Note, I do not stand against polyamory, but feel it gravely misused and tritely misunderstood. That said:

I think my ex-husband is actually on a subconscious mission to become Hef. Our marriage was fraught with his mutually overly affectionate female entourage that since our divorce has regained sexually explicit momentum and reached, in my somewhat heartbroken opinion, new lows of his enduring fascination with general close-to-home raunchiness. He wears self-made t-shirts that say 'I love brainy chicks' but manifests no such thing in the image icons of his female admirers that heavily pepper his digital desktop.

Three years prior to my ex-marriage, I also dated a man with a porn collection to rival the Mormon family-tree archives. (Ok, I'm exaggerating. A little.) He doesn't believe it's a sickness, but I, knowing what I do of his history, think the habit a disjointed, longstanding effect of something deep in his psyche. And while the knowledge of my ex-husband's source of dysfunction still eludes me (due to equally secretive emotional underpinnings), it still adamantly shocks and tends to burden me heavily.

I'm not talking about porn; I'm speaking of the widely-accepted version of masculinity and its dark, dispersed freckles of porn-obsessed, virile, 'variety-loving' males. When a woman shops 'til she drops, pleasure-seeking and sniffing in an exercise of ongoing self-recreation, she is deemed a shopaholic in most philosophical circles. However, in the throes of parallel porn-hoarding passion, men are typically still labeled quite normal, or average, or worse...excused as perfectly acceptable and probably sex-deprived mates.

I beg to differ. Every couple has issues, as does each individual. But when a man seemingly 'prioritizes' his wife by keeping secrets, he may actually love her, yes, as does a father who keeps his smoking habit out on the back porch. This does not mean he's healthy, however; and believe me, a woman deeply in love with such a man can tell the difference.

I am a very intelligent woman who still loves and cares for a homegrown, self-made emotional smut-magnet. I don't hate men like him, including the twentieth-century Playboy godfather of them all, but I find no emotional stability or conceptual development in intimately tolerating such rampant psychological abuse. Some would disagree with the 'abuse' factor, and I'm not calling for a smut-burning festival any time soon. But do I think the world would be better off with some serious self-moderation? Yes. Feminine enlightenment? For sure. Without Hef? I certainly don't need him.

Then again, he surely doesn't need me.

Most people, especially rich ones, will never deviate from whatever deviation they know, particularly if the thing established wealth, worth, or some form of self-confidence in the first place. The same applies to our 'models' of uninhibited society, whether Super, super-tan, or super-stupid. Whatever props a guy or girl gets without having to try, or without having a brain, are usually frightfully welcomed. Cultivating a sustainable, edible, flowering garden is a lot more work than slapping bargain-priced plants in a few pretty pots...and the worst part? There are always more plants blooming just a hint long enough that are vying for those spots when the neglected ones die.

This might be the one thing I hate about the relative heavens and hells of current Earth. It's not the porn I despise, though I'm not one to embrace it for reasons explanatorily lengthy; it's the stoic hypocrisy, underlying seediness and overwhelming theme of betrayal that pervades many male-female relationships. It's also something called mediocrity, a world in which crap is king, where good ideas can go bad once distended by overfunding or otherwise 'popular' support. I don't hate Celine Dion or Anne Geddes, but I neither listen to their music or buy their calendars, respectively. I mention these superstars of best-selling arenas (and preclude infinite others) not because they lack talent or drive or just reward. I bring them up because, like Hef, they are not only evanescent kings and queens, but ironically, slaves of very transitory fortune.

What has all this to do with my ex's fascination? I am a lover of true love, whether only of the utmost self, or of more than one other to share it with. I think we as humans forget that we are animal by nature, but employ the irresponsibility and convenience of both, at free will, to the detriment of real progress and growth. Such as I see it, from a viewpoint more akin to a four-year-old's than a thirty-something woman's, I am ultimately more vulnerable than I'd like to the disheveling 'reality' of innate disrespect.

I know plenty disagree that tit-collecting and psychological whoring are inherently unfashionable, and that's fine, as I hope not to know many of them too personally. But when it comes down to me, and the deep roots steeped and buried in indescribable empathy, I am far less than tolerant. I have quietly accepted for the time, with a sick feeling, that something is wrong, but am working ineffably not to let it be something wrong with me. What those with deniable bad habits would have us believe is that value is attached to (or detached from) such things. I for one, though not religiously, am not as fooled by social and psychological cluck; though who am I but just a small statement to the almost desperate contrary?