I was recently chatting it up with a friend of mine and the topic of threesomes came up (go figure!).   He, a self-identified straight man, was talking about the recent erotic experience he had with his wife and his wife’s new girlfriend, who also happens to be his new girlfriend as well.  Most of the conversation was about how difficult the whole situation was, but at one point he smiled, sighed, and said something about “every guy’s fantasy”.  

I was waiting for that part of the story.  I call it the Joey Tribiani syndrome, as in Joey from the show “Friends”.  Joey, like most straight men, talks about a threesome with two women as if it were Mecca, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the brass ring, a winning three-point shot at the buzzer, the sudden-death field goal, …—well, you get the idea.  This drooling and high-fiving over the girl-on-girl action is as much a part of performing straight masculinity as it is to drop one’s gaze into the plunging neckline of an ample-bosomed woman.  If the topic comes up and you’re a straight guy and you don’t high-five your buddy, you might as well comment on the draperies and change the subject to hair products. 

When my friend pulled the, albeit understated Joey Tribiani drool, I asked him if he’d ever had a threesome with a man and a woman.  Puzzled, he looked at me like I had started mixing some other unfamiliar language into our otherwise English conversation.   He couldn’t wrap his head around it.

“You mean, like me and my wife and another GUY?”

“Yeah.”

He scoffed, “No way!”  The whole idea was obviously beyond ridiculous.

I had been down this road with many-a straight men before.  Feigning innocence, I asked, “Why not?”

He put up his hands and turned his head away as if warding off a blow.  “Let’s just say, that’s not for me.  I have nothing against, you know, someone who is into that; I’m just not one of ‘em.  I’m not gay.”

I casually responded, “Well, I think a lot of women have threesomes with other women and aren’t necessarily ‘into’ women or lesbians and manage to have a great time.  Why can’t guys do that?”

His response was as predictable as the drooling and high-fiving.  “It’s just different.  Girls are already comfortable with touching each other.  You know, like girls hug and kiss and hold hands with each other.  Guys just don’t do that, so it would be weird.  It’s just different.”

It’s just different.  Right.  When girls are sexual, it’s just another part of friendship, you know, like a tea party or braiding each other’s hair.  It’s just girls hugging and kissing like they always do anyway.  When boys are sexual, they’re, well, fucking. There’s a big difference between friends hugging and kissing and friends fucking each other.  Duh! 

My friend’s explanation--girls are just naturally more comfortable with touching each other and besides, when girls get it on with each other it’s really just hugging and kissing anyway--reveals a whole lot more than my friend’s “natural” interest in girl-on-girl and disinterest in boy-on-boy. 

Catherine Waldby* points out that the hetero-masculine body is defined by its ability to fuck another and its refusal to be fucked.  The fuck-er is always the man, and the fuck-ee is, well, anything but a man.  This is why we can believe that, when two women get it on, it’s not really fucking (no hetero-masculilne fuck-er) and when a straight guy thinks about being sexual with another guy (a fuck-er), he fears becoming the fuck-ee.  When there’s another cock in the room, someone besides the girl might get fucked.

So when straight guys say “it’s just different” when girls get freaky with each other compared to when boys get it on, it’s not because it’s more “natural” for girls to be “affectionate” with each other.  It’s because sex is so saturated with power—gendered power.  A threesome with a guy and two girls is benign because the gender of power remains masculine.  The boy is the only one who is the fuck-er and the girls are the fuck-ees. 

Put another boy in the action, especially if there is only one girl, and suddenly the gendering of fuck-ers and fuck-ees gets, well, fucked up.  This is why, when there is group sex involving two men and one woman, straight men have to tell themselves that they’re “taking turns on the girl”.  In other words, hands off, bro’.  We’re just a coupla straight guys taking turns. 

It is also why many of the straight guys I know have had the opportunity to grab that brass ring—the double action of a threesome with two women (which, in reality, often involves the girls fucking each other while the boy twiddles his thumbs on the periphery.  Really.  Ask a straight guy who has had a threesome with two women) and many of the self-identified straight women I know have hopped in bed with their boyfriends and another gal or with a straight couple.   It’s no big deal.   Hell, it’s part of normative heterosexuality.   It resonates with everything we delude ourselves into believing about masculine and feminine sexuality and, more important, about power.

And this is why, with only a few notable (and much appreciated) exceptions, I don’t know any straight guys who would ever consider, let alone have, really hopped in bed with their girlfriends and another guy or with a straight couple (and by ‘really’, I mean not-just-taking-turns-on-the-girl ‘really’).  Rather than resonating with normative heterosexuality, especially hetero-masculilnity, it throws a rather large wrench in the hetero-normative gears.  In other words, it’s really quite queer and no longer mimics and reproduces that old myth of masculine sexual power and feminine sexual vulnerability.

Which is precisely why Catherine Waldby calls for feminists to develop and proliferate new cultural narratives and sexual experiences that eroticize a receptive masculinity.  Images and experiences where no longer are boys automatically fuck-ers (in power, the destroyer) and girls fuck-ees (the destroyed).  Not only would this open up possibilities for feminine sexual power as fuck-ers, but it would also open up the wonderful world of being fucked to straight men.  As Waldby points out, straight men are missing out by not allowing themselves to be the fuck-ee once in awhile.  It’s deeply pleasurable to be “destroyed” (in a good way) by erotic pleasure, something most straight guys don’t get to experience.  And this isn’t just about straight men becoming more receptive.  It’s also about straight women being open to eroticizing a receptive masculinity in their own desire. 

Just imagine characters in television, movies, novels who eroticize the receptive masculine body—women talking about how hot it would be to watch two men get it on.  Men flirting with each other and playing with the possibility of fucking each other to tease straight women and not having their masculinity diminished or called into question by other guys or by women.  Just imagine hoards of straight women introducing strap-ons into their sex play with straight men.  More threesomes with two men and a woman where everybody gets to play fuck-er and fuck-ee some of the time. Not only would this make sex a whole lot more interesting, fun, and playful, but it’s hard not to see how this might impact the way we think about the gender of power in sex.

My favorite line from Waldby’s essay is the following:  “Maybe what…feminism needs now is a strap-on.” (p. 275) 

Yeah, feminism and every straight woman I know. 

*Catherine Waldby.  1995.  “Destruction:  boundary erotics and refigurations of the heterosexual male body.”  In Sexy Bodies:  the strange carnalities of feminism.  Edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. (Routledge).