You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dan Savage started his sex-advice column in the early 90s. And he started the Savage Lovecast, a call-in, sex advice podcast back in 2006. Dan is also an author and LGBT activist alongside his husband. For a long time, Dan has been one of the preeminent thinkers on sex and relationships, but really his scope is so much broader than that. He has such an interesting, provocative—and I think—well-informed perspective on our culture.

I don’t do many podcast episodes on sex these days, but I loved talking to Dan, and he actually also interviewed me for his own podcast as well. And again, we talked about a lot more than sex in both conversations.

In this conversation, we explored how sex and relationships get conflated. We talked about why monogamy is correlated with relationship instability, why Dan wishes we would think of a monogamous commitment as a goal, and how he thinks about infidelity and repair.

Dan also shares a word he came up with, which is “tolyamory.” It means tolerating your lover’s bullshit, essentially. As an etymology nerd, I loved this.

We talked about the ways in which our culture purports to value marriage, but in truth, is desperate to control our sexuality, as if it could.

We get into identities, orientations, preferences, language, and how we’re raising kids today. And Dan shares why he would like us all to have a little more chill when it comes to the natural assumptions people make of us.

Then, Dan shares his take on heteropessimism, and what makes a man an attractive partner.

There’s so much to unpack with this one, and a lot to keep thinking and talking about. I hope it sparks something for you, too.

Dan’s Podcast: Savage Lovecast

Dan’s Website

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ELISE:

I’m really excited for this. Actually. This is not my typical fair, and Kiki who helps me with the show who worked with me at Goop was like, can I send you 18 questions for Dan? I was like, yes. So she is very excited.

DAN:

I can’t wait.

ELISE:

I know one of the things where I want to start, as someone who’s been one of the primary commentators on relationships and sex, which I feel like you don’t conflate necessarily, or maybe you can elaborate on that, but sex to you is very different than relationships. Is that correct?

DAN:

Yes. Originally I wrote a sex advice column and it was just about the mechanics, sex, and sometimes sex exists in the context of a relationship, and sometimes sex exists outside of the context of a relationship. Sometimes a relationship comes first, then there’s sex the other way around. So yeah, I don’t think they’re

ELISE:

Couple

DAN:

Linked.

ELISE:

I think for women, and you would have a better sense, and I feel like the people who listen to you are not necessarily in the school, but in the context of my work and research, for most women, the sex that we’re encouraged to pursue is obviously procreative. Let’s be real Dan, but also relational. And I don’t know, it’s one of those nature nurture. Are we programmed to pursue that or are we wired in some way to want relational sex? Do you have a sense on that? Actually,

DAN:

I do

ELISE:

Tell us.

DAN:

I mean, something can be multi causal. There can be more than one reason a social behavior or something manifest itself, but women are always controlling from male violence,

And I have straight guys tell me they look at the sex lives that their gay male friends and they’re like, God, I wish women were as sexually impulsive, free, available as gay men are. You guys are so lucky, and it goes to show that straight men would do everything gay men do if straight men could, but straight men because women and what straight men don’t ask themselves is why women won’t. And I think it’s kind of a combo platter, and there are biological realities, and I think there are sex differences, sexually transmitted infections likely to pass from male to female than female to male. The profound implications of pregnancy, of course falls entirely onto the woman’s shoulders in a heterosexual sex act. But there’s violence, sexual violence is something women are always having to control for, and one of the ways you can control for it, not perfectly, Lacey Peterson, as an example, is to know someone is to get to know someone, is to establish trust and get a feel for this person and whether you’re going to be safe with them naked, which is not to say that women don’t have one night stands, which is not to say hook up culture isn’t something that a lot of women have embraced.

It is, but there’s a vetting that women for their own safety have to do and that can then be valorized to look like women are the ones who are interested in relationships. Women are the ones who nurture and tend, and it’s like no, women are the ones who live in terror of male sexual violence and have to have some assurance that this dude isn’t going to rape or kill her. And the way you get that assurance is because you know them socially. There’s some social control or you’ve gotten to know them and gotten a feel for them, and you can’t tease those things apart. There’s nature, there’s nurture, there’s culture, there’s the way men are, there’s testosterone, male sexual. The threat of male men are bigger and stronger generally than women are, and women have to take that into account. And gay men, man, that all kind of zeroes out in a way, which is not to say that gay men can’t be violent to each other. I have a friend who was murdered by a sex partner. Gay men can absolutely be violent to each other, but it’s not as pressing or as

ELISE:

It’s what you’re controlling for.

DAN:

Yeah,

ELISE:

So interesting. Even thinking about obviously the biology of homosexuality and have you read that book T Story of

DAN:

Testosterone? Yes, yes. I

ELISE:

Have

DAN:

Carol Hugin. Right,

ELISE:

Yeah. And it was fascinating just even thinking about this idea of hetero men wishing to be more like straight men because I think one of the things or one of the takeaways that I had from that book is that as much as we live in a culture that suggests that gay men are feminine or more feminine than their macho hetero counterparts, the science suggests isn’t there that detail about how the penises of gay men are actually half an inch longer,

DAN:

But that involves self-reporting. I believe those studies

ELISE:

Oh, really? Entirely reliable. Oh, I don’t want to hear that. I loved that stat.

DAN:

I love that stat too,

ELISE:

And that really, maybe gay men are taking more of a bath in testosterone. It’s actually more uber masculine, which I thought was Is that accurate?

DAN:

Yes and no. And yes, there are hyper-masculine gay men out there, and there is something hyper, hyper hypersexual about a lot of gay male sexual subcultures and communities, hashtag not all gay men, but

ELISE:

I think we can caveat our whole conversation with hashtag not all people.

