SAVAGE LOVE

BY DAN SAVAGE

DEAR DAN: Shortly after our wedding my wife informed me that she would be handling our finances and making all financial decisions for us as a couple going forward. Additionally, she had already arranged for my paycheck to be automatically deposited into an account that only she had control over. I would henceforth get a meager weekly allowance for personal expenses. During that same conversation my wife informed me I would get sex only when I had earned it. I love her, and I reluctantly agreed to this. We have been married for 10 years. I do all of the housework, and I rarely get sex. My wife tells me I have no one to blame but myself, since I agreed to all her terms from the beginning, which caused her to lose all respect for me as a man. I did not realize how difficult this would be. Is it normal for a wife in this kind of marriage to enjoy giving her husband pain? She is almost sadistic. She spanks my ass with a spatula and tells me I am a sissy. Is this normal?

— Sorry I Somehow Said Yes

DEAR SISSY: Sure, it’s perfectly normal in the sense that it’s perfectly normal for a certain kind of deeply frustrated kinky straight guy to write me a fake letter about the kind of sexual relationship he’s always fantasized about having but has never actually had before tacking on a fake question at the end in the hopes that I’ll respond and he’ll be able to beat off to the whole thing.

There’s a lot in SISSY’s letter that screams fake: A normal person would’ve instantly filed for divorce; there’s no way she could’ve “arranged” to have his paycheck automatically deposited into an account she alone controlled unless she somehow managed to bring his employer in on this conspiracy; that the best question he could come up with was the most banal question asked of sex-advice columnists (“Is this normal?”). But what screams fake the loudest, the absolute deadest giveaway, is that this was sprung on him after his wedding.

Now, female-led relationships (FLR) are definitely a thing, and there are certainly some men out there in female-led relationships, and some FLR have elements of TPE (total power exchange), FD (financial domination), DD (domestic discipline), and mild FF/S (forced feminization/ sissification) tossed in. But those men had to ask for those things.. Because creating a FLR is almost never the wife or the girlfriend’s idea. It’s something a man fantasizes about and sometimes succeeds in talking his wife or girlfriend into experimenting with, but it’s not something anyone’s brand-new wife has ever sprung on him at the reception.

“From my research, and from the emails and DMs I get about how to set up an FLR, the askers are overwhelmingly male,” said Key Barrett, sex researcher and author of Surrender, Submit, Serve Her, a book on FLR. “And I have never heard of an FLR that was started unilaterally, or out of trickery, that managed to be successful.”

Like a lot of people with fantasies rooted in power exchange, it’s hotter for SISSY to think about it being imposed on him. Because then he’s the victim, not the pervert, because then his submission is pure and unadulterated. But why send a fake question to a sex-advice column? Because getting his fantasy published makes it feel real. Or, hell, maybe in some alternate everything/ everywhere kind of universe, it actually becomes real.