STRUGGLE SESSION: Girls & Boys, Cheats & Bullies, Doms & Subs and More!

...="https://savage.love/lovecast/2023/11/14/cock-blocked-by-his-own-sister/">Episode 890 about the man who wants to date his sister’s friend — not because of the advice but because of the terminology. By referring to adult females as “girls” we are not doing anything for gender equality, especially in a romantic context. This is the only term we have for female children. (Also, it is straight up not okay for grown men to pursue “girls” sexually — more of them should know & respect that!) Adult female callers don’t ask about “boys” they want to be with sexually, and it would be so weird if Dan referred to them as “boys.” I think even the teenagers probably say “guys.” I understand that callers with questions may not have thought this through and will likely continue to refer to adults as “girls.” In any case, my hope is that Dan will respond using the term “woman” because the words we use matter and this is one way to encourage listeners to treat women like the empowered, autonomous adults that we are. Thank you for the reminder. I think it’s especially easy for gay men — including gay men who should know better — to slip back into using “girls” in this way… as gay men actually do refer to men they “want to be with sexually” (read: “fuck the living shit out of”) as “boys.” (A friend wrote me recently about a “hot boy” he’s hooking up with… and that hot boy turned out to be a man in his mid-forties.) Gay men understand, of course, that “boys” means “young adult men” and/or “submissive adult men” and/or “boyishly handsome adult men,” not minors. And of course gay men using “boys” this way doesn’t invoke — or subconsciously rationalize — legal and social systems that once oppressed men as a class. For millennia, women were perpetual children, i.e., the property of their fathers until they became the property of their husbands; always minors, never adults. Calling adult women “girls” invokes that history in the same way a father walking his daughter down the aisle recalls the property transfer that defined straight marriage for most of recorded human history. (And still does in some places.) But lots of women get walked down the aisle by their fathers without feeling like anyone’s property… and maybe one day “girls” will lose its negative associations and we’ll all be able to use “girls” in the same spirit that gay men use “boys.” Ahem. Years after dumping her ex-girlfriend, coming out, transitioning, and falling in love with and marrying a different woman, CHAD reconnected with her ex-girlfriend. CHAD, who’s still in love with her ex, was hurt when she said their relationship was doomed. Says Snowflake… LW also seems like she’s been in denial about the potential (or lack thereof) for something more to happen with this crush. The crush basically told her that breaking up had been the right thing to do, because she wouldn’t have wanted to date the LW as a woman — I’m inferring here, but this is what it sounds like — to which the LW responds, “Yikes!” Again, inferring, but it sounds like the crush has always dated men, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that she isn’t interested in a relationship with a woman. We also don’t know whether or not the crush’s current relationship is monogamous, which would make the LW’s hopes even more farfetched. There was a paragraph in the first draft of my response to CHAD about that “Yikes!” There were lots of ways to read it, some innocuous, some problematic — I mean, it could’ve meant something as innocent as, “That wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” or something as insidious as, “My ex-girlfriend’s sexual orientation is an attack on me.” I wound up deleting the paragraph because only CHAD knows what CHAD meant by that “Yikes.” Snowflake, like absolutely everyone else, hated LW #1 in my most recent Quickies… Letter #1 pissed me off so much! Like for what purpose would LW even consider outing her boyfriend to his dying wife? It’s not going to get them what they want — married to the dude, tomorrow — so they would just do it for revenge? The dude didn’t lie to them! He isn’t doing anything wrong! (In my opinion.) I let LW #1 have it in my response — I joked about stoned CNN viewers rooting for her murderer (and I made the exact same joke about a male letter writer in the very next response) — but I rise now in her defense: LW #1 knew that outing her lover to his dying wife as a cheater was the wrong thing to do and wrote in because she wanted me tell her not to do it. I ask: Who amongst us, at different points in our lives, hasn’t contemplated doing the wrong thing? The unforgivable thing? The self-sabotaging thing? Confiding in a friend and asking them to tell you not to do that thing — a thing you know you shouldn’t — has two benefits: it makes you less likely to do that thing (you have an accountability buddy now!) and you get a little credit/external validation for not doing the thing you knew you shouldn’t. As for this comment about the cheating husband… If only LW #1 had some way of knowing, when she started providing release, that this guy was not good husband material. We don’t have much information about the cheating husband — other than his wife was seriously ill when he and LW #1 met, his relationship with his wife was no longer sexual, and that he was more caretaker than husband now. (And he wasn’t, according to LW #1, lying about any of that.) I talked about it a lot in our last Struggle Session and I