Matthew Hardy and Randy Klein — the duo who created our winning Feast of the Ass carol — also sent along this wonderful animated version of “The Ballad of Buddy the Ass.” I know Feast of the Ass is behind us… and absolutely no one wants to hear “All I Need for Christmas Is You” on December 27… but I didn’t want to wait until next year to share this. And if you’re still in an ass-feasting mood — and I suspect many of my followers are always up for a feast — the top ten FOTA carols are on our website along with FOTA merch!
A few FOTA odds and ends before we return to our regularly scheduled struggle session: Steve wrote via email to let me know he and his friends were inspired to start a new tradition…
Thanks for a great holiday idea! We hosted friends for an ass-themed evening, serving ass-sparagaus, ass-iago frittata, and a hearty rump roast. Dessert was butt-shaped meringues and cow-pie cookies. The playlist consisted of the past 30 years of ass themed hip hop. Merry feasting to you and yours!
Kris wrote in on FOTA Eve to say…
Just wanted to let you know my partner and I are gearing up for the Feast of the Ass! Tonight I’ll be making this peaches n’ cream bundt cake. I had to! The first part of the recipe says “What is it with boys and peaches?” and ends off with “This one’s for you, boys!” I know I love feasting on a nice peach and leaving it a little glazed! Happy feasting!
AlaskaBink and friends hosted a Feast of the Ass party — their first annual — up in Alaska (check out the amazing Buddy-the-Donkey decorations on that bundt cake!) and NovemberProjectVancouver marked the day by working a few rounds of Pin the Tail On the Donkey into their group exercise routine! I loved this story sent in by a listener about donkeys running riot in Montpelier, Vermont, on Feast of the Ass Eve. And another listener wrote in to let me know that Feast of the Ass is being discussed on bro-y fantasy sports podcasts! (Skip to the 2:30 mark to hear Josh Lloyd’s thoughts on FOTA.) And if anyone out there knows of any other FOTA parties or stories, please send them in and I’ll add them to the list!
Thingamajig flags a pretty big oversight in my response to MOMS:
Surely pregnancy prevention needs to be part of the conversation, even if the kind of penetrative sex the boy is having is not the kind that can produce pregnancies. If this trans boy continues to meet with large numbers of men on the apps, eventually he is going to meet with someone who is going to want to “upgrade” to vaginal. And based on the general impression I have of this boy, it sounds like he is likely to acquiesce to such a request, either because he genuinely wants to or because he is a pleaser.
In addition to getting her son on PrEP and figuring out — with this docs — if he needs to be on some form of birth control, MOMS needs to get her son vaccinated against Hep A and B, HPV, and monkeypox. (A full list of recommended vaccinations for gay and bi men can be found here.)
Says MK via email…
Did you see the first letter in Dear Abby today from a reader who asks about her anti-open-relationship bias? Would you ever have Dear Abby on the podcast?
Jeanne Phillips — to her credit — doesn’t just admit to being biased against open relationships, she explains how she became biased against them: “While some open relationships are successful, the people I hear from are usually the ones who are hurting, which has also influenced my feelings on this subject.”
I’m willing to concede that open relationships aren’t for everyone — in contrast to Phillips, who believes closed relationships are (or should be) for everyone — and willing to concede that open relationships have a higher degree of difficultly (and poly relationships have more potential failure points) and that not everyone in an open relationship is happy about. (See: PUD But Jeanne Phillips gets letters every day from people who are hurting in their closed relationships… but she somehow hasn’t concluded that all closed relationships are miserable frauds that are doomed to fail.
So, while Phillips deserves credit for admitting to her bias against open relationships, she loses points for failing to recognize her own susceptibility to confirmation bias. As far as Phillips is concerned, all unhappy open relationships are alike (unhappy because they’re open) while each unhappy closed relationship is unhappy in its own way. (My apologies to Tolstoy.) No closed relationship, according to Phillips, could ever be unhappy because it’s closed and no unhappy couple could ever be happier if they opened their relationship.
Jeanne Phillips first marriage — presumably closed — ended in divorce. I’m not suggesting that her first marriage failed because it was closed, but I’m guessing that if my marriage suddenly fell apart (after 30 years!), Phillips and others who share her priors would assume mine failed because it was open.
Says Isaac via email about my conversation with Rebecca Woolf…
Did you take issue at all with the issue of consent in Babygirl? No sooner does Samuel say they should agree to rules than he basically blackmails Romy into agreeing when she so much as shows any sign of disagreeing. (He says he’s going to ask for a transfer, which might expose their affair and endanger her job.) How is that consent?
Woolf and I kept talking after we finished recording and we discussed the issue you raised: Was Romy and Samuel’s relationship truly consensual? We concluded it wasn’t — not at that moment — but that was part of the fantasy the filmmaker was trying to spin. (Despite the kink-best-practices jargon that comes out of Samuel’s mouth, Babygirl film is a thriller, it’s not an afterschool special about consensual D/s.) At that point in the narrative, their dynamic enters into CNC territory — consensual non-consent — but as in most fully negotiated CNC scenes (which sometimes involve eroticized blackmail), the Dom (Samuel) “forces” the sub (Romy) to do what the sub wants to do anyway.
