STRUGGLE SESSION: Hills to Die On, Subs to Dom On, Pros to Drool On…

...d. I personally think it’s perfect for Hump! They deleted it off IG but still on their YouTube shorts. Violife Foods. Thought you and your listeners would enjoy. Man, the lengths you have to go to make a vegan cheesecake look edible, huh? Alright, I’m gonna go ahead and apologize for that remark now. The last time I made a joke about an inedible vegan dessert, I was accused of contributing to a climate of anti-vegan hatred that gets vegans killed… or something…. for not liking the cake that automatically comes with the lunch special in this little vegan cafe where I happen to be a regular. (I would never order the dessert in a vegan place on purpose.) So, for the record: I enjoy plant-based foods, I eat in vegan places, I love my vegan friends, and vegans — in my experience — taste pretty good. But I would much rather fingerfuck a vegan cheesecake than eat one. I said this to CISMAN, the 45-year-old married cis male seeking sex outside his newly ENM marriage… But I would argue — and this is a hill my gay ass is prepared to die on — that cis straight guys who are only interested in AFAB persons, regardless of how they identify or present, so long as those AFAB persons have vaginas they can stick their dicks in, those guys — guys like you — are and always will be straight guys. Says Cavlee… Why die on that hill, Dan? It seems to me like some guys who date women and AFAB non-binary people are indeed totally straight (dickful thinking being enough to bridge the gap), but some are not — they have “a touch of the pan,” you might say. I’m not going to naysay anyone who gets straight vibes from CISMAN’s letter, but the finer points of that are between him and the people he dates, not a thing solved by the simple, absolute rule proposed. And if he’s dating trans men, dude, that’s bi. Allow me to walk that back: While there are hills I’m prepared to die on (example: the person who dunks his balls in your mouth is teabagging you, you’re not teabagging him), how a married man I’ve never met identifies sexually “neither picks my pocket nor sucks my dick,” as Thomas Jefferson almost said. So, while CISMAN’s letter definitely gave me straight vibes, if he wants to identify as bi or pan because he might be open to sleeping with a trans man one day — so long as that trans man hasn’t had bottom surgery — he’s free to identify as bi or pan. And if CISMAN does wind up sleeping with trans men, I don’t just hope he identifies as bi or pan, Cavlee, I hope he actually is bi or pan. I’ve heard from a few trans men who had sexual encounters with cis men and cis women that wound up triggering their dysphoria; partway through the sex, these trans guys realized the cis person they were in bed with saw them not as men, but as masculine women — that is, they weren’t into the men they were, but the pussies they had. IS and BiDanFan and Zoftig and Auntie G and Jo Ordinary and Kisscam all had some great advice for SSS, the submissive straight man who wasn’t having much luck finding single dominant women close to his age, and we all learned something new from GreenBeanBetty during the discussion. Jonathan had some practical advice for SSS that I wanted to highlight… Others have covered ageism, sex worker shame, self-improvement, and what SSS has to offer prospective women, so I’m not going to retread all that. However, has he only been looking in one city? I was just in Boston for the first time since high school and the gay scene sucked. The food, hotels, and shopping were great. But I was just surprised by how limited the gay scene was compared to DC. At the risk of being accused of toxic metronormativity (“the cultural bias that positions urban settings and communities as more safe and desirable for queer people and positions rural settings as less safe and less desirable for queer people”), if you wanna live in a place with a great kink scene and/or a great gay scene, you might have to move. Going from a less populated area to a more populated area — from small town to big city — is the usual move, since bigger cities tend to have better gay and kink scenes. But that’s not always the case: the gay scene sucks in the big city of Boston, according to Jonathan, and my kinky friend who recently moved to LA is getting plenty of dick but he can’t find a guy to tie him up. Since SSS is already playing some very long odds here — there are way more straight male subs out