LW Notes: The Amityville Whorer

(All that having been said, engineers and soldiers often seem to end up being cuckolded, while salesmen and gym trainers seem inordinately likely to be fucking someone else's wife. Take from that what you will.)

It's worth noting that, while this funhouse mirror hero/villain pairing is less common in horror films, the disproportionate strengths and weaknesses are consistent. Some things to consider:

 Have you ever noticed that the victims in Nightmare on Elm Street movies are sleep deprived, while Freddy Kruger always seems to have just consumed six cups of espresso and a half a key of coke?

 How about the fact that Frankenstein's monster generally kills people a lot smaller than him?

 Or that Jason Voorhees' victims are usually city kids who don't know a shovel from a rake or a chainsaw from an axe, while he is incredibly adept at finding his way through the forest and wielding a variety of agricultural implements?

 Or that thousand-year-old demons (The Exorcist, The Children of the Corn, and pretty much every demonic possession movie) tend to go after naïve, ignorant young kids?

 Or that you rarely see zombies taking on a similarly-sized swarm of non-infected humans?

I could go on, but the point is clear: In both horror stories and Loving Wives stories, the protagonist and the antagonist are horribly mismatched. The victim is almost always confronted in a vulnerable setting, and forced to fight with unfamiliar tools. For men who are taught that manliness at least partially involves always being prepared for any conflict, this surprise attack is particularly demeaning.

Side Note: Physical Violence

Large-scale physical violence against the husband is a rarity in Loving Wives stories. Sure, there may be a punch in the stomach here or there, and—in one common trope—the husband may be zip tied to a chair and forced to watch his wife engage in unspeakable acts. But it's worth noting that the punched husband generally gets up again, and the zip tied husband generally escapes and goes on to wreak havoc. There are exceptions, like Carvohi's "The Battered Spouse" and Soldierboy 50401's "Grab Life by the Balls," but they are few and far between.

Why is that? My guess is that authors avoid systemic violence for two reasons. The first is agency: A basic feature of a cheating wife story is that the husband has the ability (and therefore the responsibility) to fix the problem. Most of the story, in fact, focuses on his actions to resolve the situation—and therein lies a large part of the horror. Despite the main character's best efforts, he is unable to repair his relationship. For at least part of the story, he is forced to watch his life crumble, until he realizes that there's nothing he can do but pick up the pieces (and often wreak divine vengeance upon everyone who tore his life down!).

By comparison, when a man is completely bullied, he no longer has any agency. He has lost the room to maneuver, which makes the story (and the main character) somewhat irrelevant. He is no longer an actor—now, he is just an object that is acted upon. While that's brutal, it lacks the emotional impact of trying—and failing—to save the most important thing in your world. It's worth noting that, in these sorts of stories (see the two mentioned above), the betrayed husband himself often becomes a secondary character who must be rescued by a stronger man.

I'd argue that the second reason that violent control stories are rare is because violence is, traditionally, a familiar space for men. Men tend to have more muscle mass than women, and are often taught to handle their problems directly (and often physically). Being forced to handle problems strategically—to pick your way through a cloud of deception and manipulation—is a less common, less comfortable space. By denying men the traditional male tools of direct, physical confrontation, Loving Wives stories highlight an area of traditional male weakness and vulnerability.

The Big Horror: Vulnerability

And that brings us to the biggest horror: Vulnerability. I've mentioned that a lot in this essay—and, in the end, that's what a lot of Loving Wives stories ultimately boil down to.

In horror movies, the vulnerable character is usually a woman, which dovetails with how our society sees women. They are someone to be nurtured, someone to be cared for. They are perceived as weaker and more easily overcome, so we are not surprised to see them in danger.

By comparison, men are usually positioned as the protector, the one with the gun or the fists or the big muscles or the surprisingly extensive knowledge of explosives. They're the knight, the paladin, the invulnerable defender.

And that's why Loving Wives stories traffic so deeply in male vulnerability. Because, for men, a big part of marriage involves making the choice to become vulnerable.

Think about it: When we mythologize youth—particularly male youth—we tend to focus on the lack of stability and structure. The ability to pack everything you own into a car and drive out of town. The ability to enjoy sex without any emotional attachment. The ability to change careers, to change locales, to change your life at the drop of a hat. In short, this mythological man—like Shane or Road House's Dalton or The Hulk's David Banner (TV, not movies or comics)—is free, like a maple seed on the wind.

When a man settles down, he starts to build a life. He gets a career and works hard to advance in it. He finds the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with and sets about wooing her. He focuses his energies on his wife and family, on buying that first house, then on fixing it up. In other words, he sinks his roots deep into the ground and begins to surround himself with things that matter, things that he can't walk away from. He goes from being a seed on the wind to being a sturdy tree.

The thing trees are that they are vulnerable to being cut down.

This is a significant—and often difficult—transition. Men are taught to revere people who seem invulnerable—soldiers and firemen, superheroes and cops. For many of us, masculinity involves presenting a strong, capable face to the world as we defend the things that matter to us. Things like family, community, home, country, and career.

There's an inherent contradiction there: At the end of the day, the things that we love enough to defend are the same things that make us vulnerable to attack. There's a reason that Japanese Ronin or the Western "Man without a name" are such strong heroes: They are able to support communities and cultures without having to worry about the baggage that could potentially make them weak. They can ride into town, right wrongs and dispense punishment, then ride out again. They never have to deal with the loss of things that they care about, and they never have to pick up the pieces when the war is over.

Loving Wives stories make this contradiction apparent. Suddenly the cubical cowboy who works 60 hours a week to nurture his family discovers that it's rotting from within. Suddenly, the man who prides himself on being his wife's hero is pushed from his throne, the laurel wreath ripped from his head. Suddenly, the proud father and pillar of the community sees his world crumble around him and finds himself in danger of losing everything that he's ever cared about.

Suddenly, he's vulnerable—and his life has become a horror story.

Conclusion

I was going to leave this there, but it seems a somewhat bleak final note. Instead, I'm going to return to the point that I raised at the beginning: Relevance.

I suppose that the relevance depends on the reader. If you're a Loving Wives writer, the relevance is that, hopefully, the linkage between horror and infidelity might give you some insight into why we write the stories that we write. Why we choose to make our characters vulnerable in certain ways, but not in others. How we balance that vulnerability with certain strengths, and how the tools that we give our characters can have a major impact on the kinds of masculinity that we're presenting—and, by extension, promoting.

For readers, maybe the relevance lies in considering what it is that draws us to these stories, and what we want to get from them. Are we looking for unlikely victories, snatched from the jaws of defeat? Hard-won victories that emerge from a field covered in corpses? Honorable defeats? Realism? Fantasy fulfillment? Do we want something that reaffirms the traditional masculine roles that we were raised with, or something that undermines them in search of something new?

And maybe the students of this genre, both writers and readers, might find something else. As someone who remembers Phil Donohue and Alan Alda being mocked for crying on television, I've noticed that the definition of masculinity has shifted a lot in the course of my lifetime. That process is still continuing, as we seem to be constantly considering and reconsidering the defining factors of masculinity. It's hard, contradictory, and often confusing. One of the most effective places I've seen it dealt with is here, in the pages of Literotica, where there is a constant underlying conversation about what it is to be a man.

I would be remiss if I didn't thank the people who have helped this conversation along. The writers who inspired it are too numerous to mention, but a few have taken the time to talk over some of these ideas with me and they—including DTIverson, NoTalentHack, Jezzaz and a few others—deserve a huge thank you. If there's anything you liked in this essay, it probably came from them. As for the things you hated...well, that's probably all me!