DAN:

Yes,

ELISE:

We’ll just do that.

DAN:

But for a gay man, a moderately attractive gay man with decent social skills and a phone that’s hooked up to the internet can rack up 5,000 sexual partners in a year if he wants to take that risk. Right. And I do think there’s risks

ELISE:

For

DAN:

A straight man to do that. You’ve got to be wilt Chamberlain for a straight man to do that. You’ve got to be a billionaire for a straight man to do that, you have to be a professional athlete, very high status straight man. And that’s because I’ve said this to gay men because it is possible to have too much sex. It is possible for sex to become the rocks you’re dashing yourself against in a way you’re punishing yourself or destroying yourself. The more people you have sex with, the more opportunities you have to contract with sexually transmitted infection. The more times you pull the lever on that slot machine, likely you may wind finding yourself in a room with Jeffrey Dahmer, which is what happened to a friend of mine. So there are consequences, but for straight men, the control on straight men spinning out of control sexually and having 5,000 sexual partners is women. It’s external for gay men. We have to find that control within inside ourselves

ELISE:

Because

DAN:

Sex is endlessly available to us because, not because we’re gay men, but because we’re gay men. Again, straight men would do everything that we do if they could, but they can’t because women won’t. A gay bathhouse is a whorehouse staffed by volunteers, and there is no parallel in straight land, and there may never be. It’s not like if everything was safe and everyone was wonderful and we solved rape culture and sexual violence and exploitation, that women would go to bathhouses because there’s still those biological realities of being in the female body that make sex different and potentially more consequential and has a higher opportunity cost opportunity, cost for sex with men are very low.

You can have an orgasm, you can walk away. The opportunity cost if you’re allowing someone to have an orgasm in you, if you are a female, the stakes are higher, and so it’s going to, you’re not going to be as impulsive as men are. And you see this play out. And Andrew Sullivan writes about this. Very interestingly, the difference between gay male culture, gay male sex cultures, subcultures, gay male communities and lesbian communities. If you’re in a bully lesbian community and there’s no threat of male sexual violence, if you’re in the lesbian campground, you don’t see lesbians having sex with 30 partners in a weekend. Why? It is not because they’re struggling with internalized homophobia. They’re out dykes. It’s not because they’re invested in the patriarchy or how they’re perceived by males, there are no men. There is something sort of essential and an essential difference between the male experience of sex and sexuality and the female experience of it. And we see it play out most starkly in the differences between gay men and lesbian women.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it’s so fascinating. I’ve heard you talk too about, I think, was it a Danish study? It was a Scandinavian country when they look at the survival of marriages long-term, you know what I’m referencing, but that also I was shocked to hear that. Is it lesbians and straight couples fear the worst and that gay couples when they commit generally outlast?

DAN:

Yeah. We have the data now in on 25 years of marriage equality in countries like Holland and Denmark and gay male couples are the least likely to divorce. Straight couples are more likely, and lesbian couples are the most likely to divorce. Gay male couples are the least likely to be monogamous. Straight couples are more likely to be monogamous. Lesbian couples are the most likely to be monogamous. So more data needed, more research needed. But we can say now that monogamy correlates with relationship instability, non-monogamy correlates with relationship stability.

ELISE:

So fascinating because of course

DAN:

The assumption is the opposite.

ELISE:

The perception is certainly the opposite. And as a boring, monogamous, straight monogamist, I am like, oh, that sounds like so much drama. My interest in all of it and opening up to anything is like, oh, I don’t have the energy for any of that. Which yeah, I think I’m in a low drama marriage in general, which suits both of us.

DAN:

I’m very pro monogamy. I’m in an open relationship that gradually became poly. I have a boyfriend, my husband has a boyfriend. We’re essentially lesbians. We’re long-term relationship types. My husband’s been with his boyfriend for eight years, and I’ve been with mine for 13 years and I’ve been with my husband for 30 years. We are U-Haul people, I guess.

ELISE:

Is that the Andrew Sullivan? That’s the joke, right about

DAN:

Yeah. Lesbians and U-Haul.

ELISE:

Yeah, lesbians and

DAN:

U-Haul. Yeah. But so I don’t think poly is a sexual orientation or I reject that. I think there’s gay, straight, bi and asexual. There’s sexual orientations who people are, and then there’s what people do. And monogamy is something that people can do. It’s something most people do. There are benefits to monogamy around for many people, emotional security, sexual safety, paternal security, that outweigh what you give up when you’re in a monogamous relationship, which is sexual variety, new experiences, sex and desire can’t be contained in the box. That is marriage and monogamy. I’ve said this for so long, I think it’s finally sunk in, but if you make a monogamous commitment, it’s not that you don’t want to fuck other people, it’s that you don’t fuck other people, but you’re still going to want to fuck other people and your partner’s still going to want to fuck other people.

And so you should not allow for them to fuck other people or allow for them to be inconsiderate about rubbing your nose and the fact that they think the bartender is hot. They should be considerate of your feelings at all times. But if you notice your partner noticing somebody because they think they’re hot and you blow up about that because they’re only supposed to have eyes for you, you are destabilizing your monogamous relationship because that’s just hardwired. And so I think monogamy works and can be stabilizing if the understanding isn’t we’re in love and therefore we don’t want to have sex with other people. But we’ve made this commitment to not have sex with other people. It’s one of the ways we show our love for each other, but that desire for others still exists, and then that becomes a sacrifice that you’re making for each other. Then it becomes a goat. You’re slitting open on the altar of your relationship. Take the win, take the sacrifice, take the compliment in that your partner wants you in this relationship so much that they’re willing to forego sexual adventure, excitement, variety, newness for 60 years, all power to you.

