Savage Love Episode 1004

This episode of the Savage Lovecast is brought to you by Soaking Wet by VB Health, the world's first probiotic specifically designed for vaginal and vulva health and wellness. Visit soakingwet.com and use code SAVAGE for 10% off or click the link in this episode's show notes. You're listening to the Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage's sex and relationship show for grownups. If you're under 18, get out of here, youngin'. If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony, well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast. Gen Z wanted less sex in movies and less sex on their television shows. That's what Gen Z told researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a study that got a lot of attention and made a lot of headlines. Now, not every member of Gen Z spoke with researchers at UCLA, of course. Gen Z, that's 70 million people. But a statistically representative sample did, a large enough sample that we can generalize from the results about Gen Z generally, and there is nothing we like more around here than generalizing about generational cohorts. Gen Z, not only doing less fucking than previous generations, they wanted to watch less fucking, according to the research, less fucking in films and television shows than previous generations. The headlines, they were everywhere. Variety, Gen Z wants more animation, less sex on screen, and PR. Gen Z wants less sex in TVs and movies. The Guardian, Gen Z viewers want less sex on screen. Some Gen Z kids even argued, and I am engaged in a little nut picking here, I will admit, but these nutty arguments were seriously entertained in some quarters. Some members of Gen Z took to the internet to argue that sex scenes in movies and television shows were a form of sexual assault because consenting to see a film or watch a TV show, putting your butt in a seat in a theater or on the couch in your living room and pointing your eyes at the screen, that didn't mean you'd consented to watching a sex scene. And since not everyone watches the trailers or reads the reviews or thinks to check the ratings of a TV show or film before watching, which are, you know, generally a pretty good indication of whether there will be fucking, the only way to make going to the movies or watching TV safe for, just going to say it, save for morons, save for woke Gen Z incels, gold purple haired Puritans who do not represent the majority of Gen Z. The only way to make TV and film safe for them was to stop putting sex scenes in movies and TV shows altogether. This was essentially a demand from Puritans with purple hair to bring back the Hays Code. For decades, between 1930 and 1968, films were censored. Sex could only be implied. They would show trains going to tunnels and fireworks exploding in the sky and white and foamy waves. I'll just say it. Jizzy waves. Jizzy fucking waves crashing on the shore. They would show that instead of sex. Funny thing was, there was already a lot less sex, at least at the movies. The Economist looked at the highest grossing movies over the last 40 years, more than 250 of them. And turns out sexually explicit content had fallen by 40% in just the last five years. Drug references, violence, and profanity, as critic Faith Hill dryly noted in The Atlantic, hovered at stable levels. But maybe, maybe things are changing? I mean, looking around, we do seem to be living through something of a sexual renaissance or renaissance on screens big and small. There's the trash that is Hunting Wives, renewed for a second season, please. God, if you're going to have another pegging scene, Hunting Wives, get an intimacy coordinator who has at least seen a dildo once before in their life. And there were, of course, the insanely hot sex scenes and heated rivalry. The intimacy coordinator on that show, Chala Hunter, she had at least met and maybe even talked to one or two gay men. The gay sex was so good. we also recently got Nicole Kidman and Baby Girl crazy sex scenes crazy sex next week we're getting Alexander Skarsgård and Pillian crazy gay BDSM sex scenes and pretty soon we're going to get I Want Your Sex from Greg Araki the towering figure in indie and sexually explicit cinema I Want Your Sex is about a relationship between an artist played by Olivia Wilde and her much younger male assistant. Sounds like a little bit of a flip on baby girl since the boss in this one is the dom, not the sub. And people, people of all generations, including Gen Z, people are lapping this shit up. People are loving all of this fucking on their screens. What changed? Olivia Wilde, actress, filmmaker, and star of I Want Your Sex, was asked about the UCLA study when it came out. about these Gen Z kids who wanted to see less sex, Wilde said, maybe what Gen Z is saying is we don't want to see inauthenticity anymore. We want to see, like, real relationships. We want to have something that feels genuine. So, setting aside the nuts who argue that sex scenes were consent violations, I think Wilde is right about Gen Z, this observation that she made. And maybe about all of us, Loki? People weren't tired of sex scenes. heated rivalry all by itself proved that. People were tired of cliches. Faith Hill, in her piece on heated rivalry for The Atlantic, a romance that actually takes sex seriously, talks about the UCLA study into Gen Z. When I read those reports, Hill writes, what I sensed was largely just fatigue, a frustration with a perceived over-reliance on romance and the tropes the genre often entails. Many of the UCLA study participants agreed that romantic relationship depictions often feel unnatural, forced, or toxic. They were on guard against what they saw as stereotypes and particularly tired of seeing protagonists always end up together. Nicole Kidman and her lover didn't wind up together at the end of Baby Girl. I haven't seen Pillian yet. I know Alexander Skarsgård from the trailer doms the guy, but I don't know if he gets the