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By Tara Knight
I went to Spain for my honeymoon and arranged for my best friend, another trans woman, to fuck my wife during because I wanted to understand why cuckoldry works as a sexual fantasy after I had already written about why it works as a political one. There are easier ways to research an argument. I ignored all of them in classic Tara fashion. And I needed a way to justify why I was watching my wife make the beast with two backs and be completely normal about it.
I could have reread Anti-Oedipus, gone back through the original “Dialectics of Cuckoldry,” pulled apart my argument about marriage and possession, and spent several days underlining books while Kassi (my wife) watched me turn our honeymoon into another extension of my workday. Somewhere between getting married and landing in Spain, I decided I would understand the problem better if I actually watched another woman fuck my wife. I also thought it would be hot, and there is no point pretending the philosophical justification came first and the horniness arrived later like a peer reviewer.
The whole thing was planned. Kassi knew what I wanted, my best friend knew what I wanted, and I knew what I wanted, which meant the supposedly humiliating spectacle of losing sexual control over my wife began with three trans women working out timing in a group chat. Traditional cuckold fantasy imagines the husband discovering that another person has entered sexual territory he thought belonged to him. I was checking whether everybody had eaten and whether the timing still worked. Patriarchal humiliation became logistics because that is what happens when a fantasy leaves pornography and has to survive contact with adults who have appointments.
This was sexual cuckoldry. My best friend was not becoming Kassi’s girlfriend. Kassi was not starting another romantic relationship. Nobody was joining our marriage or acquiring a drawer in our bedroom. Kassi wanted to fuck another woman, my best friend wanted to fuck my wife, and I wanted to watch. The fact that I loved my friend and Kassi loved her did not secretly transform the sex into another relationship, because relationships are things people decide together and love does not automatically assign administrative status.
That distinction matters because women’s desire gets sentimentalized almost immediately. A man wants to fuck somebody and people usually understand what he means. A woman wants to fuck somebody and suddenly there is an investigation into what she was missing at home and whether the sex revealed some hidden emotional deficit. Lesbian culture is perfectly capable of doing this too. Two women have sex and somebody has already decided there must be a deeper connection developing because apparently women cannot be horny without turning it into an institution.
Kassi wanted another woman sexually. My friend wanted Kassi sexually. I wanted to see what happened when another trans woman temporarily took the sexual position I usually occupied while I stayed close enough to watch. The stability of my marriage made the scene possible because nobody was actually being displaced from a home, a relationship, or a future. The displacement was sexual and symbolic, which let me examine the thing I had left underdeveloped in the first essay.
The original “Dialectics of Cuckoldry” was mostly about possession. I argued that cuckoldry humiliates because sexual exclusivity still carries the residue of property, especially inside marriage, where a spouse occupies a socially privileged relation to another person’s body and sexual behavior. The cuckold is humiliated because somebody else enters a relation that was supposed to belong exclusively to him, and the wife’s sexuality becomes evidence of whether his authority held.
The language around adultery gives away the entire game Men lose women. Men steal girlfriends. Somebody takes another man’s wife. A man cannot keep his woman. People use this language casually enough that the possessive content barely registers, even though the humiliation depends on it. The cuck is funny because something he was expected to retain turns out to have desires of her own.
A wife has been treated as property for most of recorded history, from women’s legal absorption into husbands to the regulation of inheritance and reproduction around her. Engels describes the relationship between monogamous marriage, paternity certainty, and inheritance in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State because a man who wanted to pass accumulated wealth to his heirs needed confidence that the children attached to that inheritance were his. The moral language around fidelity came later than the material arrangement that made fidelity economically useful.
Desire creates the problem because behavior can be constrained more easily than wanting. A husband could rely on law, economic dependence, religion, social punishment, and violence to regulate what his wife did. None of those mechanisms could turn her desire into property in the same way land could become property. The cuckold is the man who discovers that limit at the worst possible moment.
