This is the situation for which pro-dommes were invented. The marriage is basically sound, but he has a kink that's important to him, and she doesn't share it, and their lives are complex enough that a full open relationship isn't practical. Enter the paid professional, whose job it is to assess and meet his needs without overstepping any agreed-upon relationship boundaries. Many pros would be happy to include the wife in a session, as a spectator or student or co-top, thus enabling her to experience what he wants without the pressure of having to make it happen all by herself.

There are, in fact, classes that the wife could take to help her become more comfortable with this role -- if she's to dominate him successfully, she has to figure out a way to get her needs met too; otherwise the internal tension between acting dominant while actually being in service to his fantasy will tear her up (I've seen a lot of women damaged by this sort of thing). Many leather conferences and erotic boutiques offer workshops for novice dominant women, and at least one retired pro-domme (Cleo Dubois in the Bay Area) teaches weekend-long intensives for dominant women and their partners. (Such an environment might be a wake-up call for the husband -- a more experienced dominant would have the objectivity to point out to him that he's asking for a great deal and not offering much in return.)

There are also several good books written for women exploring domination -- "The Sexually Dominant Woman," "The Mistress Manual," and "The Art of Sensual Female Dominance," to name a few. Also, "When Someone You Love Is Kinky" is a guide for spouses and friends of kinky people, and "Healing Sex" is a non-judgmental guide for survivors of abuse and trauma who are trying to find fulfilling sexuality.

Any or all of these resources might help with this thorny problem...

Janet Hardy

Greenery Press

(publisher of a few of these titles)

... twice a day for a couple of months, in the middle of both pregnancies. And I don't think this is unusual, because there was a cheap Mexican place across the street from the medical complex where I saw my obstetrician, and at lunchtime the line of preggos was out the door.

A friend's son, aged maybe eight or nine at the time, asked, "Mom, what's homosexual?"

My friend, blushing madly but determined to do the right thing, went into a careful explanation: you know most men like to fall in love with ladies, well, there are some men who like to fall in love with men, and those men blah blah blah...

... and the penny dropped, the lad's face lit up, and he exclaimed "Oh! Homosexual is GAY!"

To the couple of people who have decided that the problem is that Seal Press is tiny and hence unprofessional:

Welcome to today's independent publishing scene. I too run a small independent press, and mine's even smaller than Seal: I run it singlehandedly. And we're small for much the same reasons -- an independent distributor, which is the channel that enables small publishers to compete with the giants for shelf space at Barnes & Noble, declared bankruptcy and burned them for a lot of money. Seal used to be a lot bigger, and I hope it will be again someday.

I don't know Seal's sales figures, but our bestselling book, _The Ethical Slut_, is currently at about 75,000-80,000 copies sold -- not exactly New York Times bestseller list material, but a resounding success by the standards of even the largest publishing house.

Desktop publishing has made page layout a lot easier, but it hasn't made paper or printing any cheaper. There have always been small presses, because someone needs to disseminate the stuff that's too niche or too edgy to interest the big guys. Remember, Virginia and Leonard Woolf ran a small press too, and without it you might not have seen the work of one of the century's most important feminist voices.

However, it is absolutely true that micro-publishers don't generally go out looking for a particular kind of author. By the time I finish going through the slush pile, negotiating the contracts, editing the manuscripts, doing the layouts, supervising the production, spearheading the marketing, doing the bookkeeping (ugh), answering the phones and sweeping the floors, aggressive action toward a diverse author list -- desirable though I know it may be -- simply tends to drop off the bottom of the list.

If the RealDolls are conditioning their owners to treat human women roughly, then perhaps we should quit giving baby dolls to little girls? I seem to remember being pretty brutal to mine when I was four or five, and yet my actual children, now grown, seem to have survived my parenting.

Seriously, it's a rare human who gets all his or her needs met by other humans. We have the flickering images on the tube to entertain us, our dogs and cats to make sure we get plenty of touch, our sex toys to get us off, the symbolic humans in books to stimulate our imaginations -- the RealDoll is simply an extension of any or all of those. And nobody I know has any trouble distinguishing between any of them and the actual humans we meet on the street or at work or school or church.

And for anyone who wants to debate the first part of that thesis, allow me to offer the "Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life" scene from Young Frankenstein as evidence.

Penelope sat at home weaving while her husband was out having adventures. Maybe "Pennies"?

People get married and stay married for all sorts of reasons. The asexual wife who would just as soon her husband gets his needs met elsewhere became a stereotype for a reason. Who's to say these women aren't getting exactly what they want -- stability, status, companionship, whatever -- out of their atypical marriages?

Janet Hardy