guy. And Shane and Ilya are together at the end of Heated Rivalry Season 1. I haven't read the book, so I don't know what's coming in Season 2. And no spoilers, please, from you Heated Rivalry obsessives out there who ran out and read the books after watching Season 1. But I do hope that this trend, more sex scenes, better sex scenes, continues to pick up steam and leads, fingers crossed, in the lives of undersexed Gen Z kids to more and better sex. All right. I did it. I stuck to dildos. Oh my God. Coming up on today's show, will a woman's yapping needy dogs end her relationship? And on the micro and magnum, I brought on my porn star pal, John Thomas, to talk about British boarding schools and situational homosexuality. And on the magnum, a man with an enlarged spleen is worried about damaging his internal organs when his husband rearranges his guts for him during anal sex. He wanted to hear from a medical expert and we went and got the best Dr. Evan Goldstein on the show today on the Magnum. A couple of programming notes. We are still accepting stories of your worst breakups ever. The gnarlier, the better. Record your sad, sad story and send it to us at q at savage.love. Leave a callback number if you'd like me to console you personally and I promise I will take your side. We will air these stories on next week's show. And for my Magnum listeners, save the date. February 12th, noon Pacific time, we are having another Savage Love Live Zoom Hangout for our Magnum subscribers. If you're not yet a Magnum subscriber, you can become one now at savage.love and join us at the Zoom Hangout. They're always really fucking fun. Nancy and I will be there. And if you're there, you can ask me a question live and just hang and chill with the coolest community online. online. This is for Magnum subs only again. If you're not a Magnum sub and want to become one, go to savage.love and subscribe. And we've got an all new sex and politics for you this week on Thursday with author and activist Matthew Vines. He is on a new crusade. He wants to talk gay men into monogamy. You'll have to listen on Thursday to find out if he turned me into a one man kind of guy. And of course on Friday, a new after action report. So much coming your way from all of us here at Savage Lovecast Industries. And now, having successfully stuck to the dildos, oh my God, this week's first call. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, makers of the best mattresses ever. And right now, my listeners get 27% off site-wide when you go to helixsleep.com slash savage. This episode is brought to you by Blueland. Going eco has never been easier. revolutionary refillable cleaning essentials, eliminating single-use plastics. Right now, get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.com slash savage. This episode is brought to you by VB Health, doctor-formulated supplements that work. To learn more about Load Boost, Drive Boost, and Soaking Wet, and to get 10% off, visit vb.health and use the code savage. Hey, Dan. I've been in a relationship for about five years with somebody who has a primary live-in partner of over a decade. I want to be clear up front. He is loving, supportive, and kind. I don't feel emotionally neglected, and I don't doubt that he cares deeply about me. I've always known I wasn't the primary, and I've done the emotional work that comes with that, accepting limits, managing jealousy, and not asking him to change his life for me. I also haven't dated during this time. Between COVID, my father's cancer illness, and death this last fall, job instability, and working through longstanding trauma, I just wasn't in the place to pursue other relationships. But I always believed that when I was ready, I could. We're poly after all. Recently, watching the depth and stability my parents shared in my dad's final moments made something click. I realized I want that kind of grounding in partnership in my own life someday. So I asked my partner a direct question. Could he emotionally handle if I eventually found a primary relationship of my own? His answer was essentially no. He didn't forbid it, but he said his knee-jerk reaction was that he wouldn't be able to handle it and wouldn't want to be emotionally involved in that reality. What's hard is I've already done the emotional labor for him. I accepted his primary relationship without asking him to change it. I assumed that the same flexibility would exist in my direction. Now I'm left wondering if what he's truly comfortable with is polyamory that works for him but not for me. So my question is, at what point does polyamory as complicated become this is fundamentally unequal? and how do I know when you're being asked to accept less than what you deserve even in a loving relationship my eyes are rolling so hard listening to your call that they rolled right out of my head right out of the podcast booth and probably rolling right down the fucking street right now oh my god this is not poly this is pasha pashas of course is everyone who listens to the lovecast knows we're high-ranking officials in the ottoman empire and they had harems collections of wives and female slaves and servants, and they did not share. Their wives were not allowed to have boyfriends on the side. This is kind of one penis policy Polly bullshit that gives Polly a bad name, where it just looks like a man wants to have what patriarchs had, which was access to as many women as he would like to have, and those women living under restrictions for his comfort that we're not imposed on him. Look, you deserve to have, if what you need to have and want to have is a nesting partner, you deserve to have a primary partner. He's not comfortable with the idea of dot, dot, dot sharing you the way you've shared him. He's not comfortable with you having a man in your life, another dick in your pussy that isn't his. And you having the time, attention, prioritization focus that a primary partner only a primary partner can give you fuck