A man and his girlfriend are well-matched. Except...she doesn't like to kiss and he NEEDS to kiss to get his erotic motor running. Whatever can they do? The good doctor Barak is back... but this time he's here to share his political giving strategy for this election, where your dollar is mightier than ever. And of course Dan ambushes him with a gnarly sex question. On the Magnum, what happens when a man is jealous of his...mother? Dan chats with whip smart writer Jill Filipovic about millennial/boomer divide and the seething resentments within. And, a man and his husband are finally having three-ways after 30 years of marriage. They get more excited to be with their special guest stars than they do with just each other. Is this a problem? Call us with *your* problem. (Even if it isn't a problem.) [email protected] 206-302-2064 This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Right now, Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders AND two free pillows! Go to HelixSleep.com/Savage. With Helix, better sleep starts now. We’re partnering with NOCD to raise awareness about OCD. Imagine having unwanted thoughts about your relationship stuck in your head all day no matter how hard you try to make them go away. That’s OCD. Breaking the OCD cycle takes effective treatment. Go to NOCD.com/savage to learn more.
You're listening to the micro version of the Savage Love Cast at Savage.Love.
If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony, well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Love Cast.
My first boyfriend had been out and gay for a lot longer than I had. He'd been out and gay in Chicago for 10 years. I'd been out and gay in Chicago when I met him for about 10 weeks. And he thought it was his solemn responsibility as the older, wiser gay man in our relationship to teach me how to be a gay man. I thought making out with him in gay bars and
Having gay sex with him in his gay apartment later that same night made me gay enough for all practical purposes. But he thought he needed to teach me how the bathhouses worked and the cruising spots worked, the bushes in Lincoln Park, and especially how the dirty bookstore on Halstead with the video booths at the back with the glory holes in them, how they worked.
Now that all sounds pretty squalid, I realize, and it all felt pretty squalid to me at the time. But understand that the baths and the bushes and the bookstores were where gay men and bi men and closet cases who were looking for dick right away went before gay.com and then Craigslist and then Grindr and then Scruff and then Sniffies all came along.
Anyway, I wasn't interested in the bushes or the bathhouses or the bookstores. First, I couldn't share a can of Coke with my sister, passing it back and forth, because backwash and cooties. I certainly wasn't at 16 or 17 going to suck a dick that had been in 10 other mouths for all I knew. And I had a lot of uncles. My mom had five siblings. My dad had eight.
By blood and marriage, I had 13 uncles, all of them in Chicago, and I did not know where they were at all times. None of my uncles were gay, but glory holes in video booths were popular with closet cases because you could tell yourself you were just there to watch the porn.
And I didn't know if any of my uncles, a mix of old hippies and cops, were closet cases, and I did not want to find out in a video booth at the back of the dirty bookstore on Halstead. This little trip down memory lane brings us, surprisingly, to the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina.
The Assembly, a news site that covers power and place in North Carolina, came out with a big story last week about North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and
An anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-porn, pro-gun, pro-Trump Republican who, not despite, but because of his long history of making anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-Semitic, and pro-sexual assault, pro-gun, pro-Trump statements, secured the GOP nomination for governor in that important swing state. I want to give you just a little taste of the kind of orator Mark Robinson is.
So here's a clip of pro-life, pro-forced birth Mark Robinson giving a speech in a church in North Carolina. It's hard to listen to. He's hard to listen to. But they're always telling us we need to listen to people who support Trump and understand where they're coming from. So let's listen.
You want to be left alone? You should have left me alone. We didn't argue and capitulate and talk about, well, maybe we shouldn't fight the Nazis that hard. No, they're bad. Kill them. Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad. Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing. It's time for somebody to say it.
Again, he's in a church saying some people, wicked people, need killing. He cites Nazis as an historic example of wicked people who needed killing, which I guess is a bold stance for a GOP candidate, considering the way Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are always pailing around with Nazis and white supremacists. He doesn't name the wicked people who need killing now, but...
I think we all know who he means, who churchy Republicans think of when you talk about wicked people today. The gays, the abortionists, and public school teachers who Robinson has condemned. And I'm quoting here from his speech to the North Carolina Republican State Party Convention. He condemned public school teachers for feeding your children a steady diet of communism and pornography.
Robinson hates porn. He backs Project 2025, which calls for outlawing porn and throwing adult content creators into prison. Anyway, back to the story in the assembly. Turns out Mark Robinson frequented porn shops in North Carolina, like frequently frequented, like five nights a week frequency.
According to Lewis Money, who managed the porn shops that Robinson frequented and others, clients and staffers, Mark Robinson spent a lot of money renting porn and watching porn in video booths at the back of these dirty bookstores.
At a time when Robinson and his wife were in such dire financial straits, they declared bankruptcy three times and bounced checks for $3,000 worth of Girl Scout cookies. I read the story. It's long. It's amazing. There's a link in the show notes if you would like to read it too. And I followed the reaction to it on political sites and podcasts.
