Brothel mural in ancient Roman city of Pompeii

Imagine, if you will, erotic scenes where Alpha males not only blindfold, bind, and spank a wildly excited woman but also touch each other. Imagine plural sex with two or three men kissing and grasping each other’s erect organs amid their lovemaking with a woman. These are the new transgressive sex scenes in popular women’s romance novels.

Back in the prim pre-Fifty Shades of Gray era, sex scenes hit the hot talk horizon by peeking into bedrooms of mistresses and gigolos. More hidden were stories of same sex encounters. Deviations from the happily-married norm, which wasn’t actually the norm, titillated readers with the excitement of lifting the covers on forbidden behavior. Would she succumb to his seduction before the wedding? Would he, the hero male, successfully awaken her carnal desires and fulfill her unrecognized erotic dream? That was the objective, the happily-ever-after ending that remains de rigueur for all romance stories.

Scene from the 1975 movie version of the “Story of O.”

A few notable exceptions to the mundane modern history of romantic works of literature (which, sadly, critics argue are not Literature at all but rather mere tawdry fluff) have been the startling chronicles of female enslavement and its various permutations such as The Story of O by Anne Descois. Other 20^th century offerings include the works of the reportedly-bisexual Anais Nin, who explored same-sex attraction and incest, among other off-shade topics. Anne Rice’s mid-20^th century Sleeping Beauty stories, unfolding in a fantastical world of extreme BDSM, set the high-water mark for over-the-top perversion.

Unlike Rice’s books, however, more recent works exploring dominant-submissive relationships don’t stop there. BDSM is already passé. The newest hottest form of transgressive sex in romance novels is the plural relationship. Specifically, the story’s heroine yields to seduction by men who fulfill her most craven desires by making love to her–and loving her–as a group.

In the 2017 novels by author J. A. Huss, The Turning Series, Huss goes further down the path than any previous author I’ve read. The three men of the story line, all ultra-rich Alphas with killer good looks, participate in group sex with a woman who contracts for the experience. In exchange for lots of money and adhering to a rigid schedule of who gets to be with her when, the men pursue their bisexual fantasies in the guise of pleasing a woman. Huss presents these activities in a highly provocative style without draping it in any tarnishing social condemnation. These men enjoy touching each other, admit they love each other, and yet manage not to make the male-male aspect the main point of their encounters.

Similarly, another author successful in exploring plural sex is Tiffany Riesz whose Original Sinners series delves into multiple forbidden topics. Her main characters include a female ‘switch’ who enters the story line as an adolescent named Nora who is alternately mentored, seduced, and dominated by Søren, a Catholic priest who also happens to be a sadist. His previous homosexual love affair with a school chum named Kingsley continues throughout his relationship with Nora. In occasional fits of priestly conscience, Søren ‘gives’ Nora to Kingsley who then teaches her the skills to become a highly successful dominatrix. The pinnacle, although not the end, of this storyline occurs when all three end up in the same bed.

Both authors present their ideas in well-written tales full of rich backgrounds and compelling story lines. These aren’t stupid little sex scenes isolated from any greater character development. Sex serves not only to gratify readers in ways that many of us would never pursue in person but also to examine theoretical and even ideal human relationships. Such fiction reflects our innate yearning for absolute freedom in pursuing emotional and physical completion.

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There’s no limit to how far back in literary history one might go in exploring the depths of such erotic tales. The Greeks celebrated male-male relationships in poetry and in art and named the island of Lesbos as the place where female-female sex proliferated. Roman art depicting all kinds of erotic couplings survives to teach us about that aspect of their culture. Throughout the succeeding centuries, with works ranging from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to Nabokov’s Lolita, censors managed only to heighten a work’s notoriety by banning them. A major success of modern culture has been the lifting of censorship so that humanity might more fully express its sexual fantasies and realities. [Look here for an overview of erotic literature.]

1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” played by (L-R) Elliot Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, and Diane Cannon.

As recently as the ‘free sex’ period of the 60s generation, however, the movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice found couples willing to tolerate extramarital affairs and even an attempt at wife-swapping, but nowhere in even the subtext was there a hint that Bob and Ted would consider touching each other.

What does it mean now, if anything, that women’s romance novels reveal an intense interest in Alpha males, successful, intelligent, and seductive men, who not only want to pleasure women but also each other? These aren’t gay men. In Huss’ series, these thirty-something males have shared their sexual relationships for years. They suffer no guilt and no second thoughts about their pleasure in each other.