this guy i'm sorry fuck this guy i know he's an abstraction to me you say he's a lovely person and it's been a lovely loving relationship and you've had a good five years with him you've grown in this relationship being somebody secondary not having a primary partner of your own may have been right for you, what you needed, where you were at for the first four years and six months of this relationship But it not what you want It not right for you anymore So Collar you want what he got and you entitled not just to want what he's got, but to go out there and try to find for yourself what he's always had, which is a primary partner. And if that ends this relationship, so the fuck be it. There's only one way to really find out if he could handle you having a primary partner in your life, and that is for you to go and find one and then he can fuck the fuck off if he can't handle it or he may do what you did five years ago and dig deep and process his feelings of jealousy and allow for his secondary partner to have a primary partner of their own just as he's always had a primary partner of his own so if he's poly and not pasha he should be able to go on this emotional journey and process these feelings and arrive in a place where you are a full human being, where you are allowed to have the kind of primary partner that you know that you need. And if it means giving up somebody who only has ever seen you or regarded you as a secondary partner and have that primary partner, you should be willing and able and anxious to give that motherfucker up. And I want to say good for you for asking the dread direct question. I'm always encouraging people to ask the dread direct question, you had assumed it would be fine if you one day too had a primary partner. But you didn't have clarity about that until now, until you asked the direct question. Good for you. Sleep, it doesn't exactly come easy these days, but it helps. It helps a lot to have the most cozy, comfortable mattress. And that is my comforting, comfortable Helix Sleep mattress. The Helix lineup offers 20 unique mattresses, including the award-winning Luxe collection. that is ours, of course. Terry will accept nothing less than Lux. The Helix Elite Collection, a mattress designed for big and tall sleepers, and even a mattress made just for kids. To figure out which mattress is right for you, take the Helix Sleep Quiz to find your perfect mattress in under two minutes, and your personalized mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge. And with Helix's 100-night sleep trial, you can try out your new mattress, see how your body adjusts, and if you decide it's not the best fit, you are welcome to return it for a full refund. They offer models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side like I do, or models with a more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and other stomach and back positions too. Plus, enhanced cooling features to keep you from overheating at night. Right now, my listeners get 27% off site-wide. Now is the time to invest in your coziness. Again, go to helixsleep.com slash savage for 27% off site-wide. Make sure you enter Savage Lovecast into the post-purchase survey so they know the Lovecast sent you. That's helixsleep.com slash savage. Hi, Dan. I am 37-quarter female and I've been with my partner's 38 female for a little over a year now. We're in a long-distance relationship, but we spend most weekends together, and it's generally the healthiest, most loving relationship either of us have ever been in. We communicate well, we take care of each other, and we really do feel like we're building something solid. We have one ongoing issue that's starting to feel bigger than what I want it to be. She just really dislikes my dogs. I have two 12-year-old miniature pinchers. They are anxious, needy, ankle biters, and I fully admit they are a lot. One was recently diagnosed with diabetes and needs much more care now. My partner struggles to connect with them and feels like they interfere with our intimacy. One of them always needs to be physically close and sleeps in bed with us, which she hates. This has been the source of most of our fights. She stopped making outright mean comments, but she is trying. But I still catch the eye rolls and the look of disgust. I've been doing everything I can to make things easier with training, anxiety meds, trying to keep them out of the bed, finding sitters because she doesn't want them at her place anymore. She tells me she's never asked me to do any of this. Honestly, what other options did I have if I wanted to keep the peace and keep the relationship moving forward? She even backed out of us moving in together because the idea of living with them made her too anxious. And now I'm finding myself resenting my own dogs, which makes me feel awful. I'm stressed, guilty, and scared that I could lose the person I want to spend my life with over this. I even caught myself having thoughts about their eventual passing, which makes me feel like a terrible person. Is this a deal breaker for us? Is this the kind of incompatibility that ends relationship? Or is this something couples can't realistically work through? I guess I'm a bad person too, because when you described your dogs as anxious, needy, ankle biters, but also 12, I thought, what's the life expectancy of these two anxious, needy, ankle-biting dogs anyway? It's not like they're puppies. It's not like they're one-year-old dogs and there's another decade and a half, potentially, in these dogs. Your dogs. I'm sorry to say. And I am a dog owner. And when we had to put one of our dogs down, I cried and cried and cried and cried. Not a dog lover. Love my dogs. don't love everybody else's dogs but i i get it i'm not wishing your dogs would die but they're gonna die dogs don't live for fucking ever and then problem solved i don't think you should hurry this process along i think you should take care of your dogs but you and your girlfriend 37 and 