And I was surprised that no one asked the obvious follow-up question or made the obvious follow-up statement of fact. Here's Tim Miller, host of the Bulwark podcast, talking about Robinson. with former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who you may have seen at the Democratic National Convention, where he gave a speech endorsing Kamala Harris.
Here they are talking on last Friday's Bulwark podcast about this story.
What do you think about going to a porn store five nights a week with a pizza? He brings the pizza into the porn store, goes into the back room, and he's there every night.
Sounds like a Republican candidate for governor if I've ever heard one. I mean, look, it's just the hypocrisy of this all.
What was he watching back there, do you think? I don't know. Have you ever been in a back room at a porn store? Never one time? Are you sure? Even before the internet? Even before Pornhub?
How could Tim, a gay man, fail to ask the obvious follow-up question here or make the obvious statement of fact? I texted Tim and said, girl, how did you miss the glory hole piece of this? He responded, this is more your area of expertise than mine, both generationally and subject matter.
Okay, Tim, let this old faggot me explain how video booths in the backs of dirty bookstores, most of which are gone now, gay men of Tim's generation probably have never been in one. Let me explain how it works for you and explain it for everyone else who missed the real story here. Which isn't that Mark Robinson, heterosexual man, likes porn.
It's that Mark Robinson, heterosexual man, was sitting in a room where men go to suck dicks five nights a week for years. If you go into one of those booths, there are going to be holes in the walls and dicks are going to come through those holes and the dicks are a feature, not a bug. I'm sorry.
If you seek out a place to straightly enjoy your straight porn while you masturbate straightly about straight stuff, and there are hard dicks coming through the walls in the place where you're sitting watching your straight porn, we get to call your straight straightliness into question. No one goes to a place like that despite the dicks. You go to a place like that for the dicks.
Kinzinger is right. It's about the hypocrisy. And Robinson's hypocrisy doesn't begin and end with his love of porn or his high tolerance for or love of dicks coming through walls. He's famously anti-choice. He thinks abortion should be banned in all cases, no exceptions for rape or incest. He's told women they won't need abortions if they could just be responsible enough to keep their skirts down.
But when his girlfriend needed an abortion, Robinson paid for that abortion. With Girl Scout cookies, I'm guessing, since his actual money was going to porn shops. So Robinson, he is just another screw as I say, not as I screw Republican. Porn and dicks and abortion rights for me, prison and gay bashing and forced births. For thee. Mark Robinson now, some people need killing.
Mark Robinson then, some dicks need sucking. I prefer the old Mark Robinson, the friendly, affable guy who by all reports brought pizza to the dirty video store to share with the other customers and the clerks who remember him. And in perhaps the most disturbing detail in that long story in the assembly, Mark would bring a whole pizza for himself and take it into the video booth and eat it.
which is grosser, I'm sorry, and more squalid than sitting in a video booth at the back of a dirty bookstore and eating a dick. All right, our next Savage Love Live, our monthly Zoom hangout for Magnum subs is this Thursday, 12 p.m. Pacific time. I will be answering questions live, talking with my subs, and bringing on a guest maybe. Want to join us, but not a Magnum sub?
Become one of my subs now by subscribing at savage.love slash subscribe. And coming up on today's show, tons of your Qs, lots of my As. Joining me on the micro, everyone's favorite simple country doctor, Dr. Barack. Everybody loves Dr. Barack for his compassionate, no-nonsense approach to the most fucked-up sex questions I can toss at him.
But did you know, like me, Dr. Barack is a politics junkie? This week, he's here to share the research he did on making political giving super-duper easy in this crucial moment in the upcoming election. He told me where to send money, how to send money, and I did it with him as we recorded. And you can listen and you can donate along with me.
And I ambushed him, of course, at the end with an insane sex question because who doesn't like to hear Dr. Barack squirm? And our guest on the Magnum, because of course we have a guest on the Magnum too, Jill Filipovich, journalist, lawyer, author. She wrote OK Boomer. Let's talk about how my generation got left behind.
Jill returns to the show to help me tackle a question about generational wealth. Not a topic that comes up on the Lovecast often, but a question that Jill is absolutely the perfect guest to help me answer. All right, let's get to the first call. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, the makers of my mattress and your next mattress.
Right now, Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners. Go to helixsleep.com slash savage. This is their best offer yet. It won't last long. Go get your new mattress. With Helix, better sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by NoCD. You have repeated unwanted thoughts that are violent, sexual, or aggressive in nature? It could be OCD.
NoCD offers virtual therapy that can help you reclaim your life from OCD. Their therapists are all OCD specialists, so they understand intrusive thoughts, even the ones that feel too shameful to share. To learn more about therapy with NoCD, go to NoCD.com to schedule a free 15-minute call. That's NoCD.com.
