501 - Are you having sex or is sex having you? A conversation with Dan Savage
Welcome, Dan!
Dan Savage joins us today to talk about love, sex, non-monogamy, commitment, and much, much more!
Dan Savage is a sex-advice columnist, a podcaster, an author, and has appeared on numerous television shows.
“Savage Love,” Dan’s sex-advice column, first appeared in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly, in 1991. The column is now syndicated worldwide. Dan has published seven books.
In 2006, Dan launched the Savage Lovecast, a weekly, call-in, sex advice podcast. It has 600,000 unique monthly downloads and 20,000 paying subscribers for premium “Magnum” content. It ranks consistently in the top ten Sexuality podcasts on Apple Podcasts.
He created and curates the HUMP! Film Festival, a sex-positive showcase of dirty short films, now in its 18th year. HUMP! has become a national phenomenon selling tens of thousands of tickets, screening in over 50 cities across the United States and Canada and streaming worldwide.
In 2010 Dan and his husband Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project. The IGBP has gathered tens of thousands of videos from people all over the world offering hope to LGBT kids. The book—It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living—was a New York Times best seller. In 2012 the It Gets Better Project was awarded an Emmy.
Dan’s graphic, pragmatic, and humorous advice has changed the cultural conversation about sex, monogamy, gay rights, religiosity, and politics.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are talking to the one and only Dan Savage. Dan Savage is a renowned sex advice columnist, podcaster, and author. His column, Savage Love, launched in 1991 right here in Seattle, where I am. I remember reading it back when I was in high school, and it is now syndicated worldwide. Dan hosts the popular Savage Lovecast, a weekly sex advice podcast with over 600,000 monthly downloads. He's the creator of the Hump Film Festival, which I know some of our listeners have participated in in the past. That is a sex-positive showcase of short films that has become a national phenomenon.
In 2010, Dan and his husband Terry Miller founded the It Gets Better Project, which has gathered thousands of videos offering hope to LGBTQ+ youth, and it won an Emmy in 2012. Dan's frank, humorous, and pragmatic approach has significantly influenced cultural conversations around sex, relationships, and LGBTQ+ rights. Dan, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dan: Thank you for having me. I'm psyched to be here.
Dedeker: We're psyched to have you. For many years, the way that I've sometimes conceptualized our show is that it's like Dan Savage and Esther Perel had a baby. Now that we bring--
Jase: Were your little babies.
Dedeker: Yes. Dispensing insights from a subculture to the mainstream, pulling on research and compassionate insight drawn from working with clients therapeutically. We all have Dan Savage's classic Good looks and Esther Perel's piercing eyes, so I guess my question is, would you have a child with Esther Perel?
Dan: I'm trying to imagine who would be more traumatized by the insemination process, me or Esther Perel, who I love and respect, and we've done some events together and we have a great time, but I don't think I'm her type. I think my sex maniac thing kind of, not her speed.
Dedeker: Not her speed.
Dan: Then there's the whole, like, vagina haver thing for me.
Jase: Right. There's that.
Dedeker: Well, I mean this would be a fully consensual as not traumatizing, as possible insemination process.
Jase: IVF; if it's still legal, I would totally have Esther Perel's baby.
Dedeker: Fingers crossed-
Emily: Knock on wood, yes.
Dedeker: -it will still be legal when that day does arrive.
Emily: Indeed.
Jase: Then would you name your child Multiamory?
Emily: Oh, wow.
Jase: I guess that's the real question.
Dan: Yes. It's a Greek name. One of us is Greek, I think maybe.
Dedeker: You did a Google talk with Esther Perel a few years ago about marriage and monogamy; I guess, actually, probably it was almost 10 years ago at this point?
Dan: Yes.
Dedeker: I guess I'm wondering how you feel the cultural landscape has shifted in the last decade around marriage, monogamy, monogamishness, and the rise of non-monogamy.
Dan: Man, I feel the world that I wished existed, the conversations I wished people would have; that world now exists and everybody's having that conversation and I'm a little like, "Is this really what I wanted? Is it?" It feels almost as if the poly-open conversation and the ideas, I think, leaping from gay men and gay relationships really to straight ones. I think there's been a great cross polynization in how gay people live and straight people live because gay people came out unmask.
We didn't go in for respectability politics. We didn't change how we lived. You can't be gay unless you're radically honest about who you are and what you want, what you're doing, and it was really much easier for gay people to be honest, how we structured our relationships because we were used to being honest. I always say if you looked your mom in the eye when you were 15 and told her you suck cock saying to your boyfriend, like, I want to do this or try that, or I want an open relationship, and then saying to your friends, you're in an open relationship, nowhere near as scary as saying to your mom, "I'm gay," and inflicting all those mental images on your mom.
Gay people who were in open relationships were out about it, and straight people who were in open relationships, there were far fewer of them as a percentage of the total, and most weren't out about it. The only time straight people would hear about an open relationship or a non-monogamous relationship or a polyamorous straight relationship was when the non-monogamy or the three-way or the other partner contributed to a breakup, and then everybody would hear about it. It really skewed everyone's perceptions of how these relationships could work if you weren't gay, and people would think, "Oh, those only work for gay men," and it just wasn't true. The ones that worked, you just didn't know they were working because you didn't know your straight friends or your parents were in an open relationship or a polyamorous relationship.
Now we've seemed to have reached this tipping point where a lot more people who are straight and open or poly are willing to be honest about and talk about and don't want to have to disappear their partners at Thanksgiving or Christmas because their families are coming and are writing memoirs about it like more. I think that conversation is great, and I'm a little, I guess, sometimes like, "Oh, wow, I wanted the sorcerer's apprentice; I wanted help dumping this water in the well and now, oh my God, there's so much help dumping the water in the well." We're flooding the basement.
Dedeker: Yes. Well, I want to drill down on that because when you said that you ask yourself, "Is this what I really wanted?" I'm curious about, is it just, wow, I wasn't expecting this level of volume? Is there something else that you're finding just a little bit off-putting about this world now being here?
Dan: Well, it makes me feel. It makes me think gay people feel a little less special. Like, oh, you should all be doing this, but you're not going to because you don't have our gay superpowers. It was like, oh, guess, that wasn't really a gay superpower; that was just radical honesty about who you were, what you were doing, how you wanted to live. I think one of the great truths of the last 30, 40 years is that we've seen there's nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It's just gay people weren't allowed to marry or have kids, and there was nothing gay about the gay lifestyle. It's just that was all gay people were allowed.
Now you see a lot of straight people living like gay people were believed to live all their lives until they're 30, 35. Everything that gay people were condemned for doing the hedonistic lifestyle, short-term relationships, lots of partners, straight people now do that. You just rename. We called them fuck buddies. You call them friends with benefits. We called it tricking. You called it hooking up. Straight people just changed the names of everything but adopted the gay lifestyle, proving there was nothing gay about it. Which is that was all that was possible for us. It's all we could do.
I remember what the religious conservatives said in the '70s. I was old enough to be paying attention and already realizing I was gay. It came to pass like Jerry Falwell Sr., not Jerry Falwell Jr. cuckold, but Jerry Falwell Sr., odious founder of the Moral Majority. He would say that the problem of gay people was that we were going to put ideas in the heads of straight people about how they could live, and that happened.
Jase: Yes. I think about that when gay marriage was legalized in the Supreme Court and there was that dissenting opinion being like, what's next? Getting married to multiple people?