Woolf made another point that supports that interpretation: while I took issue with the film’s retreat into heteronormative monogamy — Romy wasn’t getting what she wanted in her marriage because she never asked for it but she begins to get what she wants from her husband after the affair is exposed and so she doesn’t need her lover anymore — Woolf took issue with the fact that Romy didn’t ask Samuel for what she wanted either. A lot of women have a hard time asking for what they want, Woolf pointed out, and a woman will often endure a lot of unsatisfying sex while hoping that one day a man will come along who can read her mind and give her what she wants. Rather than showing Romy taking a risk and asking Samuel for what she wants, Samuel turns out to be the mindreader Romy needed in her life — her manic pixie dream Dom. (And Samuel — or the actor who plays him — is pretty fucking dreamy IMO.)
Anyway, Isaac, long before we see Samuel essentially blackmail Romy into continuing with their D/s relationship, we’re treated to scene after scene after scene where Samuel reads Romy’s mind with 100% accuracy. Even as Samuel blackmails Romy, he’s still giving her exactly what she wants and needs.
Again, it’s a movie — billed as a thriller — and not educational film about how people ought to negotiate consent for one-time kink encounters or ongoing D/s relationships. Samuel and Romy don’t do everything right!
Says superstar commenter, regular Lovecast guest, and senior sex advocate and practitioner Joan Price:
“…all relationships become companionate relationships if they go on long enough.” Uh, spoken as an 81-year-old, that’s not necessarily true, even when both people are old. What sex looks like, behaves like, and feels like isn’t what we were experiencing in our 20s, 30s, even 40s or 50s, but it can be spicy, fulfilling, and orgasmic!
Joan is reacting to a parenthetical aside at the end of my response to SNAGS in this week’s column. I’m happy to concede the point: it’s not necessarily true that all relationships become companionate if they go on long enough. But I honestly feel like we need to normalize the existence of loving, happy and stable that gradually became sexless. If two people are still fucking like the week they met twenty or thirty years into your relationship, that’s great — but I think those couples are likelier to be the exception. I think people would be happier overall if the sex-and-advice-industrial complex encouraged couples to be pleasantly surprised if they’re still fucking after thirty years instead of encouraging them to be bitterly disappointed if they’re not.
This came in from “A” via Instagram DM…
I’ve never left a comment on your podcast but I REALLY need to say something about your last episode. As a trans person I hope so much that you think about that and say something. WTF! Because someone is acting really fucking shitty, manipulative, egotistical or whatever you get to be transphobic? Are you allowed to be homophobic when a gay person acts like that?!? Or racist when a black person does?!? That doesn’t make sense at all! Since when is people using your correct pronouns a privilege? Purposefully misgendering people is transphobic! I’m so deeply disturbed, Dan! You really fucked up!
I think this comment is in reference to an AFAB caller who’d had sex with two different AMAB enbies who shamed the caller for advocating for their own pleasure. To recap (from memory): the caller had recently fucked two AMAB enbies and gotten both of them off — both ejaculators made their ejaculations — but when the caller asked to be gotten off too, the AMAB enbies who they — the caller — had just gotten off refused to get the caller off. Both AMAB enbies told the caller that they — the caller — was being heteronormative by “centering orgasms.” They — the AMAB enbies — only made this argument after they — the AFAB caller — asked them — the AMAB enbies — to return the favor and get them — the AFAB caller — off.
Everybody with me?
Okay, zooming out for a second: No one has a problem when I call straight-identified men who do nothing but suck cock all day long homosexual gentleman — or worse (and not just after they leave the room) — even though they identify as straight. Because men who suck cock and nothing but cock all day long are engaged in seriously gay-as-fuck coded shit and people are going to think they’re gay.
In a similar vein, I can’t think of anything more shitty-ass-straight-man coded than AMAB persons not giving a the single, solitary shit about making their AFAB sex partners come. So, you’ll have to forgive me for slipping up and referring to these two AMAB persons as men… which I only did because they were acting like the worst kind of men, i.e., the kind of men — the kind of selfish and shitty straight men — who brought us the orgasm gap. That these two AMAB persons tried to make the AFAB caller feel like they — the AFAB caller — was doing something wrong for wanting to have what they — the AMAB callers — just had (a fucking orgasm) added insult to injury.
So, sure. Yeah. I fucked up: I misgendered a couple of incredibly selfish and incredibly shitty AMAB enbies who were behaving like — who were fucking like — the worst kind of cis straight men. In my defense, the actions of these two AMAB enbies made it hard to remember they weren’t, you know, men. But misgendering people is always wrong, even when those people are assholes. So, I’m going to make an apology — I’m so sorry — but I’m not going to lose any sleep.
Alright, we’re going to close — as we always do — with a question that came in today that isn’t going to make the column. It’s short but it’s good:
Do you think that medical professionals posting memes/photos of “foreign objects in the rectum” is kink shaming?
I fall firmly in the losing-things-in-your-ass-is-clumsy-not-kinky column and forewarned is forearmed — and no one has ever lost a forearm in their ass the shoulder is the ultimate flared base — but I’m curious what all of you, the best collection of commenters on the Internet, think.