38 year old grown-ass adult women seems to me that you should be able to take the long view and not that long of you here and be a bit zen about this and regard the dogs as a temporary imposition distraction problem that you two can solve together with sitters with better training perhaps with anxiety meds but also with a promise to your partner from you that when these dogs go to their reward all dogs go to heaven when they go to heaven you will not replace them with anxious ankle-biting dogs that you didn't train not to fucking sleep in your bed or not replace them at all. You just won't get another dog. And then you guys have decades together, potentially, where you could move in with one another and do the lesbian thing and get a cat instead, which will not bite your fucking ankles and probably won't want to sleep in your bed. so you two the both of you together i want to knock your heads together you had these dogs before the girlfriend came along you're a responsible loving dog owner you're going to take care of these dogs you're going to give them a good and wonderful life and they're probably you can count your time with them probably at this point in months 12 24 36 fingers crossed and then again you'll have decades together in a dog-free home with unbitten ankles come on you guys you can do this blue land had one of those ideas that seems obvious and yet no one else thought of it first dishwashing liquid laundry detergent floor soap it's mostly water by weight and water's heavy shipping it to stores in trucks takes energy and since no one walks home from the grocery store with a huge thing of laundry detergent, you're going to burn gas getting it home. 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Blueland.com slash savage to get 15% off your first order. Hi, Dan. I've been married for five years now to an absolutely lovely man and with great sex life. Just great everything and currently trying for a baby and it's all going really well. but we've had some conversations recently that kind of just played on my mind so basically we were going through our first sexual experiences and things like that and we both went to boarding schools so quite far away from our parents house my husband basically said that he had a lot of experiences with other boys at his school which quite shocked me I have to say I watch all those programs and I kind of thought like oh that would be really sexy but actually it didn't make me feel sexy and I don't know why it didn't and he's never shown anything that I would think to be bi I mean and he didn't say anything and I didn't ask him the moment like oh did you have feelings for men and I don't know it's kind of been playing on my mind so then I was kind of thinking my god the first like three years of his sexual experiences with with other boys and like that i don't know how to feel about that um or what to ask him or ask him about like how he feels about that because he just kind of said in the moment that we we kind of like laughed i was shocked and he was like oh my god you're shocked um and then we kind of just moved on and now i realize it's like really on my mind and am i a bad person for thinking about this but it's something i never know about. Is this something that a lot of straight men go through? Joining me to help tackle this question, John Thomas is an award-winning porn star. He was best newcomer in 2019, best bottom in 2021, fan favorite 2022. Before deciding to fulfill his lifelong dream of making a career in porn, John worked as a writer and director, having studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. John, welcome back to the Savage Lovecast. Hello, Dan. Thank you very much for having me back. It's a pleasure to be here. I think everyone can hear why I wanted you to answer this question with me, because you were a great guest last fall, and you sound like someone who went to a British boarding school. Did you go to a British boarding school? So I did briefly go to a very posh school where students boarded, but I was a day pupil because my father was the curate in the parish so I was able to live uh and nearby and walk to school um but I felt like at the time as a small child I felt like I missed out on all the fun of staying overnight at school and uh getting up to mischief I'm growing up in Bath itself Bath is dominated by some very fancy characterful boarding schools or private schools as I called them growing up And listening to this question, it to me sounded like the woman could well be someone who had gone to school in Bath. The accents are akin. I have to say, for having, she's British, she went to boarding schools. She seems curiously or strangely not informed or naive about what goes on at British boys' boarding schools. I grew up in Chicago. They had a reputation that penetrated the Midwest, man. that there was a lot of what they call, what they call, sex researchers call situational homosexuality in a British boarding school A lot of boys would mess around with other boys not because they were gay or bi but because the only thing available to them were other boys Was that your experience of being a day pupil? You weren't there for the nighttime mischief, but did you get a sense that some of the nighttime mischief you were missing out on was boys experimenting with each other who may or may not be gay? I was pretty young when I was at this, a pre-prepertoire, was its name, but the showers to me, the communal showering that we had to do after four hours of rugby every day, even as a young child, when the older boys came in, there was this kind of, it's hard to say whether it was like, I guess it was a form of bullying, but this kind of, this very odd, like, teenage-child interaction of boys in the changing room, the shower room, and I would say this was my experience also when I was a teenager in a comprehensive school, You're told that you're gay and it's kind of like a bullying thing, but it's also like I didn't think I was