Between the ages of 13 and 16 I engaged in bestiality with our household pets. I was a horny kid, and I guess kind of a freak. It never went beyond oral copulation, and I eventually curtailed the whole thing due to guilt and shame. I am now a 21-year-old woman who is moving toward a healthy human sex life and trying to get over what a sick kid I used to be. But I still feel horrible about my dog-cocksucking past. My questions are: Is there ever a right time to tell a partner or significant other about bestiality in your past? Will I ever be able to have a healthy relationship with a human without being able to be fully honest with them? I’m in counseling right now and it’s helping a lot, but if I enter a long-term relationship I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell my partner about this.
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I’ve always looked at it this way, MUTTS: a relationship is a myth that two people create together, and myths tend to play fast and loose with the facts. When two people create a nice, lasting myth, they don’t share every last indiscretion, bad move, and blown dog. Instead they present slightly improved versions of themselves, selling themselves not as they actually are but as the people they would like to be. No man wants to be in a relationship with someone who tells him nothing but lies, of course, and you shouldn’t present a completely fictionalized version of yourself to your lover. But little omissions here and there, little edits and exaggerations, and, again, the occasional bald-faced lie are not only permissible, MUTTS, they’re advisable.
There are benefits to this approach beyond not hearing “You fucked dogs!” over and over again. Once someone falls in love with the idealized/edited version of you, you’ll be in the position of having to be the person you led your partner to believe you are. We all wind up having to live up to the lies we tell about ourselves, and it’s this living up to the lies that often makes us better people. With some effort, and provided the lies weren’t huge, we can make them come true.
I’ve always assumed that everyone who reads this publication also reads the Wall Street Journal, so it didn’t occur to me to bring Julia Angwin’s recent story on penis-enlargement pills (“Some ‘Enlargement’ Pills Pack Impurities,” August 13, 2003) to the attention of my readers. But just in case some of you missed it, here are the dirty bits: In a lab analysis commissioned by the Journal, various “enlargement” pills were found to contain “significant levels of E. coli, yeast, mold, lead and pesticide residues.” E. coli is a bacterium found in shit, LALD, so the high levels of it in the pills studied indicated “heavy fecal contamination,” according to Michael Donnenberg, MD, head of the infectious-diseases department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Oh, and the amount of lead in the pills “surpassed the limit set by California’s strict labeling laws for ‘chemicals causing reproductive toxicity.’”