Hi, Dan and the tech-savvy at-risk youth, long-time listener and Magnum subscriber who is a cishet male in his mid-40s living in the Midwest, dating an early 40s cishet woman in the Deep South long distance for about the last year. We see each other in person once a month on average, but FaceTime pretty much every day.
She isn't a listener of the show, but knows that I am and suggested that I shoot this question to you. Passionate romantic kissing has always been the fuel to my erotic engine, but it is erotic kryptonite for her. This isn't an issue of oral hygiene as I'm someone who flosses, brushes, tongue scrapes, and uses mouthwash multiple times per day.
My dental hygienists love how easy I am come checkup time. The thing is, she's neurodivergent and for her, the wetness of romantic kissing and the close facial proximity are something that take her out of the moment and make her feel suffocated. It basically kicks in her fight or flight response. This has been the case with all her past partners as well, so it's not unique to our relationship.
For me, the wetness and closeness of faces is the thing that makes my motor run. All of that said, I'm a firm believer in neuroplasticity and the ability to rewire ourselves, but I'm having a really hard time rewiring myself to get the same jolt of excitement through other activities alone.
We have an incredibly solid connection with great communication, but this is something we want to solve, so we're both getting what we need out of the relationship. So Dan, how can I change my erotic engine to run on alternative fuels?
She doesn't like to be kissed on the mouth. She doesn't like those wet faces coming together. How does she feel about, I don't know, the other end of her gastrointestinal tract? How does she feel about having her ass eaten? Does that do anything for you, making out with the other end of the GI tract? I don't know. It seems to me that you two have a fundamental disconnect here.
If kissing is something that you require... to get going, to feel engaged erotically, to become aroused. And kissing is something, for neurodivergent reasons, that she absolutely positively cannot do.
If this thing that gives you not just tremendous pleasure, but this thing you kind of need to experience all the other pleasures that come bundled with sex, that thing triggers her fight or flight response, probably you're not going to be able to do that thing. You may be, or you may not be, you guys have made this work up to now, sexually incompatible.
You know, if you need X and somebody absolutely positively cannot do X, and X isn't just something that you enjoy, one of the many things that you enjoy, but it's crucial. It's the gateway enjoyment thing that takes you to all the other things that you enjoy and that hopefully your partner also enjoys, but they can't do X. Well, maybe you shouldn't be together. You are together.
So far, you have figured out how to make this work. You bring up neuroplasticity and not to change her and her feelings, but to change you and your feelings. And what I think you're trying to get at there is, is there a way to decenter kissing from your erotic script, erotic imagination, the thing that gets you going, the key that you slip in to start the engine? Is there something else?
maybe eating her ass, maybe making out with her armpits. Maybe there's some place you can go with your mouth that engages with an erogenous zone of hers where she enjoys that kind of tonguing, open mouth kissing, that sort of allowing you to be the sucker fish or whatever it is that you need to be to click in. When it comes to people adopting different like
sex acts, whether we're talking, you know, just from the vanilla play box or the kink play box, people will grow and change and will wind up one day doing, enjoying things that when they first began their sexual journey, they didn't anticipate that they would enjoy or ever really want to do.
And when you sit down with somebody and really talk about it, you can usually trace the thread back that there was a thread that ran through from, you know, being held down for a kinkster, like, They really were aroused by being held down.
They liked to be held down, all the way up to the insane bondage they do now, which if you'd suggested to them they might be interested in that, when all they really wanted to do was be held down, they would have been like, ooh, no, gross. But they grew in that direction, but there is this thread. I don't know what that thread would be for you, for kissing.
What are the sensual and erotic engagement of kissing, that pressing your faces together, drinking each other's saliva, breathing their breath in, taking in their carbon monoxide along with their saliva, and just being that close and that intimate, tasting each other's mouths in that way, what flows from that? Of course, my mind went straight to eating her ass.
Maybe she'd feel differently about that. And it would tag for you some of the bases of that feeling of... intimacy of pressing a significant GI portal of yours into a significant GI portal of hers. So that's what I would suggest, but you know, I'm a demented fag pervert. Of course, that's what I would suggest. You two together have to figure out what works for you.
And you may wind up having to pay a significant price of admission here. People don't get everything that they want in a sexual relationship.
If you love or require anal and you're in love with someone who just can't or won't do anal, well, then you face a moment where you have to say, particularly if it's a sexually exclusive relationship, you're making a monogamous commitment, I want to be with you more than I want to fuck a butt or have my butt fucked. And so you choose this person over this act.
What I'm having a hard time with the way you set this up, the question of the way you frame kissing and how important it is to you again, is that it is the beginning of all sex for you. That's not just giving up an act and leaning into the other 10, 20 acts that you two enjoy together. That's giving up something crucial, something
foundational, something you really, really fucking need the key for your engine. And that's harder. That's maybe a price for admission. In some cases that would be too steep to pay, but if you're together, you've already paid that price of admission. Unless your girlfriend is allowing you to kiss her while she wretches struggles to get the fuck away from you, which I hope you're not doing.
