Hey there, and welcome to your Savage Lovecast recap and review. We are in the thick of summer. How does the heat affect your love life? Do things get steamier for you as the temperature goes up, or are you scrambling for something cooler?
You can listen to this week’s episode and read this week’s Savage Love column.
Dan’s opening rant this week is about dumpster graffiti. Dan saw “FORCED TO WEAR DIAPER AND GIRL’S CLOTHING FOR MY WIFE’S FRIENDS” scrawled on a dumpster this week. This guy (almost certainly a he) is fantasizing out loud. Good for him, Dan says.
On to the calls! A woman works with an offensive, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, alcoholic coworker. Everyone is treating him with kid gloves because his wife just died. Should our caller go to her boss with some of his more revolting comments that make her uncomfortable? Dan says our caller needs to stand up to this brand of toxic whiteness. Go get him fired.
A mid-20s gay man is away from home on a program. A good guy he’s known at this new place for a week is coming on very strong, already offering to uproot his entire life to follow the caller back home after the program ends. The guy won’t stop gushing about how attracted he is to our caller, and it’s pushing the caller away. What should he do? Dan says, although there are exceptions, this kind of coming on too strong is a sign of abuse and manipulation. After all, if someone does uproot their entire life for you, you do feel some sense of obligation. Even if his feelings are genuine, this is a case of very bad judgment. Push back on this, and make sure that if you continue to see each other after the program, it’s long distance.
A woman lives with her boyfriend of 3 years, but she’s had bad feelings about the relationship for a year now. A month ago, they got into a fight while he was black-out drunk, during which he hit her, covering her in bruises (this is me editorializing: she described it as “it got really physical,” but she fled to a friend’s house, scared and bruised). They’ve been living separately since then. She says he’s been taking steps to make himself a better person, but he hasn’t told anyone about what he did. He also sometimes acts like he didn’t do anything wrong, blaming her hysteria for the fight. What’s the best thing to do here? Dan says she needs to dump the motherfucker already. He’s not actually sorry for what he did. This is an extinction-level event, and his actions should cost him this relationship. Further, calling the police, to force him to get the help he needs, might not be the worst idea here.
A 25-year-old straight man can’t get the woman he’s been dating for 3 months to come, even when he’s asked her to show him how she does it and doing the same thing. She reports that, instead of feeling like she’s going to come, it feels like she’s going to pee. Any suggestions? Dan thinks he should ask her when she started masturbating – it’s possible that she hasn’t been at it for that long. In any event, relax. He’s a new sex partner, and it may take her some time for her to get fully comfortable. In the meantime, make it about her orgasm by providing support while she masturbates. If you want to incorporate a sex toy, go shopping together. If you’re only interested in getting her to come to feed your ego, that’s not sexy.
A woman really enjoys overhearing people having sex. She doesn’t intentionally spy on people, but if her roommates or neighbors are getting it on, she will listen intently. Sometimes, when she’s alone in her room and hears her neighbors, she even masturbates to it. She’s never been caught, and won’t ever let herself be caught. Is this wrong? Dan says she has an absolute right to masturbate in her room. Dan categorizes this as a benign secret thrill, as long as she’s not creeping.
A straight woman and her boyfriend both recently picked up second jobs to get wedding and house money. They aren’t having sex right now because they are both tired. Is this worth it? This is a cost-benefit analysis they have to perform, says Dan. If the stress of not having sex for however long it takes to crawl out of debt is going to destroy the relationship, it’s not worth it. Dan suggests figuring out how long it takes each to feel miserable in their second jobs, then cycling on and off (for example, if they can go 3 months without sex, then go 3 months with another job, 3 months without, and so on).
