. Maybe it’s the fact that “owgasmically” isn’t a word. Which is something you should know, having been to some super fantastic places and taken part in mind-blowing adventure sports. I mean, really.

Anyway, to answer your question, it sounds like you’re experiencing the onset of perimenopause, which is the transition state before actual menopause for women. (For those of you not in the know, menopause is process by which a woman’s reproductive system shuts down. Your ovaries stop producing eggs and the production of estrogen also decreases somewhat. It’s a natural part of a woman’s reproductive life cycle—sort of like puberty in reverse.) Perimenopause can last up to ten years, and during this time, many women experience symptoms such as spotting, hot flashes, insomnia, vaginal dryness, a decrease in libido, and yes, problems achieving orgasm. You may want to check out various kinds of lubricants to see what will help you during intercourse, and also, give yourself some time to adjust and don’t beat yourself up if you’re having difficulty climaxing. Your orgasms (owgasms?) have not disappeared forever.

Of course, some women don’t experience any major discomfort while transitioning into menopause, and other women have a very difficult time. It’s all based on the individual, and there’s no way of telling which category you fall in. The only way to know what’s going on down there is to see a sensitive gynecologist who’s willing to help and advise you. And talk to your partner about this, too. She or he will need to be apprised, and you’ll definitely want their support as you go through this part of your reproductive cycle.

Dairy Dilemmas

I am a 27-year-old guy writing from a small town in Karnataka. I am a big fan of your column. I have a small little problem. I have recently developed a fetish for breast-feeding or adult nursing. Am I going to have any problem with my health in the future or in my relationship with my future wife? Is this fetish normal?
–Mother’s Milk

I get so many letters from people asking me to explain their fetishes when a straight-up Google search would tell them just about everything they need to know. In fact, the fact that you used the term “adult nursing” leads me to suspect that you have already done some, shall we say, “research” online. But that’s not why people write to me, of course. What all letter-writers want is someone to tell them that it’s okay to have their own desires, however weird they may be, and I assume that’s what you want from me as well.

However, just in case I’m wrong about your level of Internet access, I made the Herculean effort of looking up “breast feeding” and “porn” and found too many websites to catalogue in this humble column. Not that pornography is necessarily a barometer for all things sexual, but it’s pretty safe to say that if porn that features your fetish exists in the web universe, then there’s a definite audience it’s catering to, and therefore, you’re not alone. Plenty of the breast-feeding sites I found are pay-per-view, so they must be turning some kind of a profit in order to stay in existence. (Incidentally, I find it hard to believe that every single woman involved with breast-feeding porn is a new mother, since medication does exist that can induce lactation whether you’ve been pregnant or not. But that’s neither here nor there. Oh, the things we do for money.)

As far as fetishes go, breast-feeding is pretty mild one. As for problems with your health, while viruses like HIV can be passed through breast milk, you’re probably pretty safe if you know your partner and her health history. With regards to possible issues with your future wife, I’m really not the person to talk to. Only your future wife can tell you what she thinks about the demented dairy games you want to play, so I suggest you ask her.