So yeah, heater ass. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. You know your mattress isn't just for having sex, you perverts. You do need to get a good night's sleep on that thing too, if for no other reason than to recharge your batteries for having more great sex on that thing. So I recommend the best mattress for both.
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You can try out your new mattress, see how your body adjusts, and if you decide it's not the best fit, you are welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix offers models with memory foam layers to provide optimal pressure relief if you sleep on your side, like me, or models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions.
Plus, enhanced cooling features to keep you from overheating at night. Helix mattresses all come with a 10 or 15 year warranty depending on the model. Right now, Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners. Go to helixsleep.com slash savage with Helix. Better sleep starts now. We're going to take a quick break from your calls to speak with Dr. Barack.
What can I say about Dr. Barack? He used to be a simple country doctor and frequent and reluctant guest on the Savage Lovecast, a simple country doctor and a professor of medicine at the University of Washington. But after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Dr. Barack was radicalized. He jumped into political activism.
Now he sends out spreadsheets to friends recommending candidates that they can donate to to help stop the spread of fascism in this country. Dr. Barack, welcome back to the show.
It's so good to be here, Dan. Especially good to be here talking about something other than the wild and wooly crazy things that you often ask me to talk about.
I am woefully behind on my political giving this season. I gave to the top, gave money to Kamala and Tim, but I don't want to waste money on no hope Dem candidates running against high profile Republicans in blood red districts. Dems set hundreds of millions of dollars on fire, wasted money on those kinds of candidates in 2020 and 2022. I have a thousand dollars to give away today, Barack.
I want to give it to 10 candidates who can make a difference. Walk me through how I can do that.
Great. And it is so good that you're asking this now because if you are behind, then you're only every day that goes by you are becoming more behind that this is the time is so critical to give now. People really shouldn't be delaying because as we're getting close, this election is going to come so fast.
And giving these campaigns more time to use your money makes every dollar you give more effective. Also, so important to pick a big dollar amount that you're going to give this year because a year has never been more important than this one.
And so you want to pick a big dollar amount and then portion out how you're going to give it and give it now and then stop feeling sort of impulsively guilty every time that somebody is coming at you for giving money.
And stop giving money to somebody running against Marjorie Taylor Greene in a district where she's going to win by 60 points. That's right. That's setting money on fire. People did that. They threw money away on the person running against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Person running against Lindsey Graham in whatever shithole state he comes from.
Hundreds of millions of dollars. We're not going to make that mistake today. We're going to give it to Dems nobody has heard of in races where they have a shot.
Absolutely. And so this is the way to be strategic. The way to be strategic, I strongly recommend the website swingleft.org. And if you go to swingleft.org, you can really find a single button to donate to all of the U.S. house races across the country. I think they pick out like 10 or 15 of them that are the most likely to be really close and important for us to win.
and they will automatically spread your donation among those 15 candidates that they have selected. You don't have to do all that work. Go to swingleft.org, find their U.S. House fund, and give to those candidates with one click.
I have opened swingleft.org. I'm looking at their list of the 10 races that they're raising money for right now. Dems who have a shot at winning. Amish Shah running in Arizona for a house seat. Rudy Salas, California. George Whitesides, California. Derek Tran, California. Tony Vargas, Nebraska. Laura Gillen, New York. Mondaire Jones, New York. John Mannion, New York.
Janelle Bynum, Oregon, and Ashley Ijaz, Pennsylvania.
I've never heard of any of these people, but... That's okay. You can trust swingleft.org to have done the hard work that we can't do to pick out among these hundreds of U.S. House races across the country that need our money to win back the House.
Okay, so I'm clicking on donate a thousand. I thought I was going to donate 100 bucks at a time to 10 different candidates. This is going to take a long time. But I'm going to do this the easy way.
It's so easy. And swingleft.org is so reliable. They do really, really careful evidence-based work. And at any moment when you're going to this website and clicking that button, they are constantly reassembling what they see and they're tracking as the most closest races to give to.
Okay, I am... Telling them not now for a couple other things. Thank you for your contribution. Would you like to share contact information? Yeah, please don't share my contact information. It is a little confusing, so let me walk people through that quickly.
Go to swingleft.org, click on Our Strategy, click on Win Back the House of Representatives, click on Donate to Win, and then select your donation amount. We've received your one-time contribution. Yay, I made my contribution to these 10 Democrats running all over the country, hopefully to take the House back. Taking the House back is really important.
Incredibly important, Dan.
What do you think about the Senate?
So the Senate is going to be trickier. So right now, we have this razor thin majority in the Senate, and we have seven very, very vulnerable Democrats who are up for reelection. And so it's going to be a stretch for us to hold on to the Senate, but it is possible.