Dan: Hope so.
Jase: Whoops, also right in some counties already and that's coming, so it is weird to think like, it's not that the fear itself was wrong, but to be afraid of it is the thing we disagree with.
Dan: The thing that you are trying to make other people afraid of when that thing arrives, not so scary. I hear a lot of young gay people say, or I've heard gay people say, that there's something assimilationist about gay marriage and gay people are getting married or betraying the spirit of gay liberation, and blah, blah, blah, and that's just bullshit. Nobody I know who's gay and married is monogamous. Nobody I know who's gay and married and not monogamous lies about it or feels like they have to hide it. We're getting married as ourselves on our own terms.
We assimilated marriage into our gay lives, proving that one of the things they said when we were fighting for marriage was gay people were trying to redefine marriage. The reality was straight people had already redefined marriage because marriage about 60, 70 years ago became whatever the two married people in a marriage said it was, and it could be religious or not, kids are not, for life or not; it was whatever they said it was. The wife could be submissive to the husband, or the wife could be offender. Whatever they said it was, it was. That's why they could no longer exclude same-sex couples from marriage because straight people redefined it in such a way that gender roles no longer defined marriage and so you couldn't make make a non-biblical bullshit argument to exclude gay couples from marriage as straight people redefined it and practiced.
Emily: I'm jumping back into non-monogamy after having been in a monogamous relationship for nine years. I keep questioning like, "What is it about non-monogamy that I find so attractive?" Part of me sometimes just wonders, "Is it simply that I want novelty in relationships?" I tend to be a person that often will jump in really intensely and quickly and fall in love really quickly, but then I also find myself falling out of love pretty quickly too. Sometimes I think from listening to some of your interviews in the past. I have a question for all of us, like, what is love, and is it even possible to love someone and have a good relationship with them but not necessarily be deeply intensely in love with them in the way that many of us think that is?
Dan: That's an easy question.
Emily: Okay, is it?
Dan: Who'd like to go first? No, no, no.
Emily: Yes, no, it's not. Oh, boy.
Dan: How do you define love? Do we each of us have a different definition of what it should look like, what it should feel like, and what it means or portends for a future? Is it not love if you love passionately quickly and temporarily? Does that mean it wasn't love or does that mean it was a different kind of love with a shorter shelf life, but it's still valid? I just think it's just really hard to tease out what it is about us as individuals, as humans, and what we need and where socialization ends, biology begins. I actually think there's some ghost in the machine. There's something working in each of us that we can't quite understand to wrap our heads around because there's something about sex that is chaotic and desire that is fundamentally chaotic. So much of the way we structure our relationships is to contain that chaos and to limit its ability to create drama or upend our lives, or do harm.
I think that different people have different needs around chaos, drama variety, sensation seeking, and I think that's not character failing. I think actually that there may be evolutionary something or other deeply at work because some of us are driven to have multiple partners, multiple sexual experiences, seek out variety of novelty. There's going to be a knock-on evolutionary benefit to that kind of stirring and mixing because we know that when people breed outside their very local environment, people who are maybe closely related to them or very much like them, that that is good for offspring species, good for the survival. This is the stuff where I get really stoned in my dorm room, in my head.
Dedeker: Oh, yes, no, bring it. We love it.
Jase: Yes.
Dan: Because sex is bigger. We're told when we're kids that we will grow up one day and have sex, and the reality is we grow up one day and sex has us. What is sex doing with us? Sex is 500 million years old, billion years old? It built everything that lives. It built us. It's building whatever comes after us and we pretend like it's something that we control and that we are in charge of. To limit the drama and chaos in our lives or to keep it to a reasonable roar, we need to find out how to channel it. We need to figure out how to ride that beast, but it's the beast, and we are riding it. It's riding us really. Yes, jumping back into monogamy, there's a certain amount of variety and new experiences you want, and you want these loves that burn fast and quick. Some people would look at that and say, "Well, you're damaged somehow if you can't make a long-term commitment."
One of the things I bang on about all the time on my show is we talk about LTRs and reify them and put them on a pedestal. I think we should also talk about STRs. They can be successes, and they can be very rewarding. If you know that you're the STR type, if you're honest about that, and you're not taking advantage of the assumptions someone might make about you wanting an LTR like most people want an LTR, then having a series of short-term relationships over the course of your life that enrich it and create a network of friends and former lovers and occasional fuck buddies, and the current main squeeze that you're passionate about, that seems to me a very beautiful way to live.
Jase: That's often something that we've talked to people about. That idea of within the polyamory world, there can be still this reifying of these long-term relationships and a little bit of dismissal of hookups or shorter-term relationships, things like that. One of the things that we've actually seen as a bigger problem is because of that, people who actually want those short-term relationships, so they want those hookups, will feel like they can't be honest about that, and that's where people end up getting hurt because they're misled or there's assumptions made about what people want. Whereas if they were honest about that, everyone would've been better off. It's like not wanting it; that's the problem, but sometimes when we can be a little shady in how we go about that.
Dan: Romancing someone to get into their pants can be a kind of misrepresentation about your intentions, even if-
Jase: Yes, that's the point.
Dan: -maybe you just misapprehend your own intentions going in. At least in gayland, everybody in a long-term relationship, I know it was a hookup. It was not like the hookup is the culmination of a seduction or dating or anything; it was just like Grindr hookup. I met my boyfriend having a three-way with my husband and this person we'd never met before. 12 years later, he's still there.
Dedeker: I feel like I've heard that story 6 billion times now.
Dan: I've hooked up with other people where that didn't happen. I think it's different in hetero, pan, bi, poly circles than gayland. Off on man island sometimes it's a little different.
Dedeker: Yes, sure. Sometimes, but I do think for my opinion is that I think that that behavior of this maybe unintentionally shady or unintentionally confused representation of what you want does come from, I think, a lot of non-monogamous people, and especially people who have been non-monogamous for a long time, people who have it wrapped up in their identity, often come from a place of defensiveness because they're used to their relationships being disregarded or minimized, or being accused of, "Oh, you're just in it for the sex. You're just in it to use people."
Dan: Some people are.
Dedeker: Some people are, and that goes down this whole rabbit hole of how like, "Okay, if you are just in it for the sex, that's also okay." That's like a whole other thing. I think people do come from this place of like, "If I'm going to prove to the world that my polyamorous relationship or non-monogamous relationship is legit, it's got to align very closely with what we see as the markers of success."
Dan: We're reacting sometimes to people who say polyamorous relationships aren't committed relationships. I'll prove to you how committed my relationship is by committing instantly or my next relationship or my additional relationship. We all see in poly land the people who we know when, in retrospect that, "Oh, we got played," because we detect a pattern in how that particular person really has weaponized polyamory to convince people that they're interested in the potential relationships, but then you see the pattern where they're really not. We're just interested in having a lot of sex partners. Which is a fine and legitimate thing to want and to go get, but there are people out there who realize that they can have a lot of sex partners if they're willing misrepresent their intentions.
Sometimes we look at somebody who fucked us and then realize that even if they were open to a relationship, it's not us they wanted, and we will say they misrepresented their intentions when they actually didn't. Getting to know somebody, getting to fuck them for a little while, sometimes you realize that they aren't what you want, you don't gel, there's something about them. You found out they voted for Trump, whatever it might be, and you reject them. To protect their own ego, they will say, "Well, you were lying about being open to our relationship because we are not in a relationship." That proves you weren't open to a relationship. As if every dating scenario ends up in a relationship if both people are open to it when we know that's not the case.