Traditional cuckold pornography exaggerates the contradiction until nobody can miss it. The husband watches another man satisfy his wife, the third man is presented as sexually superior, and the wife’s pleasure becomes the evidence used to settle the comparison. The fantasy often becomes grotesquely racial because Amerikan sexual culture has spent centuries attaching racial meaning to masculinity and sexual power, which means old white anxieties around interracial sex are still available for pornography to reuse as humiliation.
The first essay treated that structure as a problem of ownership because another person’s desire cannot actually become property. I still think the argument holds. What I had left unfinished was why the symbolic failure of possession could become erotic for the person supposedly losing something.
Property explains the humiliation. It does not explain the horniness.
I could explain why a husband might feel degraded by another man fucking his wife. I had a worse explanation for why I wanted another woman to fuck mine and why the fact that Kassi was my wife made the whole thing more sexually charged. I wanted to know why temporary displacement could become exciting when I had arranged it myself, why jealousy could remain present without becoming a demand to stop anything, and why another person gaining sexual access could still mean something after everyone involved had rejected the idea that Kassi belonged to me.
The useful question became how I had learned to want it.
Calling it a kink would only name the result. It would not explain why marriage intensified the fantasy, why watching mattered, or why a scenario built from the cultural meaning of betrayal still worked after everybody had planned it together. I wanted the production history.
I. The Field Study, Unfortunately
The first thing planning the scene taught me was that desire gets much less mysterious once somebody has to organize it. Popular culture likes spontaneous passion because spontaneity makes sexuality look as though it has no material conditions. People get swept away and bodies supposedly know what they want without any interference from the ordinary world. Real sex still has to happen somewhere, between people who have schedules, boundaries, bodies, health needs, and enough privacy to do what they are discussing.
Ours required all of that. It required enough trust between three women that another woman having sex with Kassi could become erotic play without creating uncertainty about the marriage. It required a friendship where I could tell another trans woman that I wanted her to fuck my wife and receive an actual conversation instead of concern. It required the kind of T4T intimacy where somebody can know enough about your life to have heard the stories about your worst ex, your transition history, and the details of your marriage and still be the person you trust to participate in something that ridiculous. Erotic life happens through practical conditions. A fantasy that feels immediate inside the body can depend on privacy, money, safety, friendship, and whether the people involved have enough control over their lives to make the thing possible. Desire develops inside those conditions even when the conditions do not mechanically determine what anyone will want.
Talking about it with Kassi turned an abstract idea into something we could actually imagine doing. Bringing my friend into the conversation changed the fantasy again because now it involved a specific woman I knew and trusted. Anticipation became part of the desire before anything physical happened.
By the time we were in Spain, the essay and the desire were already mixed together. The old theory had helped produce the experiment, and the experiment was going to alter the theory. I had built a painfully literal example of desiring-production before anybody took her clothes off.
Deleuze and Guattari use desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus to describe desire as something that works through connections rather than sitting untouched inside the individual. Bodies, images, institutions, memories, objects, and social meanings enter the process together. Their argument is aimed at psychoanalysis, although the concept becomes useful here because nothing I wanted existed in isolation from the world around me. The desire developed through marriage, sexual imagery, my own history of jealousy, the old essay, conversation with Kassi, and a friend who was willing to participate.
I did not invent the social meaning of cuckoldry. I understood what “wife” meant before Kassi became mine. I understood that sexual exclusivity carried weight before I decided to play with it. I knew being replaced was supposed to hurt and that watching your partner with somebody else was supposed to humiliate you. Pornography had given me some of the visual language of watching, while ordinary romantic culture had taught me what another person’s sexual attention was supposed to mean. I took those materials and made something personal from them.
People often respond to the idea of socially produced desire by insisting that they really feel what they feel, as though social formation somehow makes sincerity impossible. The objection does not make much sense. Social production explains how something acquires force. A desire can be socially produced and still be felt directly in the body because the body is part of the social world rather than an escape hatch from it.
Cuckoldry makes this especially obvious because the fantasy requires social knowledge before anybody can experience it as a fantasy. Nobody is born understanding what a spouse is or why somebody else having sexual access to one could be humiliating. Nobody has an innate concept of being “the cuck.” The fantasy needs a culture before somebody can make it her own.