And even if we don't hold on to the Senate this year, we really do want to still have as many of these candidates defend their seats so that two years from now we could win back the Senate. And so again, rather than going click, click, click to each one of these U.S. Senate races, I really recommend going to swingleft.org's U.S. Senate fund, and they will automatically give to the seven U.S.
Senate races that are going to be the closest, that unfortunately this year are all defend races, but we've got to defend those seats.
All right, Dr. Barak, I thought this was going to take a long time and we would have to go through these races one at a time and I'd have to open everybody's website and put my credit card in and make $100 donation. So we have some extra time here. Can I ask you a sex question?
No, I've got more to tell you about politics.
Okay, tell me one more thing about politics and then you have to answer a sex question. Nobody gets off this show without answering a sex question.
I just want to put in one more plug because Pennsylvania is going to be the state that really decides this election. And there is a really, really good grassroots voter mobilization organization in Pennsylvania that's called One Pennsylvania. Their website is onepa.org, O-N-E-P-A dot O-R-G. And give them some money, too, because it's that on-the-ground grassroots mobilization organization.
that is underfunded, and that's really going to make a difference in that state, and that state is going to make a difference in the presidential election.
Okay, Dr. Barak, I will give $100 to One Pennsylvania if you answer a sex question with me now. If you refuse, I'm not going to make that donation, and my $100 may be the critical $100 that swings Pennsylvania for Kamala Harris. Dr. Barak, what is your answer?
Will you take a sex question with me? Under duress, I will answer your sex question.
Okay, we're not going to play it. It's a call that came up a couple of weeks ago. I'm just going to summarize it. A woman called in because she has a friend who's an adult baby diaper lover and he wants to have a smaller penis. There are some people out there, some men who are trying to shrink their penises with smaller and smaller cock cages.
And to shrink his penis, to make it the small penis of his dreams, he was injecting meth into his erectile tissue, into his penis. Dr. Barack... What do you think? Injecting meth into your penis to shrink it, is that a good idea or a bad idea?
Oh my God, that's such a bad idea, Dan. There are so many ways in which you could do one of the most important parts of your body really, really permanent horrible harm by doing that. Parts of your penis could shrivel and die and never come back. Don't do that. That's a horrible, horrible thing to do.
I can see Dr. Barak right now. You guys can't. Dr. Barak still somehow sitting at his desk in front of his microphone is curled up into the fetal position. Dr. Barak, is there a doctor recommended dick shrinking treatment option? What would one out of one professors of medicine on the Savage Lovecast with me right now recommend?
Oh, you know, in the same way that there's no proven ways to make your penis bigger, there are no proven ways to make your penis smaller. And people really need to just sort of like embrace and accept the penis that they have.
Good advice. I have been giving similar advice for years, but apparently even listeners to my show won't take that advice. And they're trying to make their dicks bigger, make their dicks smaller, some of them. Listen to Dr. Barack, professor of medicine at the University of Washington, simple country doctor radicalized by the election of Donald Trump. And don't inject meth into your dick.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
But do go to swingleft.org and scroll down to their list of House races to help swing the House and Senate races. Before I let you go, Dr. Brock, you've been coming on the show for years and it doesn't seem to give you a lot of joy or pleasure. You always seem like hell. You're in hell when you're on the show having to answer these questions. Why do you keep coming back?
What do we have on you that keeps you coming back?
You know, I believe in what you do, Dan. I want to support you. I think you're doing such good things. And I know that it's not easy to find doctors who will take the kind of abuse that you did.
Will demean themselves by coming on this program.
So I'm here for you, man. I'm here for you.
Okay. I just want people to know you're not doing this under duress. We're not holding your family hostage. You're here of your own free will, even though you're dying every time you're out.
That's right. You're doing good things, Dan. I applaud you.
Thank you for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it. And now I'm off to One Pennsylvania, onepa.org, to make that donation I promised you I would make.
Thank you, Dan. This has been great.
Picture this. You're in the heat of the moment. The attraction is there. The chemistry is crazy. You are feeling amazing. And then all of a sudden, it hits you. An intrusive thought so disturbing, embarrassing, or disgusting that it doesn't just kill the mood, it shakes you to your core.
It might be taboo or aggressive, and you know it's the complete opposite of what you actually want and who you actually are. So you start to worry, why did I think that? What does this mean about me? And worst of all, this isn't a one-time thing. These types of intrusive thoughts keep coming back, popping up when you least want them to, and they don't seem to go away.
Your distress snowballs until it feels out of control, but telling anyone about these thoughts seems too mortifying. Here's the thing about disturbing, taboo thoughts. They're more common than you think. In fact, almost everyone has them. But for people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, they tend to feel sticky and cause a lot of anxiety.