Dedeker: Sure, yes. I think we started to tiptoe into this a little bit, but you've been dispensing relationship advice for decades at this point. I want to know, is there one piece of common relationship advice that's out in the ether that you wish you could just disappear from the planet that really gets under your skin, and you wish people would stop repeating a particular piece of relationship wisdom?
Dan: Oh, my God, how do I pick just one?
Dedeker: Yes, I know it's hard to pick, but whatever comes to you first.
Dan: Micro-infidelities and the damage defining--
Jase: Micro-cheating. Yes, left that one.
Dedeker: Fine, because I forgot that that's a newish term, the micro-cheating.
Dan: That's particularly a problem for people who define cheating as unforgivable. Then you want to define cheating as narrowly as possible. If you define cheating as unforgivable and then you define everything as cheating, you're setting any relationship you might get into up for failure or collapse, and that drives me up the wall. Most of the people who come to me advice are in monogamous relationships or want to be in monogamous relationships, and I'm constantly butting up against unrealistic expectations and ideas about what a monogamous relationship looks like.
First, started writing about this 30 years ago. I think this attitude is less prevalent now, but people really did. Some still, many more did 30 years ago. Believe that if you are in love with somebody, you won't want to sleep with anybody else. If somebody's in love with you, they won't want to sleep with somebody else. In which case we wouldn't have a word for monogamy because it would just be like breathing. Even though we have a word for breathing, I guess maybe we'd have a word for it. People wouldn't have to make monogamous commitments and monogamy wouldn't be the struggle that we all know it is for monogamous people.
You get this thing in relationships where people police their partner for evidence of what they should just accept is true. Yes, your partner checked out the barista because on some alternate timeline your partner would fuck the barista, but they're not going to fuck the barista because they've made a monogamous commitment to you, and it is a struggle to honor that commitment.
As I say all the time on my dumb show, if you're with somebody for 50 years and they cheated on you twice, only two baristas in all that time, they were good at monogamy. Not bad at monogamy. I think the piece of relationship advice I really hate the most is if somebody could cheat on you, they never loved you. I just took a call on my show this week from somebody calling about her mom who found out while her husband, the caller's father, was on his deathbed, that he'd had an affair and he was no longer able to talk or converse. Her mom now believes that their entire 30, 40-year marriage was a lie and that he never loved her.
Jase: That's how the narrative goes.
Dan: That does such psychic damage to people. We pump that into people's heads knowing that most monogamous commitments are going to, at some point, be touched by infidelity, touched by the angel of infidelity. We should encourage people to be resilient and to take the relationship in its totality, and to know that their partner is human and fallible, and that cheating can happen for all sorts of reasons. The reason isn't always they didn't love you. I think rarely that's the reason.
Emily: Do you think that that's why so many young people these days are more open to the possibility of non-monogamy because they realize, "Shit. My parents or a bunch of people that I know, or just society in general, clearly knows that infidelity is a thing that is probably going to happen. Why don't I just kind of shift more towards a place where non-monogamy is okay in general and be okay with it, or figure out ways in which to be more honest and open about what it is that I want"?
Dan: I think it may be, although there are some people who watch their parents divorce because of infidelity and adultery, and they quintuple down on the importance of monogamy.
Dedeker: True.
Dan: There are some people who watch that happen and think the monogamous commitment, especially one as rigid as that, may have been the problem.
Dedeker: It's the whole model of compensate thing that we do with our parents.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: It's funny because I was definitely in that more doubling down on monogamy way of thinking about things for what, the first 20-ish years of my life, and then now I'm completely on the opposite side of that for the last 20 years.
Dan: One of the paradoxes in this conversation around monogamy and polyamory is that monogamous people always believe polyamory or any degree of openness is fundamentally destabilized, and because they often don't know people in open relationships, they don't get to see how stabilizing a force, non-monogamy, some agreement, mutual agreement about outside sexual contact and when and how that might be permissible can stabilize a relationship because it diffuses the bomb that blows up so many monogamous commitments. Monogamy is really binary, especially the way a lot of people define it. I can't remember the name of the sex writer. I found this quote. It's in one of my books. I quote her and I credit her, but I can't now credit her. She said every monogamous relationship is a disaster waiting to--
Emily: Whoa.
Jase: Wow. That's a whole statement.
Dan: Now we've all seen polyamorous relationships go tits up. We've all seen --
Dedeker: I don't know what what you're talking about.
Dan: I've seen poly disasters. I've experienced poly disasters. I think our relationships are stronger. If I can go off about one of my favorite studies out of the Netherlands looking at marriage, because they've had same-sex marriage the longest and they looked at lesbian marriages, gay marriages, and heterosexual marriages. They found that the people who were most likely to divorce were lesbians. The people who were less likely were straight, and the people least likely to divorce were gay men. Gay men were the least likely to be monogamous. Straight people were more likely. Lesbians were most likely. Monogamy correlates--
Jase: I remember reading about this study.
Dan: These studies with relationship instability, whereas non-monogamy correlates with relationship stability.
Emily: Fascinating.
Jase: Absolutely. Something on this subject of love and sex and all of this, I think that you on your show talk about sex a lot more than we do on our show. I'm curious for your insights on this, but I know that years ago I was trying to explain to a friend of mine about relationship anarchy. I was talking about--
Dan: Explain it to me because I--
Jase: At least the way that we tend to talk about it on our show is it's more about rather than saying our relationship is this type, so therefore all these things come with it. It's more like going to a buffet and a la carte picking out, "Okay, do we want sex in this relationship? Okay, sure. Maybe only this type. Do we want to live together? Do we want to be emotionally fidelis," whatever. You're picking and choosing.
Dan: How is that different than any other relationship since people get to define what their relationships are for themselves with their partners. I don't get how that's distinct.
Jase: I think that it's more about the philosophy behind that. For a lot of people, when you go from we're dating to now, like, "oh, now we're officially an item," all this baggage comes with it. All these expectations come with it. I think the whole point is, just let's not make those assumptions. What I wanted to get at though is I was talking to them about how you could have sex and physical intimacy in a relationship, and you can have friendship in a relationship or you could have love. She said, "Wait, what's the difference between love and friendship besides sex?" I was like, "Huh." I feel like maybe I would-- no, it was what's the difference between romance and friendship besides sex? That was specifically her question. I've, for years, thought about that where I'm like, "Yes, I think we can sometimes feel that difference, but it's not really something you can pin down quite as clearly as that."
Dan: There's a great book, The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen.
Emily: Yes, we had her on the show.
Dedeker: Oh, yes. We just had her on the show.
Emily: I love that book so much.
Dan: I love that book too. One of the things I think Esther Perel writes about is that that whole façade, my husband and my best friend, that those are different roles. A friendship is usually, but not always, I have friends I have sex with, a sexless romance. Typically, one of the things that distinguishes a friendship from romantic relationships is the absence of sex, unless you're gay. There's a lot of gay men out there who had sex with their friends. Maybe it's like the definition of pornography. You know it when you see it. How did you find friendship versus a romantic relationship? You know it when you feel it. You feel differently about these things, and you perceive them differently as other people live and practice them.
Jase: It's funny actually in the screenwriting book Save the Cat. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one. It's been around a long time in the screenwriting world. That when he's breaking down the different genres of movies, he talks about the rom-com and then the buddy comedy, and he said that they're the same movie, just one they kiss at the end, and the other they don't.
