Exhibitionists are made, not born. Children have no shame in their nakedness. However they may come to be conditioned to associate exposing their bodies with social transgression though, they've been with us for a while.
"The men played on pipes of lotus. the women on cymbals and tambourines, and such as had no instruments accompanied the music with clapping of hands and dances, and other joyous gestures. Thus did they while on the river: but when they came to a town on its banks, the barges were made fast, and the pilgrims disembarked, and the women sang, playfully mocked the women of that town and threw their clothes over their head."
This is Herodotus in the fifth century BC, describing the exhibitionism of Egyptian women on the way to festival at Bubastis, the city of cats.
It may be late in the game to point out that my wife Kate is an exhibitionist, but it seemed like I'd missed the early signs only to have them flashing at me after Kate's encounter with the truckers. She had exposed herself several times without going off the rails as she'd done with Pat and Gene. We'd visited nude beaches a couple of times and she'd stripped off immediately, while it took me some time to adjust and peel off my own swimming trunks. That wasn't an explicitly sexual atmosphere, though. Lots of people like going au naturel when swimming or visiting a nudist camp and it's more about the freedom of nudity than about sex.
The first outdoor music festival we went to, when we were dating, Kate had asked to sit on my shoulders and I hadn't given it a thought, hoisting her up so she could see better, I supposed. I only realized she'd yanked up her shirt and exposed her naked tits to the crowd when guys started reacting and reaching up to feel her breasts. She fended them off and it was only then I noticed that five or six other women were also showing off their assets and having similar reactions with guys trying to grope them.
When I asked her later she'd shrugged it off as just going with the celebratory flow. It was a big party, she explained, and she'd just jumped in and gotten in the spirit of the moment. In any event it was a win for us both because we had hard driving sex later at home. The images I'd constructed in my mind of Kate exposing herself fueled intense sex with her for weeks.
I accepted her answer and the next concert we went to, some months later, she repeated the performance. It was kind of a turn on for me this time. Kate looks incredibly good and has beautifully shaped tits. I was proud to show her off as mine. She let herself get groped and felt up a bit this time but grew tired of it after only a couple of minutes. The men were getting pretty aggressive she said. But again, her exposure and the open groping ramped up my sex drive in the weeks afterward and Kate was well aware of what was driving me. We joked about it while catching our breath after fucking. She told me she'd be willing to run around naked downtown if I was going to fuck her like that as a result.
But at our third festival she rode it out for several minutes. Of course I couldn't see whaat she was doing- or having done
to
her- when she was up on my shoulders, but I was well aware of the male hands and arms struggling to reach and feel her up. I left it up to her to say she was finished. It was only when the surrounding crowd grew raucous that she tugged at me to put her down. Some guy behind her had been trying to pull her shorts down and was probing her ass crack and she got scared. We were in real danger of being knocked down and it briefly became alarming. Once she had her feet on the ground- and I had my hands and arms free to swing- that the feeding frenzy dissipated.
Again, once we were out of the crowd and safely back in our motel room we fucked like we were possessed. We took it for the gift to our arousal that it was and only discussed it in a perfunctory way, as a one off that hadn't led to any extracurricular sex. In fact that had never crossed my mind until later. I imagined her getting felt up and used by crowds of men, powerless to resist and finally giving in to them, giving them what they wanted. It was all vague unformed and faceless fantasy in my head but whenever I felt my libido to be lagging, imagining Kate servicing strangers always got me hard as iron.
Kate liked to dance and she accepted requests from friends and strangers alike if I was present, which was most of the time since we seldom go out to taverns alone. She had once asked me if I needed a night out with the boys now and then.
"What boys?" I answered. "I had friends like that before I met you Kate, but I didn't get married to you to spend more time with the guys. I only want to be with you. If my friends couldn't deal with that I'd get new friends."
She smiled broadly and said "Right answer! I feel the same way."
So we were secure in our relationship and she was free to dance with anyone she wanted. Recalling how turned on I'd gotten at the concerts knowing that other men were looking at her naked body and touching her, she gave her dance partners some latitude in trying to feel her up on the dance floor as long as she knew I was watching.
This was her new tease and she played it well. We didn't go to wild and noisy clubs but to local bars and taverns, usually as part of a group of her friends or mine. So these weren't venues where much overt sexual activity was tolerated. If I was off in the can or busy talking with someone Kate would shut her dance partners down politely but emphatically. The tease was for my benefit alone.
But as soon as my wife could see I had my eye on her she let the men play grab ass and give her tits a brush or even a squeeze or two. It never lasted long. She'd allow a guy's hand to stray down to her ass and enjoy its contours for maybe thirty seconds or at most a minute before dragging his hand away. Some were persistent and she'd play that game for a while, letting him fleetingly grope her cheeks, then push his hand away only to have him pinch a nipple through her blouse. Occasionally there was some dirty dancing but that too was fairly tame and brief. No one was allowed to get too aggressive or push her boundaries too far or for too long.
It was foreplay for us. We had pillow talk where we'd talk about what had happened at the tavern and about sex with others but it was no more than story time to gets us cranked up for the main event, which was exclusively us.
So this is the back story to the day Kate fucked Pat Oswald and his co-driver Gene. That was both spontaneous and a relatively slow simmer that only boiled over when she climbed into Pat's sleeper, shutting me out of the illicit sex act. In fact it was that act of disregard that shook me, not the sex itself. It really set me back on my heels. I was caught off balance. Not only had she consented to sex with a stranger without my approval -in fact in spite of my strong disapproval- she'd lied to me about several incriminating details. The only thing that held us together was that we loved each other deeply.
Splitting up was never on the table or in the discussion. I was hurt and my trust was shaken to its foundation but I never doubted my love for her or hers for me. Kate tacitly acknowledged she'd fucked up. She was contrition personified in the following weeks without actually coming right out and asking for forgiveness. I knew the what, where and how of her deceptions. It wasn't necessary to enumerate them out loud. She knew she'd betrayed my trust and how she'd done it, in detail. And she knew it was her deceptions and outright dishonesty and manipulation that had wounded me.
The most explicit apology she ever gave was to say she knew she'd hurt me and all she could do from that point on was to behave in a way that demonstrated her devotion to me.
"I'm only human, Ben. I can't promise to be the perfect wife. I'd only be setting myself up for failure, and you for disappointment. But I can't imagine not having you in my life. If you feel like I need to be punished I understand why. Just don't make that punishment be withdrawal. I couldn't take that."
I didn't answer and didn't need to. Words can be just so much bullshit while actions tell the real truth. If I were to set out to punish her or try to get revenge she could take it- Kate has a strong sense of self- but it might damage us as a couple even further. And neither of us wanted the kind of marriage that would create.
