Hey there, and welcome to your Savage Lovecast recap and review for the week of April 24. There’s no rest for the wicked, but I hope you enjoy this.
This week’s Savage Lovecast can be listened to here.
You can read this week’s Savage Love column here.
Dan’s opening rant is about the Trump administration’s crackdown on comprehensive sex education and the comeback in abstinence education. Under Obama, teen pregnancy and STIs had fallen to record lows because of comprehensive sex ed and greater access to contraception. Now, an abstinence-only educator is in charge of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. It’s like Trump said: The. Best. People. Dan then goes to a roll call of Republican lawmakers paying their mistresses to get abortions. Republicans didn’t start electing officials at odds with their morals in 2016.
On to the calls! A straight man somehow found a girl in a male-dominated outdoor sport they both played. After they got to know each other and slept together, she told him that she had an open long-distance relationship with another guy. Our felt like he got hit by a train. She hasn’t been in a monogamous relationship in six years, but he wants to ask her to be monogamous with him. Is that fair? Sure it’s fair, Dan says (he guesses the sport is jousting), but it’s just as fair that she ask that he be okay with a nonmonogamous relationship. The way to approach it is not to treat this as forever – say you want to be monogamous with her for a year, and see where it goes.
A 25-year-old woman is engaged to be married in three months. She never had any doubts about it – until now. They are in an open relationship with full disclosure. A few weeks ago, she hooked up with a lesbian coworker, they had the most amazing sex, and now she thinks she’s falling in love. Our caller knows that there’s nothing her fiancé could say that would cause her to stop seeing the new girl. Should she call off the wedding? Dan chalks this up to new relationship energy and pre-wedding jitters. Dan advises our caller to go to her fiancé and tell him what’s going on. She should mention that she won’t stop seeing this other woman and that she is in this real quandary. And just a reminder: anyone can be perfect at 3 weeks. Don’t call off the wedding. This is a sticky one, but I agree with Dan here.
A millennial woman is noticing a trend at weddings she attends. In the advice books, someone always says, “Have sex every day.” This upsets our caller, who is a kinkster who likes to plan sex. Isn’t this actually shaming? Dan thinks our caller is overthinking it. The subtext of the advice is for the new couple to remember the lustful early days of the relationship, not a literal prescription to have sex every day.
A woman is starting a new dom/sub relationship. Her experienced dom told her that she is not allowed to use the safe word during punishment and that a good sub receives anal, which was one of her hard limits. This feels uncomfortable to our caller. Dan brings on Sunny Megatron and Ken Melvoin-Berg, hosts of American Sex Podcast and creators of a Showtime series, to help with this. Consent is the foundation of every BDSM encounter, as everyone knows, and this dom is stepping right over the line. Run! Subs have to have a way to reassert control during play. Ken talks about the BDSM questionnaire, which actually sounds like fun.
Everyone sticks around for one more question. A caller, inspired by the pee tape, wonders why anyone would want to be peed on. Ken is a personal fan of getting peed on. He likes the wet and messy feeling, and he thinks it’s primal. Dan observes that more men are into piss play than women, and wonders if it isn’t because boys see pee as a toy.
A 27-year-old woman comes from sitting in the sauna. What gives? Dan reminisces of his salad days when he spontaneously got boners in the back seat of cabs in New York. For some reason, he says, the caller’s brain associates the sauna with pleasure. Don’t ask why, just enjoy it.
A 29-year-old woman has been with a 30-year-old man for 3.5 years, and he has eaten her pussy zero (0) times. He says he is afraid of being bad at oral, having not done it since he was 15, and gets anxious about it. Our caller has never had to teach anyone how to give oral. Any tips? If he’s afraid of being bad, Dan says, our caller can remind him that any oral is better than none. Dan thinks, though, that the boyfriend is repulsed by the idea. Assuming he actually wants to try, she could sit on his face and grind, incorporating her fingers, to start – this will give her some control.
A woman has been married to her husband for 14 years, together for 22. She realized in the last few years that her ideal relationship model is polyamory, while her husband’s is monogamy. The husband has been trying to accommodate, but he can’t seem to get over his jealousy. They’ve built a life together, so what can they do? Dan calls back to ask a question: what was the extent of the trying? Our caller has had emotional and physical relationships, and the husband knows, but not all of the details. The sad truth is that someone is going to have to lose here. Dan faults the culture for forcing people into monogamous commitments that they are not prepared to make. Our caller says her husband always figured she would change, which is something to work on in counseling. Dan finally advises our caller to try to pay the price of monogamy for a while; sometimes, a poly under duress person will become freer to explore openness when they have some degree of control about the process.
A 27-year-old cis queer poly woman has been exploring kink play, and especially impact play, for five years. She’s gotten hung up, though, because she was the victim of sexual assault two years ago, and our caller is starting to refer to it as such. She had a long-term kink partner, but he was distant to her at a time she needed reassurance. They transitioned to more vanilla. She and this partner, who has another play partner going, are planning to go to a kink weekend. Our caller doesn’t really want to go at this point, but she wants to re-enter the world of kink. How can she find joy and excitement in kink again? Dan thinks going to the kink weekend would be a mistake. If the partner and the other partner are going to be at the kink event together, the chances are high that our caller will feel frozen out. Sexual assault is not exclusively in kink’s domain at all, so our caller could start to dissociate kink from assault. Kink, after all, should be about enthusiastic consent.
A 27-year-old woman and her boyfriend are poly swingers. The boyfriend went out of town and had sex with two women, plus another woman at the club. That’s all fine, but he sent a text saying he had unprotected sex with the first woman, which is a hard boundary for our caller. Worse, this is the second time he’s done this. They had a huge fight about this. How can they rebuild trust after this betrayal? Dan thinks that people who repeatedly break hard rules are essentially either destroying the relationship or telling their partners that they are never going to follow that rule. That’s something to discuss in therapy. If the boyfriend can’t follow this rule, maybe a new rule is in order: no play out of my sight.
Caller feedback! If your parents give you so much money that they feel entitled to run your life, make your own money. Cock rings are great for the ladies, especially if they have clit stimulators. An ER nurse says not to use your wedding ring as a cock ring, and if you get anything around your cock that you can’t get off, go to the ER right away.
Thanks for reading.
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