Dan: That's really true.
Dedeker: I would love to see the combination, though. I would love to watch a buddy cop movie that's also a rom-com in the end.
Dan: I would love to watch a love triangle movie where the solution is not pick.
Jase: Yes, that would be great.
Emily: Absolutely.
Dedeker: Yes, we're still waiting on that one.
Dan: A new Bridget Jones diary where she gets to have both Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.
Jase: That's the dream right there.
Dedeker: Actually, because you're so connected to media, you've run the HUMP! Film Festival for so long, I'm curious about your perception of how media portrayals of gay relationships, non-monogamous relationships, how have you seen that change over time? I wonder does it track the same thing where you're like, "Oh, wow, this is so cool. Also, I'm a little offput by all these brooms putting water in the well."
Dan: When it comes to gay relationships, I think you see better representation, but there's still is this self-consciousness among people who are writing, creating media that they hope will be consumed by a mass audience about how they're making gay people look. I wrote a screenplay with David Marshall Grant for Spoiler Alert, which was about a gay relationship, and Michael Ausiello's memoir about his husband dying of cancer tragically, and the arc of their relationship, which was exclusive, there was in fidelity. There's a beautiful scene in the book that I was really thrilled that we were able to put on the screen where Michael, as kid, is dying, invites Michael's affair partner, somebody he had a long time running affair with, to the hospital to say goodbye.
There's this moment where he comes out of the room and these two guys have had this tense rivalry. Michael knew and the guy knew Michael knew, but they never acknowledged it, and they hug. That happens in the book and it's tremendously moving. Then we put that on the screen, and one of the things I heard from people was that would never happen in real life. I was literally taken from the memoir, which is real life about what happened. I was really proud that we put that on the screen.
When I see the portrayals of gay relationships in media, I don't know. I don't see reflected in media the relationships with the men I see around me in my life. I'm not just friends with crazy radical gay people in Seattle; I'm friends with gay people all over the country. In rural areas and small towns too. When it comes to poly or non-monogamous relationships, I've seen some screenplays, I've worked on some things, I've read some treatments and I almost feel like doing something about non-monogamy specifically is like looking right at the sun.
I feel like the best stuff I've seen about poly or non-monogamous relationships, that's not what it's about. It's a fact of this relationship in this story. Everything I've seen where-- Somebody worked on a script called Monogamish and it was looking right at the sun and it was not good. I love that analogy.
Jase: Yes, I've been trying to find a good way to explain that, and I like that idea of looking right at the sun. We've always said too is a good non-monogamous polyamorous relationship is boring in the same way that a good monogamous relationship is boring to watch a movie if that's what it's about. There has to be something else going on.
Dan: A good non-monogamous relationship-- My husband and I have been together 30 years. We have an adult child that we raised together. Most couples, married couples in our position, are like waiting around to see who's going to die first. Terry and I are just like, we have so much to talk about and so much to process. Even when we're in conflict and sometimes we are in conflict over committed relationships to our boyfriends and that can bring us into conflict with each other.
The relationships between various metamorphs and extended poly things like we're doing can be tense at times too. Whatever else, Terry and I look at each other and go-- even when we're fighting, one of us will say, "We're not bored. I'm just waiting for one of us to die." It's like, "Yes, there's a benefit. There's a perk to this." Like you were saying, like the non-monogamy, Emily. It keeps you-- new experiences, variety, this kind of like churn. It's not just about new holes to come in but new people to get to know and new eyes to see the world through.
Emily: 100%
Dan: New experiences, almost to have vicarious experiences. My boyfriend's 22 years younger than me. My husband's boyfriend is 30 years younger than me. They have kept me young. I know who Chappell Roan is, and my 60-year-old gay friends have no idea. I can hum a couple of her songs because they've been playing them nonstop for six months in my house.
Emily: Wow, what a good strategy to stay connected to the young folks.
Dan: Yes, and you get to suck them off too. What could be better.
Emily: I did want to touch on that a little bit. There's a precariousness in new relationships, while they can be so fun and exciting and make you feel so good. It's also that question of but they could go away at any time and there's this lack of feeling as though it's secure in a way that long-term relationships are. I've felt that back-and-forth weird dichotomy of, "I am simultaneously in a new relationship and in an established relationship." The emotions and the whiplash that come with that is really challenging at times. I feel silly for saying this because I'm like, "I've been on this show for 10 years now." Yet, I'm going back to non-monogamy for the first time and remembering what it's like to feel these things again. I think for all of us can we just touch on that a little bit? That back and forth feels so scary at times.
Dan: To watch your long-term partner go through that. That can be a challenge for people because you look at your long-term partner and those kinds of intense feelings they're having and fears that they're having around the insecurity and perhaps the potential ephemeralness of this new relationship. One of the things you have to learn how to live with is the long-term partner, the one where they do feel this sense of security, safety, intimacy, connection, but not necessarily that kind of passion.
As you're watching your long-term partner have feelings for someone else that they don't have for you anymore, can never have for you again, but had for you once. That's to do like, let your partner have that with somebody else, and to then be there for your partner if that comes to shit, as it almost always does, most relationships don't turn into 30 years. Most relationships are quickly over.
Emily: I heard the statistic was like with most don't make it to a year. Most relationships do not, which is wild, but it's just said plainly like that.
Dan: Most should not. That's why we have no foul divorce. It's why we don't have yentas anymore, arranged marriages, hopefully. We get to choose and sample. One of the things I find so fascinating growing up in the '60s and '70s and becoming aware of the adult world in the '70s was half of the movies and TV shows, and books that were out there were about the midlife crises. You never hear about the midlife crisis anymore because people now have lives before they marry and settle down if that's what they want to do. My parents were married at 20 and had four kids by 24. Four separate pregnancies, my poor mom.
Emily: Woof.
Jase: Wow.
Dan: Then they had midlife crises in their late 30s, early 40s because they hadn't lived.
Dedeker: No, Dan, that's the thing is the people, at least among my own client base, who-- I guess I never thought about it as a midlife crisis, but the people that I see go through that are the people usually that were raised Christian, got married at 18 and now at 35, they're coming to me because they're realizing, we never lived. We never dated anybody else. We never had sex with anybody else. How do we live while also maintaining this base of a relationship that's now lasted for more than half of our lives?
Dan: One of the things you got to do if you lived, if you had a life before you settled down or picked one person, was you had those relationships that lasted three months, six months a year. You learned about yourself. You learned about other people. You learned about what you liked. I think that's really important, particularly for women, because there's something about the male experience sexually that men are fully aware of whatever it is that turns them on by 15, including their kinks, whatever because of socialization or something essential about nature and female sexuality and way it's revealed differently or experienced differently. I think those sexual awakenings or discoveries come later in life for women.
I may pull out of my ass theories; it's tied to sexual peak, which for men is in the teens and for women is 30. Crazy things begin to manifest when you're in your sexual peak and come to the front of your mind. Also, women that have the burden of excavating their actual desires sexually but also relationally out from under their socialization, and it's a double burden, I think. I think there is something natural at play there too.
When women marry at 18 and then they're 30, they begin to come into their own sexually, like, "Good luck. I hope that the person you picked at 18 is somebody that you can go there with who wants to go there with you," and yatzy, that's a win but often it's not the case. If you'd been that young woman who lived the gay lifestyle in your 20s and moved to a big city and got a funky apartment and had a bunch of friends you ran with and a bunch of short-term relationships with guys, and hopefully good experiences with guys, and then when you pick that 30 at your sexual peak, I think you're better situated if you want to sexually exclusive relationship or a committed relationship at all to pick well and not then have a midlife crisis at 40.