don’t want to repeat myself. But I wanna say this (again): We can demonstrate loyalty and commitment with something other than our genitals. And a man who stays and cares for his ailing spouse is far better “husband material” than a man who “does the right thing” (according to some) and abandons and divorces his dying wife before touching someone else with his dick — same goes for wives with dying husbands, husbands with dying husbands, wives with dying wives, spouses with dying spouses, etc., etc., etc. Another cheating husband made an appearance in the column last week. Unlike LW#1, “Yet Another Other Woman” doesn’t wanna marry the married man she was sleeping with. She just thinks it would be better — for him — if he were ethically non-monogamous and/or ended his sexless marriage. Says BiDanFan… The thing with YAOW’s situation is that, as you note, her paramour would have probably given her an almost identical description of his marriage whether this was true or not, in order to gain her sympathy and translate that to her ongoing poontang. I agree with Zoftig, who noted Mr. YAOW is getting everything he wants out of this situation, and how terribly convenient for him. Okay, for sake of argument, let’s say Mr. YAOW is getting everything he wants out of this situation, as Zoftig agues. Isn’t YAOW getting everything she wants, too? She wants sex, she doesn’t want him. (The fact that he isn’t ENM clearly wasn’t a dealbreaker for her.) And if Mr. YAOW’s wife isn’t interested in having sex with him (which, yes, could be a lie, but for sake of argument let’s accept this on face value), then the wife isn’t being cheated out of anything she wants. Indeed, she may be relieved not to be asked/pestered for sex anymore and may not want to know why she isn’t being asked/pestered for sex anymore. Everyone wants to round cheaters down to the worst possible person — even if that means inventing facts not in evidence, facts that incriminate the cheater and confirm our priors. I advised a caller whose high school bully seemed to be flirting with her to meet up with her bully when she was home for the holidays and maybe… if the vibe was right… hate-fuck the shit out of her old high school bully and then call us and tell us all about it. Pissed Off At Idiots thinks it’s a bad idea… Re: hate fucking your bully. You’re way more trusting than I am. I figured the caller’s bully is playing a long-game prank. I had a bully befriend me, only to fuck me over and laugh about what a dumbass I was. Caller should be careful. I followed up with Pissed Off. When did the horrible prank happen? During school or years later? Pissed Off replied… Honestly, that incident was during, when we were in school. He and another guy pretended to realize I was pretty cool. We hung out of weeks. Then they beat me up. The joke is, now he runs the Facebook group for our high school class. I was on it and he called me fat. We were already in our fifties. Same old. I worry for the caller. The old hope for validation is strong in some of us. Ugh, that’s horrible — I’m so sorry that was done to you, Pissed Off. But if the bully in this case is playing the long-game, she’s playing a very long game: the caller hasn’t seen her bully for more than a decade. But I agree the caller should approach this situation with extreme caution. Erotica author Thomas Carver chimed in to say… Haven’t listened yet, but hate fucking your bully sounds like the plot of one of my books. A few weeks back, I gave some advice to Memento Audere, a late-blooming gay man who worried he’d never be able to live out his dominant fantasies because he’s slight and twinky, AKA boyish. My guest expert Spot reassured him that there were definitely sub guys out there into serving Doms who are smaller and weaker, but I wanted to make sure MA also saw this from porn performer Rob Wilde… Urge to lick boots, sniff pits [and] be used and abused by a twink half my size rising. Can’t wait to show you how @blake_riley_humiliates, bullies and degrades me into being his lowly, worthless slave. If there’s a market for kink porn featuring taller, hunkier men submitting to smaller, twinkier Doms, then it’s safe to assume there are hunky gay men out there turned on by the thought of submitting to boyish Doms like you, Memento Audere! And as a lot of people pointed out in comments… most straight male subs are bigger and stronger than the female Doms they serve! Says OrchidThief… Dan always says how the only currency a child has is their presence in their parent’s life. I take that to heart. I cut my Trump voting family members completely out of my life (including parents). I was somewhat surprised that Dan has not done something similar with his Trump voting father. Unlike so many Trump-pickled assholes, my dad is capable of having a conversation without bringing up Trump. He doesn’t have a Trump flag outside his house, he doesn’t have a Trump bumper sticker on his car, he doesn’t think Biden stole the election, and he doesn’t attack his kids for voting for Democrats. I wish he lived in a state that was more solidly blue or more solidly red, so his vote would matter less than it does (sometimes a single vote decides an election), but I’m not going to cut my dad out of my life — his vote may be toxic, but I don’t think he is. Okay, two last things before we wrap Struggle Session up for the week: Joe has been “live-skeeting” episodes of the Lovecast on Blue Sky. If you’re on the site, give him a follow! And our Muppet-Faced Man of the Week: rock climber Samuel Carr!