Noodles!

I am 26 and a happily married housewife with a 6 year-old son. My husband and I share a very passionate relationship. He is very experimental and liberal about sex. During oral love making sessions he often asks me to swallow his semen. He says that semen is full of vitamins and nutrients and is very good for the health. But recently, one of my girlfriends told me that semen contains a lot of fat content. I am a little overweight so I’m concerned about this. My second doubt is regarding my attire at home. Although my husband wants me properly dressed in public, he wants me to be very sexy at home, especially at night when nobody else is at home other than our son. He wants me to go topless after nine, sometimes doing the cooking and serving of food in the semi-nude. As I said above, my son is very young so I’m a little reticent about this. My husband says that there is nothing wrong in letting my son look at my breasts and that it will help him develop a healthy attitude towards females and the human body. What is your opinion on these matters?
–Hot In The Kitchen

To address your first question, semen is perfectly harmless to ingest, provided it’s STD-free. Semen doesn’t have high fat content, but it’s definitely protein-rich and contains trace amounts of zinc, amino acids, vitamin C, and other good stuff. The amount of semen that the average male ejaculates is between 1.5 and 5 milliliters. (To put that number in perspective, the average chicken egg—another excellent source of protein—contains 43 milliliters of fluid.) So yes, semen contains a number of nutrients and has a lot of protein, but the amount you’d be ingesting is so small that it wouldn’t affect your diet or health anyway. As long as you don’t personally mind swallowing, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

As for your other concern, girl, are you nuts? Let me just ask you this simple question: if your mother or father made a habit of walking around the house with their dangly bits waving around, wouldn’t you feel a little, I don’t know, weird about the whole thing? Especially after you’d hit adolescence? There’s a reason why parents and children are supposed to maintain sexual distance, and it’s because you start getting into very creepy territory when you close that gap. Parents should definitely talk to their children about sex in an honest and non-judgmental way by providing information, answering questions, and being supportive of their kids, but I guarantee you that no child ever wants to hear or know about the down-and-dirty details of their parents’ sex life. Instilling a healthy respect for sex and the body is very different from actually parading your noodles around. Your husband is asking you to make your child an unwilling and non-consenting observer of your sexual activities, and saying it’s for his own good is completely disingenuous. If your husband wants you to make the rotis in the buff when no one else is around, more power to the both of you. But when your kid is in the house? That’s a definite no go.

Cross-dressing With Sis

I’m 20 years old and I have been cross-dressing since for the last seven years. I secretly wear my older sister and mother’s clothes and innerwear. Last year I came out to my sister about my cross-dressing and she was very accepting about it. I want her to dress me up and have fun with it, like we used to do when we were very young. How do I go about that? The very thought of being dressed and made up by a female excites me too much. I’m 100% straight though.
–Anticipating Cross-dresser

Um, I fail to see how being straight affects this conversation, but thanks for informing me. In any case, it’s really great that your sister is so cool with you being a cross-dresser. Bravo. However, I wouldn’t recommend that you ask her to dress you up. Why? Because dressing in women’s clothing is a sexual act for cross-dressers, and it’s not a good idea to involve your siblings (or any relatives) in your sexual life. As you yourself pointed out, the very thought of a woman dressing you up in her clothes is sexually exciting for you. You might as well ask her to jerk you off. Why would your sister want to be involved in helping you get turned on? It shouldn’t be a problem to ask her if you can borrow her clothes and makeup, but don’t ask her to help you dressed on top of that. I see only disaster ahead.

Oh, and be sure to return her clothes and makeup to her in the same condition she gave them. Nothing sucks more lending someone a cute top and getting it back with makeup stains all over it.

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.