And if this doesn't sound like OCD to you, that's because it's misunderstood. OCD isn't what most people think. OCD latches onto unwanted thoughts and can make you feel like a monster, even though that isn't true. But that's what makes it so debilitating. The thoughts can feel so real that seeking help can seem like a huge risk.
And since so few people understand what OCD is really like, it can feel like you have nowhere to turn. If you relate to this, no CD wants you to know you're not alone. They created NoCD to help anyone struggling with OCD and taboo or disturbing intrusive thoughts to get the treatment and support they need. NoCD provides virtual therapy with licensed therapists who specialize in OCD.
They're trained in Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy, or ERP, the gold standard treatment for OCD, and they understand intrusive thoughts, even the ones that feel too shameful to share. NoCD also accepts many major insurance plans and offers always-on support between sessions. To learn more about therapy with NoCD, go to NoCD.com and schedule a free 15-minute call with their team.
That's NoCD.com to learn more and to book a free 15-minute call.
Hey, Dan. 36-year-old bi cis lady who is also a mom of two calling. Yesterday, my two kids got invited to a play date by a woman I used to be very close with. Our older children met at preschool and have been best friends ever since.
This lady and I are no longer on the greatest terms, and we don't really speak often, but we used to be best friends until COVID happened, and then she became a big old anti-vaxxer. But yesterday I was dropping them off at her house. Don't worry, she got vaccinated since then. And we were talking about the start of school. It's the first year our kids aren't going to the same school.
They're going into middle school, but mine's going to go to public, and hers is going into Catholic instead. She said her daughter was heartbroken and wanted to go to public school with my kid, but that they just had to send her to this new school after what the public school did to ruin her mind. I was confused. I had no idea what she was talking about. And then she continues.
Well, she came home all confused after her sex ed classes. She came up to me and she said, I think I like girls. I said, no, you don't. That's wrong. That's gross. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. I just couldn't believe it. It broke my heart, honestly. I looked at her and I said, like, you didn't really say that to her. Like, oh, my God.
I told her, you know, she's her own person. You can't decide what she likes and you don't get to make that choice for her. And, you know, she said back to me, like, I've never heard her talk about this kind of thing before. You know, the school's loading her head up with all types of shit and I don't think it's right. And so I told her exactly what having sex with a woman would be like.
And she was so disgusted. She told me to stop. I told her, you know, I'm bi, right? Like, I don't understand what's wrong with that and where any of this is coming from. And I ended the conversation and I told her I had to leave. And it was very abrupt. And she said, fine, and just turned around. And I went home and I cried. You know, she texted me after and she said, I hope I didn't offend you.
I want you to know that I'm open and I'm okay if she likes girls. I just didn't like the school getting involved. I told her it was hurtful. She replied with a bunch more, but it honestly just came off as so disingenuine, like she was just backtracking to make herself look okay.
You know, she told me she accepted everyone, and I told her to tell everything she just said to her daughter, like, not me. I think I'll just wait until I see her daughter and privately let her know if she ever needs to talk that I'm here. But aside from that, I'm just so hurt. She's turned into such a fucking bigot after COVID.
But I just want to make sure her daughter gets the support that she needs.
Part of me wants to wish a gay kid on this woman. But no part of me would ever want to wish a mom like that on a gay kid. Gay kids, lesbian kids, bi kids, trans kids deserve better. That said... You did a good thing. You did a great thing. You did an amazing thing. And you're not giving yourself enough credit here.
When you blew up at your friend about the shitty things she was saying about the school, about the public school where you're sending your daughter and the shitty things she was saying about queer people and the shitty things she said to her daughter about being a queer person or being a lesbian.
She texted you later and tried to walk it back and apologized and wanted to make sure that you two were still good. And you read that as disingenuous and you dismiss that. her sending you that text is just her trying to cover her ass. I heard that as you, by confronting her, by not letting it slide, you created in her some cognitive dissonance.
She realizes, even if it was a disingenuous text, she realizes on some level that the good person that she wants to be or wants to be perceived as being is in conflict with the shitty, homophobic, lesbophobic, ranting anti-vax lunatic that she was with you in that moment. So you can work with that.
If her kid is going to be gay when her kid grows up, there are a lot of people out there who have wonderful, loving, supportive parents who are there for them and their same sex partners who were not there for them. in the same way when they were 12 or 15 or 18.
Parents do when they're faced with having a gay kid reach this fork in the road where they have to choose their bigotry or choose their kid. Used to be, you could pretty reliably predict that most parents would choose their bigotry or their faith tradition or whatever the fuck over their kid. That's why there were a lot of
Gay and lesbian adults running around 40 years ago who were estranged from their families of origin. These days, more and more, increasingly now, it is the exception to meet a gay person who's estranged like that from their family of origin because their parents chose their bigotry and their homophobia or their transphobia or their whatever phobia over their own kids.
