Struggle Session: Gibson Can’t Drop Out, Cheaters Never Prosper, Licorice Isn’t Butt-Safe, and More!

...rgMpCU&t=23s">top of the podcast for Susanna Gibson to drop out of the race for the Virginia House of Delegates: That suggestion doesn’t work. Early voting has already begun in Virginia. That means even if Gibson drops out of the race, her name stays on the ballot. No one would be added if she drops out. In order for a Democrat other than Gibson to win, Democrats need to coalesce around a write-in candidate that wins a plurality of the vote. That’s a high bar to meet. Best to let her take her chances despite the candidate’s poor choices. Too much of a risk for her to drop out. Dropping out just hands the seat to the GOP and the fight for the legislature is too close to simply toss away the seat to the Republicans and anti choice Gov. Glenn Younkin. It was Gibson’s decision to run despite having made a whole bunch of porn with her husband — as God intended us to make porn — that (most likely) handed a crucial seat in the Virginia House of Delegates to the Republicans. Like I said at the top of the show, I wanna live in a world where people meet, flirt, and fuck online without their online lives negatively impacting their offline lives, professional and political. But we don’t live in that world — at least not yet — and a critical race in an evenly divided state legislature… yeah, maybe not the best time to push the envelope. Not that Gibson intended to push this particular envelope; it didn’t seem to occur to her that the porn she made with her husband might become an issue — she seemed so clearly blindsided by it — and political naïveté that extreme is going to be politically disqualifying in the minds of most voters. That said, I should’ve checked to see if Gibson could drop out of the race before urging her to do so — not that Gibson is taking political advice from the likes of me, but still. Thank you, TWB6YZ, for writing in, and here’s hoping Gibson manages to pull it off. But I fear Gibson is gonna go down like Cal Cunningham, another Democrat with a real shot in a red-trending-purple state, went down: undone by a stupid sex scandal. Jleigh had this to say about Sugar Daddy Asking Dan, the reader who didn’t understand why the camgirl who loved him — or claimed to — was ending their relationship… I know that we are supposed to take the letter writers at their word. I’m having a bit of a hard time doing so with Sugar Daddy, and I admit I’m bringing my own past experience in to color my reaction. Daddy, I hope it is as you have reported, that you really did forge this connection and weren’t/aren’t over-messaging this girl, pressing your case, making her feel beholden, insisting on maintaining a “friendship” despite whatever she tells you to the contrary because that’s what YOU want. Perhaps it really is a lovely interlude that must end for the reasons she has supplied you. Perhaps it is *decidedly* not. Whatever it is, I hope you heed Dan’s advice and move on. Dashing added… SDAD could be a stalker — sex workers get the all the time. She might be saying stuff to appease him and hope he stops contacting her. While I think it’s entirely possible that SDAD could be annoying this woman, I don’t think he’s stalking her, as she lives in another country and they’ve never met in person. He could be cyberstalking him, but then I would’ve expected her to block him on every platform she could instead of trying to let him down easy. So, while I know stalking happens — it’s certainly happened to women I know who do sex work and plenty of women I know who don’t — I don’t think this woman is afraid of SDAD, just done with him. Regarding RFTN, a Dutch reader who’s thinking about giving “normal” monogamous marriage a try after things with both her FWBs wound down at same time,  Coolie says… I HOPE Mr. RTFN is enjoying fruits, but that isn’t in evidence, and I do think her “tacitly approved” DADT is more wishful than actual. I prefer my non-monogamy to be of the ethical variety and even a DADT can be ethical, but this one isn’t. I, too, prefer ethical non-monogamy (ENM) to the non-ethical alternatives. And hard agree: DADT agreements — when entered into by mutual consent — are one way couples practice ENM. But while couples ideally work out agreements before one or both starts fucking around, lots of couples who practice ENM did it backwards — meaning, the fucking around came first, the agreement to fuck around came later. In other words: someone cheated, someone got caught, someone got forgiven, and then the couple decided to stay together and practice ethical non-monogamy, i.e., they decided to open the relationship officially, open it ethically this time, and in some cases open it retroactively. If I may paraphrase Winston Churchill: When it comes to non-monogamy, you can generally count on straight couples to do the right thing — after exhausting all the alternatives. (Winston Churchill never actually said anything like that, but still.) Says Karen via email… Just finished listening to ALL of the Lovecast.  