gay until you said it. But I did when I was, I think I was 13. I was on a trip over a residential trip to Paris with my school. So I was 12 and 13 year old boys. And this came back to me after listening to the question. I was not aware that I was gay, but, you know, the other students were making me aware that I was different. but in my sort of room of four boys the person who I considered to be like my bully initiated us that we all had to do dares which effectively were all like somewhat sexual in nature so he dared one boy to like who presumably had a big dick to slap his dick against the mirror in the bedroom and then they wanted me to jerk off under the covers and and I don't remember what else but it was someone who was ostensibly the very heterosexual kind of rough bully who was initiating that experience, not the fey little faggot in the corner. I have to say that maybe our conversation isn't going to be a comfort to the caller because you went to boarding schools, there was some sexual roughhousing play that you experienced with other boys and you're gay, gay, gay, gay, very, very, very gay, gay porn star gay, like stratospheric levels. Collected all the shits, all the life goals. But a lot of the boys who mess around with each other in these British boarding schools or boarding schools or other places where women are scarce and young men are plentiful, don't grow up to be gay. It was just, I wanted to read this thing from Gore Vidal's United States. It's a collection of his essays. he has an essay called The Birds and the Bees and he went to boarding schools and he writes it was common for boys to have sex with one another it was called messing around and it was no big deal if the boy became a man who kept on messing around it was thought queer but no big deal so long as he kept it to himself and so collar yeah your husband may like this could mean absolutely nothing what shocks me about the collar shocked me five years into a marriage and you're only now having the conversation about your first earliest sexual experiences that seems odd to me i think terry and i had those conversations like five days into our relationship not five years certainly not right before we became parents yeah but i guess after five years it's kind of a shock but but also i i don't know if it makes a difference whether it call it in the state whether he was at a single sex school or whether it was mixed and whether she was at single sex or mixed because i think that would also maybe change one's assumptions if she was at a mixed sex and he was at a solo sex establishment but i agree i mean i have someone very close to me who i i you know knew them in their their their teens late teens um sort of into early 20s sort of studenthood to be pretty experimental open-minded and as they've grown older, you know, they're very keen to be like the breadwinner who provides for their female partner. Like, you know, it's like the opposite of becoming more liberal with age. You know, they're still a young adult, but they're becoming the young adult that society expects them to be. I wanted to unpack a little bit of a paradox about young men in a boarding school environment, because the caller obviously is worried that what does this mean about her husband's sexuality, that he messed around with boys. Obviously, that's only something that a gay boy or a bi boy could do. But in these environments, situational homosexuality, in some senses, it was easier for the boys who were straight to mess around with other boys who were straight because the stakes were lower for them. It didn't mean anything. So long as they could overcome the hurdle of being perceived to be gay or accused of being gay. Whereas for the gay boys, like I was a gay boy in school and some of the other guys were messing around but for me like it didn't it involved my heart it was what i wanted not just what was available to me and so i like found out years later that one of my high schools like all these straight boys who were kind of anti-gay bullies that they were all like having jack-off parties and circle jerks and the kind of rough housing you describe like these challenges or dares and i would not invite it to any of these parties i think because they could tell i was gay and that would ruin the like straight vibes circle jerk but also like i would have been too nervous because i would have been too excited emotionally not just excited sexually at a moment like that yeah i think that's a it's a really good point because also for a young gay person during puberty we are becoming ourselves and it and it and it feels complicated and especially you know if you're someone who's now married and preparing for children you it's unlikely that you were like wow i'm gay at 12 and i'm good to go if that was the case with this this man whereas if you're just a straight boy and you're you know playing sports or or whatever you're doing you know writing essays your sexuality is not in question this is just part of exactly the journey towards getting a girl uh at some point. Not that the caller shouldn't question her husband. I really feel like you need to call her. You say you're not sure how to feel about this. Doesn't sound like you're aroused by it. It seems to me that you're concerned about it. Like, what does it mean if you're about to have a baby with this man? You don't want to have a baby with this man and have him leave you two years later for some dude. And the fact that he mentioned it to you so casually, I think also speaks to this isn't who he is. He's not gay or bi. If he was worried about your perception of him as gay or bi, he probably wouldn't have tossed this out there. So you just need to go to him, caller, and say, like, I've had a little anxiety about this. And this is something I thought only a gay dude would do in high school, but you did it in high school. You're not a gay dude. You say, caller, you have like active sex life. Does he plant his face in your