I probably could have reached that conclusion without arranging fieldwork in Spain, although that would have required a level of restraint I have never demonstrated consistently and likely never will.
II. Three Trans Women Ruin a Perfectly Good Patriarchal Fantasy and it’s the hottest thing I’ve seen.
My best friend being another trans woman mattered because traditional cuckoldry is organized around men almost as much as it is organized around sex. The husband is humiliated as a man when another man enters his marriage sexually, and the wife’s pleasure becomes evidence used to rank the men against one another.
Women’s fidelity mattered materially because women’s sexuality affected paternity and property. A man whose wife slept with somebody else was experiencing something his culture had already defined as an injury to his status, which is why the cuckold became a joke long before internet pornography gave the figure an endless supply of thumbnails.
Then three trans women wandered into Spain and broke the casting. There was no man whose masculinity could collapse and no male rival who could prove himself more virile. My friend did not become metaphorically male because she was the third person in the room, and I had no interest in forcing a husband back into the scene through some symbolic replacement because doing that would avoid the more interesting question of what happens when the men are actually absent.
I was Kassi’s wife, my best friend was another woman, and the cuckold script remained legible because the relation between spouse, third person, and spectator was still there. The old masculine circuit had nowhere to go, which moved the erotic tension toward my position as a wife and toward the fact that another woman was temporarily producing sexual responses in somebody whose body I already knew.
Queer people still inherit heterosexuality’s social history. We grow up learning the same ideas about jealousy, desirability, exclusivity, and possession. We can reproduce those ideas with no straight person present. Marginalization does not produce automatic political intelligence, a fact queer internet culture has spent years demonstrating for free.
The more interesting problem begins when inherited roles stop fitting. I could not occupy the humiliated husband role because I was not a husband. My friend could not become the sexually triumphant man because she was another trans woman. Kassi could not function as the woman through whom two men established hierarchy because there were no men competing over her. The relation had to reorganize itself.
That made comparison between women more important. Women learn early to interpret desirability through comparison, and another woman’s beauty can become information about our own before we consciously decide to think that way. Another woman giving our partner pleasure can become evidence about our sexual adequacy because the culture has already taught us to treat desirability as a ranking system. Trans women inherit that system under conditions where femininity itself is constantly treated as something we have to prove. Passing, beauty, sexual recognition, and womanhood can become tangled together until another trans woman’s appearance feels like a commentary on our own body without her having done anything to us. There are few things more recognizably T4T than seeing another trans woman look gorgeous and having to stop yourself from turning admiration into an investigation of your own face.
That possibility was present in the scene because my best friend was another trans woman. I could watch Kassi respond to her and turn every reaction into evidence in a competition that mostly existed because I had been trained to recognize one.
The interesting part was that the comparison never had to finish.
Another trans woman could be desirable to my wife without reducing my desirability. Kassi could enjoy her without making that enjoyment into a judgment on me, and my friend could occupy a sexual position normally associated with me without becoming my replacement.
I was still watching another woman fuck my wife. Deeply. The scene was exciting because I knew what that was supposed to mean and could feel the old meaning without accepting its conclusion. I had no interest in calling that empowering because the word explains almost nothing. I had a good time, learned something useful, and patriarchy remained completely intact.
I did find an expensive earring the next morning in a place where it had no obvious reason to be, which was a much more convincing material record of what had happened than any political slogan I could have attached to it.
III. Watching Desire Move
The part I remember most clearly is the change in Kassi’s attention because I know my wife’s face extremely well. Living with somebody gives you a strange amount of knowledge about expressions that would mean nothing to anyone else, and sex adds another layer because you learn what pleasure looks like on that person.
Then you watch another woman produce it.
That was where the theory became concrete for me. My best friend touched Kassi differently because she was a different person, and Kassi responded through that relation. I recognized the expressions while also seeing them produced through somebody else and watching her moan like that for someone in a way I can and can’t make her feel is one of the hottest things I’ve seen.
Recognizing your wife’s pleasure while being excluded from its immediate cause is intensely erotic. I was close enough that nothing felt impersonal, while the fact that I was watching rather than causing the pleasure gave the scene its distance. The sexual attention had moved elsewhere, and that movement was what I had actually wanted to see.
