I’m a 42-year-old straight guy, married 15 years, no kids. I love my wife and have remained faithful. Recently I opened a Second Life account and created a female avatar for myself because, though I’m straight and comfortable with my gender and sexuality, I’ve always fantasized about being transformed into a beautiful woman and having sex with other beautiful women. SL allows me an opportunity to explore this fantasy of being a lesbian and also lets me engage in types of fantasy sex play I would not normally do in real life, such as BDSM, multiple partners, and anonymous sex.
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My wife knows I have an SL account, but that’s it. She’s made it clear that she considers sex in SL to be adultery. I disagree. I see it as a form of user-controlled porn–so long as I follow the three rules above. I only go on SL when she isn’t at home, and I don’t spend time in SL when I could be with her. We have a normal sex life, although she’s not as GGG as she was when we were first married. She’s grown more conservative–personally and sexually, not politically–as she’s grown older. I love my wife very much, and I want my marriage to last. But sexually I’m more adventurous than my wife, and SL allows me to express that side of myself without any RL adultery.
First, SLINORLA: you’re in a marriage, not a court of law. You don’t have to tell your wife the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God. No marriage–no civil union, no domestic partnership, no semiregular hookup–would survive long if each partner made a full confession of the previous day’s minor betrayals at breakfast.
Ever since Oedipus gouged out his eyes, LAFFS, conventional wisdom has held that it’s better to err on the side of not fucking your father’s wife. Oedipus’s dad was married to Oedipus’s mom, granted, but if Sophocles were writing plays about today’s blended families–and it’s a shame that he’s not–a 17-year-old Oedipus with a tickling fetish and a cock tease for a stepmom would doubtless come to a bad end.
Milton may be a closet case, but Ricardo engaged in flippantly transgressive banter with the wrong person. Why would he mention masturbation to a coworker who’s clearly fucked-up about sex? You and Ricardo’s other “bros” can still save his job, however–just walk into HR en masse and pull an “I am Spartacus!” Tell HR that you’re all guilty, each and every one of you, of sending flippantly transgressive IMs to one another. HR won’t be able to crucify all of you at once–they can’t fire everyone, right?–and will opt for extracting an HR-face-saving/Ricardo-job-saving promise that the transgressive banter will stop.