Dedeker: That's so interesting because also the overlap, the other trope that I tend to see among that same demographic, the heterosexual couple that got married at 18, is then that 30, 35, they open up their relationship. They bring in a hot buy a babe to be their third. That's when the wife is like, "Oh, actually, I'm a lesbian." It's a joke, right? I've seen that play out so many times.
Dan: I have seen that play out too. Not in my life. My husband is still not a lesbian. The night is young.
Dedeker: If you just tried hard enough, maybe, or you've explored. If he found the right person, maybe. I'm so sorry that this question I'm realizing right now is almost like a little bit of a homework assignment. My apologies in advance but looking back on your 30-plus years of writing your column, I'm curious do you have a sense of different eras or different chapters based on the predominant relationship concerns or sexual concerns, or trends of each period? I know you talked a little bit about people have maybe-- A while ago, having these more unrealistic expectations of monogamy versus now. I'm curious if there are any other trends like that that you could notice.
Dan: I've straddled a really momentous time, began to write the column before the internet existed, before the internet porn came along, before same-sex marriage. There have been so many changes. When I first started writing my column, I would often get the question, "What is a butt plug?" Somebody would hear somebody mentioned a butt plug and they had no one to ask and no way to know. I loved getting that question because I could write that column in my sleeper with the hangover and I often did. Now butt plugs have a wiki page, so nobody-- All my questions are relationships and situational ethics. I wished I'd coined the phrase, am I the asshole? I always said the questions are all now, "I did this, they did that. Who's the asshole?" I wished I'd gotten out in front of Reddit.
Emily: Am I the asshole?
Dan: Am I the asshole? It's brilliant but I was the original having to weigh in on who the asshole was. Now everybody gets to do it on Reddit. I follow that, I read it, I love it.
Dan: The thing is then the question, "Am I normal always? Am I normal?" I got a letter once from a woman whose boyfriend would massage her feet after her work shift as a waitress, putting herself through college, which was almost something you could do 30 years ago but can't do . Then she found out he had a foot fetish and then she broke up with him because he was getting something out of that massage too and she wanted a normal guy.
I think internet porn and the online discourse about sex-- And I hope part of the discourse about sex I've to help drive is the understanding now and everybody's bones that when it comes to human sexuality, variance is the norm and everybody's got their weird shit. The proof of that is in the Pornhub stats and you just can't pretend anymore.
The one radical thing that we did when I started Savage Love and the paper, The Stranger took a risk on it, was I said, "I want to write about sex.
The way people talk about sex with their friends, using the language people use when they talk about sex with their friends." Now, post blogging, post sex columns, post so much, that doesn't seem new or different or anything.
Dedeker: It's not the first thing anymore.
Dan: Right. When I started doing that in 1990, nobody was doing it. If you wrote about sex for the newspaper, you wrote about it in a stilted Sanskrit, a kind of archaic, ancient language. You didn't say, "I sucked a dick." You said, "I performed fellatio."
Dedeker: Well, wasn't it in Seattle, the columnist who used visiting Tukwila as a euphemism for married sex. Have you heard of this?
Dan: No. I love it though.
Jase: We say it all the time because we live right near Tukwila.
Dedeker: It was like in '80s or '90s. Yes. It was some advice columnist, or no, it was some columnist, he covered a story of some married couple that had been married for decades and they had sex every single day or at least they claimed to have sex every single day.
Dan: No one wants to go to Tukwila that much.
Emily: Yes. Come on. Wow. That's a lot.
Dedeker: In interviews, this writer, this journalist says --
Dan: I've been to Tukwila, I know.
Dedeker: This writer just says, "I don't know. That's just what came out." Then it stuck. At least he was trying to maybe push the ball forward a little bit.
Dan: My son walked on on us having sex once, and I jumped out of bed and said, "I was just saying good morning to Daddy," which then became what we said to our boy,
Dan: Saying "Good morning to Daddy," was just--
Dedeker: Well, we live close to Tukwila. Now, it's a joke. Anytime I have to drive past Tukwila .
Emily: Yes.
Dan: That's been the big change in the 30 years is just watching-- There was a study a few years ago-- I'd have to dig it up, where they wanted to measure the prevalence of paraphilias. What they found was more than 50% of people had paraphilias, which meant paraphilias are non-normative sexual desire, a kink. If more than half of everybody has one it's normative but it's not nonnormative.
Jase: It's not nonnormative anymore. Yes.
Dan: I think that's what everybody has through their heads now. Is that you would say to somebody 30 years ago, walk into a room, there are two people having normal sex, describe it. They would say, "Husband, wife, missionary position, lights off." Now, we all know that that is not normal in the sense of being the most common form of that. You walk into a room, you see two people having sex, the odds are better, it's not that.
I think really, the internet online pornography and the discourse about sex, which was partly driving and driven by what the internet was doing and what sex was doing on the internet, and how porn was a driver and sex workers were a driver. That conversation reinforced itself on both sides. It's really, I feel like that's been the big sea change.
Dedeker: To play deviled advocate now, I have to give the disclaimer that I don't agree with this stance or this argument, but it's one that I've often heard. I've heard people make the argument, "No, it's the other way around. It's the rise of internet porn that encouraged people and told them it is okay. Where maybe 50 years ago, if you had a fetish for putting your body parts in a toaster, you just realized, "Oh, that was silly. I shouldn't do that," until the internet comes along. Now, you have a whole community of people who want to put their body parts in toasters.
Dan: Boy, I tell you about my kink before we start recording-
Dan: -then you just fold it into your comments to embarrass and humiliate me, which I love.
Dan: I think there's a reinforcing snowball effect there. Look at-- I think Debby Herbenick at Indiana University has done great research on choking and its ubiquity and how it's been widely adopted. It really was porn that mainstreamed it and shaped people's expectations around it and normalized it in a way that's very dangerous and for some people, potentially traumatizing, although some people like it.
Some of the people who have been traumatized by choking are people who were asked to do the choking by a sex partner. Not just people who sprung the choking on a sex partner. Yes, that was porn. Yes, it has had these knock-on effects and this back and forth, but there was nothing entering the porn pipeline that was a creation of porn weren't things that people were doing and enjoying. Yes, some people have a reactive sexual-- They can imprint on something but I don't think there's anything that we see out there in the world sexually that we want to then do that doesn't vibe with something that was already in us erotically that wasn't present if dormant in our erotic imagination somehow.
While I do think porn can have a negative impact or it can script things for people that they need to be more thoughtful about engaging in, especially around consent and safety --
Dedeker: Toasters.
Dan: Toasters. Yes, you don't want to put your genitals in just any toaster, some of them are sharp.
Dan: Porn is a reflection of, but it's also is a distorting mirror.
Emily: Why is it that even though you can find just about anything that you possibly could ever want on the internet, and that has brought so many people together now in terms of we have communities that are toaster fetishists and spanking and whatever? Yet I feel like the discords now is that young people are not having as much sex as our generation and above did and does still. Why the hell is that happening? Why are people not having sex?
