Hey there, and welcome to your Savage Lovecast recap and review for the week of May 15. Let’s get right into it.
You can listen to this week’s episode here.
Dan’s opening rant is about the two anti-LGBT laws that were passed last week (right after the AP ran an article noting how no such laws had passed yet this year). There are two new anti-LGBT adoption laws in Oklahoma and Kansas. They both do the same thing: allow private adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBT folks in choosing where to place adoptees. What makes this even more heinous is that these private agencies receive state money. Don’t forget who the real victims here: <strike>pot</strike> kids. LGBT folks, according to Dan, are more likely to adopt older, higher risk, and interracial children. Children in foster care can’t leave to go to a blue state – they’re stuck.
On to the calls! A “mid to late 20s female” was videotaped getting undressed without her knowledge by her mom’s boyfriend. Our caller was able to find and destroy the video, but mom’s boyfriend pled innocence, and mom believed him. A couple of years later, it came out that mom’s boyfriend had molested his niece. Again, mom chose to stick by him while he got treatment. It’s been eight years since this began. He seems contrite and sincere, but our caller and her sister do not interact with him. What is our caller’s responsibility here? Dan says she could be in the same room with him – the visitation room at the funeral home. It’s hard to believe that mom has chosen to be in a relationship that has driven away her children. Neither child should feel guilty about staying the hell away.
A white gay man is seeing an Asian man. Most of our caller’s relationships have been with Asian men, and he’s been accused of having an Asian fetish. The boyfriend is concerned by this, and brings it up sometimes. The boyfriend suggests that our caller should try hooking up with some non-Asians, even if the caller doesn’t find them as attractive. This sounds like a lot of work to our caller. Is who he’s attracted to something he can change? Dan says, Nope! We should examine why it is we’re attracted to certain people, because the culture informs a lot of that. But if you’ve interrogated your desires, and they are desires, then they are probably authentic, and you should accept that. As long as it doesn’t cross the line into objectification, you’re all right. Dan does offer a spoonful of salt at the end that he is white, so he invites his Asian listeners to call in to offer their perspective.
A mid-50s straight man lost his wife to cancer about eight months ago after 30-plus years of happy monogamous marriage. The cancer spread over two years. About three months after his wife’s death, our caller felt like he was ready to date again. He’s been dating his girlfriend for about four months now. Our caller’s 18-year-old daughter is really upset about her dad dating again. What should he do this summer when the daughter comes home from college? One of the hard things about this, Dan points out, is that our caller shifted his position from lover and partner to caregiver about 2.75 years ago, which shifts the grieving process. The daughter, however, has only lost her mother about eight months ago. She is, necessarily, in a different stage of grieving, and she needs more time. Dan thinks our caller needs to have a conversation with his daughter, perhaps with the help of a therapist, about where they are in the process. Our caller might need to accommodate his daughter at this point, by, for example, rolling the new girlfriend out slowly.
A 29-year-old guy has been dating his girlfriend for 3 years, and she gives painful blowjobs. She uses her teeth and leaves marks. He’s told her to cover her teeth and use her hands, but she won’t change. He doesn’t want to shatter her by saying she’s been giving terrible blowjobs all these years, so what can he do? Dan tells the story of his uncle, who got blown by a lot of groupies in California and told them all that every guy likes to get blown like this. Porn might be the problem here – she might be deepthroating and not using her hands. You can discuss how you prefer blowjobs, but it will have to be delicate and it will have to be hands-on. You can use that conversation to check in about both of your sex lives.
A mid-20s gay man is getting involved with a same-age gay couple who live about seven hours away, and he may be falling in love. The expectation is that our caller doesn’t get any sex outside the couple, but he gets none when he visits. Even worse, they will give him the play-by-play of all the great sex they have while he’s on the road to them. One of the couple is emotionally attached, the other isn’t, but our caller is clearly secondary. What can our caller do? Dan calls back to yell at the caller to stop seeing these crazy people! This isn’t a potential throuple, this is bullshit! If our caller insists to have a conversation, he needs to stand up for himself and lay out his needs. But you don’t have to settle for these jerks.