ELISE:

A lot of you could say non-monogamy in relationships that are supposed to be monogamous, right? I don’t know what those rates are. You might have an idea.

DAN:

A lot of cheating,

ELISE:

A lot of cheating, right? Recovery from that. But most people, I don’t know what the stats are on people who make it all the way to the death’s doorstep in a fully intact monogamous relationship where there hasn’t been any. I

DAN:

Don’t know. I’ll never have that stat because

ELISE:

Sadly, people

DAN:

Don’t tell the truth.

And why would they? What I say to people, and I don’t say this to destabilize monogamous relationships, I say this to stabilize monogamous relationships. I want monogamous relationships to succeed. Most of my straight friends and family are in monogamous relationships and I’m rooting for them. But I say to them, if you’re with somebody for 60 years and they cheated on you twice, they were really, really good at monogamy. The culture tells you that if you’re with somebody for 60 years and on their deathbed, you find out because you’re going through letters or whatever, that they had an affair 30 years ago, what you’re told is they didn’t love you. Your relationship was a lie, and that you’ve been betrayed and in this unforgivable way. And I think that destroys people. If we say to people that cheating is unforgivable, and then we define absolutely everything as cheating, not just touching somebody else with your genitals and having a physical affair, but having a work spouse or liking somebody’s Instagram hot pictures or having an emotional affair or sending a birthday text to your ex from 20 years ago. All of these things are infidelities now, micro cheating. But if we tell people cheating is unforgivable, define everything is cheating, then we’re going to destroy a lot of relationships. And what we should tell people is people are human. People fall down, people screw up. And that a monogamous commitment is a goal.

And yeah, I get in the weeds about this. It can be very disorienting sometimes for me to talk to people because when I say somebody cheated on you once or twice, they were good at monogamy, somebody will come back at, why would you destroy a relationship for something so trivial as sex? Why risk the relationship for something so unimportant as sex? And then I turn that around on them and say, why end a relationship over then something so trivial as sex? Your partner screwed up. They feel bad they had sex with somebody else. Hopefully they didn’t tell you about it if it was a one-off. And you’re never going to know. They let you live 40 more years without the burden of knowing as Esther Perel calls it in her book. But if it only happened once and they monogamous back, they got monogamous again, and they straightened up and flew right for 40 more years, you should be able to forgive that. And my wanting to have a case by case judgment about these things. Some people regard it as controversial. Fuck your sister on your wedding night unforgivable. No way. The relationship survives, right?

30 years into a marriage and sex is not at the heart of it anymore. Maybe sex has fallen off. Maybe the relationship has become loving and supportive and intimate, but a little bit more sibling, then romantic sexual partnery and your partner slept with her personal trainer when you were out of town just one time, or your husband got a happy ending massage on a business trip. I think those things to save the marriage should be something that you can forgive and saying they need to be forgiven, recognizes them as infractions. It’s not nothing. It’s not you don’t get a free pass. It was a wrong committed, but I think the default setting should be there. If we want our monogamous relationships to survive, they need to be able to survive the almost inevitable infidelity that will touch them.

ELISE:

And you’re not speaking in a way that’s different from Esther Perel and Terry Real. And you think about every developmental psychology model, right? Rupture will happen, and it’s really the repair that’s the most important part. And so I think if you go into it, I remember interviewing El baton years ago, probably 10 years ago, and I said something about I was relatively newly married in the first five years, and I was like, I cannot imagine an infidelity happening and I don’t think I could get over it. And he cautioned me. I should go back and listen to the tape, but he was like, be careful. Hold your role. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. And I wouldn’t prejudge any relat

DAN:

Or lock in, wear the self-fulfilling prophecy. I owe it to the person I was at 25 now that I’m 50, to not be able to forgive this because at 25 I swore I would not be able to forgive this.

ELISE:

He was like, hold it with more flexibility. It’s a little do not be so rigid about and so certain about what’s going to happen and how you will respond. And I really took it to heart. It was not what I expected, but I think it’s the repair. How well do we recover and make each other whole recognizing perfection is probably not possible, right?

DAN:

We are accepting the framing here that it’s always a problem for some people. 25 years into a marriage, they’re kind of done with sex, at least with their partner, and then they find out their partner’s like getting it elsewhere and they don’t object. They don’t say anything. They’re technically being betrayed, but they’re relieved

And they don’t want have an official open relationship because they don’t want to bring it in out of the cold. They don’t want their partner to get indiscreet. Sometimes one person thinking they’re having an affair and getting away with it causes them to be so discreet that it’s a kind of consideration for their partner’s feelings that their partner who knows they’re being cheated on but isn’t calling them out on it, appreciates. I came up with the word polyamory recently. Another one of my acquaintances that polyamory many loves polyamory is from Tula, which is the Latin for likes to put up with

ELISE:

To

DAN:

Your

ELISE:

Yeah, tolerating it.

DAN:

Yeah, you’re tolerating your lovers’ bullshit. There’s a lot of people out there who are Tali, the kind of unarticulated D-A-D-T-I don’t want to know. And what happens, and I actually think that the majority of open relationships are kind of polyamorous relationships.

ELISE:

So interesting.

DAN:

Somebody is doing

ELISE:

Something terrifying for people to hear, but probably quite accurate.

