There wasn’t supposed to be a Struggle Session today because I was supposed be at a secret location filming the intro for the HUMP! 2025 International Tour. (Tickets on sale now!) But the filmmaker got COVID, which freed up my Thursday, and here we are. So, let’s struggle!
Dry January? At this political moment? Xavier isn’t having it:
With regard to Tawny Lara and Dan’s sanctimonious, preachy, AA sermon/discussion: You can take that Dry January bullshit and shove it right up your asses! But obviously use PLENTY of lube and leave some space for the coming “Sober October ’25” nonsense while you’re at it! Happy New Year! And yes: I plan on being drunk on January 20th. Like any sensible liberal! Cheers!
You’re free to get just as drunk as you want to or need to on January 20th, Xavier, and with my full support… so long as alcohol is a blessing in your life and not a curse.
This came via email…
Do you want us to believe that you were able to provide a 15 minute promo for Feast of the Ass at the beginning of your podcast and nobody involved happened to mention that this is the same time we celebrate a federal holiday called Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday?!? Love the sentiment, Dan, hate the timing.
The Feast of the Ass is celebrated on January 14th. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is commemorated on the third Monday in January. The third Monday in January never falls — it literally cannot fall — on the 14th of January. So, you can fuck off with this virtue-signaling, buzz-killing, do-bettering bullshit. If I had resurrected the Feast of St. Sebastian this year — which used to be celebrated annually on January 20th — you might’ve had a point. But there will always be at least one day to recover from Feast of the Ass celebrations before Martin Luther King Jr. Day rolls around because the third Monday of January never comes earlier than the 15th; this year we have six days to recover. And seeing as both holidays involve acts of service, I think they vibe, as the kids say. As Mardi Gras (sexy fun) is to Easter (solemn observance), so FOTA can be to MLK Day — but no one wants to feast on an ass with a stick in it. You’ve got twelve days to pull that thing out!
P.S. The Feast of the Ass has been celebrated on January 14th for centuries — it’s not within my power to move it to some other day!
P.P.S. If you have a beef with anyone, it should be the people pushing Blue Monday, an annual “awareness day” that falls on the third Monday in January — the exact same day as MLK Day.
P.P.P.S. My favorite St. Sebastian — the official patron saint of athletes, cops, and soldiers, and the unofficial patron saint of gay bondage boys everywhere — can be found in a small church in a tiny village in a little corner of Austria. Check him out. He looks like Leif Garrett in his prime.
Says BiDanFan:
I’m going to call correlation versus causation on the claim that gay men’s marriages last longer because they’re more likely to be open. My counter theory is that women are pressured to get married far more heavily than men are, and therefore more likely to marry the wrong person. Without this societal pressure, it seems obvious that gay men would only get married if they met the right person, which is more likely to lead to marriages that last.
That statement about gays being less likely to divorce thanks to open marriages — or our marriages being more likely to be open — was a qualified one; there’s an “appears to” in that sentence for a reason. That reason being… yeah, it could be correlation. But the fact that gay marriages are a lot more likely to be open and a little less likely to end in divorce does seem to refute the argument — made by many, including many gays — that open relationships are less stable than closed ones. If that were true, married gay male couples be the most likely to divorce, not the least likely. I’m not the only person who thinks it’s reasonable to hypothesize — or even conclude, as the great Stephanie Coontz did in this op-ed for the NYT — that some degree of openness isn’t incidental to the success of so many gay marriages.
As for your theory, BiDanFan, that could part of it — there could be co-causalities at work here! Men generally feel less societal pressure to marry. More study needed! But it’s interesting that lesbians — or bisexual women who marry other women — somehow manage to overcome the overwhelming pressure society puts on them to marry men but not the societal pressure to get married in the first place.
Says Thingamajig…
Dan often gives the advice to do A until you reach the point of orgasmic inevitability then switch to B to finish. But in my experience — admittedly 99.99% solo — the interval between OI and O is a couple seconds at best, certainly not enough time to switch to another activity without sliding back down the mountain. Is that just a limitation on my part? Can other guys really get over the hump and coast to orgasm over a much longer period?
TC seconds Thing…
Great point. Not too long ago, Dan floated the idea of switching tactics at the point of inevitability so guy could cum inside his partner. That made perfect sense to me at the time. But for this week’s letter writer, I don’t think fifteen seconds of penetration is going to satisfy the wife’s desire for vaginal intercourse.
First, in my vast personal experience… ahem… some guys can extend the point of orgasmic inevitability (or ride along its edge) long enough to treat their partners to a little penetrative sex before climaxing. And if what your partner wants most is having that load dumped in them… and you can’t get all the way there from PIV/PIB/PIT… you can make that happen for your partner by getting yourself to the point of OI doing whatever works for you and your dick — usually stroking — and then switching to vaginal or anal or oral at the last minute (or the last second). But if your partner wants to be lovingly dicked down for an hour before you dump your load in them, getting to OI and then switching to penetration isn’t gonna cut it. This is where toys — dildos and dildo harnesses — can come in handy. (Or come in hole-y?)