The fantasy became less interesting to me as a story about losing Kassi and more interesting as a way of seeing her desire exceed the relation she had with me.
Possessive romance encourages the belief that intimacy means complete knowledge. You know your partner, know her body, and eventually start acting as though the person you know is contained inside the relationship. Another person can expose the limits of that belief quickly because different relationships make different capacities visible. The same woman responds differently because another person brings another history and another way of touching her into the room.
Kassi with me and Kassi with my best friend were different sexual events. Neither one revealed some hidden real version of her. The differences were produced through the relation itself, which made Deleuze’s account of desire much easier to understand than another paragraph of French terminology ever could.
It also exposed something uglier about romantic possession. If your partner’s desire confirms your value, then her desire for somebody else starts to feel like evidence against you. Women are trained into this arithmetic constantly. Another woman receives attention and suddenly you feel as though something has been taken from you. Another woman is sexually capable and your own body starts feeling like it is under review.
Cuckoldry turns that scarcity into spectacle because somebody else receives the sexual attention and you sit there watching what happens when the thing you were taught to experience as scarce moves elsewhere.
I expected most of the erotic charge to come from humiliation. A large part of it came from realizing there was nothing to subtract. Kassi’s pleasure with my friend did not erase anything between Kassi and me. My friend could be sexually desirable and I could remain sexually desirable because no actual ranking had to be completed.
The possibility of comparison remained part of the tension. I could have spent the entire scene comparing our bodies and reading Kassi’s reactions as data if I wanted to ruin my own evening. I chose not to turn the experience into a performance review of whose transition looked better under hotel lighting.
That choice was easier because the material stakes were low. My marriage was secure. My friend was not becoming Kassi’s romantic partner. Nobody had lied or broken an agreement. The symbolic image of displacement remained after the consequences associated with betrayal had been removed.
That changed what jealousy could do.
Traditional romantic culture treats jealousy as evidence that somebody cares, while some alternative relationship cultures treat it as proof that somebody has failed to become enlightened enough. Both approaches flatten an emotion whose meaning depends on conditions. A woman who depends financially on a partner has material reasons to fear replacement, and somebody whose partner broke an agreement has a real reason to feel betrayed.
My situation had removed most of that danger while preserving the recognizable shape of the emotion. Another woman was sexually occupying my wife’s attention and I was watching something that could have been threatening under different conditions. Because the actual threat was absent, the feeling could become part of the erotic tension.
Sex does this with social meaning constantly. Humiliation can become pleasurable when the person humiliating you respects you outside the scene, and submission can become pleasurable when refusal remains possible. The body reacts to a sign whose ordinary consequences have been changed by the relation.
Cuckoldry gave me the sign of sexual displacement without the loss that sign normally predicts. That is where simple feminist accounts of fantasy stop being useful because the political history of an image tells us where the image came from, while the relation in which it reappears tells us what else it can do.
A wife can eroticize the symbolic violation of possession while rejecting the idea that her spouse is property. The history remains active because it supplies the meaning, and the new relation changes what that meaning does.
That is where feminist sexual analysis should stay interested.
IV. How a Desire Gets Built
I could explain the whole experience using internalized misogyny and save several thousand words, although the phrase would tell us very little about how an actual desire formed.
Saying a woman wants male approval because she has internalized misogyny does not explain the experiences that attached pleasure to approval or what the woman herself did with those experiences. The concept becomes useful only when we can describe the process.
A girl learns that beauty changes how people treat her. She receives praise for looking a certain way and starts experimenting with presentation because the changed treatment feels good. Being looked at acquires emotional weight over time, and later that attention can become erotic because worth was attached to it long before sex entered the picture.
There is no single moment where patriarchy installs a preference. The woman participates throughout the process by interpreting what happens to her and developing pleasure through it. The social world supplies meanings while she builds a life out of them.
That is how material analysis can take structure seriously without treating women as fools.
We have agency inside conditions we did not choose. Marxists already understand this in other contexts because a worker makes decisions inside a labor market she did not create, and nobody mistakes the existence of choice for proof that the structure disappeared.