DAN:

But what do we want? I mean, what do we want? What’s more important? This is the stuff that breaks my brain sometimes. I’m the one who’s accused of putting too much emphasis on sex. I think sexual fulfillment is important. I think meeting each other’s sexual needs is really important, especially in a sexually exclusive relationship. I don’t think you can just tell your partner to rip their kinks out of their erratic imagination, inconvenient or awkward, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or you can tell your partner not to look at other people or masturbate sometimes about other people. Sex matters to human fulfillment. And sex came before human culture. Sex came before humans, 500 billion years old, sex built. It’s building whatever comes after us, natural selection, spontaneous mutation. We act like we’re in charge of sex. We should tell kids instead of when they’re little, you’re going to grow up one day and have sex. You’re going to grow up one day and sex is going to have you. And sex can be very chaotic and dangerous and it can kill you. So how are you going to be had by it? You have to

Figure out how you can be had by it in a controlled way where you’re giving sex, what sex needs, giving your sexual imagination and a erotic in your life what it needs, but in a way that doesn’t harm you or your partners or these other things you want in your life like commitment and family. But I’m told I put too much emphasis on sex. But when I look at a marriage, 30 years, I’ve been with my husband for 30 years. We have grown children, two extended families knit together, but maybe we’re not a good example because we’re open in Bali. Let’s take an imaginary, monogamous, straight marriage man and a woman, kids together, 25 years kids in college now, two extended families knit together. They have this shared family history. They have this family home that the kids still come back to. They have this lifetime of intimacy and they’re known so well by each other. And I look at that and I think all of that matters and is important. Other people look at that and think that’s important, but if he had sex with somebody else, they got to get a divorce. They have to throw all the rest of that away. And I’m the one who told that I put too much importance on sex. How is that not putting

An existential importance on sex? Sex is so important that it negates everything else a marriage is about. Everything else that a marriage is about should be discarded because somebody had sex with somebody else once. I think that’s crazy. And the cultural shit that Hillary Clinton came in for when she didn’t leave Bill Clinton because of the affairs he had that were exposed, I think is so instructive of this attitude that we want cheaters punished, we want cheaters left, even if it harms the person who is cheated on, even if it harms the children in that family, even if it harms the extended family, even if it harms the culture and the society. And I look at that and I think that’s crazy. That’s not a culture that values marriage. That’s a culture whose idea of marriage is to control human sexuality as if it could.

ELISE:

Yeah. Isn’t it wild thinking about that? I mean, it’s fear clearly, but the way that we would like to control other people’s relationship, sexual expression, all of it. What is that baseline fear? Do you know what that is? Actually,

DAN:

I think it’s transference and projection because sex is scary. And so we want to control it by controlling other people and how they have sex because we know that our own desires weren’t chosen, our own sexual fantasies, interests, attractions, those were imposed on us. And sex is big and scary. I gave a talk once at a college and this young woman stood up and said she was junior, 21 years old and still hadn’t had sex, and she was afraid. She was just so afraid of having sex and how could she learn not to be afraid of sex so that she could have it? And I looked right at her and I said, sex is scary, and you should be afraid.

Bungee jumping is scary and you should be afraid. You make sure that the belt is attached. You watch somebody else do it first, but then you jump because you want the thrill, the experience. You want to feel alive, but it’s dangerous. It is scary. And we have to approach sex with some fear and trembling. And I think a lot of people take their fear of sex, which I kind of feel is hardwired into the human condition and human experience because we become consciously aware of sex and sexuality and how chaotic a force it can be in the lives of adults while we are still children, before we hit puberty. We are aware of the circus and the dangers and the craziness and chaos of sex. And there’s something about that 8-year-old who’s been told where babies come from, who knows it, who’s watching their older siblings make fools of themselves or their parents, one having an affair.

And there’s something. But you hear about sex when you’re five six, and you’re like, Ew, gross. Adults are disgusting. I’m never going to do that. And then along comes puberty, and it’s like you’re dragged away by your ankles and your sexual orientation wasn’t a choice. Your kinks weren’t a choice. Nothing was a choice. Your basic set desires weren’t a choice. It was just all imposed and revealed. And there’s, I think this sense of violation deep in our human experience about sexuality because it takes such a long time for human beings to become sexually mature compared to other mammals and primates. And there’s just this long period of disgust and dread before it happens to us. And then we carry that disgust and dread into our adult lives. We know we can’t control what our sexuality is. We can control how we act on it. We can control the choices that we make. We can make sure that they’re ethical. We should be held responsible and accountable for the choices that we make, but we’re not in control of our sexuality. And there’s some part of us that compensates for that emotionally by controlling other people’s sexuality

Or seeking.

ELISE:

Well, and you’ve mentioned the word control several times now. It is. There’s a loss of control that’s inherent in every sexual act, and I don’t know, many of us are not comfortable with that bargain. I like to have control and I don’t want to give anyone For a long time, it took me and it goes to early sexual trauma. I don’t want to give anyone any control over me, and that creates its own complex dynamics. But that really is this fear of loss of control is then you see reflected in the culture.

DAN:

You have this tremendously negative association between the giving up of control and being violated. And that’s a tragedy because part of the joy of sex can be ceding control and letting go of self and the performance of self and the policing of self and the policing of your own safety. And that’s robbed from so many people, particularly women that is taken from women, and that is tragic.

ELISE:

Yeah. I know you like naming things. I think about this cultural moment that we have where the language is so complicated and intense, and for people who do not understand the language, it can be intimidating or they can be,

DAN:

Oh my God, yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s very dangerous to misstep in this culture. It has been historically in the last

DAN:

Five, five years, can I just say we’ve seen support for LGBT rights decline at the same time that being supportive of LGBT rights meant there’s going to be a pop quiz every day and a new vocabulary test every day, and if you fail it, you’re going to get dog piled. I think those things are

ELISE:

Related. I agree.

