‘Hotwifing’ Is Being Sold As A Marriage Booster — Yes, Really

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.

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The New York Post published an article yesterday based on a new survey that’s just come out.

The headline reads:

‘Hotwifing’ — the sexy new couples trend that’s ‘strengthening’ marriages across the country

Now, to be clear, I don’t encourage you to read the article or the survey, but this is part of a broader cultural trend, a broader cultural normalization of polyamory, of “consensual non-monogamy.” That’s the new gross clinical jargon they use to sanitize their own perversions.

From the article:

Could ‘hotwifing’ save your marriage? 71% of kinky couples say loaning their wives out for that thing that only husbands and wives are supposed to do together strengthened their union.

Seventy-one percent. The overwhelming majority of these “kinky couples” say it strengthened their union. In reality, these are people whose unions are probably not all that strong to begin with. But they say — and these are people who are obviously very, very confused about a lot of things — that pimping out their beloved actually strengthened their union.

Color me a little bit skeptical.

Could ‘hotwifing’ save your marriage? 71% of kinky couples say loaning their wives out for sex ‘strengthened’ their union https://t.co/U2cynXcIlF pic.twitter.com/aA51Nem0Eu

— New York Post (@nypost) March 11, 2026

In any case, you hear a lot about this right now. When some people read this, they react in the old fuddy-duddy way: “Geez, these kids today. This is crazy. Can you believe what they’re doing now? In the olden days an inch of stocking was looked at as something shocking, but now anything goes.”

That’s the wrong approach. Because this is not novel. This is not an innovation. There’s nothing new about this. This is just paganism.

Our culture — the West, sometimes we describe our nation as a Christian nation — but even what we call the West is really a pale shadow of what we used to call Christendom, which was Christian civilization that thrived from roughly the age of Constantine up through the Protestant Revolution, which then starts to crack it up a little bit. But still you had a substantially Christian civilization, albeit amid wars of religion.

Then with the Peace of Westphalia and the Enlightenment, people tried to preserve Christianity but without taking religion all that seriously. You get into modernity and you’re really living on the fumes of Christendom. Soon enough that gives way to overt paganism.

Here’s what Tertullian, an early Christian writer and Father of the Church, has to say about how pagans versus Christians regarded sex.

A great line from Tertullian in his “Apology”:

All things are common among us, except our wives. We give up our community where it is practiced alone by others who not only take possession of the wives of their friends but most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with theirs.

It’s a great observation — almost Chestertonian millennia earlier. He says: we Christians are different from the pagans in that we share everything except our wives, and the pagans share nothing with each other except their wives. They won’t share their money, they won’t share their food, they won’t share their resources, they might not share their time — but they will share their wives.

But we Christians are the opposite. We’ll give anything to each other except for our wives.

Saint Jerome has a famous line in his commentary on Hosea:

Rarely does a heretic love chastity.

Every so often there is a heresy that promotes chastity, but generally speaking you notice — especially in modern religion, with wacky pastors of weird breakaway schismatic churches — they’re always promoting strange sexual practices. That’s the one common thread among all the weird heretical forms of Christianity today.

Rarely does a heretic love chastity.

What this new study reveals — the one meant to shock us with a New York Post headline, “Can you believe 71% of these kinky couples say it’s actually great for their marriages when they cheat on each other?” — is not a new discovery about the present. It reveals how ignorant we are of the past.

This is what paganism was always like.

It’s amusing when people think they’ve discovered something new. These people promoting orgies and decadence and bacchanalia think they’ve discovered freedom. “In the old days people were uptight, but now we’re free. We have free love, we’re doing drugs, we’re polyamorous.”

It makes you think: wow, no one has ever thought of that before — doing drugs and behaving like degenerates. What innovators you are.

It just reveals how little we understand the past. We pretend we understand ancient paganism. We pretend we understand what Christianity replaced. We really don’t.

A great example of this is in the Bible. In Exodus, the Israelites leave Egypt, and Moses goes up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Five seconds later, the Israelites abandon the God who led them out of Egypt and start worshiping a golden calf.

Moses comes down and essentially says: what are you doing? Stop worshiping this golden calf.

When people imagine that scene, they think the Israelites were just bowing down saying, “Oh golden calf, we worship you.” But that’s not really what was happening.

They were actually doing the same stuff modern pagans do. They were indulging in food and drink, engaging in all kinds of strange sexual behavior, revelry, and excess.

It’s the same pattern.

There is nothing new under the sun.

So when we come across these “new discoveries” about relationships and marriage and free love, what we’re really doing — wittingly or unwittingly — is rejecting Christianity, reverting to a kind of base, degraded paganism, and pretending that we’ve discovered some new revelation.

But it’s the opposite of a new revelation.

It’s the rejection of revelation.