pussy? That's often a sign that a guy is not gay. And you can take the yes of all the sex you've been having with each other over the last five years for an answer and you can view his early sexual experiences through the prism of that prison pirate ship british boarding school cliche of a place where boys mess around with other boys as a part of their sexual initiation sexual development but it's not just a gay or bi thing it's often a thing that young straight boys do because there's only other boys around it's called situational homosexuality. And when people talk about it, the three examples they always give are prisons, pirate ships, and British male boarding schools. Yeah. I think you're right. I think if he was a closeted, concerned bisexual or gay male, he wouldn't be offering this information up so freely. To his wife. To his wife, yeah. That he is diligently attempting to knock up at this moment. Yeah. John, where can people find you online and find your work? The two best places to find online, either on Instagram, where it's sort of the man behind the body, I don't know, which is johneast.fitness. And then if you want to see the body in action, go to Twitter, if you must, for John Thomas underscore fans. John, thank you so much for jumping on the phone with me today. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Dan. This episode is brought to you by Load Boost by VB Health. This doctor-formulated supplement isn't just about performance. It's all about results. We're talking increased semen volume, enhanced orgasm intensity, and yes, even better taste. So your partner will thank you too. The adult industry knows the importance of a great money shot. And as someone with a personal investment in loads, I can tell you that Load Boost is the real deal. The ingredients are 100% scientifically backed and designed to improve sperm health, prostate function, and overall experience. It's vegan, loaded with nutrients, and manufactured in the USA with top-tier quality. Want to try it out? Head to loadboost.com and use my exclusive code SAVAGE to get 10% off or click the link in the episode description. It's time to elevate your performance, your volume, your taste, and thanks to Load Boost, you might just become someone's new favorite performer and favorite flavor. That's loadboost.com and use my exclusive code, SAVAGE. so this is pretty fresh but I just had a gentleman friend leave my place and we had been building up the anticipation to meet and have sex for weeks he came over things were great and I tried to prepare as much as possible as a bottom and clean myself up and beforehand he started to refer to my ass as a pussy. And that's always a bit of a red flag, but I'm used to being with a lot of DL men and that kind of stuff. So, you know, it's what it is. But we were having sex and I guess I wasn't as clean as I thought. And, you know, as they say, I started to paint the trade, run to the bathroom, quick shower, get back going. But as soon as we started doing it again, he just couldn't stay hard. So things ended without much of a climax. And we kind of just agreed to call it a night. My question is, how do we avoid this? Is it because these men look at our assholes as pussies and expect them to be clean as such? And is that something that I should see warning signs about? Because obviously some guys don't have any issue, but those that do really do. And they may try to be polite, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding. How do we navigate that? Do you call them out on it? Or just let it be? Because it's pretty hard to not feel shitty after something like that happens. I think butts are butts, and I think shit happens sometimes. Even after a person has taken steps to avoid shit happening. and a top somebody who is versed and sometimes likes to top has to be chill about the fact that getting painted is a risk now if a person is cavalier about it you know you don't want to fuck somebody who could give a shit whether they shat on your dick or not that's not okay but if a person is douched and done their screw diligence and taken the steps that they can reasonably take to enjoy anal sex with you without getting shit all over your dick or your crotch or your waist or your sheets. And it happens. You have to be a fucking grownup about it. And I think that generally means jumping in the shower together, showering off, and then perhaps not during that sexual encounter, pivoting back to anal sex, pivoting to something else, oral sex, mutual masturbation. You know, if you shot on him, maybe he gets a pass. Maybe he can't get hard to get back in your ass that time because of the disgust response, the presence of feces and the association at that moment with anal and feces might arouse in him. And so you just do something else. And I think the mistake you made is common to a lot of younger gay men and bi men where it's always anal it always has to be anal all male male encounters involve anal penetration and sex oh my god I'm gonna work heated rivalry and one of the things I loved about heated rivalry was all the sex they had before they had anal sex and all the sex they kept having that wasn anal sex after they started having anal sex They had oral sex They did a lot of mutual masturbation They felt very seen It wasn portraying anal as analogous somehow or parallel to vaginal intercourse. It was one of the things that Shane and Iliad could do together and enjoy together, but just one of the things. And so when this happened and you painted this guy's dick and you had to jump in the shower, you could have done something else and maybe had a positive sexual encounter and climaxed together and then put some distance between, you know, the unpleasantness of the painting and the joint connection you created together. As for pussy, man, like I got a letter a few years ago at the column, angry letter from a lesbian because she'd overheard younger gay men referring to their asses as pussies. And she thought