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Read other letters about this article
Cary, you astonish me. Who exactly is the one who's 'nuts' here? I may have disagreed with some of your advice in the past, but have always found it measured and balanced. Never have I seen such a blatant refusal to even see that there may be a problem. Did you write this when you were drunk or tired? If so, please take it down and repost when you're ready.
Anyone who has seen Clerks or Chasing Amy knows the situation here, and knows that it's more complicated than Cary makes it out to be. High-minded feminist justifications for doing what you want with your body and whatnot will not get rid of the fact that the LW is, or at least was what by the average person's standards would be called a 'slut'. She makes references to her 'past' and mentions her boyfriend being uncomfortable with the number of people she's slept with, so we can assume it's fairly high. From our knowledge of the male psyche and the description of the guy's reaction, we can also assume fairly safely that the threesome she refers to is MMF, not FFM.
Cary, you're married, right? I'd like to invite you and any other guys reading this to vividly imagine your wife/girlfriend being penetrated by two men. How does that feel? Then imagine it hapenning before you met. Feel much better?
Now, like LW's boyfriend, I am not religious or conservative by any stretch. But, also like LW's boyfriend, I have a sense of what is 'wrong and right'. This is obviously someone who had no respect for herself or her body. It's one thing to reject the ridiculous notion that one has to be married to have sex. It's completely another to indiscriminately give it away to people you barely know, and yet another to let yourself be enjoyed by multiple people simultaneously. I don't think you have to be a fundamentalist or a moralist to agree that sex is an intimate act in which you open yourself and make yourself vulnerable to another person. Promiscuity on the level of LW's completely devalues and destroys any such intimacy. So how indeed can the boyfriend feel like what they're doing together is meaningful at all when she has given it away to so many with far less commitment? Not to mention the intense jealousy he must feel at the fact that she has engaged in an act that he will never get to.
Third-wave feminists would desperately like to believe that such girls are bravely flouting the conventions of society and taking control of their sexuality, but the sad truth is that the majority of them, especially in and before college, generally do it out of low self-esteem and a need for attention, like those on Girls Gone Wild. From the uncomfortable tone with which LW mentions her 'past', it would seem that she falls into this category, but unfortunately, she still has not fully understood what exactly was wrong with the way she was before, or how it makes others view her. Listening to people like Cary will only push her backwards.
I am sure this letter will be roundly scorned as a classic example of double standards and misogyny, and so on. So be it. Look, I'm not some old fundamentalist. I'm a grad student in my early 20's, and I've read just as much Foucault and DeBeauvoir as the rest of you. And I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who have gone too far in trying to apply postmodern theories of sexuality to their lives and relationships only to end up with heartbreak when they realize that maybe they're not as postmodern as they thought, by which time the damage has already been done. Any of my guy friends - most of whom are progressive, college-educated atheists - would react exactly the same way LW's boyfriend did. Yes, there are people who can successfully carry on like that, but they are few and far between, and frankly, I don't envy them. If the sex-positive feminist crowd thinks that makes people like us dinosaurs, feel free to search for more 'enlightened' men, but you might realize that there's not as many as you would think.
In the end, my advice is actually the same as Cary's. Leave. Leave, because he's too good for you, and you've hurt him enough already. You may be a different person now, but there are consequences for the unbridled 'fun' you had in your youth, and one of them is that you will now have to try that much harder to find people who will accept your past. Nor are they obligated to, and many of them will not. The sooner you realize this, the better. And do yourself a favor by watching Kevin Smith's "Chasing Amy". It's a better illustration of your conflict than either Cary or I can provide.
