I've just read The Soulful Bard's intelligent and well-reasoned essay concerning Literotica's Loving Wives category. The essay, as I said, is well done, carefully crafted and informative. But I feel a need to add a bit to his essay, not to argue with anything Soulful Bard said, but to add a bit from my own perspective.

Soulful's essay concerns itself with the types of stories that the Loving Wives category attracts. He categorizes five types, from revenge to reconciliation stories and his essay seems to be complete. I would like to talk about one more way to look at a loving wives story: the reader's reaction to the story.

A few weeks ago, I authored a very short piece that in my mind was a comment about the Loving Wives category. The piece was in the "Author's Hangout" thread part of the Literotica "Community Board section. It was in response to a challenge by Lit author AMoveableBeast which asked for stories on a variety of subjects but that the stories be very short, ideally less than 500 words long. Mine came in at fewer than 200 words. My little story starts now:

Brad Hampton doodled a stick figure onto the pad in front of him as he spoke into his phone. Brad frowned at what he was hearing. "I don't give a shit," he said. "No-fault State or whatever. Do whatever you have to do. Hide it in the Cayman Islands. Wherever. She ain't going to get any of my money. You can let her have the house. No way she'll be able to keep up the mortgage payments. You got the judge on board. Okay." Brad hung up the phone. "Fuckin' divorce lawyers," he thought, "They don't know nothing."

He was lucky to have found out. A couple of thousand under the table to her therapist had led to the information. It was supposed to be client privileged, but what was all his Wall Street money for, if not to get information, legal or otherwise.

It was really simple. Maggie had cheated. Drunk or not, .it didn't matter. She cheated on him. She'd get it., get it good. No excuse for cheating. Brad completed his doodle, a rope was drawn around the stick figure's neck.

The End

For a moment, please, if you are reading this essay, stop and think about YOUR (dear reader) reaction to the short story. Are you pleased that, "good, the bitch cheater wife is going to get beat?" Or did you react in another way entirely? Have you thought about it? Okay, let me continue.

I was trying for something in the story. That something was irony, a situation where the reader will see past what the protagonist in the story, Wall Street Macher, Brad Hampton, thinks is happening.

The story is about a Cheating Wife, well, really, about a wife who has cheated. The protagonist in the story is a Wall Street type who is working at punishing his wife who has cheated on him. The Wall Street man, Brad Hampton by name, is angry and is planning. to cause his wife financial harm while divorcing her.

I attempted in the small space allotted to the story to paint a picture of Brad. He steals from the government and his wife by hiding money in the Cayman Islands. He has bribed a judge. He has suborned a Marriage Counselor by bribing the counselor to reveal privileged information. He uses his position to break the law by garnering through bribes information that smacks of insider trading. I did my very best to paint him as a reprehensible figure. His drawing of a stick figure is meant to subconsciously bring to a reader's mind the child's game of Hangman.

I was trying to have the reader contrast this Wall Street trader with his wife who apparently slept with another man while she was drunk. He thinks of her as a cheater, no excuse, someone who is getting what she deserves.

I hoped that the reader of the story would see the irony of the situation, that the real cheater, bribing, tax dodging, lying Brad Hampton is the cheater, by far the more guilty party in this situation.

Sadly (to my mind) that is not how many of the readers, not all readers but many readers of this story saw it. Their reaction (by email and by comment) was to consider Brad a hero, someone not a cheater but someone who is justified in what he is doing, no matter how underhanded and illegal it might be.

I write this essay not to argue with AMoveableFeast—his essay makes a lot of sense to me-but to point out that so many readers of Loving Wives stories approach these tales with personal agendas that conform to Brad Hampton's, with no sympathy, no attempt to look at another's point of view and with the idea that anything is fair when revenge is the point.

Two of the most prolific author contributors to Loving Wives are Matt Moreau and Just Plain Bob. I think it interesting to note that these authors in their hundreds of stories seem to have half end as revenge tales and half as reconciliation stories. I wonder how their readers react to them.