there than dominant women — he should do anything and everything he can do to improve his chances. That might include visiting cities that have better kink scenes, as Jonathan suggests, or actually moving to one. TruthLemonade had thoughts about SSS: Can you change? People might not like that suggestion. But you admit that you are struggling and frustrated as male subs are not in demand. And Dan says that some Doms are frustrated subs. BiDanFan, who is no fan of TruthLemonade, pushed back: Dan has said many times, backed by research, that kinks are hard-wired. So, no, SSS cannot become dominant (or vanilla) because more women prefer men who are dominant (or vanilla). Someone can step into the dominant role to please a partner — or attract a partner — and while that may be a change for them (maybe they never imagined themselves in the dominant role), it doesn’t mean they’ve changed. Maybe it’s better to say they’ve adapted. (Adapted to scarcity, in SSS’s case.) Because a sub who plays the dominant role during a BDSM scene hasn’t magically “changed” into a Dom in the sense that their fantasies now revolve around being a Dom. Even most people who identify as switches have a preference for one role or the other — sub or Dom, usually sub— but that doesn’t stop them from getting good at both roles and really enjoying both roles. So, while I agree with BiDanFan — kinks are hardwired — SSS could, like so many other frustrated subs before him, make himself more marketable on the kink scene by learning to enjoy the Dominant role. To avoid being trapped in that role he should let the women he plays with and/or date know he’s a switch with a strong submissive side. Many of the dominant women he’s seen out there in the kink scene — some of them older, some of them already partnered — were subs long before they began to explore their dominant sides. The power dynamic in a D/s relationship can shift over time and the Dom can become the sub and vice-versa. (Like I said in my response, SSS, you gotta play the long game here — and you gotta get your ass into therapy.) One last thing about SSS: he sent his letter to another advice columnist, which is a thing that sometimes happens. Usually the LW will send the exact same version of their question out, but SSS sent a longer and more detailed version of his question to to Dr. Nerdlove. Dr. Nerdlove’s very thorough and helpful response to SSS can be read here. Over on Twitter, Sarah Carpenter posted a clipping — an actual newspaper clipping, with coffee stains and everything — from an old Savage Love column: I cut this out many many years ago thinking someday if I decided to have kids this would help. I even saved it after it got coffee stained. Anyways, had kids, looking forward to the day I get to hand this to them. The column Sarah clipped contains my advice for teenage boys who are anxious to get their romantic lives started. SSS didn’t share his age, and I’m guessing he’s not a teenage boy, but some of my advice for inexperienced teenage boys might actually benefit him too. What I said about the gym in the column Sarah saved is pretty problematic — all bodies are irresistible — but I stand by every other word. DEPT. OF SO MUCH WINNING: Tiffany emailed me this morning to say… I thought you might like to know that “tolyamory” is listed as an option in the Feeld survey I received today! Happy Thursday! What?!? The OED gets behind “pegging” and two weeks later Feeld — following the lead of the the Times of London — gets on board with “tolyamory”?!? Tiffany included screenshots of the survey question (“What is your preferred relationship style(s)?”) and all of the possible answers. The list is long — Feeld surveys are nothing if not comprehensive — so I took a screenshot of the section of the Tiffany’s screenshot where “tolyamory” appears: I could not be more excited about this — really and truly! Thank you for sharing, Tiffany! And thank you for the love, Feeld! ‘ Alright, one last item of Struggle Session business to attend to: our Muppet-Faced Man of the Week is tennis star Carlos Alcaraz, who just won Wimbledon. In addition to having a nice moment with the Princess of Wales, Alcaraz has the nicest Muppet mouth on the pro circuit. Nice thighs, too. And nice shoulders. Nice everything. A tough win, but into round 3! 💪🏻😀 @rolandgarros 📸 Getty pic.twitter.com/23BANwvipS — Carlos Alcaraz (@carlosalcaraz) May 29, 2024 Hope everyone has a great weekend and I will see you next Tuesday!