DAN:

Used to be get over your homophobia. You could have some gay friends and hang out at the gay club. And now it’s like you have to know the difference between ace and aloe and trans medical trans and I can’t pass these quizzes and this is the space I live in 24 hours a day.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I agree. I think when we make people bad and there’s an inherent response of then polarization and a projection that comes from that. And I think the language policing, just watching it and in Montana where people are like, I cannot keep up with this conversation. I don’t even know a gay person much less a trans person, and it’s not my intent to offend, and yet I’m wrong. Meanwhile, I’m like, it’s our language that fails. And if the language is inadequate, then just who cares? And I say these things and I get in trouble, but I’m like, I get misgendered all the time for what it’s worth. And I’m not going to make someone wrong, some guy wrong who sees my height and my short hair and calls me a man, and he’s not trying to offend me. I don’t need to ruin his day.

DAN:

I’m all for being chill, and I think people should be chill. My husband and I adopted almost 30 years ago. There were gay men who were parents out there, but they were gay men who’d had children while they were in straight marriages and then divorced, and their children were older. We would be out with our infant and people would look right at me with the baby and look at our baby and say, Hey, where’s your mom? And I was never offended by that because it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption because most kids don’t have two dads, especially 30 years ago.

ELISE:

Right.

DAN:

And so I was never offended by that assumption, and ours was an open adoption here I’m talking a lot. Ours was an open adoption, and so mom was a presence in his life and mom existed and we honor his mother and we would talk about his mom, but as a gay man, it’s not quite misgendering, I don’t know what to call it. People would make assumptions about my sexual orientation and how my family came to be that were incorrect and hetero, I don’t want to call it heterosexist, it’s too strong a word, just like hetero default setting, but it was a reasonable assumption and I never blew up at people. And now it feels like so many people there are just waiting to blow up at people for making reasonable assumptions that are going to be correct 90% plus of the time, and you can’t blow up at people for making reasonable assumptions. If you correct their mis assumption about you and they double down and they’re an asshole, then you can blow up then they’re being a jerk.

ELISE:

Yes. Yeah, it’s an intentional assault. It’s interesting, and again, I don’t want to misstep or hurt anyone’s feelings, but I also feel like we live in this culture where identity factors have become the most interesting things about us, or it’s the way to say, I am not them. I am this other very complicated identity, and I know that those identities, I recognize those identities are hard fought for and closely held. And then also I’m like, how is that the most interesting thing about where are we in the culture? Why is this so important? Can you help me?

DAN:

No, I can’t because I don’t know either. The Cambrian explosion and niche, sexual orientations, gender identities, neo pronouns, I find it all. I find it all odd. It also doesn’t impact my life too tremendously. I don’t have a lot of people in my life whose pronouns are kitty, kitten, cat or whatever, the neo pronouns, the expectation that everyone should have a spreadsheet in their head where they’re slotting and remembering and memora. I can barely remember people’s names and faces. If I have to remember a unique set of pronouns for everybody I’ve ever met, that obviously isn’t going to work. And it just feels like there are people out there who want special attention, and we fall for it when we’re like, oh my God, all these people who want special attention, and I just don’t give it to them.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it’s this instinct, I guess too, which is that we want the world to conform to our preferences for how we want to be received and seen, and there’s a certain degree of that that’s reasonable, of course. But yet, it’s a general view that I think we all have across political parties, and this isn’t about any specific, it’s I want to set the thermostat according to my preferences, and that is a reasonable expectation.

DAN:

I think where it gets explosive and toxic is when people, again, I said this second ago, but when people want to make the reasonable assumption, a violation or an assault

ELISE:

And

DAN:

Want people to walk around not making reasonable assumptions, I think of my friends who are bi, but in opposite sex relationships. Most of my friends who are bi and in opposite sex relationships understand that they will be perceived to be straight, and that is a reasonable assumption that people will make about them because most people in opposite sex relationships are, and the onus is on them. If people make that assumption to correct

ELISE:

That assumption, if they care to, I also am like, why We care so much about people’s, they

DAN:

Don’t even have to,

ELISE:

Right? Right. Yeah.

DAN:

But it can come up. You’re bi, but in an opposite sex relationship, and somebody says, just between you and me, all of us straight people here, you can clear your throat and say, well, I’m bi. I wound up with a wife, but I’m bi. You want to be seen, but you haven’t been wronged. And what the internet seemed to gas up and put in front of all of our faces and elevate were the people having meltdowns about how wronged they were when somebody made the perfectly reasonable assumption.

I see these people who are asexual, 99% of people are allosexual, are not asexual, are sexual. So people are going to make that assumption about everybody, that everybody’s sexual. 97% of men are straight. People are going to make the assumption that when they meet me, unless I’m signaling in some way that I’m gay, then I’m straight. I haven’t been wronged. When people make what is probably going to be an accurate assumption, in almost all cases, what we want culturally is a space for people to identify themselves and then not be penalized or not be stigmatized because they aren’t the default thing. They don’t line up with the assumptions we generally tend to make. We could get everybody who freaks out about it to calm down. If you could just get them to admit that they make those assumptions too

ELISE:

All

DAN:

The time. The person who’s like, I’m so wrong because you thought I was straight and I’m bi, and you shouldn’t assume people are straight just in opposite sex relationships, even though that’s going to be correct 99.99% of the time and have a meltdown about it. And it’s that same person will turn around and assume the guy with the infant in the baby backpack standing there in the line at the grocery store that his wife is coming

ELISE:

With

DAN:

The grocery cart when it’s actually my Twinkie husband.