this was terribly sexist and i disagree actually and it's not has not been my experience the people who refer to butts now in gay sexual spaces or encounters as pussies or cunts that this is sexist or demeaning or something that dl guys engage in or a term dl guys use alone uh this is really common really prevalent and man i gotta say like 40 50 years ago when i was coming out of the closet. If somebody referred to your ass as a pussy, those were fighting words because there was then in the gay community, this kind of sexist disgust with women's genitals, women's bodies, this misunderstanding of what it meant to be gay, which was not that we were attracted to other men, but that we were not attracted to women. And so much of it was framed through heterosexist prison that there are a lot of gay guys running around who can only understand themselves in that negative framing, not into women, so into men as if men were the consolation prize or the default. And I just don't think that's how younger gay people regard women or women's bodies anymore, perhaps because of their exposure to a lot of pornography. You know, when I was young and gay, I had never seen a vagina. Somebody who's young and gay now probably exposed to a lot of pornography as a child and has a certain, like, comfort with vagina. Even in your call, in your question, you don't say pussies are gross and disgusting like gay men, my 16-year-old gay friends did in 1979, what you say is that he assumed by calling your ass a pussy, it would magically be just as clean as a pussy is. Right? So your assumption, your understanding of pussies is that they're magical, sparkly, clean things that are always ready to fuck, which is not necessarily true. Women have menstrual periods and sometimes women don't want to get fucked. And so even in your question, I see this kind of progress and I see a kind of progress and all these like gay men referring to their asses as pussies and cunts. Although it is a little discomforting at times and odd to my old ears because it seems to me to come from a place of respect and even awe because pussies can do things asses can't, but man, can they take a pounding and they're self-lubricating and they're self-cleaning, all of which our asses are not. We aspire our asses to what pussy can do and what pussy almost always is. And I think that's charming. And it took me a while to get there because the first few times I was with a guy or talking to guys who used pussy or cunt, I was like, wait, what are we doing here? Anyway, I've dug myself down a very deep rabbit hole here. ironically, I'm pretty up my own pussy. I mean, up my own ass at this point. So I'm just going to sign off from this question. But yeah, not necessarily associated with DL guys, pussy cunt, and he shouldn't have been such a baby about it. Shit is a known risk. Getting painted is a known risk if you're going to have butt stuff sex. But you two together shouldn't have gone back to anal after the painting. Your butt should have been off the menu and you should have had something else for lunch. hey Dan question for you about one of your newer favorite things to talk about and that is heated rivalry so as a straight female watcher of the show something that stood out to me was how fast and furious Shane and Ilya's sexual encounters were it seemed like they would both finish in like 30 seconds to a couple of minutes max this was kind of surprising to me because I've only ever had hetero sex with men and I feel like in general you know women need a little more foreplay more time to warm up. So the duration is, generally speaking, one would hope a little longer so that both parties get off. But then I got to thinking if a sexual encounter only includes two men and you don't need all the foreplay, all the time to warm up, you know, those biological differences between anatomy, maybe it could be quicker. So I know you can't generalize for the whole gay population, but I'm so curious to hear from you and or other gays. Is gay sex generally kind of short in duration. No, it is not. A little dramatic license taken in my favorite thing to talk about right now, Heated Rivalry, where they kind of just collapsed the sex scenes a little bit. Things progressed from initiation to climax a little more quickly than they would, so that they could show us something rare in rom-coms or shows that include sex or sex scenes, which was sex from initiation to completion. And of course, you know we couldn't have 30 minute long ilia fucking shane's ass or pussy scene so we had like minute long and that blowjob the famous blowjob when shane's on the phone at the cottage and ilia doesn't take his playful no for an answer and goes down on him while he's trying to have a conversation with a friend about the birth of a new child and ilia gets shane off pretty quick ilia must suck a mean dick man assuming shane isn't a premature ejaculator yeah that blowjob transpired, went from beginning, went from initiation to climax a little more quickly than any blowjob I've ever given or received. But I think that was dramatic license. And while it's true that some gay sex progressed a little faster than straight sex acts, because men may not need the same amount of foreplay that a woman needs to be ready for penetration, if two gay guys are having anal sex, there will be foreplay. There must be foreplay to avoid injury. Another thing the heated rivalry got right. The first time Ilya fucks Shane's ass, what do we see or what is implied that Ilya is doing before he enters Shane? Eating his ass. So there is foreplay. There is anal foreplay because you can't just throw a dick into a butt. You gotta prep. All right, time for listener feedback. First up, a few comments listeners left in the comment thread about last week's show at Savage.Love. Says Not Kent, Dan's explanation of asexuality was a valiant effort, but he made the entirely understandable mistake of confusing sexual attraction with libido. Sexual attraction