Marx performs a similar operation on the commodity in Capital, Volume I. Value appears to belong to the commodity as though it were another property of the object, while the analysis reveals social relations among people appearing in disguised form as relations between things. The price is real. The finished form simply hides the process that produced it.
I want the same operation applied to desire.
“I like this” is real. It is also the finished form of something with a history.
Feminism has already done this kind of work with marriage and femininity. Adrienne Rich does something related in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” by treating heterosexuality as an institution that has to be organized rather than a preference women simply arrive holding. Whatever disagreements one has with the rest of Rich’s framework, the institutional question remains useful because it asks what keeps an apparently personal arrangement reproducing itself.
Desire deserves the same treatment, which is why Deleuze needs to become for feminism what Hegel became for Marxism. I mean that as an act of theft rather than discipleship. I want feminism to take the machinery that lets desire be understood as production and make it answer to women’s material lives.
Deleuze on his own can become uselessly airy because discussion of flows and becoming can drift away from the question of who has money, whose name is on the lease, and who has enough security to experiment without ruining her life. Materialist feminism keeps the analysis tied to actual conditions.
No single institution decides what anyone will want. Power works through repetition, reward, punishment, representation, and the meanings attached to bodies, while the person takes those materials and produces something personal from them.
I built a cuckold fantasy from thinking about possession, my own history of jealousy, my marriage, and the fact that another trans woman I trusted was willing to participate. Trusting another trans woman with something like that is its own kind of intimacy because T4T friendship can involve enough mutual information to run a small intelligence service, and I had apparently reached the level where the background check advanced to “I trust you with my actual wife.”
Then I made the fantasy real, and the experience became another condition shaping what I want and how I understand it.
I could have discovered this by reading.
I chose the less efficient method.
V. Pornography, Race, and the Problem With Preference
Once desire is treated as something with a production history, “people like what they like” stops explaining anything because recognizing that preferences exist only identifies the thing that needs explanation. The feminist question concerns why preferences form recognizable patterns and why social stereotypes keep reappearing inside supposedly private erotic life.
Capitalism certainly does not believe desire is inaccessible. Advertising studies attention constantly. Porn companies organize bodies into categories because those categories predict what people will seek, while dating apps build filters because attraction has patterns. Capital treats desire as measurable enough to monetize and political discourse still acts as though asking where a preference came from constitutes an intolerable invasion of privacy.
Pornography matters particularly for cuckoldry because contemporary porn has standardized a visual language around the fantasy. The watcher becomes sexually secondary and the spouse becomes spectacle, while comparison structures the humiliation. Those conventions can give people a vocabulary for fantasies they already have and can also expand what becomes imaginable through repetition.
Representation and desire influence each other because somebody encounters a category, recognizes something interesting in it, explores it further, and adapts what she finds to her own life. What happens in real life then changes what she seeks afterward.
Race makes the social production of desire even harder to deny because racial hierarchy has shaped erotic meaning for centuries. Black women have been hypersexualized while being denied the protections historically attached to respectable white femininity, while Black men have been subjected to a different sexual mythology built around exaggerated masculinity and danger. Patricia Hill Collins describes these forms of representation as controlling images in Black Feminist Thought, and the concept matters because those images help make political treatment appear like a neutral description of what Black people supposedly are. (I’m not gonna try and pull some shit about me watching two white girls fuck as a form of subversion because that argument is always stupid.)
Pornography inherited these histories and turned many of them into categories. Cuckold pornography becomes one of the uglier examples because racist myths can become part of the humiliation itself and older racial anxieties around sex get recycled as erotic material.
A liberal account reaches the person who finds the fantasy arousing and calls it a preference. A moralistic account calls the fantasy racist and ends there. Material analysis asks how racial power became erotic in the first place.
That is the work I want feminism doing because power becomes hardest to see once it feels like personality.
The bedroom remains political after everybody has consented because consent establishes whether people have meaningful authority over participation, while the desire itself still exists inside society. My own night in Spain is useful precisely because everybody knew what was happening and wanted to be there, which made it easier to examine the social meaning without confusing analysis with a question about coercion.