ELISE:

No. And I think about what’s happening in our culture, and I think about kids too, and in terms of what we profess to want, which is a more inclusive, loving, collaborative world where people are free to do what they want so long as they’re not harming anyone theoretically, although it’s human to hurt and to get hurt. But I think about the neuroticism that we’re fostering amongst kids where if I were that age, I would, and again, I wrote a whole book about women being programmed for goodness and fearful of being labeled as bad or toxic or mean or any of these other adjectives. But I think the instinct for many of us is to retract and withdraw for fear of getting in trouble, saying the wrong thing and offending someone even if it absolutely wasn’t our intent. But we never assume the best. It’s always we assume the worst typically, or that’s been what’s happening.

DAN:

Yeah, I’ve talked about that with my friends where the assumption of malice, you have to look, this person made an assumption it was reasonable. Your reaction, you are assuming malice on their

Part, and you can’t assume malice until malice is proved. Social media elevates the people who are having the biggest fucking meltdowns and freakouts and being the biggest dicks, my non-binary friends who get he himmed or she heard who are then like, well, no, they don’t have meltdowns, but the ones who do jump on TikTok and they jump on Twitter and they jump on blue sky and then they get passed around, and it’s a reality distortion field that distorts our perceptions of gender and sexual minorities being hypersensitive, especially if we’ve seen a few people get canceled are really in trouble for it when most of us are taking in stride.

ELISE:

Yeah, I take it in stride.

DAN:

You got to take it in stride. We live in a world where most people aren’t queer and aren’t gender diverse really, and most people aren’t gay and most people aren’t asexual. We want the world to be safe for people who aren’t normative in whatever categories they might fall into. And not to be stigmatized, penalized, pathologized, but we’re still an assumption making species. We make a billion assumptions every day to get through the day. And a classify

ELISE:

Species

DAN:

You, and we have to, and you’re not being wrong. If we could just get that across to the TiVo brigades, you’re not being wronged. And actually you get to be interesting. You made this assumption about me being straight, I have this baby, and here’s my husband. Suddenly I’m more interesting. Isn’t that fun to get to be more interesting than the default assumption?

ELISE:

I mean, it raises a question though, and I don’t know how I would feel if I were 14 in this culture that the only way to be protected in some weird way is to choose. I know it makes you a target. And yet within progressive circles where we tend to assassinate each other and or find the malice to quote you, is the most protective thing is to choose an identity that makes you not white, cis, heteronormative, et cetera, right? Or do you think that that’s not, oh

DAN:

My God, there’s just so many things going on there.

ELISE:

Yeah,

DAN:

I see a lot of young people. The kind of non-binary I see often and I really actually respect is somebody who’s just kind of a conscientious objector to gendered norms and expectations. Who says here

ELISE:

Into that too? So boring, gender’s boring,

DAN:

And yet most of us have traits that align with our gender identities. Most of us have traits that don’t align with gendered expectations or sex roles. So we’re all kind of non-binary, I guess, but the very loose definition of non-binary, which means it’s meaningless. But there’s some people I know who say they’re non-binary just because they don’t want anything to do with sex expectations, sex roles, I’m fine with that. Not puberty is terrifying, especially in the ways in which young girls suddenly start attracting unwanted attention. And I’m a hundred percent in favor of the ways in which some of the young, I have watched a lot of my friends’ daughters grow up who are now in their twenties and thirties, but I watched them go through the tweens and teens, and a lot of them have identified as non-binary or asexual when they were 12 and 13 and 14 because they could opt out of dating of the pressure of the competition, of the jockeying for status about who has a boyfriend and also deflect unwanted male attention by saying they were asexual and it was a refuge. And I’m a hundred percent down if some parts of queer identities are temporary refuges for people who aren’t ready for the sexual marketplace or the sexual marketplace is coming at them, which friends whose daughters were 12 and approached on buses and hit on the way to school and terrified by it. And if this is a safe harbor for a lot of young people during puberty, I’m fine with it and pro it, but it is, you do see people making these choices for reasons that may have something other than

ELISE:

To

DAN:

Do something other to do with than just this is absolutely who they are. All the girls that in my little world who identified as non-binary and asexual when they were 14 are now young straight women, fine thing to be fine thing to be asexual and non-binary at 14 and a fine thing to be a young straight woman at 24.

ELISE:

And as you’re just thinking about coming of age, just how confusing it is and to have this as the conversation would be extra confusing. I would imagine as someone who is a total tomboy, I’m sure I would’ve had moments where I’d be like, am I a boy? I don’t know. I don’t know. Don’t.

DAN:

This is the thing about the non-binary discourse that actually annoys the fuck out of me because when I was a boy, I liked musicals, I liked baking, I didn’t like sports. And what I was told by boys was I was not a boy,

And that was painful. I would be called a girl as an insult. And I don’t think there’s anything insulting about being a woman, a girl, and I had to insist on my being a boy and just a more complicated different kind of boy, but still a boy. And so now when I hear people say, well, here’s this boy, and he likes musicals and he likes sparkly dresses. I was a drag queen for a long time, and he likes to bake. Well, maybe he’s not a boy, maybe he’s, maybe he’s trans. He’s a girl. That sort of triggers a kind of not trauma response, but a little PTSD from my own childhood. Not that I think I would’ve ended up being transitioned if I were growing up now, but just I felt very negated and disqualified, and I had to fight to be the boy than I am and a different kind of boy than I am. And the people who were trying to take it from me when I was 10 were straight people. And now I see queer people trying to take boyhood from boys who are not gender conforming boys. And for me, that feels like a betrayal

ELISE:

Again. Yeah, we get ourselves into our own. We keep painting ourselves into corners in some ways.

