In yesterday’s fine article on same-sex marriage, Maggie Gallagher quoted a Massachusetts man who said that “most married gay couples he knows are ‘for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.’” (As long as it’s casual, that’s OK, evidently; wearing dinner jackets would transgress the sacred bounds of matrimony.) Ms. Gallagher was incredulous, and understandably so; yet judging from our popular press, the idea of threesomes is no longer all that outré in the straight community either.
In the June issue of Glamour, under the heading “5 things to say no to,” item 1 is: “Any threesome in which you’re committed to one of the other two.” If you’re not committed to one of the other two, presumably, Glamour would say: “You go, girl!” Admittedly, this advice is mostly directed at single women, so they do have some respect for marriage, especially when in item 4 the magazine turns suddenly and mysteriously prudish by telling its readers to avoid “Married men. Seriously.”
Still, one has to wonder. At National Review we are often told that opinion journals contain so few ads because advertisers don’t want to be associated with anything controversial. Now, Glamour certainly has no trouble selling ads; its issues are as fat as its models are thin. Evidently, then, the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to have sex with two people at once, as long as they’re both strangers, is now considered entirely mainstream.