Parameters of their bisexual activity are obvious, however. They never act on each other unless in the process of acting on the female. The woman and her desire, her satisfaction, is the appropriate arena for them to express their erotic thrill with each other. As they dominate her, their genitals may touch and even be handled by one or the other of the three males in the relationship. They may kiss. Watching each other expose and self-stimulate their arousals serves to both trigger the men’s greater excitement as well as the female reader’s.

One of the favored features of such play is double penetration so that both men’s genitals enter the women and can be felt through the thin fleshy wall between the woman’s vagina and rectum. The woman’s fulsome enjoyment in such penetration is described but so is the man’s gratification in feeling the other man’s cock next to his own.

Not every reader enjoys such stories, as reviews of these works quickly testify. But that’s the nature of erotic literature in general, forming a rabidly interested readership on one hand and a horrified coterie of critics on the other. But the fact that we as a culture have advanced to the point where authors can openly present such ideas to the public gives hope that human sexuality can flourish in offering new and important ideas to society as a whole. What is more promising than the concept of men who aren’t afraid to acknowledge their desire and love for each other alongside their love and desire for women? Nothing could be further from the inherent violence traditionally characterized in male control of females.

Not to say that women’s romance literature offers much of interest to men. Tending more toward the visual, men’s erotic media often show a man with two or more women intent on pleasing him in all ways as well as delighting each other in various lascivious acts. Finally there’s a full set of options available for male as well as female delectation.

So-called ‘plural marriage’ such as shown in the reality TV series “Sister Wives,” is just the latest iteration of men taking more than one wife. In Biblical times, men such as Abraham had a wife and concubine. Harems featured multiple wives and concubines with varying degrees of favoritism by their husband. Mormons most famously practiced polygamy (more accurately polygyny), but other cultures around the world share wives between brothers, among other examples.

Polyamory, the practice of or desire for intimate relationships with more than one partner, with all partners aware and accepting of those relationships, is the latest actual manifestation of the new sexuality making inroads into longstanding tradition. This is not exactly the same as a plural relationship. A woman could have two male partners in a plural relationship and not be polyamorous, meaning she and her partners would not see anyone outside the relationship. Or they could all be polyamorous, meaning that while they enjoyed a committed relationship with each other, they could dally with persons outside the relationship.

The movement of a socially-enlightened population toward diverse sexual relationships promises an interesting road ahead. These are natural progressions of people freed from the strictures of ancient religious rules promulgated in the interest of preventing bastardy and confused inheritance. Old patriarchal traditions no longer hold sway over the actions of women, thanks to the advent of effective birth control. While the nuclear family may remain the norm for rearing children, experimentation even in this arena shows us that the male-female couple is not necessarily more successful than a same sex couple or even a communal family.

In her stories, Huss sidesteps the potential of her characters to form a plural family. [Spoiler Alert] Each of the three novels conclude with one of the men pairing off with a woman in a happily-ever-after. Personally, I found this mildly tragic and somewhat disappointing. Why should men who both love the same woman and each other have to yield to tradition? Why couldn’t there be a happy family with two men and a woman and their child?

Similarly, in her Original Sinners series, Riesz conforms to the expectation that true love between a man and a woman results in a monogamous relationship. But is that true? Is three always a crowd?

So far lacking in any measurable amount is literature showing female domination of men in ways that strengthen the female or liberate the man from his duty to be Alpha. Romance stories still affirm the male’s ability and desire to take care of the female and the female’s ability and desire to ‘complete’ the male’s life. These are elements women demand in ‘escape’ reading. Apparently, the more ‘liberated’ and equal women become in the real world, the more they crave fantasies where men take unerring charge in the bedroom.

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Further reading:

More than Two, written by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert and published in 2014, addresses the ethics of consensual non-monogamous relationships.

The Ethical Slut, written by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt and published in 1997, discusses how to live an active life with multiple concurrent sexual relationships in a fair and honest way. Discussion topics include how to deal with the practical difficulties and opportunities in finding and keeping partners, maintaining relationships with others, and strategies for personal growth.

Why rules don’t apply:  https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-various-plural-relationships-like-polyandry-and-polygamy-survive-flourish-in-society-Shouldnt-they-be-crushed-or-declared-a-crime-the-very-day-they-first-come-into-light

Multiple ‘husbands’ per woman (None of this material addresses male-male sexuality in polyandrous relationships.): http://jezebel.com/5981095/polyandry-is-actually-way-more-popular-than-anthropologists-have-thought