By Justin Lehmiller
Washington - In the wake of allegations that he spent years watching his wife have sex with another man, Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned this week from his post as president of Liberty University in the US.
Falwell has denied the specifics of those allegations, but if they're true, he would be neither the first nor the last conservative man to take pleasure in sharing his spouse or partner while he looks on, a sexual practice known more commonly as "cuckolding." In fact, a disproportionate percentage fantasise about just that happening to them.
They're not alone, of course. Cuckolding routinely ranks among the top searches on the world's biggest porn sites, as reported by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam in their book "A Billion Wicked Thoughts," for which they analyzed the contents of hundreds of millions of Internet searches. But as my own research has shown, reports of that sexual fantasy exhibit a surprising ideological pattern.
For my book "Tell Me What You Want," I studied the sexual fantasies of 4 175 Americans from all 50 states. I asked my participants to report how often they fantasised about hundreds of different people, places and things - including cuckolding.
A majority of heterosexual men (52 percent) said they had fantasised about watching their partner have sex with someone else.
One way to understand why these desires are so much more common for conservative men is through what sex therapist Jack Morin termed "the erotic equation," which he spelled out as follows:
Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement
The basic premise here is intuitive: When we are told we cannot do something that we want to do - even if we do not have a particularly strong desire for it - those restrictions make us want to do it even more.
Violating taboos creates risk - and taking on a certain amount of risk can heighten arousal and excitement. This is precisely why public sex (or semipublic sex) was another extraordinarily popular fantasy in my survey: The thrill of potentially being caught in the act amps up the intensity of the situation.
Because those on the right tend to have more restrictions placed on their sexuality in general, it stands to reason that they have access to plenty of potentially appealing taboos.
And among those many paradoxically pleasurable roadblocks to sexual gratification, cuckolding is one of the most prominent. They are really, really not supposed to let themselves become cuckolds, let alone to long for it.
According to this logic, a man who shares his wife with another man doesn't just violate social and moral dictates for monogamy, but he also violates traditional notions of masculinity. In the eyes of many men, cuckolding is the ultimate form of emasculation.
This sentiment is precisely why many on the right have taken to using the term "cuck" to denigrate men they see as giving up their own power and control, or humiliating themselves. It is also why many of them use the term "cuckservative" to refer to conservative men they see as caving to the left.
It may, paradoxically, be precisely because of all this that cuckoldry fantasies are so appealing. People on the right tend to place a very high value on their freedom. .
Resistance to restrictions, in this mode, becomes a way to reassert personal freedom, and that's a big deal for those on the right.
After all, people on the left tend to be much stronger supporters of the #MeToo movement and have more vocally advocated for models of enthusiastic sexual consent. Flirting with this taboo may therefore be why BDSM is more tantalizing for them.
In short, while the specific content of our sexual fantasies and the particular activities we pursue in our bedrooms may differ to some degree according to our political affiliations, the factors that feed our erotic desires might not be so different after all.