It is a generally accepted fact that any man who wishes to open up his relationship because he seeks sexual novelty beyond his wife but does not want to cheat will soon find that it is his wife, and not him, who is the biggest beneficiary of their new arrangement (doubly so if the man had to badger the wife into agreeing to the new relationship rules in the first place). “I wanted an open relationship, but my wife is the only one getting laid!” posts are everywhere on Reddit; and a recent one — deleted from Reddit but archived in screen caps posted to Twitter — happened to catch my eye. It wasn’t simply the predictable tale of an eager polyamorist hoisted by his own petard; the headline of this post stresses that this is not simply about a wife, generally, but a bisexual wife specifically. And oh, does that open up a can of worms.
Because what we have here is not simply “I’m angry that my wife is getting laid more than I am and now I want to close the relationship.” What we have is “My bi wife is sleeping with other men, and I'd prefer that she sleep with women instead; indeed if she’s not sleeping with women, if she’s not procuring ladies for us to have a threeway with, is she actually bi?” It’s not quite a demand for a one penis rule (he says his wife should “also” sleep with women, not “only” sleep with women, which is hilarious in its implication that she can just magic wand up some ladies to bang it out with), but it seems clear that that’s this dude’s preferred setup: he can sleep with as many women as he wants, his wife only gets to sleep with women, he never has to feel threatened by another dude — and never has to worry about whether his wife is threatened by the other women he sleeps with, because why would he care about her feelings?
[I feel like I should note here, just as a bit of advice, that if you are a bi woman in an open relationship with a straight man, you should absolutely refuse to agree to a one penis rule, just on principle. I don’t care how uninterested you are in dating other men, I don’t care how hot it gets you to swear fealty to this one dude and his one dick. If your partner has the option to date other women, you should also have the option to date other men. Maybe you will never exercise that option, that’s your prerogative! But it should be on the table all the same. (An open relationship between two bi people who both agree to only pursue people of a different gender than that their primary partner is different, however. It’s the imbalance that makes the one penis rule so bad.)]
And look, obviously this dude is a piece of shit, but I think the narrative he shares is an interesting one because it illustrates the difference between how men think about their straight and bi female partners. It is very, very common for straight poly women to be forced to deal with their partners’ insecurities, to have the open relationship they were badgered into in the first place threatened with closure because they’re, uh, too good at getting laid outside the relationship.
Bi women get to deal with that and this assumption that our male partners get to dictate the way that our queerness shapes our casual hookups and secondary relationships; that our queerness will serve to enhance their sexual pleasure and experience of non-monogamy, with no consideration for how we might feel about our partners’ extracurricular activities. It’s a heightened, intensified version of girlfriend/wife as human sex toy, as object there to mindlessly fulfill a man’s sexual whims and fantasies, without ever having needs of her own.
There’s something else I want to mention here as well. As I mentioned above, it’s a standard trope that when a man and a woman are in an open relationship, the woman is just naturally going to pull more; that it’s easier for women to find casual sex partners than it is for their boyfriends and husbands. And that’s sort of true, but really only within the bounds of a relationship between two straight people, or at least a man and a woman who are only pursuing other cross gender attractions (and as long as you’re also assuming that no one is particularly picky about who they sleep with, or interested in emotional connection alongside the sex).
But this is not because it’s “easier” for women to get laid. It’s because, generally speaking, men are more open to casual sex than women are (see also: the existence of Grindr vs the absence of any comparable app for queer women). Once a woman is only dating other women (whether by choice or coercion), the set up suddenly becomes radically different. It is much easier for a man — even a non-monogamous man — who is pursuing women to find dates and hookups than it is for a woman who is pursuing women. You think straight women are suspicious of poly men? Queer women are even more suspicious of ENM ladies who’ve got boyfriends/husbands. And I mean, understandably so.
You can see how this is the perfect set up for many men — likely for the man who wrote that Reddit post, too. Not only does a poly man in a one penis rule set up never have to worry about being threatened by other men, he’s also likely getting more action than his partner is, and whenever she’s seeing another woman he can badger her into bringing that lady into the bedroom for a threeway (whether he will coax his own casual partners into group sex with his primary partner is, of course, more up for debate).
And you can see, too, how it reduces bi women to simple sex objects, even more than our straight peers. A straight poly woman may make her male partner feel insecure, she may threaten his sense of dominance and lead him to petition for closing the relationship if she’s going to be getting more play than he is. But she’s not as automatically expected to use her own sexual explorations to arouse and satisfy him in the same way, she’s not as immediately assumed to be a tool who solely exists to serve her male partner’s whims.
It’s bad enough to be reduced to the status of “my wife.” “My bi wife,” though? It’s usually worse.
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this resonate so much with some past relationships. thank you for sharing