Dan: The internet can be isolating. One of the things when I was in college, there were the anti-porn protests that would say, "Porn is the theory, rape is the practice." As different states got online and internet porn came to different states, as a state got online, you would see rates of sexual assault and violence in that state drop. The arrival of just this pipeline of porn, the tsunami of porn, it resulted in people who might otherwise be out in the world to get their sexual satisfaction violating people just staying at home and jacking off and that's good.
We don't want those people in our bars. We don't want those people putting drugs in the drinks of our friends, although that is the thing that still happens. I think I'm all for me, too. I'm all for holding shitty men accountable but we do now live in a moment where men are still expected to make the first move but the consequences, if you guess wrong when you make that first move for a boy in a high school or a college can be really severe.
We aren't educating kids with sex education. We do cover reproductive biology. We don't cover what you can do in three minutes. We don't cover what should be covered in sex education is how do you talk somebody into fuck at you. What does that look like and what does that sound and how do you guess right?
I got a letter from a woman saying, "There's a guy in my class and I want to hit on him, but I don't want to sexually harass him. I want to ask him out, but I don't want to sexually harass him." Asking somebody out once is not sexual harassment. Asking them out again and again and again after they said no the first time, that sexual harassment.
I've also heard from people, parents whose sons have had their lives upended because they asked somebody out once and were accused of sexual harassment, or they were at a drunken party where people drank to lower their inhibitions. Then people did things because they were disinhibited that then were not violent, but they were non-consensual, go for it, reach, touch. That then was framed as sexual assault.
Yes, we created a real minefield and abandoned people under 30 in it. Then we're wondering why they don't fuck as much but we're also looking at the that fucking we were doing. Those of us who are older and middle age, we're looking at the fucking that we were doing at 18 and 20 with the benefit of hindsight and with rose-colored glasses on. A lot of that fucking wasn't great. A lot of it was clumsy and awkward. If there's less sex because there's less clumsy, awkward sex, I'm for less sex.
It is a problem that there are people out there who are very deeply frustrated who don't have sexual partners who've never touched anybody and don't know how to find it. Because we socialize men and women so differently, you've got guys now, guys who are being thoughtful about it are the guys who aren't approaching because they don't want to do anything wrong. They don't want to hurt anybody. They don't want to get accused of sexual assault. Then you have a self-selected group of Andrew Tates who are going for it because they don't care. It's really warping the sexual landscape in ways that we're going to need the sex education we will never have in this country to correct for.
Jase: Yes. All of that hits home very hard. I know that even for myself as not a young person who, I guess was in high school before we had the internet and I still struggle with that. That's a big part of why I just haven't dated since 2019. Even then, it was people that I already knew just because it is a little bit of this minefield of like, "If I'm doing all right, it's maybe just safer to not."
Dan: That's sad because then you don't have those experiences and you don't make those connections that the chaos of sex can make. I do feel like we need a two-pronged approach where we tell people hitting on someone more than once and you hit on people with your words. You don't lunge at people, you ask is not sexual harassment. You have not been sexually violated if somebody asks if you are interested or want to. They keep asking, well, then you're being harassed.
There's an old Tina Fey's get from Saturday Night Live. It was like, "Yes, that's kinda it," where "What's sexual harassment in the workplace? It's when Fred Armisen asks you out."
Dan: Isn't sexual harassment in the workplace is when I forget who the hot male football star actor was the other guy? When he asked you out, that's not sexual harassment. That's not --
Jase: It's not a good example. Yes.
Dan: –a good setting.
Dedeker: Well, what's so funny is, Jase, I think last year, you took me to Queen Anne to your old neighborhood there where you used to live when you were in your early to mid-20s or whatever. You took me to this park where you're like, "Yes, I used to bring dates to this park or whatever." I was asking, grilling you all these questions because you were dating at that time before dating apps and even before dating websites.
I was like, "How did you meet people?"
You were just like, "I don't know. I just talked to someone I found was attractive in the cafe and asked them out." I was just like, "What? You would just ask someone out in person just on the street?" It's so mind-blowing to me now, even though it was not that long ago that that's just how it was, that there was that risk.
However, I think that Dan, what you're describing is there is still this big gap between the way we socialize men and the way we socialize women as far as expectations around sex, courtship, flirtation, romance, dating hookups, all those things that when I think about my experience as a woman that if a guy does randomly approach me and ask me out, there is all this socialization that dictates. It is safer for me to assume he's not going to take the first no for an answer. It is safer for me to assume he's going to be persistent.
Then that creates in me a sense of like, "Oh, if a guy's asking me out and if I'm not into it and not feeling it, I really need to push back against it," because just my, "No, thank you" is not going to be listened to, which is not always true in every single case but I do think there's still a lot of women and still young women that carry that socialization. Yes, there is this weird morass in the middle of all this, this fog that we can't quite cut through or see through.
Dan: Now, we need to talk about slut-shaming. Now, we need to talk about the ways many women feel that they do need to say no first as the opening play so they don't look like a slut. Your sincere, no, can be hard for a guy to tell apart from another woman's opening playful, maybe not. Yes, the way we socialize men, the way we socialize women is to set heterosexual relationships up for failure. I think on some basic fundamental level, men and women are fundamentally sexually incompatible but that's just my bias showing-
Dan: -which also has to be controlled for and worked around. I think there's a difference. When I talk about asking a person-- And I'm not talking about some random approaching a woman on the street. I think men should be told "That's not okay because women move through the world having to deflect unwanted male sexual attention everywhere they go. It's almost always from assholes."
If you approach some woman that you don't know on the bus or in a cafe perhaps these days, she's not going to be able to tell you apart from somebody with no judgment, and who is not somebody she would ever say, yes, to. It's putting yourself in situations where you interact with people. Leave the house, join a club, volunteer, do this, do that, have a friendship network which many men do not have anymore, many young men do not. Get away from the fucking internet.
Then women that you interact with where you begin to get a sense of perhaps there's some interest or vibe there, then you can ask that person out. Not go plop your ass down next to somebody on the bus who's got headphones on, is listening to something and reading, and has a hoodie up, leave her the fuck alone. Yes, that's not what I mean when I say "It's okay to ask somebody out once. "It's not okay to do that at all.
Everyone complains about dating apps, but in a way, God bless them because it is the place we can go where we say, "Here you may approach me, stranger." You never know who you might meet.
My customer and I, we predate the dating apps because we met at Re-bar in Seattle 30 years ago the way people used to meet.
Dan: He came up to me-- Anyway, I won't tell that story again but my boyfriend and I met on a hookup app. I approached him, he was much younger and I thought I would never meet him. He lives on the other side of the world. I was just like, "Your pictures are really hot." I literally, I think I said, "And I'm never going to meet you and we're never going to probably interact but I just wanted to say" --
Dedeker: He took that as a challenge.
Dan: He didn't take it as a challenge. He just took that as a-- I guess, we just began to chat because I was polite and respectful. I had reasonable expectations, which were no expectations at all and we just kept chatting every once in a while. Then my husband and I were in Berlin and we said, "Hey, we're in Berlin not too far from where you are. Do you want to come to Berlin and hang out?" He did. Yes, God bless dating apps.
I think you say to people, "Don't approach strangers on the bus," but you can open Tinder on the bus and see if that person on the bus that you thought was cute is on Tinder at that moment or Grindr or whatever else, which is how a lot of young people who are more successful dating and fucking around do it. All the young gay guys I hang out with-- Because my husband's boyfriend is so young, they go to the bars and they don't pick people up. They go to the bars, they see people they might think are hot and then they look to see if they're on Grindr which they will be if they're out that night and they're interested in inviting. Then you message that person on Grindr who's across the bar-
Dan: -and send him your pictures. You don't walk up to him and start talking like I walked up to Terry and started talking three years ago at Re-bar.
