Science Explains Why Men Enjoy Watching Their Partners Have Sex
Science has explored open relationships over the last few years, and it has a lot to say about MFM encounters
It seems so bizarre, so strange, so unusual whenever people go against the usual grain of convention, breaking taboos for a little thrill in the bedroom.
Some people become aroused at the mere thought of the danger implied in public sex. Other people get their thrills incorporating pain into their pleasure, breaking down the standardized bodily conventions thrust upon us by nature herself.
But others enjoy another kind of taboo that most of us would blush over, as we announce loudly that this particular kink is totally off-limits.
“Unthinkable,” we might say, to describe the practice of partner-sharing, men consenting to allow their partners to have sex with other men.
It’s no surprise why this is the case. Since time immemorial, at least since we were able to conceptualize the sex-conception-parenthood link, men have lived in utter terror of the thought of their partners straying, finding another piece of action on the side, and possibly coming home pregnant with another man’s child.
Men whose girlfriends or wives cheated on them were humiliated, shunned, and called cowards. This stigma is one of the most enduring stigmas throughout the history of humankind.
Boundless ink has been spilled in the scientific literature spelling out exactly why men are terrified of cheating wives. You may have heard by now that men are generally more hurt by sexual infidelity, while women are generally more pained by emotional infidelity.
There’s a lot of evidence backing up these findings. Historically, men risked raising children that weren’t their own, unbeknownst to them, and women risked having their partners stray, developing strong emotional bonds with other women, leaving her and her kids in the dust.
So why would men enjoy seeing their wives have sex with other men?
Fortunately, science has some answers.
First, a bit about what men want.
The Silent Sexuality of Men
Male desire often exists silently in a loud world where our wishes and needs are misrepresented by we men ourselves and collective media that seeks to portray, and manufacture, our desire.
Most men can’t admit to the thrill they experience in thinking about or watching their partners have sex with other people.
It’s probably because men in cultures all over the planet strive to portray an aura of masculinity in a world where male weakness, especially in the bedroom, is judged harshly and unforgivingly.
They fear the swift judgment of those who would interpret this as a signal to walk all over them.
But they exist — and not just in the margins.
The Inner Fantasies of Men
One of the most fascinating glimpses into the sexual minds of humans all over the world comes to us from the 2012 book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desires (available on Amazon here).
In the book, researchers explained how they teased through an incalculable number of internet searches to find out what really makes people tick sexually behind closed doors.
Online, people are uninhibited in their searches for adult content.
The book comprised a litany of incredible discoveries about private sex and the human mind, but one of its findings that were most intriguing is the fact that cuckold porn ranked second place among the top male porn searches.
The only category that outperformed cuckold searches was searches based on age, with most men searching for youth.
A brief aside, I’ve covered some surprises in age-based searches among men in another Medium article titled Do Men Really Want Younger Women: Here’s What the Science Has to Say, and you might be surprised to learn that most men aren’t strictly interested in underweight teenage women with unblemished, porcelain skin, at least according to their porn searches.
I’ll include a link to that story at the bottom.
Wife sharing is wildly popular to a degree that most of us don’t quite comprehend. Leon F. Seltzer Ph.D. writes for Psychology Today that it’s actually the norm, not the exception, and it’s the difference between our social and private selves that makes us question if this behavior, or desire, is morally wrong.
It’s wildly popular…but why?