CNN, the network known for providing hard-hitting, always-truthful stories about the current political climate, took a day off from combing the White House halls for anonymous sources Thursday to issue a bit of marital advice. And as expected, it’s just as fantastic as their reporting.
According to CNN, perhaps the best thing to do for your relationship is to let your partner sleep with another person.
No, really. The network reports that, according to a recent study by three people with admitted interest in destroying the moral fabric of society, “cuckolding” — or watching your partner have sex with someone who isn’t you — is actually good for marriages, and can have some positive benefits.
The authors David Ley, Justin Lehmiller, and “Savage Love” writer and activist Dan Savage, want you to know most people who try being a “cuck” find it a positive and rewarding experience, and that “acting on cuckolding fantasies can be a largely positive experience for many couples, and hardly a sign of weakness.”
“This fantasy has been around as long as marriage and sexuality,” says Ley, who just so happens to have authored a book on the subject of partner-swap fantasies called, “Insatiable Wives.” “But we’re hearing more and more about it these days, and more people are rejecting the social stigma against this fantasy.”
The authors didn’t actually talk to any heterosexual couples — it’s actually titled, “The Psychology of Gay Men’s Cuckolding Fantasies,” and the only people interviewed for the study were 580 men who self-identified as gay — though CNN was quick to extrapolate the study’s findings across the board.
“Overall, our research found that for the most part, cuckolding tends to be a positive fantasy and behavior,” said Ley. “It doesn’t appear to be evidence of disturbance, of an unhealthy relationship, or of disregard for one’s partner.”
One of the authors, Lehmiller, appears to have spoken to heterosexuals about cuckolding fantasies (58% of men and 33% of women, he found, had at least thought about the practice, but he didn’t get much information on whether they’d tried it). But because the practice “isn’t quite as taboo” in the gay community, he admits it might be a little more prevalent among gay men than among straight couples.
Savage was clearly enthusiastic about the issue. “It’s not cuckolding if there isn’t an element of humiliation, degradation or denial,” he told CNN. “Our erotic imaginations have the ability to turn shame lemons into delicious kink lemonade.”
The authors even went so far as to call the idea “rewarding,” though it’s not entirely clear who gets the reward (or really, what that reward is, aside from, perhaps, a sexually transmitted disease, or years of crippling embarrassment).