VI. Transsexual Desire and the Politics of Being Seen
Trans women understand the social character of desire with unusual clarity because everybody keeps trying to make attraction to us into a political event. A man desires a trans woman and immediately interrogates his sexuality, while a lesbian desires a trans woman and somebody else decides lesbianism requires an emergency meeting.
Medical transition changes how people read us. Race changes desirability again. Pornography has already produced categories around our bodies before many of us ever enter adult sexual life.
Then people tell us attraction is private as though everybody has not been discussing our bodies loudly for years.
Desirability can become tied to recognition for trans women, which means being wanted as a woman can feel like evidence that somebody actually sees you as a woman. Another woman can therefore become more than another attractive person because she can become comparison.
That was part of what made having another trans woman in bed with my wife matter. (And let me tell y’all I don’t know how she didn’t break the bed.) My friend and I were both available for comparison, and I could have turned Kassi’s responses into evidence of my own inadequacy if I wanted to make myself miserable. (Instead it made me have to cross my legs.)
I found the opposite more interesting because another trans woman could sexually excite my wife and still exist beside me rather than above me. I could enjoy her desirability and enjoy Kassi’s response to her without turning the scene into a referendum on whether I was woman enough.
Trans women need more ways of relating to one another outside competitive comparison because social media encourages us to rank ourselves constantly through beauty and passing. Every transition becomes content and every body becomes available for comparison, which is why every trans woman I know has at some point screenshotted another trans woman’s selfie and sent it to a group chat without a caption because the caption was already understood.
Nothing captures T4T psychic life quite like thinking “she is so fucking gorgeous” and “I need to close Instagram for an hour” at the same time.
The market loves this arrangement because insecurity creates consumers and comparison creates engagement, while the resulting anxiety still feels personal. Desire moves through platforms somebody owns and bodies become visible according to systems built for profit.
I have no interest in telling trans women our desires are false because society shaped them. I want us to understand how much of our emotional life has been made profitable to somebody else.
That is a feminist problem.
VII. Revolutionary Relationships? And Love
I love my best friend and Kassi loves her too, while she remains our friend because that is the relationship the three of us chose.
That sounds more significant towards our analysis of desire and love than it should because transsexual people are constantly pushed toward forms of intimacy somebody else has already decided are supposed to liberate us. If you love somebody deeply enough, people assume the love should become romantic. If you have sex, people assume the relationship category has changed. If several trans people become close, somebody starts talking about communal life as though intimacy has a predetermined destination.
I reject that pressure because my best friend can know me intimately, love me, have sex with my wife, be loved by both of us, and remain my friend. Friendship is not an unfinished relationship waiting for romance to complete it.
That matters particularly for transsexual women because isolation from ordinary social life often gets romanticized after the fact. We are pushed toward one another because the outside world can be hostile, then people start describing the resulting enclosure as inherently radical.
Community can keep people alive, but segregation does not become liberation simply because the people inside it share a scene politic and call one another family.
I love trans women and I want trans women in my life. I have no interest in building a politics where loving trans women requires living inside a trans-only social world. Choosing the shape of our relationships matters because so much of trans life has been organized by other people. Families decide who we are supposed to be. Doctors decide what counts as legitimate transition. States decide what relationships they recognize. Queer scenes develop their own expectations and sometimes begin treating enmeshment as political virtue.
I want transsexual women to have enough freedom to decide for ourselves.
A trans woman can marry another trans woman because she wants to. She can live alone. She can remain single. She can build friendships that never become romantic. She can have sex with a friend and still call her a friend afterward because the people involved decide what the relationship means.
That is part of what freedom looks like.
I love my friend in a way that is serious enough that I do not need to promote her into another category to prove it matters. Kassi loving her does not make her a second wife, and sex does not appoint itself relationship administrator.
Love is part of the relationship because we put it there.
The category is still friendship because we put that there too.
That ability to decide matters in a culture that keeps trying to shove trans people into a communal enclosure and then describe the enclosure as liberation. I want something larger for us than a prettier version of segregation. I want trans women to have friendships, marriages, casual sex, family, solitude, and ordinary social lives without being told that one arrangement carries more political virtue than another.
