Embracing Jealousy
One of the things I’ve realized recently is just how jealous I can get when it comes to relationships; it doesn’t matter if I’m dating the person, lusting after them, or something in between.
I get the impression that the guys I’ve seen in the recent past are the opposite. They want to know everything, and seem to find it titillating to know what I’ve done when I’m not with them. I had dinner with an ex, then went to a sex toy store, checking in on Facebook. He immediately texted me and asked who I was fucking (answer: nobody, I was getting a vibrator). I’ve had several other guys be far from horrified about my outside hookups; they wanted explicit details, whereas I recoil at just hearing the name of another girl, sure that she is prettier/smarter/hotter/better than me. When jealousy rears its ugly head, I’m not quite sure what to do, hence my break. Social media and access to so much information about our current and former (and future) lovers can help fuel jealousy, as a recent Facebook study of 308 college students, confirms. But even setting aside the Internet, unless you live in a hut with someone in the woods, they are bound to interact with other people on some level, and that can set off jealousy triggers in the more sensitive among us.
Writer Tracy Quan has been on both sides of the jealousy divide, and says, “When I feel it, I enjoy it. That's the only way to live with jealousy. You don't want to end up like Othello or, for that matter, Desdemona. Stay away from guys who take their jealousy too seriously. Feel your jealousy and then move on.”
Quan, a former escort, wrote about Tiger Woods’ alleged jealousy over his porn star mistress, Veronica Siwik-Daniels (aka Joslyn James) for The Daily Beast, stating “When a jealous, demanding lover resents your clients or your work, the tension can be thrilling and irritating in equal measures, and the deliciously toxic dynamic oh so hard to resist. If we fall for a man’s jealousy, we are falling not just for the man himself, but for our own hyped-up image of ourselves as sex stars.”
I’m not a sex worker myself, but I can see that someone might feel that same way coming into my world from outside the “sex world,” as it were; I have written about many relationships and hook-ups in easily-accessible forms, posed for nude photos, and have had plenty of strangers say inappropriate things?see my first SexIs column, “Are Your Breasts Real? and Other Questions Not to Ask a Sex Writer”.
There’s this idea floating around that anyone sexually “open,” who writes or freely shares details about their sex life or isn’t all about monogamy, forgoes their right to be jealous, and that’s ridiculous. Even Catherine Millet, who detailed a very busy erotic life in her first memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., called her second, Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.
Even fictional characters aren’t off the hook. Regarding her novels Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Diary of a Married Call Girl, and Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, Quan says, “People ask: how can the female protagonist, Nancy Chan, be jealous or possessive of her husband when she's a cheating call girl? What right does she have?”
“But jealousy isn't just or sane or part of a contract. It's a feeling. Besides, it is a huge compliment to the man. There are worse things to have on your resume than ‘a call girl thinks I'm shagworthy and she's jealous!’” says Quan.
I get the impression that the guys I’ve seen in the recent past are the opposite. They want to know everything, and seem to find it titillating to know what I’ve done when I’m not with them. I had dinner with an ex, then went to a sex toy store, checking in on Facebook. He immediately texted me and asked who I was fucking (answer: nobody, I was getting a vibrator). I’ve had several other guys be far from horrified about my outside hookups; they wanted explicit details, whereas I recoil at just hearing the name of another girl, sure that she is prettier/smarter/hotter/better than me. When jealousy rears its ugly head, I’m not quite sure what to do, hence my break. Social media and access to so much information about our current and former (and future) lovers can help fuel jealousy, as a recent Facebook study of 308 college students, confirms. But even setting aside the Internet, unless you live in a hut with someone in the woods, they are bound to interact with other people on some level, and that can set off jealousy triggers in the more sensitive among us.
Writer Tracy Quan has been on both sides of the jealousy divide, and says, “When I feel it, I enjoy it. That's the only way to live with jealousy. You don't want to end up like Othello or, for that matter, Desdemona. Stay away from guys who take their jealousy too seriously. Feel your jealousy and then move on.”
Quan, a former escort, wrote about Tiger Woods’ alleged jealousy over his porn star mistress, Veronica Siwik-Daniels (aka Joslyn James) for The Daily Beast, stating “When a jealous, demanding lover resents your clients or your work, the tension can be thrilling and irritating in equal measures, and the deliciously toxic dynamic oh so hard to resist. If we fall for a man’s jealousy, we are falling not just for the man himself, but for our own hyped-up image of ourselves as sex stars.”
I’m not a sex worker myself, but I can see that someone might feel that same way coming into my world from outside the “sex world,” as it were; I have written about many relationships and hook-ups in easily-accessible forms, posed for nude photos, and have had plenty of strangers say inappropriate things?see my first SexIs column, “Are Your Breasts Real? and Other Questions Not to Ask a Sex Writer”.
There’s this idea floating around that anyone sexually “open,” who writes or freely shares details about their sex life or isn’t all about monogamy, forgoes their right to be jealous, and that’s ridiculous. Even Catherine Millet, who detailed a very busy erotic life in her first memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., called her second, Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.
Even fictional characters aren’t off the hook. Regarding her novels Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Diary of a Married Call Girl, and Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, Quan says, “People ask: how can the female protagonist, Nancy Chan, be jealous or possessive of her husband when she's a cheating call girl? What right does she have?”
“But jealousy isn't just or sane or part of a contract. It's a feeling. Besides, it is a huge compliment to the man. There are worse things to have on your resume than ‘a call girl thinks I'm shagworthy and she's jealous!’” says Quan.
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