Pompous in panties

Dear Sasha,

I’m an intelligent, caring man who likes to wear lingerie during sex. I have been asked why I am so turned on by lingerie. It feels luxurious next to my skin and it makes a woman look stunning. To me, women become goddesses in it. By wearing it, I immerse myself in the beauty that I so admire. I also participate in an act of resistance. Women are asked to dress sexy for men, and it is only fair that they have a chance to watch men entice them in sexy boudoir wear.

Finally, while wearing lingerie, I see sex as raw passion and as a path to enlightenment. I love being with people who make the world safe and beautiful, and people who turn my flesh into steel.

Unfortunately, while I have had several girlfriends who were thrilled to satisfy my fetish, right now I am devoting so much of my time to a job I love, I am not seeking a serious relationship. However, when I introduce this idea to a partner in a fling, she doesn’t know enough about me to see that I am not a “pervert” or “gross”—words I have been called too often.

Do you know of any dating services that could be useful for me? I’ve tried several online sites (e.g. Alt.com, Eroticity.com), but I have been bombarded by requests from men, couples, pranksters etc., and my particular fantasy seems most exciting to me when I’m involved with one woman.

I’m tired of feeling like a pervert. I really want to make the world a better place and living some of my erotic fantasies gives me the energy to help others.

Dear S.I.,

Are you sure it’s not the laboured intellectualizing around your fetish that’s putting people off? If I brought a man home who started rhapsodizing about participating “in an act of resistance” to justify his freaky shit, I’d be like, “Seriously dude, just shut up and put my panties on!”

You are running up against several problems. One is that you are assuming that lingerie is enticing on anyone by mere virtue of its design. To me, a man in women’s lingerie is like a huge, showy painting by Delacroix in the lobby of a building designed by Mies van der Rohe. I personally revel in contradiction and contrast, but I can see some people just not digging it. Secondly, you are offering yourself up, in your mind altruistically, for objectification that is on par with what women experience. If that is your goal, they should be the ones who choose what you wear, not the other way around. My guess is that given the opportunity to objectify you, a lot of women aren’t going to select Wonderbra as a medium.

If you are putting yourself across online as you do in this letter, women are going to read your profile and read right through it. Let me be perfectly frank: you sound like another guy trying to get laid just the way he wants, with no strings attached, with the additional gall to make it sound all transcendent and enlightened. Perhaps you think baring your soul so poetically will make you irresistible, but to me it sounds condescending and self-deceptive.

As for the responses you’ve gotten, anyone who has any experience with Internet dating will tell you that they are besieged with requests from people who don’t fit their requirements, this seems to be the nature of dating anywhere - it’s just accentuated online because people are emboldened by anonymity.

A girlfriend who has been on the kink scene for years suggests a way of making more personal contact: “He should check out some of the fetish and kink events open to the public. He could wear, say, a pair of leather or PVC pants topped with a lacy, elegant camisole, and keep his eye out for any interested glances.” She too, warns about the flowery language, saying, “It sounds like the sort of Sensitive-New-Age-Guy bullshit that used to send me running hard in the other direction.”

Just tone down your mystical motivations a bit and accept what you are: a smart guy who likes to wear ladies, undergarments. Guess what? That makes you a pervert. That’s cool.

Got any questions for Sasha? E-MAIL: POULEDELUXE@YAHOO.COM