The revolutionary part of this relationship has nothing to do with my friend fucking my wife.
The revolutionary part is that none of you get to decide what that makes us.
VIII. Capitalism Already Knows Desire Is Produced And Sells it back
Capitalism already behaves as though desire is produced because contemporary markets are extremely good at encouraging people to express desire when that expression creates something sellable. Older forms of power relied heavily on prohibition, and those forms still matter around abortion, trans healthcare, sex work, and bodily autonomy. Contemporary power also encourages people to discover an identity and then buy whatever is required to make that identity visible.
A sexual subculture becomes legible and companies learn how to sell to it. A kink gets a name and eventually develops merchandise. Capital has no deep commitment to sexual conservatism because desire only has to remain monetizable. That complicates the idea that sexual liberation automatically functions as rebellion against capitalism. Pornography depends on novelty, dating apps depend on continued searching, and social media depends on self-display. Transgression can become a product as easily as respectability can.
The second half of Anti-Oedipus matters here because Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as capable of dissolving older codes and capturing what becomes available afterward. Capital does not need to preserve a taboo if breaking the taboo creates a profitable market. Feminism needs that insight because women can gain real freedoms while entering new systems of discipline. A trans woman can gain unprecedented visibility and become subjected to constant algorithmic comparison, while pornography can loosen old taboos and standardize new expectations about what sex should look like. Personal freedom and social capture can coexist inside the same development.
That is why I resist describing individual sexual choices as empowering. The word tends to collapse too much history into how one person felt. My cuck scene had no grand emancipatory significance. It gave me a useful experience of desire moving differently inside my marriage.
I have no interest in turning my vacation into a political program and insisting everybody else should organize her relationship the same way. Humans are already bad enough about deciding that whichever arrangement currently makes them happy reveals the natural destiny of the species. Materialist feminism should ask what the relation actually does and what conditions make it possible, then stop trying to make everyone’s bedroom prove a theory.
IX. What Feminism needs to Steal
What Hegel was for Marxism, Deleuze needs to become for feminism because Hegel gave Marx a way of understanding relations through movement and Marx forced that method into material production. Feminism can take the account of desire as productive and force it into the material organization of women’s lives.
Feminist politics has developed a strange relationship to desire because one tendency becomes suspicious whenever women want things formed inside patriarchy, while another protects desire from criticism by declaring preference private or authentic.
Women still desire through the world that formed us.
We remain active participants in that formation. This formation interacts with our desire and informs our analysis around such. We can enjoy fantasies containing meanings we reject politically and use inherited sexual scripts differently from the people who produced them.
That gives feminism a harder job than approving or condemning sex. The feminist question cannot end with whether somebody wants something because consent matters precisely because women need meaningful authority over what happens to our bodies. Once that authority is established, another question becomes available. What made this desirable?
Ask it about pornography, jealousy, passing, or cuckoldry.
Understanding a desire does not require getting rid of it. I can explain how patriarchal possession made cuckoldry sexually intelligible without losing my interest in cuckoldry.
Human beings can know things about ourselves without turning knowledge into prohibition.
Feminism should be able to handle that.
Validation talk cannot do much with this because “your kink is valid” eventually leaves us asking what comes next. The language emerged from legitimate resistance to shame and pathology, but it became much less useful once it started functioning as a way of ending analysis.
I do not need feminism to reassure me that getting cucked is valid after I personally arranged the experience and enjoyed it.
The interesting question is how a fantasy produced within the history of patriarchal marriage became pleasurable inside a marriage between trans women where the third person was another trans woman and none of us wanted the hierarchy the fantasy inherited.
That actually teaches me something.
X. The Experiment Eats the Theory
The strangest part of the experience was realizing afterward that planning it had already proven the argument I thought the night itself would prove because I had imagined a clean sequence where theory came first, an experiment followed, and analysis arrived afterward.
Nothing happened that neatly.