DAN:

There are some effeminate little boys out there who are trans women who are going to transition,

ELISE:

And

DAN:

We need to allow for the child to learn and grow and figure themselves out and not impose. And there’s the majority of ate little boys out there are going to be gay men when they grow up, and not all of them are going to be effeminate gay men when they grow up. And not all gay men were effeminate when they were boys. It’s just so complicated, and I just feel like we just should let kids grow up

ELISE:

And

DAN:

Not impose or rush. And I guess that makes me a conservative monster now.

ELISE:

I know. Well, but yes, I agree. I think it just requires a fair amount of space.

DAN:

I wrote in one of my books that my son came out to me as gay twice and first time when he was like four. And it’s just because he thought he wanted to be his dad’s, right? And he thought being gay meant you lived with your best friend, which to him sounded great when he was four. And our response was to, we made a list of all the couples we knew, and it was like 40 straight couples and eight gay couples. And we’re like, okay, look at, this is the odds. Most people are straight when they grow up. You might be most likely straight when you grow up, but you could be gay, which would be great, which would be fine, not great, fine, but odds are, so we kind of said, no, you’re not. When he was four, and then when he was 10 or 11 right before puberty, he said he was gay because girls were gross. And we were like, huh, thinking girls are gross

ELISE:

When

DAN:

You’re 10 is not a sign of homosexuality and adulthood. We loved girls when we were 10, we didn’t want anything to do with the boys. So twice my son told me he was gay, and I told my son, you’re probably

ELISE:

Not gay

DAN:

Once, probably not the other time. Definitely not. We laughed about it. And so I didn’t affirm him. My son came out as gay, and I did not affirm him. I questioned it and I made him think about it, and then I let him figure it out. I didn’t say, you’re absolutely not, and you’re not allowed to be gay, and I’ll throw you out of the house if you’re gay. I didn’t threaten him like some homophobic parents do to their kids who are gay, obviously, and they’re terrorizing them. So we didn’t try to control where it was going, but we were not affirming. And so I hear sometimes people say if a kid thinks they’re trans or is exploring their gender, that it’s transphobic for the parent not to immediately affirm and reinforce that. And I think I’m not a homophobic, I did not affirm and reinforce my son’s gay identity. I let him grow up and figure it out.

ELISE:

Yeah. I had this, I have two sons. My oldest is 12, and he hasn’t gone through puberty yet. And just the other day I was like, do you have a crush on anyone? And he was like, no, I don’t think so. And he essentially said, I know you want me to be gay mom. I don’t know if I’m gay. And I was like, oh, I don’t mean to be, I don’t care. Honestly, you do you and whatever it is is great. But I was like, oh, what am I putting on him?

DAN:

If you do hope he is gay and he is grown up, I can cure that. Just Google dark Lands and Antwerp and watch the videos that pop up, and you’ll be really psyched if your son is not gay. He’s

ELISE:

Not gay. Yeah. But it was interesting that that was his interpretation, that I was just jonesing for him to be gay.

DAN:

Are you jonesing for him to be gay?

ELISE:

Am I? No, I mean, I think I carry in my mind all the stereotypes about I don’t have a daughter. And I’m like, oh, I hope I can stay in close relationship with my sons. And it might be easier if they were gay, but that’s clearly not factual. I don’t know. I was trying to understand where that might be coming from.

DAN:

Do you think it might be rooted partly in your traumatic early experiences? Many

ELISE:

Possible. And I think my brother who’s gay and in a long-term committed relationship, but he was in a 20 year what ultimately became a marriage. And then my brother-in-law died tragically in his sleep when he was in his late thirties. But that for me was the model relationship from, I met Peter, my brother’s husband when I was 15, and he was my brother and my best friend, and they had the best relationship of anyone I’ve ever seen. So to your point, I have no idea about the status of their monogamy, but they were the best couple.

DAN:

Well, hopefully if you Google Darklands and Antwerp, you won’t find a video of your brother.

ELISE:

No, I hope not. But now I’m curious. Just kidding. Okay. I know I need to let you up, but before you leave me, I want to know, speaking of vernacular, Kiki was like, there’s hetero pessimism, hetero antagonism, hetero fatalism. She was like, the discourse about relationships is so depressing, negative, pessimistic right now. What’s your take?

DAN:

It’s hard to unpack, and it’s really dark. Women were property for all of recorded human history until about five minutes ago. The romantic, sexual marital field, the dating field was tilted so dramatically in the favor of men for so long. And most men weren’t even aware that that field was tilted. A woman didn’t exist socially, economically, politically, if they didn’t have a husband, couldn’t get a credit card, couldn’t sign a lease, couldn’t start a business. A woman didn’t exist without a man. So all women, eventually life was a game of musical chairs for women where every woman had to finally sit the fuck down on some dude. And that benefited a lot of shitty men, and a lot of women wound up in relationships, a lot of shitty men who made them miserable. Now, women can sign leases and have credit cards and have jobs and have their own careers, and they don’t have to settle for a shitty man.

And there’s a lot of shitty men out there who are really angry because the field is not tilted in their favor anymore. And the choice we seem to be hurtling towards or what the right is trying to manufacture, they’re talking about taking the right to vote away from women. They’re talking about undoing no fault divorce, which would require women to stay married to abusive men, forcing women to carry rapist babies to term banning abortion, restricting birth control. And all of that together is, I call it the GOP agenda for American women. Husbands, you can’t leave pregnancies, you can’t prevent, and politicians, you can’t vote out of office. It is an attempt to dial the clock back to before women became legally equal to men and tilt the playing field in favor of all of these shitty men. So I think hetero pessimism, I think a lot of male anger on the right about feminism is about the inability to recognize how things have changed, that a romantic partner has to be earned. And you have to be an attractive potential mate because a woman given a choice between settling for a MAGA hat, wearing Trump voter who’s misogynistic and horrifying and horrible, or no one at all is going to pick no one at all.