is about looking at someone and wanting to have sex with them based on how they look, among other things. As an asexual person myself, I don't see other people as hot or sexy, but still might be romantically interested in a person. There are plenty of asexuals who have high libidos and enjoy sex. words. Hmm. Some of us are old enough to remember when they meant things says by Dan fan. I disagree that the four time husband to be should delete the sex recordings he made with his exes. He should get them off his phone where his wife might find them and save them on a password protected memory stick and stash that stick away in the attic. If this marriage ends too, or if they have a chat one day and it turns out his fourth wife isn't bothered by him keeping these old videos, which isn't the same thing as her not being bothered by him regularly masturbating to them, he'll regret deleting them. And finally, he says Delta 35, regardless of genders, I don't think rimming should be standard. Certainly not on a first date. Just saying. Sure, often requested, but I think front hole genitalia are quite a bit different from back hole. That it wasn't standard first date stuff just 30 years ago suggests it's not necessary. Same with anal sex. A bit beyond P-I-V or oral in terms of prep, lowercase P-R-E-P, as well as prep, uppercase P, lowercase R, uppercase E-N-P. All right, everybody. Thank you for all of your comments. I do read and appreciate them all. And a note about last week's intro. I talked about rmassivecock, the subreddit, where men with massive cock share pics of their massive cocks with other Redditors, mostly male Redditors, who appreciate massive cocks. As Jacqueline and others pointed out in the comments, there are two subreddits, rmassivecock, which is where men show off their massive cocks, and r slash massivecocks, where farmers show off their giant roosters. Apparently, I used rmassivecock and rmassivecocks interchangeably in the intro, so my apologies to anyone who went to rmassivecocks hoping to see massivecocks. I understand you didn't consent to look at all those giant roosters and I feel terrible about it. Got something to say about something I said on this week's show? Go to savage.love and say it in the comment thread under this week's show. And now, as ever, Savage Love listeners who left voicemails on our ancient old answering machine about last week's show get to have the last word on this week's show. I'm calling with a comment for the guy who is entering his fourth marriage and has some sexual media from a past relationship. And the first person he actually needs to be checking in with is with his ex because sexual media expires at the end of a relationship. And if you want to continue to take pleasure with that, you need to check in with that ex. And I would recommend that everybody has a conversation when they break up about any sexual media that they have shared with that partner. And if you do decide that it's okay for that partner to have that media going forward, then I would recommend you set another time point in the future to check in again about it, because that may change for many people depending on the relationships they're in. And people may decide at any time point that they are not comfortable with their exes having that media. So I would say check in there first, and then you can continue to decide how you want to You'll receive. Hi, Dan. This is in response to the caller whose cat was not paying enough attention to her and instead putting it on her partner. My question would be, are you the one feeding them and playing with them? You said you clean their litter boxes consistently, but cats don't really know who cleans their litter box. But they do know who's feeding them and who is playing with them. So spend some quality time with cat toys playing with their cat and taking over some feeding duties. and you may see a change in their affection. This is for the caller who is wondering why her boyfriend doesn't go down on her. I have found that men who say they love eating pussy and don't do it, they're just the same as men who say they're feminists but just think they're supposed to say that. They're just lying. And there's lots of men who genuinely love it. date one of them. And we are going to leave it there. Got a sex question for me? Got a relationship quandary? Go to savage.love slash askdan to record your question directly onto our website or you can email us a recording of your question at q at savage.love or you can call us at 206-302-2064 and leave us a message on our answering machine. And if you tried something new and you want to talk about it with me, email us at q at savage.love and come on, come all over after action report. The best dirty little film festival in Texas coming to Austin in May and everywhere else is back in theaters in a couple of weeks with more than 20 brand new short films that explore and sometimes explode. Sex, love, lust, kink. Bring your lover, bring your polycule hell, bring your ex. And yes, Europe hump is coming for you. Berlin, Germany, May 19th and 20th. I will be there. I will be hosting. Amsterdam in the Netherlands, May 23rd. I will be hosting the opening weekends of Hump in Seattle as well, live and in person. And again, those screenings in Berlin. For a full list of cities, dates, showtimes, and to watch the scorching hot Hump 2026 trailer and get your tickets now, go to humpfilmfest.com. Follow me at bluesky at Dan Savage. Follow me on Instagram at Dan Savage. Follow John Thomas on Twitter at JohnThomas underscore fans. Follow John Thomas on Instagram at John East Fitness. Follow Dr. Evan Goldstein on Instagram at Dr. Evan Goldstein. And to learn more about his practice, go to bespokesurgical.com. The Savage Lovecast is produced every week by Nancy Hartunian and me and Nancy and the tech-savvy at-risk youth. We will all be back at you next week for another installment of the Savage Lovecast. Thank you, as ever, for downloading.