A 26-year-old woman has been with her 31-year-old boyfriend for 2.5 years. During the last 1.5 years, she has gained 50 pounds, and he no longer wants to have sex with her. They have sex only once or twice a month, and she always initiates. Is this mean of him? She wants to get fitter, but she’s never going to be as skinny as when they met, because she was “basically anorexic” then. Dan calls back. He wants to know about the anorexia thing. She had anorexia for 2 years when she was 20, but she got treated for it. When she met her boyfriend, though, she was still skipping meals. She was skinny then, but not skeletal, she says. Dan then asks what’s been going on in the last year and a half? They moved in together, she says, and when she could no longer skip meals (and he started cooking pasta with garlic bread for her) she gave herself permission to eat whatever. She says she’s brought up that he doesn’t seem attracted to her anymore, and he gets quiet. Dan recounts his own food issues. He says our caller needs to have a tough conversation with the boyfriend to work together to start having a healthy relationship with food again. Even if he, as a firefighter, can eat pasta every night, she can’t, and they will be more successful if they work together on this. (Dan also gets incredulous that people eat garlic bread with pasta. “You can’t eat bread with bread!” he yelps, in perhaps the most wrong thing he’s ever said.) As for the question of if he’s wrong, Dan says this sudden change in body type in this length of relationship can negatively impact sexual attraction, and that’s not necessarily cruel. But it’s time for some radical honesty to move forward together. And go to the gym!
A man has seen two movies in the last week featuring man-on-man love scenes. Both of them were bottom face-down, with top coming in from behind. Why are filmmakers so unimaginative? Dan muses that straight people are often confused by the term “gay missionary.” Queer as Folk, for one, featured that kind of lovemaking.
A lesbian in her late 30s has a question about processing. She’s in a new relationship, and she wants to process everything, and her new partner is resisting that. This has happened in the last few relationships for this caller. She wants to know if Dan and Terry make appointments to process or if they do it over breakfast or (god forbid!) text. Is it possible to have a deep intimate connection with someone when you can’t process? Dan convenes a panel of expert lesbians to help answer this: Tracy Cataldo and Katie Herzog. Dan says he and Terry process via text, which he does not recommend. Dan has long faced the wrath of queer women by saying that there is some truth in the stereotype of constant lesbian processing. What even is processing? The panel (Dan didn’t introduce them individually, so I don’t know who is who) defines processing as “adult conversations about the relationship.” Relationships that are only about processing are exhausting, but in long-term relationships, there needs to be some balance of figuring out your shit and knowing when a conflict is unresolvable and finding a workaround. For our caller, specifically, she needs to find someone who enjoys processing as much as she does. Dan’s firsthand view of lesbian processing leads him to believe that sometimes it’s a futile desire to eliminate all conflict in a relationship.
A 21-year-old lesbian has been strongly queer-identified since she was 17. Tonight, though, she made out with a dude. She’s freaking out. The panel says she needs to chill out. Don’t feel pressured to put yourself in a box. If you identify as a lesbian, and you make out with a dude, lesbianism is still your truth.
A woman has been with her wife for 7 or 8 years, married for 1. They’ve been in therapy for a while, because our caller wants an open relationship, while the wife does not. The therapist told them they should break up, but they got married anyway. Now the wife is pregnant (with their second child; our caller carried the first one), and our caller really has an itch to get some outside the relationship. Our caller isn’t being honest about her feelings anymore, and she’s scared to bring it up now. Dan says it’s nice to get this question from a woman for a change. The standard answer for straight men who ask this question is that he doesn’t get to open the relationship when there’s an infant and a pregnancy. The same applies here, the panel agrees. Also, these people are fundamentally incompatible and they shouldn’t have scrambled their DNA together. At some point they are going to have to be honest with each other.
Two lesbian women, 24 and 25, have been in a relationship for over a year. Lately, they’ve been fighting almost every day, often over stupid stuff. They don’t want to keep fighting, but they can’t seem to stop. Katie says that fighting every day, at this age, is a sign that the relationship won’t last. Tracey agrees: pull the plug. Dan thinks the reason they are fighting over stupid stuff is because there’s some larger issue that they don’t want to address. Life is better when you find someone you’re not always in conflict with. The lesbian star chamber has issued their rulings.
Caller feedback! A young queer person didn’t have any problem disclosing her own divorce, and the people out there aren’t going to judge you for it. A straight guy doesn’t think men should be forced to eat pussy if they don’t want to. It’s annoying when coworkers bring up that they knew you as a child.
Thanks for reading.