Lisa Schiffren truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

I did not want Corner readers to miss out on Fred Schwarz’s fascinating post at the Media Blog on the new rules for single women and sexual adventures. Noting Maggie Gallagher’s reference to the "jaw dropping" idea that monogamy in gay marriage can include "the odd threesome," he points out that this is also increasingly common in heterosexual culture. He writes:

In the June issue of Glamour, under the heading “5 things to say no to,” item 1 is: “Any threesome in which you’re committed to one of the other two.” If you’re not committed to one of the other two, presumably, Glamour would say: “You go, girl!” Admittedly, this advice is mostly directed at single women, so they do have some respect for marriage, especially when in item 4 the magazine turns suddenly and mysteriously prudish by telling its readers to avoid “Married men. Seriously.”

The question is, is it mainstream behavior for women to have threesomes? If so, how did that become the norm? If not, why would the editors at Glamour write as if it is the norm? There is no serious data on such things.

We’ll stop here to point out that Glamour is not exactly Foreign Policy or Actuary Today, so it’s possible that, no, there is no serious data on the prevalence of the three-backed beast outside of male fantasies and possibly David Vitter with a $500 gift card and his wife out of town. I tend to think that articles like this are meant to be titillating and more along the lines of private fantasy fodder to be whispered into the ears of guys like Mr. Lisa Schiffren in order to better speed up the whole ordeal because there’s a Barneys catalog on the bedstand and it’s not getting any younger…

Schiffren doesn’t quote this part of Schwarz’s post:

Still, one has to wonder. At National Review we are often told that opinion journals contain so few ads because advertisers don’t want to be associated with anything controversial. Now, Glamour certainly has no trouble selling ads; its issues are as fat as its models are thin. Evidently, then, the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to have sex with two people at once, as long as they’re both strangers, is now considered entirely mainstream.

Have these people ever looked at women’s magazines before? "His secret fantasies and how you can fulfill them…", "Readers share their steamiest secrets!", "Turn your guy into a sex genius" "Two wetsuits and a dildo: Do’s and dont’s!"

Whoops, Sorry. That last one came from the Liberty University Alumni Report proving that, even with fundamentalist Christians, love is in the air… even if it’s dangling from an overhead beam.

While National Review could certainly use a little somethin’ somethin’ like that to bring in the big advertising bucks, I don’t think that that is where Kathryn Jean Lopez, Mona Charen, Kate O’Beirne, and Lisa Schiffren’s talents lie, if you known what I mean and I think you do and probably wish I hadn’t brought it up.

But let’s get back to Lisa who, when not using her Hubble Telescope of Fashion Empowerment to check out the latest trends, goes small screen and reads the sexual tea leaves as embodied by Samantha from Sex and the City:

The people responsible for making threesomes seem ubiquitous among young women are, among others, the writers and producers of Sex in the City. Samantha had at least one such episode, in which she decided to invite a younger woman into the bed she shared with her on-and-off boyfriend, whose name I have forgotten, as a birthday present for him. It was cringe-inducing. We were supposed to notice that the boyfriend was more interested in the younger woman than was comfortable. And we were also supposed to notice that even the entirely sexually-liberated and omnivorous Samantha felt a twinge of jealousy.

So they were trying to tell us that it was bad.

Or not.

One real difference between the movie and the original show is that the movie portrayed the characters as middle-aged women, with all that implies for their happiness and desires. The original HBO series was frequently, and I always thought correctly, said to be written by gay men, who projected a lot of the norms and behavior of gay culture onto the female characters. This was especially the case with Samantha, whose voracity, promiscuity, and utter lack of guilt, shame, or desire for something deeper than sex was a better representation of a type of gay man than any common type of woman.

Yes. Only gay men are voracious and promiscuous, lacking guilt or shame. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they will absolutely will not stop, ever. They are Sexual Terminators.

The rest of us guys? We’re just want to cuddle.

Talk about your unrealistic fantasies…