Hey there, and welcome to your Savage Lovecast recap and review for the week of March 20. I really really do not want to think about the Trump sex tape that it seems like we will see any day now, so I’ll ask a question at the top instead. What do you keep in your house specifically for others, either your significant other or potential dates you bring home, that you have no use for? I have ice cream in the freezer just in case, although sometimes I’ll rip into it on my own. I also keep bottled water in the fridge even though I drink from the tap, and I need to restock some white wine. How about you?
You can listen to this week’s episode here.
Dan’s opening rant is about a politician’s dick pics we did see this week – that of a 19-year-old city councilman in Texas named Cross Coburn. Coburn sent pics of himself to a Grindr match, who turned around and sent the screenshots to the city council, the mayor, and local media. Coburn stood up for himself against this politically motivated attack (and crime). The mayor and people around town are less than convincing in their defenses. It might be worth following this story to see whether this makes a dent in Coburn’s budding political career and whether his extorter is ever brought to justice.
On to the calls! A trans guy needs a pep talk. He’s losing his hair, but he doesn’t feel sexy like the hypermasculine bald guys like The Rock. How can a submissive feminine trans guy be bald and sexy? Dan points out that the sexiest thing of all is confidence, and covering up for baldness (with a combover, say) exposes a lack of confidence that is unsexy. As for sexy sub bald men, Dan says to get some kink porn.
A 27-year-old woman has been dating a man for 4 years and they have a great relationship. But she realizes that she doesn’t want to marry him, so she feels like she needs to end things. The boyfriend’s father, though, is dying of cancer and has two months to live. How long should she stay before she can break up with him? There is no painless way to dump someone, Dan decrees. The boyfriend will find fault and assign blame no matter when she ends things. It comes down to what kind of “evil” person she wants to be. Dan thinks waiting until after the father dies to break up is the less evil option here. In the meantime, be there for him, support him, but make no promises and accept no proposals. I think Dan is correct that waiting until after the father passes is less evil, but it doesn’t answer her question of how long after that she is obligated to stay. If I were her, unless being in this relationship is unbearable, I would try to make it two months or so after the father passes away.
A straight married guy has been with his wife for 10 years, married for 5. The wife’s sex drive has plummeted since her mother died and they had their child (much more due to the first) five months ago. The wife wants to keep trying regular sex, even though it is not enjoyable and a bit painful for her. Should they wait it out for a while until her sex drive picks back up, or should they fake it till they make it? Dan has been there after the death of his mother. Sometimes he went through the motions of sex, even when his heart wasn’t really in it, and caught a groove. But the pain complicates things a bit, and so Dan goes to an old standby – redefine sex to include more than intercourse. Go through the motions with outercourse, mutual masturbation, and oral for the moment.
A 31-year-old pansexual woman is living abroad in Central America for the time being. She is two and a half years sober. She’s dating a local guy. She has been initiating and having sex with him while she is asleep in the middle of the night. She is connecting this sleep-fucking with her drug and alcohol soaked blackout days. She told all this to the guy, who is great and wants to help. She wants him to check in and make sure she is giving conscious consent. What else would Dan suggest? Dan says the guy could always just refuse these middle of the night come-ons. Sexsomnia is not related to blackout sex, and our caller needs to dissociate those concepts. But the safest way to go about this is just to make a blanket rule that says no sex in the middle of the night when they’ve been asleep.
A straight poly man tried a don’t ask don’t tell arrangement, and it failed miserably. How could it ever work? Every time you leave out a chunk in your day, or smile at your phone, your partner will know. Dan, in True Scotsman fashion, says an ideal DADT arrangement accomplishes two things: (1) it allows for some outside sexual contact in an otherwise monogamous relationship, but (2) it limits the scope of that opportunity, because the outside contact has to be done in times and manners so that the primary relationship isn’t threatened. DADT arrangements don’t really lend themselves to having other partners on the side, in other words. So if our caller considers himself poly, a DADT arrangement is not going to work.