Emily: Okay, all of us talk about relationship communication on our shows. To close things out here, as we're starting to wind down, I want to know from each of us, what do people really get wrong about communication, and what can they do better when it comes to communication and relationships.
Dedeker: What a gigantic question because I think people do so many things wrong with communication.
Emily: They do
Dan: The four magic words. This is communicating with somebody you're about to have sex with. This is the advantage that gay people have over straight people. When two guys go to bed together for the first time, when they get to, yes, they get to consent, they have to keep communicating because what's going to happen next can't be assumed. Who's going to fuck who, whether it's going to be fucking or not.
As a young gay boy, 16, 17 years old in the city of Chicago, the first time I slept with a guy, he looked at me and said, "What are you into?" At that moment, I was like, "Oh my God, I have to tell you, I have to say?" because it can't just happen. At that moment, I was empowered to rule anything in and anything out and ask for what I want, I had to ask for what I want.
The problem with straight people is they get to, yes, they get to consent and they stop communicating because it's going to be normal sex, vanilla sex, straight sex, little rolling around, maybe some oral, and then penetrative intercourse. What is there to discuss? The reason gay people are better at sex, have more sex, which is a double-edged sword as we've seen, HIV/AIDS, Monkeypox, other things is that we communicate in a way that straight people don't have to. Some straight people do, but they don't have to and so many of them avoid it.
Nothing makes you better at sex and relationships than good communication. Having to practice good communication from the start with a new sex partner, sets you up for a felicity around having these conversations and the ease and comfort with having these conversations that contribute to sexual satisfaction, relationship satisfaction in a way that is so beneficial. We got marriage from you guys, please take what are you into from us.
Straight guys, if every time you said "Yes," to sex, your ass got fucked open, you would say, yes, to sex less often than you might otherwise. For a woman to be asked, "What are you into," one of the possible answers that you are willing to accept has to be, "I'm not into vagin-- Or I'm not into penetrative sex today," but oral frottage, rolling around, mutual masturbation, there's all sorts of things.
Every, "What are you into?" conversation between gay men doesn't end with somebody getting fucked in the ass. It just doesn't but straight sex always ends with her getting fucked. If every time you said, yes, you got fucked, you would say, yes, less often. Straight guys, if you want to have a lot more sex, define sex more broadly and sometimes, take for an answer, "What are you into?" "I'm into all these other things tonight, but not into that, not tonight. Maybe another night, but not tonight."
Then you can't treat hand jobs, oral sex, mutual masturbation, frottage has sad consolation prizes, but as sex, too, and good sex and rewarding sex are here. Use this vibrator on me while you kneel between my legs and jack yourself off. That's sex, too.
Dan: It can be great sex. I'm a proselytizing evangelist for this point, but nothing would improve straight sex and relationships more than that, being adopted, normalized, mainstreamed. Then everybody having the what are you into conversation.
Dedeker: I remember seeing you say that in an interview once. It's specifically the piece about, "Can you imagine a straight woman saying to someone, "Yes, I'm not into vaginal penetration," whether it's, "I'm not into it tonight," or it's like, "No, I'm not into it ever. That's just not what I do," but everything else is --
Dan: "I'm not a bottom," is one of the right answers for gay men .
Dedeker: It's so mind-blowing to us culturally. I know for me, I think over the past five-ish years or so, I've definitely been in, I think, a big transformation about my attitudes around sex. It shifted to be a lot more pleasure-oriented rather than performance-oriented and much more oriented around "What do I actually want? What does my body actually feel like today?" Then communicating that, whether it's weird or non-normative or anything.
We already covered ground with the way that women are socialized, but that's why I said earlier that I think excavation is such a good word for it, that I think a lot of women are having to excavate out from underneath all these layers of socialization and expectation and this sense. I know for me, when I heard you first say that, way back in the day, that the first thing that struck me was, "Oh, is that actually an option? I can actually not be into vaginal penetration." I can actually say that to somebody and he's not going to die.
Dedeker: He’s not going to die because we're socialized that way. If he has an erection and you don't do what he wants, he is going to die, so you have to do it at all costs.
Dan: Or more horrible to contemplate the fear women often negotiate in that moment. "If I say, no, to him, is he going to kill me, or is he going to hurt me? Is he going to react violently?" which is something that any decent sex education would pound into the heads of men who are interested in sleeping with women, whether straight or bi, is that it requires a solicitousness and awareness that most men coast along for years and years and years before they realize. Often it takes a loved, intimate partner sharing their story of sexual violation for it to really come through to a guy. That should be something we talk about in sex-ed in a way that it doesn't paralyze people.
Jase: I just wanted to say on that, I think that to add to this communication piece, something that I often encourage men to do specifically-- I think this is good for everyone, but if you are going to be the one to ask for something, in the way you ask it, try to make it clear that no isn't okay answer to give. It's possible to do it in a way that shows that's also possible, and no, is also fine. Maybe they still won't trust you. Society is going to encourage them not to, but there can be a lot of freedom in that for the other person to go like, "No," then to actually follow it up with a "Thank you for taking care of yourself. Thank you.--
Dan: The only thing I would add is encouraging people who are being asked about something that they've never thought about doing or wanted to do, of accord, to not lead with a, no. Just drop the N, go with an oh, instead of a no, because it can be hard for people to ask for what they want. They may have been dumped before when they tried to bring it up, whatever it is.
You get into dicey territory when you tell people, "Sometimes you should do in bed something that you didn't want to do." You should never do something in bed that would traumatize you that you are disgusted by, but sometimes you do for your partner. Amy Muise calls it communal sexual strength, when you go there for a partner and you try something, you step outside your not quite your comfort zone, but it wasn't your idea. It wasn't anything that had ever occurred to you that you would want to do.
We live in a sex-negative culture, we recoil from that and also we have to be really careful about saying to women, "You should just do whatever he wants," because then women do wind up doing things that are traumatizing or make them feel dehumanized or objectified in a way that isn't hot. We want to be attractive time to time, but not in a way that's not hot. I always think of that woman who found out her boyfriend was a foot fetishist.
Emily: That's so sad.
Dan: Don't marry the honest foot fetishist but you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac is my curse on you, but letting somebody touch your feet because it gives them sexual pleasure, even if that's not something that you ever thought of because it doesn't give you sexual pleasure, how is that not a gift you can give somebody that you love and are attracted to. We often don't want to do the things that we don't want to do, not because they would harm us or gross us out, or we just curl up in the fetal position on the floor. Just because we've also got it in our heads that we should never do anything that we don't want to do.
Then you end up in a relationship with two people who, the Venn diagram of their shared sexual interests has such little overlap that neither is sexually fulfilled in that relationship. Some effort to push those circles closer together by stepping outside your comfort zone by being GGG, as I like to say, and being game for anything within reason, and is not reasonable to do things that traumatize somebody or leave you traumatized, but within reason, let your foot fetishist boyfriend suck your toes. How hard is that? If that traumatizes you, how are you going to function in this world, because worse is going to happen than getting your toes sucked. Getting your toes sucked is actually hot or feels interesting afterwards.