So fun to go back through history with the show! Dan went from reluctant podcaster to a podcast master! This 64-year-old kinky woman has learned so many things from the show.  Thanks for all you do, Dan! I can’t imagine listening to every episode of the Lovecast — all 883 of them — but, hey, if you would be up for listening to every episode again and taking notes this time, Karen, there are a lot of listeners out there who would love to have an index that breaks down each show by subjects, guests, and rants! Elise via email… I know you’ve gotten a flood of mail on this topic already, but consider this: what if the naked weirdo had said he wasn’t ok enjoying his kink in the presence of… Jewish women? Or Latina women?  Just like “trans,” those are identifiers that might be statistically associated with certain physical traits, but it would be pretty offensive to assume you would be sexually repelled by anyone in those categories. (My trans partner suggested this paradigm shift, and I think she’s right: society is more comfortable excluding trans women than other kinds of women from situations — sexual or otherwise — based not on the appearance of individuals, but based on some blanket phobia.) The physical trait we’re talking about here — sex — isn’t an insignificant one. I’m more than ready to concede that the naked weirdo was being unacceptably controlling about the guest list at a party that wasn’t being thrown for him or by him. But if we were talking about sexual activity… and mate selection… is being exclusively attracted to members of a particular sex — your own or the opposite — always evidence of a blanket phobia? Or is it evidence of a sexual orientation? I’ve said — for years, and sometimes to a lot of pushback — that we owe it to ourselves to interrogate our sexual desires and romantic attractions, to consider and reconsider the kinds of people we find attractive (including the genders and/or gender presentations we find attractive), because it’s the only way to make sure our desires are our own and not desires that were — if I may borrow a phrase — assigned to us. People who ask themselves these sorts of questions — people who interrogate their desires — are sometimes surprised to find that they’re genuinely attracted to more types of people, across all categories, than they were consciously aware. And that’s a good thing! But sometimes people think deeply about their desires and find that they’re fixed — not assigned, not reactive, and not rooted in disgust or repulsion. Just fixed. And while some people discover their gayness or straightness transcends biological sex — for some it’s about gender, men or women, and not sex, male or female (or, if you prefer, AMAB/AFAB) — homosexuality and heterosexuality are valid sexual orientations. Again, I’m speaking more generally here, not speaking specifically about the naked weirdo who ruined the book club before it could even get started. Says Randi via email… DAN!!! I just listened to your response to the woman whose partner wanted her to put stuff in her ass and have him eat it and I am shocked that you didn’t take the opportunity to share the most important piece of safety information about ass play. No! I’m not talking about germs! I’m talking about losing stuff in your ass!!! I (my husband) lost a small buzzing vibrator in my ass. It was a very traumatic experience. I won’t go into the whole story, but when I finally told my doctor about it he told me that nobody should ever put anything into their asses that isn’t connected to a person or a flared base! The ass sucks things in, and the second sphincter can actually suck the thing in deeper, and can cause a blackout response. People DIE that way! After three hours of bearing down, howling when it almost went into the second sphincter and I felt my consciousness dimming, I drank coffee and shat out the little vibrating thing that was still vibrating. I take every opportunity to share this PSA. Don’t put stuff in your ass that can get stuck there!!! Thanks for your decades of wisdom! We’ve done hole shows emphasizing the importance of flared bases — whether that flare is a pair of large fake balls on a silicone dildo or a grown-ass man at the base of a cock (“without a base, without a trace”) — and we’ve talked at other times about the various things people have lost in their butts. During the early days of the COVID pandemic, when hospitals and emergency rooms were slammed with sick