And this is the process, what you've just laid out in your call, the process by which the parent who isn't supportive out of the gate gets there. They encounter pushback. They encounter, they say shitty homophobic things to someone they think is just going to stand there and nod and say, yeah, yeah. Shitty homophobic things back to them. Who's like the fuck? No, don't say that. That's shitty.
That's awful. That's potentially harmful to your kid for you to say that LGBT kids are much greater risk of suicide. LGBT kids with unsupportive parents. who are bullied at home for being queer are at much, much greater risk of a suicide attempt. Surely your friend doesn't want that for her kid. You need to settle in here.
Whether to salvage the relationship with this woman because you valued it once upon a time and maybe you'll get back to the kind of relationship you used to have with her. Maybe she'll come to her fucking senses. Or so that you can continue to be a presence in the life of this queer child whose parents are failing her at this moment.
If this child is queer, you know, sometimes kids think they're queer when they're 11 and then they're not so much a few years later. That happened in my family. But you want to be there. You want to be part of her life.
So I think you should take your friend's apology, the text at face value and continue to see her, hang out with her, get your kids together for play dates, which you're still doing at 11. You won't be doing so much when they're 13 or 14. Your kids will be directing their own social lives hopefully at that point.
And if she's awful two, three years from now, and you don't want to have to hang out with her, but your daughter still wants to hang out with her daughter, they can make that happen. And if you want to, at some point you can say to that kid, look, you can be whoever you want to in my house, like right on.
And you could come out as bi to that kid if you want to and be that safe place that some queer kids need. They need that trusted adult, right? that they can trust. Maybe their parents can't trust so much, but they can trust.
But you can't be that adult for this kid if you nuke your relationship with her mom and your kid and you are exiled from their lives in the same way that public school was exiled from their lives. So if you want to be there for this kid, you're going to have to get along to go along or go along to get along.
I never remember which way that's supposed to come and order the go where they got in that expression, that idiom. You're going to want to have some sort of detente relationship with your old friend. If you want to be in this, in her kid's life, in case her kid might need you, do your old friend the favor of of accepting at face value that she was sincere in these text messages to you.
And to give yourself the credit, perhaps, of having created the kind of cognitive dissonance in the homophobic parent of a queer kid that ultimately, usually, typically, when it resolves, resolves in the kid's favor and the letting go of the homophobia. You're a peer to this woman. You came out to her spine, ripped into her. Thank God. I'm so glad you did the right thing.
The text messages you got afterwards, kind of a win. Take the win.
After 30 years together and a few listings to your podcast, Monogamish, my husband and I decided to open things up a little bit and periodically invite a third to join us. We have noticed, however, that we are far more into it and far more excited when there is a third present than when it's just the two of us.
I think that's to be expected, but my husband wonders if we should be worried about that.
Of course you're going to be excited about the sexual adventure you're about to have with your husband when a third is coming over. Of course that, objectively, there's more to get excited about there than having sex with your husband again, who you still love and want to be with. But...
Sex in the context of a multi-decade, long-term, committed, romantic, and still sexual relationship is different than sex with somebody new. It doesn't get the cortisone and the adrenaline pumping in quite the same way. It is great in other ways. There's intimacy, there's familiarity, there's comfort, there's this deep understanding of your erotic imaginations and inner lives.
And there is something about, you know, sex with somebody you've been with for decades and decades and decades that is, it confirms what you mean to each other. You're not exploring what you might mean to each other. There's nothing risky about it.
And so, yeah, like you guys just need to both accept, like when there's a third present, like that's exciting in a way that you two can't be exciting for each other anymore. There's a lot of other things that you two can be for each other after 30 years that some rando you found on Grindr who's on his way over can't be for you, for either of you. And it's just different.
And what's great about what you're doing is you have your husband and he has you and you're having this kind of excitement too. with and for each other. This is happening for the both of you, not despite your marriage, not despite your relationship, but because of your marriage because of your relationship.
So this excitement, although there's like this outside force acting on your relationship and your sexual connection, that's creating this kind of excitement, it is a part of your sexual connection and your relationship. And you should, Look at it that way.
Not, oh, it's a terrible sign that we're excited about this three-way in a way we're just not excited about the kind of routine, regular, sometimes maintenance sex we have with each other. And that's a bad sign. And we should be as excited to have sex with each other now as we were the night we met when we were still strangers to each other for the most part. I'm sorry.
There's no getting back to that with somebody you've been with for 25 years, with somebody whose farts you could identify in a room with 100 people farting in it. There's just no way to get back there alone together. But you guys have managed to get back there alone together with a third to experience this kind of excitement about your shared sex life. That's awesome. That's a superpower.
That's a win. That is a win, take the win. And if you're gonna feel sad about anything, I mean, feel your feelings, you can help but feel your feelings. You can recall to each other how exciting sex was when you first met. And what it was like those first times that you fucked, I don't know how you and your husband met. Did you meet wholesome introduced by friends at a dinner party?
