The reality is, women have sexual drives just like men, and we aren't going to cater to your feelings of entitlement anymore. We aren't going to stay pure to marry someone who's been around the block fifty times and express graditude for the STD he brings our virgin selves. If we're not worth your purity, you're not worth ours. That's reality, boyos. Get over yourselves. It's not hard-wired--there are plenty of examples of animals where the females are territorial, aggressive, and sexually dominant.

Stop justifying your selfishness. Sheesh. It's no wonder some of you whiny losers can't get laid.

I think you are right, prochoice mama, but I think in general men want inexperienced partners more than they want to have active and imaginative sex lives with their wives after marriage. There are enough men who say the Madonna-whore thing is hard-wired. What men think they want, and what they really want, are two different things. I submit that many of them do not even know what they want, until their beloved crosses the line in their minds from "Madonna" to "whore" and their feelings change. I have heard men who are intellectually tring to be enlightened about this type of thing say that once a particular woman changes in their minds to the "whore" category she can never change back. I have heard men say this is the reason not to have early sex with them. This may not be all men, but I think it is more than they even know themselves. I think their animal brains (or whatever you want to call it, evolutionary psychology, lizard brains, religion or whatever) take over even when intellectually they try to fight it. For this reason, I reluctantly side with those who say much of this is hard-wired. Therefore, NEVER TELL. EVER. Let 'em still be asking on your 80th birthday. And if someone tells some story from your past, deny, deny, deny. People fought duels over this. Guys know the rules. Once a guy claims you as his serious relationship, you become an automatic "Madonna" and anyone who tells tales is asking for a duel. I'm exaggerating and of course there are STD's to disclose about, but as far as that STD, you got it from your ONE serious relationship whom you met at a church garden party introduced by your grandmother and that cad jumped off a cliff a few months later out of remorse. Anyone can come up to your present guy and say you did so-and-so in college or at a party. It doesn't make it true. For years in the "old days" people would tell tales and it was the tale-teller who suffered the social opprobrium. Those were the rules in the old days. Therefore--deny, deny, deny. Guys do not want the truth. Call me a hypocrite but I'll be in line behind 90 percent of guys. P.S. Yes STD's must be disclosed. But you got it from a long-term serious relationship introduced at a church social, remember.

Couldn't believe how hard Cary came down on a guy who seems essentially shy and rather uptight about sex. Maybe the thought of a threesome is just too far outside his moral territory. Didn't she notice up to now that he's sexually conservative (and she isn't)?

I think this whole episode was a blessing in disguise. Sooner or later, the deep basic differences in their core values (which always include sex) would have torn them apart. Better it should happen now, rather than five years down the road with two little kids wide open to the emotional damage of a messy, hurtful breakup.

Nobody with a lick of common sense would argue that BF doesn't have the right to find a GF who lives up to his standards, whether we agree with those standards or not.

The problem is that BF went on a "rampage" and made LW feel bad about her past - a past she apparently didn't think much of until he made it an issue.

If he didn't like her past, what should his reaction be? If he wants to live his life according to certain standards and discovers his GF isn't up to those standards (the idiotic "damaged goods" philosophy men apply to women all the time), what should he do?

Go on a rampage and make her feel worthless? Or dump her and move on to find somebody better for him?

BF sounds like a jerk. LW can do better.

Not every woman who's a "slut" is wild, uninhibited, and good at sex, and not every (relative) virgin is frigid, repressed, and bad at it. Don't make sweeping generalizations. In my experience (7 lovers so far), self-confidence and attentiveness matter a lot more. I've only slept with one women who admitted to a promiscuous sex life, and she sucked in bed - she was by far the worst I'd ever had. Conversely a woman who at age 31 had had two partners before me was the best, because one of those partners was a long-term boyfriend who had taught her well. I know plenty of people who haven't slept around but by all indications have happy, sexually fulfilling marriages, so don't act like your route to erotic bliss is the only one.

Furthermore, not every guy divides the world into Madonnas and Whores, and not every guy who does will sleep with (but not consider a relationship with) the latter. I have a friend like this, and while I think he's a bit hung up, he's honest with people about his (rather high) expectations and doesn't judge them by standards he doesn't uphold himself. Seems fair to me.

The LW could heat up a curling iron, stick it in, and sear her own flesh clean of the evil sin, and thus by her suffering, atone and cleanse herself. Or she could mix a solution of acid and scrub up in there with a scrub-brush.

I'm only half-facetious. I don't know what happens in _A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn and google isn't cooperating today, but when I was little my mother told me a girl gets raped in that book and her father either scrubs her with acid or scalding hot water or something painful to "make her feel clean" and this was presented to me as a GOOD thing. I am old enough now to realize the writer of that book meant no such thing. My mother apparently thought it was a good thing and told me this when I was I don't know...8?

There's a reason there are scenes like this in novels and people's mothers told them stories like this in the 60's as if it was a GOOD answer to the damaged goods problem. The damaged goods problem comes from a very deep dark place in people's psyche. Men AND women, or my mother wouldn't have told me that Tree Grows in Brooklyn story at such a young age. In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, it was presented as customary in Roman times for a rape victim's father to kill her. I 'm not sure how widespread that custom was and when it died out in the western world but google around and you will find it still goes on in the world.

Another thing the LW could do if she wants to hold onto this man that badly is hop up to Mark Driscoll's church in Seattle and get baptized by immersion or find another fundie church that baptizes by full immersion and maybe the boyfriend will feel that the religious atonement rite has washed her "clean" and taken her sins away like some fundamentalist Christians believe. Before everyone hits the ceiling, other Christians believe that sins like anger, selfishness, greed, hatefulness, etc. are every bit as damning as sexual slips, only it is harder to keep those at bay and the struggle only begins when one converts. And that baptism is only a symbol. But a fundie baptism might just set this boyfriend back on his rocker, for a time. There are churches where they can keep going to confession to keep the sins washed away, and this may be good enough to satisfy the boyfriend if she keeps it up the rest of her life.

I am being facetious there. That's not how I view sins, forgiveness, and the Christian life but that is how fundies view it. So run up to Mars Hill or find one of those kinds of churches in your neighborhood and get baptized in a nice white robe if it will wash it away in the boyfriend's mind once and for all. THEN leave him, ha!