Not my thing, but I've let guys do it. It's just like, how can you not take pleasure from the pleasure that you have the capacity to give someone in a moment? If you can't take pleasure from your capacity, give pleasure to somebody you care about who gives you pleasure, who solicitous about your interests and needs too, you're cheating yourself out of a lot.
Emily: As I've again left a long, long-term relationship and tried to figure out now what it is that I want if you can get clear on what it is that you're hoping for in your relationships, whether that be trying to find someone long term, trying to just be monogamous or non-monogamous, trying to just find your next hookup partner that you're upfront about that, with the person that you're going to start dating, but then also understand that there should be some flexibility there. I think there are so many of us who get into this mindset of, "I have to find this specific thing," and they don't allow for the possibility of more or something different. There's a rigidity there, I think --
Dan: The "What do I want?" conversation has to include "What do you want?"
Emily: Absolutely. Absofuckinglutelly and see if those two things align instead of just expecting, 'Well, we'll figure it out someday," but try to be as upfront and clear about it from the beginning as you can.
Dan: I want to tie this all back to something I said earlier-
Emily: Please.
Dan: -about sexual peaks and women come into their sexualities and really profound and sometimes shocking to the woman ways like at 30. You dumped the foot fetishist when you were 20 because you wanted normal sex and that was gross and weird. Then at 30, suddenly your gross weird stuff starts to surface. Rather than having a foot fetishist that you love, who loved you, who's in your debt, who's filled with gratitude for the way you've indulged him for the last decade, 30, you married some boring mope with no kinks.
Dedeker: Oh, but does that person exist really before– .
Dan: I think anybody who tells you they have no kinks is lying to you.
Dan: They have a kink-
Emily: They're lying to themselves.
Dan: -but they're embarrassed or ashamed or it's too illegal they can't talk about it.
Emily: There you go.
Dedeker: Last question. What keeps you going doing this work for so many years? The 5,000 times you had to tell somebody to dump the motherfucker already, how do you maintain a sense of hope and drive to keep doing this work?
Dan: Sometimes I will be with Nancy, the producer of the Savage Love cast, and we'll take a question and I'll be like, "Oh, I can't talk about that. I've talked about that," and she'll go, "10 years ago you talked about that," when this column --
Jase: We go through exactly the same thing with episode topics. We're like, "Didn't we just do that?" We looked back, we're like, "Ah, that was three years ago," or "That was five years ago."
Dan: This person when you covered this topic was 10, 9 and they weren't listening, hopefully. I try not to be too self-conscious about sometimes repeating myself. I remember when Emily Yoffe, who wrote Dear Prudence, signed off after nine years and she said, "I've said everything I have to say." I was already 20 years into Savage Love at that point.
Emily: Wow.
Dan: I just feel like it's such a great gig. This computer is propped up in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia, which I have read and referenced in my work. Her column had to be pried from her cold dead hands-
Dan: -and that's how I feel about having a successful advice column. I'm going to die writing this column. It's too much fun, it's too interesting. The trust people demonstrate in me or the faith they have in me when they write to me-- Even though sometimes I'm wrong and people take a piece out of me, which I welcome because I've learned a lot writing my column. It's not just me coming down from the mountain with the tablets, it's a conversation. It's just such a great gig. I couldn't understand how anybody could walk away from and so I never ever will. I will be carried out in a box-
Dan: -and I love it. I love it. The only thing I don't love is, I used to get, because the column is so old, I used to get descriptions of-- People would write me and say, "I am too embarrassed to go to the doctor," and then they would describe the sore on their anus or their vulva or their penis and I would have to print this letter and say, "I'm not a doctor. You still have to go to the doctor. You've just delayed going to the doctor."
People don't write the descriptions anymore. They just take-
Emily: Send the picture.
Dan: -digital photographs and attach them to their email. "I'm too embarrassed to go to the doctor," not too embarrassed to stand on a sink in my dorm room, bend over, and take this picture.
Emily: And send this to Dan Savage.
Dan: Send it to you on an unsecured server with my real name attached to it. Not to embarrassed for that, "Please tell me what this is." Write these people back and say that is, "Go to the student health center, go to the doctor."
Dedeker: Well, we're lucky. I don't think we've gotten any of that in our line of work, not yet.
Jase: No, yes.
Dedeker: Please don't. Don't take that as an invitation anyone listening.
Dan: It makes it impossible for me to read the Savage Love mail in a cafe or on an airplane.
Jase: Right. Yes. That makes sense.
Emily: For sure, yes.
Dedeker: Normally we've put a question on our Instagram stories every single week that's usually tied to something about the episode where people can essentially answer anonymously. If you can't think of anything that's totally fine, but we'd like to offer if there is one thing you'd want to know how the Multiamory audience feels, would you have any questions you want to pose?
Dan: Sure. Yes. Do you feel there's something illegitimate or abusive about hierarchical polyamory? Are you so deluded as to think that there are non-hierarchical polyamorous relationships?
Dedeker: Oh, Dan, we've covered that ground so much and our our audience will have a lot to say.
Dan: I really want to stick it. I don't believe there's any such thing as a non-hierarchical polyamorous relationship. I think people get hurt when they have to pretend or they're conned into believing.
Jase: That's often something we've talked about. Even just recently, we were talking about that on an episode of the harm caused by people thinking they're not allowed to have it, and so they try really hard. It's like we were talking about with the pretending as if you're interested in a long-term relationship because you think that's the only thing that's acceptable to want, when really what you want is hookups. I feel like hierarchy can fall into a similar thing, but boy, people are passionate on the other side of that.
Dan: My husband's boyfriend was new and Terry and I, at that point, had been together 25 years or 24 years, and somebody said to him "You have to insist as non-hierarchical." I was just like, "Oh no, that's not happening." We'll grow together in time and things will get more equal but I'm the fucking husband. We can't pretend that Terry and I haven't been together for a quarter of a century, and don't have shared property and other ties to each other that you can't compete with pretty twink, sorry.
We're not going to lie to you and pretend that you can, because that would be dishonest and us being manipulative. We would be selling to you an idea of the relationship you're in that's fundamentally untrue. That's my problem when I see people who say they're practicing hierarchal polyamory, they almost always aren't practicing hierarchical polyamory, they're just lying about it.
Dedeker: I think it comes down to a language problem, honestly. What I'm starting to see is that when people say "Hierarchy,' it's collapsed into-- Or if you're practicing hierarchical polyamory, that means all of the horrible toxic controlling power dynamic behaviors that people have fallen victim to when they're the unicorn hunted by a couple or whatever. Then when people say non-hierarchical polyamory it's a fill-in for everything good, everything nice, and everything ethical. It gets flattened many things on the internet do but--
Dan: I thought it was ethical for us to say to Terry's boyfriend then, "You're not the husband. You don't get to have an opinion about whether we sell the house or not, sorry."
Dedeker: Sure.
Dan: That'll impact you if we sell the house but you don't get a vote. I think you're absolutely right that people use hierarchy to stand in for manipulative, abusive, controlling, when we use it to mean we're being honest about the facts on the ground. Seven years later, it's a much more egalitarian relationship that we have with Terry's boyfriend, Tom. He's earned much more of a say in how we run our affairs because he is now embedded in them. Three months in, six months in, you don't get a vote.
Dedeker: I think the discourse has difficulty grappling with that nuance, because surprise, surprise, things get really black and white on the internet.
Emily: People have a lot to say there.
Dan: This was so much fun. Thank you.
Jase: This was awesome.