and dying people, I begged my listeners to think of the doctors and nurses on the front lines and not put anything in their asses that might get lost. While deaths are rare, the risk of losing something in there is definitely something anyone considering assplay should take into consideration — but it’s too late for the listener you’re concerned about, Randi, as she already stuck a turkey stick dipped in olive oil up her butt. She didn’t wind up in the E.R.; that turkey stick wound up in her sub boyfriend’s mouth, which was where she hoped to deposit it, but maybe she should think twice before attempting to repeat this trick. That caller originally asked about putting licorice up her butt, and some listeners felt I let her down by not explaining how she could safely do that. (Does any brand of licorice come with a flared base?) Andrew rushed to my defense… Dan has a right to refrain from explaining to someone how to put licorice in her ass if he has no lived experience or insight or desire related to putting licorice in his ass. Okay, you don’t know that Andrew — I mean, I haven’t, but you don’t know that and I could be lying. Free replied to Andrew… Her original question related to whether licorice was safe to use in the butt, or whether there were better alternatives. Andrew replied to Free… Simple answer: No, it is not safe to eat licorice that has been in someone’s butt. A better alternative is to eat licorice that has never been in anyone’s butt. I have to jump in here: It is NOT safe to eat licorice out of someone’s ass because then you’ll be eating licorice, which is an absolutely disgusting thing to eat. My advice: throw the licorice away and eat the ass instead. Last comment on this topic goes to BiDanFan… I have no idea what a turkey stick is. Behold! Dash, on BlueSky, with a plug for proper popper etiquette and an observation about hung tops… I usually ask because I apparently fuck a lot of tops who are sensitive to the smell. It’s always the ones with the biggest equipment that make you work for it! Reacting to another — OH MY GOD ANOTHER ONE NOT ANOTHER ONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP — dumb “microcheating” article, I said this over at The Bad Place… Define cheating as unforgivable, define everything as cheating, then wonder why you’re getting divorced again. Jonas jumped in with something I wish I’d said… Next up, nanocheating. “What is your threshold for faithfulness of a partners particles? Is 100% really too much to ask?” “Faithless Quarks — is your partner spinning away from you?” Which prompted Pancho to jump in with something we all wish he hadn’t said… In a healthy relationship, if you do something you wouldn’t be willing to do if your partner was across the room and might see, then it’s “cheating.” If you wouldn’t be comfortable with your partner hiding exactly what you’re doing from you, then don’t hide it from them. Wow — so, in a healthy relationship, you don’t stop picking your nose when your partner walks into the room, because that would be cheating. Leaving the room to fart? Cheating. Closing the bathroom door to take a shit? Cheating. If that’s what a healthy relationship looks like, I’ll stick to my unhealthy ones, thanks. Honestly, I don’t know how a relationship lasts longer than ten minutes under these modern everything-and-everything-is-cheating regime — except for those truly hardcore cucks out there, I guess, who must be loving this shit. Modern cucks no longer have to wait for their wives or girlfriends or husbands or boyfriends to find an actual person to cheat on them with, they only have to wait for their wives or girlfriends or husbands or boyfriends to leave the room for a moment of privacy and then — BAM! — they’ve been cucked. Microcheating can’t be as much fun for cucks as macrocheating, no doubt, but it has to beat notcheating. (If I were the conspiracy-minded type… I might think a cabal of cucks embedded themselves in the sex-and-relationship industrial complex expressly to promote this microcheating bullshit.) I took one last swipe at this story over at The Bad Place… If you’re going to get accused of cheating for a little harmless flirting, you might as well go for it. https://t.co/Z75SzswjD2 — Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) September 28, 2023 But last word goes to Davin: Dan, one of the best, longest-lasting relationships I ever had, we had a precept that cheeky flirtation at bars, parties, etc. was perfectly fine. Did I cross the line? Duh. As did she. Not at all why it ended. The worst ‘ships were ones where the “jealousy” monster was employed. Okay, I hope you enjoyed this week’s Struggle Session — now go and enjoy our Muppet-Faced Boy of the Week: Austrian model and hiking enthusiast Peter Mai!