My husband was sexually predatory. Now he's playing the victim: Bad Advice Friday paid subscriber bonus

A woman's husband triggered her during sex. Now she's comforting him--and the sex 'experts' she contacted agree he deserves her support.

Bad Advice Friday is a twist on my usual Feminist Advice Friday. In this semi-regular column, I look at the bad advice other columnists have given. The bad advice is often rooted in patriarchal norms, in the idea that women’s emotions really don’t matter, and in the cultural practice of centering men’s desires at the expense of women’s needs. You can find a complete list of previous bad advice columns here.

The problem

I once again find myself addressing the bad advice on Slate’s How to Do it column. When we last left the fearless authors of this column, they were shaming a woman for expecting honesty from her husband. Now they’re here to remind us that in a heterosexual relationship, comfort and support flow in one direction, and one direction only. A reader explains:

We were…sort of teasing each other [during sex], and I put my knees around his hips to keep him from entering me, and he said, “You think you can stop me from getting in?” as a joke, but it was like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over me.

Did her husband do what any actually decent man would do and immediately apologize and tend to her needs? Oh no. Like any other fake nice guy, who cares more about being perceived as nice than actually behaving nicely, he decided he was the real victim here:

He said I am entitled to feel however I feel but that I made him feel like a rapist and that he was still processing. I feel terrible as I would never want him to think I feel that way about him, but I also think it’s important for us both to be able to speak up about things in and out of the bedroom.