The original theory had changed my desire before the experiment began. Writing about possession made me more interested in the erotic possibility of giving up the symbolic claim. Talking to Kassi changed what became imaginable, and talking to my friend changed the fantasy from an abstract scenario into a relation involving a specific woman. The actual experience then changed how I understood the original essay.
Theory entered desire, desire produced a night in Spain, and the night changed the theory.
The desire changed through books, marriage, friendship, sexual history, and the kind of T4T intimacy where somebody can be snorting k off your tits the same day as they drop a callout doc for fucking up your kittenself pronouns
I changed while participating in the production, which is why the autonomous individual is such a weak starting point for feminist sexual theory. The individual is real and she has a history. Her body learns through what happens to it.
That does not make desire infinitely programmable because nobody gains the right to redesign another person’s sexuality according to feminist theory. Understanding production means understanding conditions and recognizing that different social relations give future desires different terrain to develop on.
A society where women have greater economic independence changes the stakes of marriage. A society where trans women are treated as ordinary women changes what sexual recognition has to carry.
We cannot know every result in advance.
Liberation should give women enough material freedom to find out.
XI. The Redux
The first “Dialectics of Cuckoldry” was about the impossibility of owning another person’s sexuality, while the redux is about the impossibility of understanding desire as though it were private property because possession explains why another person fucking your wife can signify humiliation and desiring-production explains how that humiliation becomes erotic material.
The old meaning remains inside language and fantasy after we reject its political authority, while people can use those meanings differently depending on the relation they build around them.
My experience in Spain belonged somewhere inside that transformation because I occupied the cuck position without becoming a failed man, my best friend occupied the third position without becoming a male rival, and Kassi’s pleasure did not have to rank anyone. The sex stayed sexual and the marriage stayed romantic, while the humiliation became erotic because there was no actual threat behind it.
The supposed loss of control required my active cooperation and several messages confirming the time.
The old script was recognizable and still behaved differently because the people inside it had changed.
Feminism needs a theory capable of examining that without deciding whether the sex receives political approval because women are going to desire things formed inside a world shaped by patriarchy. We will inherit sexual meanings and sometimes use them differently. Pornography will shape fantasy and capital will monetize experimentation.
Those contradictions are exactly what feminist analysis has to explain. That is what I want Deleuze for.
I want a way of following desire through social relations without reducing women to passive victims of ideology and without declaring desire politically untouchable the second somebody experiences it sincerely. Materialist feminism can then ask who has power, what conditions made the relation possible, and what changed when the people inside the relation changed.
Those questions give us a politics capable of surviving actual women, which matters because women are never going to become theoretically convenient and I certainly did not. I went to Spain right after getting married, arranged for my best friend to fuck my wife, watched another trans woman give Kassi pleasure because I found the whole thing extremely hot, and came home convinced that the experience had clarified a problem in materialist feminism. I could have written a literature review, although no dissertation committee on earth would have approved the methods section I actually used.
The literature review also would not have shown me that the theory helped produce the desire and the desire changed the theory because the distance between the two had never been as large as I thought.
Desire grows out of a world already full of meaning and becomes personal because we are the people living it. Feminism should be curious about how that happens. For me, the answer involved marriage, sexual possession, being a trans woman, loving another trans woman, trusting another trans woman enough to involve her in something ridiculous, years of thinking about jealousy, a honeymoon in Spain, and the unfortunate influence of French philosophy. It also involved the kind of T4T friendship where somebody can know your transition history and your most embarrassing ex before somehow ending up fucking your wife as part of a theoretical demonstration.
I planned the entire fucking thing for an article, and in retrospect the planning may have been the article.
Works Cited
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990). Used for the controlling-images argument concerning racialized sexual representation.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Used for desiring-production and for the account of capitalism dissolving older social codes while capturing what becomes available afterward.
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Used for the relationship among monogamous marriage, inheritance, and paternity certainty.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Used at the level of method for understanding social forms through the relations and movement that produced them.
Tara Knight, “Dialectics of Cuckoldry,” Bundle of Styx. The essay this one is a sequel to.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867). Used for commodity fetishism and the appearance of social relations as properties of things.
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980). Used for the institutional account of heterosexuality.