A late-30s woman recently lost her husband to cancer. She is really attracted to his married best friend, who is in a band with her. She can’t tell him how she feels. How can she cope? Dan calls back. He says it’s understandable that she would want to be intimate with the husband’s best friend, as a way of connecting with someone that the husband was connected to. It’s even worse that they’re in a band together. Dan’s advice is to get out of the band for a while. In that time, she can find someone with whom she can fuck through her grief. The caller says she isn’t interested in fucking through her grief with anyone. She also points out that the band is her way to connect with her husband – he taught her how to play, he played with his best friend, and his death kind of fueled the passion and success of the band. The last thing she wants to do is step away from the band. Dan rescinds his advice to leave the band, but advises her to spend time in the range of other men and develop another crush. Can our caller confide her feelings to the wife? It might help if the wife could be convinced that this would never happen, but that would be flying too close to the sun. Our caller should find someone else to confide in.
A 30-year-old woman has been dating a woman for 4 months. They have a great relationship, with radical transparency, but our caller is concerned that this woman likes our caller’s dog more than our caller. The latest example of this is last night, when the woman canceled a date with our caller on her birthday so the woman could stay home with the caller’s dog. Dan says the girlfriend is being radically transparent about how little she cares about the caller. DTMFA. Unless the birthday celebration was a huge thing that the girlfriend was going to get lost in anyway and the girlfriend made it up later, this is a really shitty thing to do.
A west coast mid-30s lesbian owns a dog. When she takes the dog to dog parks, he likes to engage in some humping action. Sometimes the other owners get really upset at this. How can she teach him to stop? Are the other dog parents being sex negative? Dan would continue to go to the dog park and laugh off the humping. Dan also suggests a shock collar. (Despite owning two dogs, Dan does not like dogs.) My dog Stella was never a big humper, so I didn’t have much experience with that, but she was terrified of bigger dogs off leash. I would hire a trainer to see if better socialization would help this dog out.
A man has been dating a woman for 8 months now. She has a toy poodle, and lately she has been floating the idea of having the dog in the room while they fuck. It puts the guy off a bit, but he hasn’t told her this yet. Dan seizes on a line the guy said that I thought was a joke: the caller said, “I’m sure she’s getting some sweet exhibitionist thrills out of this, yeah?” Dan suggests that if she is getting a thrill from the dog being there, that our caller might want to be out of the room instead. Dan takes the statement at face value and is shocked by it. Why is she doing this? Because she doesn’t want the dog to feel sad. There’s nothing wrong with letting the dog in. Dan arrives at the right answer, but man did he take a detour on the way there.
Alana Massey, author of the book “All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers”, comes on to discuss SESTA, the bill working its way through the Senate that is supposed to curb sex trafficking. What it actually does is amend the Communications Decency Act to make it prohibitive for sites to host sex work ads, which would basically drive sex work further underground. (The short version, if my recollection of my law school IP class can be believed: Sites that host and allow user submissions, like The Avocado, are generally immune from prosecution and civil liability for the content that they host. SESTA would make sites criminally and civilly liable for ads for sex work that appear on their sites.) Dan calls the law offensive on its face, arguing that it does nothing to make sex work safer. Massey compares the likely effects of the law to what happened in San Francisco after the site Redbook went down, which saw an increase in street prostitution. Sex traffickers are not going to the sex work sites, Massey argues, and so all this bill does is penalize sex workers who are not coerced. Massey’s article on the topic is here.
A mid-30s gay man has been with his husband for 6 years, married over 2. Before the wedding, the husband expressed his hesitance at getting the marriage license. They got married anyway, but 2 weeks ago, the husband said he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone better out there for him. They are in an open relationship. Our caller thinks the husband is his 0.65, which he is rounding up to the one. Does Dan have advice? Dan thinks the husband’s actions before and after the wedding should have dropped the husband to a 0.55 or so. The husband had cold feet and now regrets this marriage. You can only round up people who want to be the one for you. The husband has pushed the caller away a couple times now, and though couples counseling may fix things, the husband has told the caller all he needs to know.
A caller’s best friend has always been open-minded, but lately has become judgmental. A year ago, the best friend married an asshole of a man. The friend’s husband always says awful things about the caller under his breath, including calling her a whore (even though she’s only ever been with her husband). In addition, the best friend was extremely judgey after the caller told her about a man she was attracted to. Now the caller and her husband are talking about opening up their marriage, but they don’t want to tell the best friend about it for fear of being shamed. At first Dan was worried about the friend’s husband being an abuser, but he’s settled on the friend now being an asshole, and finding another asshole to be with. Dan advises finding other things to do besides hanging out with this friend.
Caller feedback! A guy’s come is like a woman squirting, and he probably isn’t contributing equally to the housework. Fleshlights are not made out of silicone. Sex at 46 for women is better than it ever was.
Thanks for reading.
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