And what’s the reaction of the men? We’re seeing the reaction from men, this Christian pastor, that Pete Heworth just retweeted his interview where he’s calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. That women are these things that other human beings come out of, and that’s all women are supposed to be. When you consider how brief a period of time we’ve lived, my mother couldn’t get a credit card. I remember when my mother couldn’t get a credit card in my living memory, my mother couldn’t get a credit card without my dad signing for it. How briefly this period of emancipated women is what a short period of time we’ve lived in a world in the West. Women are emancipated what’s going to be easier for men to get better and learn how to compete on a non tilted playing field, or for men to forcibly roll back the clock. And what we’re seeing is a rolling back of the clock, and I understand why women aren’t filled with hetero pessimism. I would be hetero pessimistic too. You see men drifting further and further to the right, women moving further and further to the left.

ELISE:

How

DAN:

Do you make a marriage out of that?

ELISE:

No, totally. And I’ve heard you say, and you mentioned that being a compelling candidate for a partnership, right? And what we also see is men or boys interpreting that as about a set of physical attributes. Again, this idea of being powerful and dominant as in sort of the proto masculine when I’ve heard you talk about actually it’s about your attractiveness socially. Are you good at social relationships? Are you interesting and compelling person to be around? I think that’s what we’re orienting towards. And yet that’s falling farther and farther away.

DAN:

What is my life going to look like with you?

ELISE:

Is

DAN:

A life with you a more attractive prospect than a life on my own? And then what happens as more and more women choose a life on their own to these surplus men who are then easily radicalized?

ELISE:

And

DAN:

Then politically what happens? Well, we’re kind of seeing it, right? We’re seeing it right now. They’re purging women from the US military. He is purging women from the US military, from positions of authority. I’m more hetero pessimistic than most heterosexual women I know. I’m actually, I keep observing everything going on, and I’m terrified for where we are 25 years from now

Or what we may have returned to or been dragged back toward. So I get hetero pessimism and women giving up on men and women who don’t want to date. And ladies, golden girls that live with your four best friends in a nice house and hire a hot beta cook. Boy, Gardner that you guys pass around in Gayland, we have these people we call pass around party bottoms, get a pass around, party top, get some guy you can share with your girlfriends. It’s going to feel like you won the lottery. Go do Polly. If there’s not enough good men for everybody to have one, find one that you and your friends can share. They’re out there.

ELISE:

And then the interim, those of us who have sons who turn out to be straight, may we raise them to be socially desirable and kind people who would be fun partners, right?

DAN:

Yeah. I mean, it’s such a hard thing to balance. They have to be socially desirable, kind, be able to take care of themselves.

But what people who are attracted to men, if they’re honest with each other about what they find attractive about men is people do like men with an edge, men who are a little dangerous, a little mysterious. And one of the skills that men need to develop to market themselves sexually, romantically, is cultivating that edge without it becoming a black toxic mold that spreads all over their personality and all over their lives without it being misogyny, without it being violence. But a man needs to be a little scary to arouse a partner. Did you watch the White Lotus?

ELISE:

Of course.

DAN:

Season two. Oh my god, I can’t remember the character’s names. The assistant to Tanya Porsche.

ELISE:

Yes.

DAN:

And she meets Alby by the pool, and Alby is like Ivy League consent culture, totally respectful. And clearly what Mike White is saying at that moment is like, she’s not getting wet in Albee’s presence. And then along comes the dangerous, mysterious, hot British guy. And it’s not like Alby wasn’t hot, Alby was fucking hot. The actor who played him was hot, but along comes the asshole and she can’t keep her hands off him. And to learn how to create a little bit of that asshole,

ELISE:

A little friction.

DAN:

Yeah. So you have that as a part of your emotional, sexual, romantic skillset without being an asshole. That’s a hard thing for a boy to do, but it’s a necessary thing.

ELISE:

I think we need the Dan Savage School for

DAN:

School for boys,

ELISE:

School for Boys. I think that’s your next chapter.

DAN:

I would be a bad headmaster.

ELISE:

So Dan Savage is, I think he’s probably one of the longest running advice columnists in the country, and if you haven’t listened to his show, the Savage Love Cast, it’s really interesting and he is super bright commentator on current culture as well as sex and relationships. But it is a much wider conversation than you might think, but it’s a very interesting lens into what’s happening in our current culture politically and otherwise. And I find it really insightful and helpful for me as someone who hasn’t thought about that, where sex and identity factors haven’t been at the center of my life. Just to understand the conversation and what’s happening. And he runs it with guests. Yes, but it’s also, there’s a lot of Dan on topics of the day and he takes callers and answers their questions. So I’ve been on his show to answer questions about abortion and also about fantasy.

We had a really interesting conversation about, he talks about how kink someone’s kink is typically an eroticized fear. I write about this a little bit, but not in such a clear and articulate way in the chapter on lust. But we talked about that in the conversation that I did on his show, and we talked about rape fantasy and how closely rape, which is etymologically related to ravage, how they’re very closely entwined in many women’s fantasy lives, in part because of that idea of an eroticized fear. But I think that that’s really helpful frame. It’s in a way his great great, and he’s certainly heard about a lot of things from a lot of people, which I think adds a lot of nuance and complexity to what he provides. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.