Slut, Ph.D. is a blog about sex intended for savvy folks with eccentric and deviant lifestyles and tastes. The Slut has a Ph.D. in Sociology and studies contraception, gender, sex, and BDSM. She’s also a practicing kinkster and queer polyamorist known in the BDSM scene as Cookie Monster. To request advice to be answered on this blog, please email theslut@slutphd.com.
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Please note that even though The Slut is an academic, these writings are not intended to reflect her academic opinion on the issues she discusses. These are personal opinions and viewpoints which are often informed by her sociological training.
Slut, Ph.D. 
I’m happily married. But, there’s a side of me that needs, craves sex. I have to get out and get it, somehow. So, i look up a local massage palor and get my bell rung. Then, i’m happy until the urge comes along again. My wife is beyond sex at this point in life (70). But, not me.
I’m wondering if I should try to curtail this urge or continue.
Robert
Dear Robert,
I admit that your predicament is somewhat outside of my experience. The libidinous mismatch that happens between people as they get older is often a big problem. If you’re not having sex with your wife any more, then you’re not risking her health by exposing her to STD’s with other people, and as long as you’re using condoms with sex workers, you’re not exposing yourself to too much risk either (but for Goddess’ sake, for your own health as well as that of the professionals, use condoms!). The thing is, if you’ve been married for decades, trying to negotiate an open and honest ethically monogamous arrangement can sound like way more trouble than its worth. But what if your wife finds out, freaks out, and you end up losing your wife because you weren’t being honest? If you’re satisfied with the occasional visit to a sex worker, I‘d strongly recommend having a conversation with your wife where you tell her that that’s all you need to be happy sexually and remain happily married; tell her that you’ll be discrete, and you promise to use protection, and she doesn’t have to know anything she doesn’t want to know. If you’re confident that your wife will completely freak out at this idea (admittedly, I don’t know many 70-year-old women myself, but I do know that on average, their views about sex tend to be pretty different from mine), then I’d say your realistic options are: 1. Continue to hide what you’re doing and hope that you don’t get discovered, while being careful about safer sex. Getting a sexually transmitted infection would be a great way to get found out. 2. Try to decide if sex or your marriage is more important to you. If the answer is “sex,” then just go ahead and leave your wife and find someone to have regular sex with. 3. Ask your wife for general permission to sleep with other women, and promise her that she doesn’t have to find out about it. After all, if you make the calculation that your marriage is more important to you than sex, you don’t want to do the very thing (get discovered having sex with other women) that would bring about the downfall of your marriage!
I can’t lie. There’s no easy solution to these problems. As an ethical slut myself, I want to tell you that “honesty is always the best policy!”… but really, I know that realistically, that’s not always the case. If you really believe that your wife would leave you for merely suggesting that you’d like to sleep with other women occasionally when she has stopped having sex with you herself, then you definitely should omit the fact that you’ve been doing that for awhile. On the other hand, if she finds out that you have been, and you haven’t talked to her, then what I assume is a marriage of decades is then at even greater risk. On the whole, my advice is: delicately ask for permission. Unless you’re someone who gets off on the thrill of cheating (and those people exist, unfortunately), you’ll probably enjoy the sex that you’re having more if you have your wife’s permission. But if you really can’t bring yourself to ask permission, are you willing to keep risking your marriage for illicit sex? (If the answer is “yes,” then my only advice is be careful in terms of condom use and general discretion).
There is a separate moral question here, which is, what do you know about the social politics of your local massage parlor? Are you sure that the women who work there are being well-treated and are there of their own volition? Is condom use a default policy there? If your answer to any of those questions is “no,” then you’ve got an entirely different set of moral quandaries to deal with. I could never advocate the financial support of an institution that takes advantage of its workers (I’m all in favor of the legalization of prostitution so that sex workers and their customers will both be safer). I don’t envy your situation; good luck.
To be completely truthful. I have been doing this for 30 years. I have been very careful and used condoms. Sometimes they just offer a blow job or hand job. That’s all i really want. This is not what my wife is interested in. Otherwise i’m a faithful husband. Today she’s off with the girls shopping for the day. I’ll sneak off and pay someone to give me a hand job and come back home happy for a while. She hasn’t detected anything going on. My other problem is I have ED and i can’t get it large enough to actually screw anyone. I’ve been to doctors to solve this issue with bad results. They suggest and implant so it will be hard all the time or a balloon type that i can inflate when the time is right. Neither of these options is what i want to do. So, I’m stuck with my sex life kinda on the small side. It works so far but, i’m guessing from the way things are going I’ll be done with sex in a few years anyway. Enjoy it while you can. Old age is not for the faint of heart.
I want to thank you for those lovely female condom videos. My gf finally allowed me to have oral anal sex after a bit of an adaptation of your instructions. Could i request a oral sex uses video for female condoms?
Thanks again.