Did you meet in a sex club? Did you meet through Grindr? Like 30 years ago, probably not Grindr. How did you meet? You can talk about that and like feel nostalgia. You can also allow yourself to feel loss because the excitement that you got from each other, that doesn't come back, but you always have to balance that kind of acknowledgement of what
was present in your relationship when it was new and isn't anymore with a thumb on the scale where you're looking at and valuing everything you are to each other now that you couldn't be to each other then and the ways in which your relationship has deepened so that when you think about that loss, you're also thinking about what you've gained.
And what you've gained recently is this kind of excitement that you thought, people together 30 years don't have this kind of excitement in their life unless they're fucking somebody else together. You have this kind of excitement.
back and you're doing that for each other you are exciting each other in a way that you used to when it was just the two of you and now you excite each other in this way by dragging some strange dick home and that's awesome All right, time for listener feedback. First up, some of the comments left on last week's show in the very lively comment threads at savage.love.
Lots of people jumped into the comments to talk about the East Coast academic who felt bad about how he fetishized his cowboys when he could fetishize something completely unproblematic instead like skinheads. Anyway, says Chris T., the guy with the cowboy fetish has nothing to be ashamed of because black and brown cowboys exist. Cattle rustling used to be considered lowly field work.
The term cowboy once was a derogatory term because 50 to 60% of cowboys were Latino and black. The only thing racist about cowboys is how Hollywood whitewashed and excluded people of color from portrayals of them. There are books out there and photo journals dedicated to black cowboys that could make this man feel a little less guilty about his preference.
Says John H., also about the cowboy thing, There were, of course, genocidal cowboys, but jobs like banker, landlord, senator, or president should be way higher up on the worried-about-contextual-racism scale. That's a good point, John, but you know, I've never met a person with a president fetish, but I will bear that in mind if I ever get a call from one.
Finally, he says, ooh, shiny88, Dan, I always feel so validated when you talk about kinks emerging in early childhood. I literally remember tying up and making little cages for my Barbies. And I didn't understand why I was embarrassed about it and would try to hide that from my parents. Fast forward 30 years and dot, dot, dot. Well, I'm sure you can guess what turns me on. All right.
For more listener feedback, check out Struggle Session every Thursday at Savage.Love, where I usually respond to listener and reader comments at length. But for the rest of the summer, we're having a little experiment where I post a letter that's too long for the column and let my superstar commenters at Savage.Love weigh in and give advice. Struggle session goes up every Thursday at savage.love.
We're not putting it behind a paywall for now while we conduct this little experiment. Watch for a new one. This Thursday, jump in, give some advice. And now everyone's favorite part of the show, the part where I shut my big gay mouth and let my listeners have the last word.
Hello, this comment is for the caller, the 64-year-old caller who is attracted or turned on by cowboys. And I just wanted to offer an alternative. I recently went to a queer line dancing thing in LA, and I know that they have it in New York City as well.
So I think that a lot of us country folks who got the fuck out of there are sort of reclaiming that space and bringing a nurturing, erotic, safe approach to that community that we were thrown out of. So maybe... you know, he could go and be an observer and just watch these like beautiful cowboys dance with each other.
And I think that he can actually take that and run with it in this sort of reclaiming of space.
Hey, this is a Magnum subscriber and I'm calling in with a comment for the young woman who called it, who was with the guy who came too fast and then was a jerk. I totally agree with everything that Dan said. I just wanted to add that as a speedy ejaculator myself, much older than the age you are. I would have really really loved to have been with someone as kind as you when I was 18 years old.
I think what you said was exactly what I would have liked to hear. I'm really sad that this guy who you were with Couldn't hear it and respond in kind. I just think you should just keep on doing what you're doing, and you will get with guys who are able to receive what you are offering them, all that kindness and sensitivity, and you will find a guy who...
either comes too fast and is really appreciative that you are kind about it. And you will get with guys who then start to understand that good sex is not all about the hard deck. So thank you.
Hi, Dan. I wanted to respond to this straight man from the East Coast asking about women with foot fetishes. I would have agreed with Dan's response, theoretically, regardless of my personal experience, but as of a month ago, I can verify there's at least one woman on the planet with a foot fetish.
I met someone recently for the dating apps, and after coming back to my place, things escalated when she started giving me a foot massage. I've never fantasized about feet myself, but not only did this girl give a damn good foot massage, started to really turn me on, and things escalated from there into a fun, kinky time.
We've only met up a couple of times, but on both occasions, the intimacy starts with a sensual foot rub. And in between dates, she has dropped a couple flirty texts about massaging my feet. So yeah, I'm calling that a foot fetish, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Given my limited sample size, I'll assign 1% to the proportion of the female dating pool that has foot fetishes.
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