And this didn’t come up in my response to that LW, but men can and should (and, as they age, might need to) mix a moment or two of stroking themselves up with the PIV/PIB/PIT to keep themselves hard and get themselves there. But that won’t work for a man if his partner interprets his “need” to stroke himself as evidence that he’s not really attracted to her (or him) or not sufficiently turned on.
Another satisfied customer…
Thank you so much for answering my silly couch question (Episode 935)! Yeah, I paid my ex off and feel ten times better. More importantly, I’m grateful for your podcast and the humor, heart, and intelligence packed into each episode. Especially in times like these. I’m happy to be a Magnum subscriber and just thankful. Happy New Year to you all!
And a message from a listener for all the sad closeted hetero-romantic bi guys out there…
I just listened to your intro about sad lonely bi men in your New Year’s Eve episode. I’m a queer, mostly straight woman and I want to date bi men but I can’t find any! I’ve only met two that I know of and they were already attached. There are women out there who want to date bi guys! Love your show!
Bi guys! The women out there who wanna fuck you can’t find you if you’re in the closet! (I only just noticed that there’s a debate raging in the comments on this week’s show about my top-of-the-show advice for bi guys. I’ll go deeper on this topic in next week’s Struggle Session!)
Says Bruce via email…
Read your columns and bought your books. Won’t pay for your advice column. Miss the old days. Everyone wants you to subscribe to something. Never!
Once again: the original version of the column — since it first appeared in The Stranger in 1991 (the really old days!) — was 1250-1350 words long. The column now runs to more 2000+ words every single week and two-thirds of it (more than 1250-1350 words!) appears before the paywall. So, just as much Savage Love is available for free now as it ever was. I’m going to send you a free sub — because you’ve been a reader for a long time — but for the record: I haven’t taken anything away from long-time readers! You’re getting more Savage Love every week and Struggle Sessions too!
Gabe asked on Threads…
Members of the LGBTQ+ community: this is a genuine question, so please no crazy hate. When and why did we start to accept and embrace the term queer? When I was growing up that word was a slur. What does the term queer mean to you? I genuinely want to understand.
Gabe didn’t ask me specifically, but I answered anyway: Please, people, for the love of Christ, google “Queers Read This.” Gays and lesbians chose “queer” 35+ years ago. “Queer” wasn’t imposed on us by sinister blue-haired allo enbies who wouldn’t graduate from kindergarten until 2010. No one has to like “queer,” no one has to use “queer,” but gays and lesbians over 50 shouldn’t pretend that kids today made “queer” happen.
It’s been a while since we featured a Muppet-Faced Man of the Week around here… but this guy definitely has BMFMOTWE (Big Muppet-Faced-Man-of-the-Week Energy!)
Okay, finally… here’s a question that isn’t going to make it into the column. It’s a column-worthy question, for sure, but it came before the holidays and next week’s column is a Quickies and I didn’t want to make this LW wait any longer for a response:
I am a 30 year-old woman and I live with a close friend. I’ll call them “Zachery.” We have lived together for eight years and haven’t had any issues. We get along great and we spend a lot of time together. We met through another close friend of mine, as we were all grad students in the same program. I’ll call her “Amanda.” Zachery and Amanda used to be extremely close, almost like siblings. This past June they had a falling out and while it has been difficult to navigate my relationship with both of them, we have made it work.
Recently, Amanda came to me with a very upsetting story that she had been told by another colleague of ours in grad school. Amanda was told that one night, when Zachery was out drinking with a group of people from the grad program, a female friend of theirs drank too much and became so ill that they had to go to the hospital. To help out, Zachery and another male friend of this woman’s went to her apartment to tend to her dog. While in the apartment, the male friend walked in on Zachery in the woman’s bathroom, sniffing her dirty underwear. He confronted Zachery and also told the woman the next day. From our understanding, the woman later approached Zachery about the incident and he admitted to it, but of course, they are no longer friends.
This story was, of course, very upsetting to me. I have a lot of trust in Zachery and did not expect this this kind of behavior. To engage in a kink non-consensually while your friend is in the hospital is a moral failure, in my opinion. Since hearing this story, I have been trying to research panties kinks and what this all could mean, but I think I’m just avoiding the fact that it makes me very upset and I don’t trust Zachery anymore. Because I live with them, I know I need to have a conversation with them, but I feel so uncomfortable and unprepared for this kind of conversation.
Do you have any insight or advice on how to approach the conversation? How can I believe women and advocate against sexual harassment, but live with my roommate for several weeks while knowing this and not saying anything? Between their falling out with Amanda, this woman who was in the hospital, and two other female friends with which they’re on a “friendship break” with, should I be concerned that Zachery is a danger to the women around them or at least demonstrates disrespectful patterns of behavior towards women?
Somewhat Nervous In Floundering Friendship
Got some advice for SNIFF? Drop it in the comments…