I’m lucky enough now to have a partner who enjoys both of our fantasy lives. When she sees a tall blond German looking guy, I know she’s thinking about fucking him, and I like it. She’s being open and honest with herself about what she likes and desires, and isn’t trying to be something she’s not to protect my ego. What a compliment! She trusts and loves me enough to know that I am ok with not being a 6′5″ German underwear model. In the same way, she realizes and appreciates the fact that no matter how old I get, twenty-one year old college girls will look really sexy.

Oh.. and there’s the part where she likes girls, too. That’s a good thing.

When it comes right down to it, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that a healthy sex life requires a conscious and honest admission that “ownership” of anything between two people is a dead end road.

I have a feeling that you’re right on the money on this one: this jealousy-over-masturbating thing is about control. “He’s only supposed tobe having that much fun with me!” I can sort of understand, but it’s still lame.

So I think there is a lot of both fear and insecurity involved too:

~ insecurity that you’re not as good as women who fuck for a living and have the bodies to prove it, if he’s looking at porn. If he’s not, then he must be thinking about another woman, another woman he actually knows - because if he weren’t, he’d be having sex with me rather than on his own.

~ fear that masturbating to porn is a “gateway drug” to actual sex with an actual other person. We could perhaps blame the Bible for this attitude: “But I say to you, anyone who stares at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

*There have been a few gay men complaining their boyfriend looks at porn too much too. I’ve never heard a man complain that a woman looks at porn too much. Except my partner ;-)

Also, one reason you guessed: it’s a part of that myth that my partner should be able to satisfy my *every* need. If I masturbate… that means he failed! I heard this once from a woman who had such feelings: “I should be enough for him”. Well, that explains it.

Perhaps for some people, an orgasm is an orgasm and there’s no difference (in their minds) between when they masturbate and when they have sex. At least, that’s the reasoning I’ve always told myself as to the phenomena you’re describing.

When it comes to solitary sex vs. partnered sex specifically . . .? I feel like solo sex is analogous to going off and spending time by yourself reading a book or going for a walk. Even in a relationship, most people need alone-time. Why not alone-sex too?

But our culture doesn’t see masturbation as a legitimate way of being connected to yourself: we still frame masturbation as a substitute for partnered sex — something that people do when they can’t get sex with someone else. So actually, I think insecurity could be a really big part of peoples’ unhappiness with a partner masturbating: they could be reading it as a judgment of their “performance” as a sexual partner.

But I absolutely do not get the part about how being in a relationship means diverting every milliliter of your sexuality towards your partner — and how any divergence from this is tantamount to betrayal.

I think the romantic narrative about partnered sex, too, idealizes a sexual relationship — and that partner — as being able to meet all of your sexual and emotional needs. So when it turns out that your partner has a relationship with their sexuality that is entirely independent from you, that can probably be threatening. Especially if you, yourself, don’t have a similar relationship with your own sexuality.

This is particularly true in the sexual-conservative/abstinence-only narratives about sex (which are creeping ever further into the sexual mainstream right now), in which there’s this sort of scarcity-of-resources model of human sexuality. Policing sex, in and outside of marriage relationships, is in large part about channeling what is percieved to be a limited supply of erotic capacity toward your partner — rather than imagining that that capacity is infinitely expandable. So in the limited-supply concept of sex, any sexual energy spent on yourself directly takes away from sexual energy you would otherwise spend on/with your partner. Even if in practical terms the sexual relationship appears to be flourishing.