A 22-year-old woman has a question about revenge porn. She’s been hooking up with a guy who took videos of her giving a blowjob. She asked to see the videos, but he won’t show her them. How can our caller protect herself? There’s no way to force him to delete them, Dan points out, and even if she could, it would be really easy for him to retrieve them. The only way to ensure they don’t get out is by trusting the person, and that’s why it’s so important, when someone whips out their phone during sex, to put your foot down there. It’s not a bad idea to familiarize yourself with your state’s revenge porn laws to learn what protection you can avail yourself of.
It’s time for What You Got? The scientist this time is Damien Jacob Sendler, chief of sexology at Fellnet Health. Dr. Sendler studied what happened to people who accidentally choked their partners to death during BDSM breath play. There are 15 cases where people were prosecuted for killing their partners accidentally during sex through asphyxia. Dr. Sendler reports that the literature says that about 8 percent of people have tried this kind of breath play. To Dan’s surprise, people who choked people to death in BDSM play don’t get punished as often as people who choked people while committing robberies, say. The three requirements to stay out of jail seem to be: a heterosexual couple, free of drugs, giving clear consent. Dr. Sendler seems to believe that the bottom in this situation is already victimized by not being able to achieve orgasm in another way, and so that sort of absolves the top in public opinion. I’m not sure I buy this.
Back to the calls! A straight woman in Canada has a boyfriend who lives in a duplex. The middle age couple on the other side have a late-teens, early-20s daughter. He’s always been able to hear their shouting matches, but he figured it was normal. But one day, clear as day, they heard the daughter shout, “Get the fuck out, you fucking pervert!” What should our caller do? If it were a child, call CPS. The boyfriend can apparently message the daughter on Facebook, which is a legitimate option here. But with the age of the daughter, the only other option is the police. And Dan urges the caller to use caution when calling the police in the United States, especially if the neighbors happen to be black. It’s nice that Dan is so woke, but I do appreciate it more when he gives caller-specific feedback, or at least doesn’t make it seem like he just skipped over that our caller is from Canada. That said, Dan does point out that there are lots of reasons that the daughter could be shouting what she’s shouting, and not all of them point to abuse. In this situation, Dan would reach out on Facebook to see if she’s okay and needs help.
A 35-year-old woman has been dating a guy for a month and a half, and it’s been amazing. She didn’t tell anyone about this guy or ask her friends about him. But her friend reached out, swearing her to secrecy and saying the guy’s ex-wife said the guy was a sex addict and saw a lot of sex workers. What does she do with all this information? Dan says this information dump is fundamentally unfair. But our caller must have known something was up, and didn’t want to know what. Our caller could confront the guy, bearing in mind that he’s probably going to be charismatic about the whole thing.
A 29-year-old straight man is in a monogamous relationship with a bi 28-year-old woman. He has cheated in the past, and she knows about it. His libido is uncomfortably high. She has a high libido too, but his problem is he wants to fuck everything. He calls himself a feminist. He masturbates as much as 12 times a day. He wants to be with this woman, but she wants to be monogamous, and he can’t fathom going a few weeks without having sex with other people. Dan lays it out: our caller and his girlfriend might not be sexually compatible. He has to lay it out there in a conversation – he tried to be a good monogamous person, and he can’t do it. He could force her to be open under duress, but that ain’t a good look. The caller mentioned having mental issues, and the insanely high sex drive could be related to an OCD or bipolar issue, so SSRIs may work on curbing things a bit.
Caller feedback! Teachers can read books by non-white male authors. Embrace the different orgasms you get from masturbation by masturbating while cuddling. Maybe that guy who has videos of women pooping also has videos of kids pooping.
Thanks for reading.
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