Transcript
A (0:00)
You're listening to the Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage's sex and relationship show for grown ups. If you're under 18, get out of here, youngin. If you're stuck in a relationship quandary, or if you're looking for sexual harmony,
B (0:18)
well, there's nothing you can't ask on the Savage Lovecast.
A (0:27)
I should have watched the Oscars this weekend. I didn't. I never watched the Oscars. Not even the prospect of Conor and Hudson walking the red carpet could get me to watch. And I should have watched that new documentary on Netflix about the toxic male influencers out there poisoning the brains of our boys Inside the Manosphere by BBC documentarian and cultural critic Louis Thoreau. And I want to watch it. And I will. And you should too, Especially if you have boys. But I didn't. Not this weekend. I couldn't because I had a busy weekend. Seeing the boyfriend again after three months recovering from jet lag, which gets harder as you age. What a drag it is getting old and throwing my boyfriend a birthday party. I had my hands full this weekend. And not just my hands. Ha ha ha. I also couldn't pay too much attention to the poly discourse online, which is raging again. The current firestorm was kicked off by the release of Lindy West's new memoir, Adult Braces, which is about her journey into polyamory, an even bigger firestorm than the absolutely enormous one kicked off by the publication less than two years ago of Molly Rodham Winter's A Memoir of an Open Marriage, which was about Winter's journey into polyamory. Rachel Krantz wrote about her journey into polyamory, An Open An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation and Non monogamy. Sophie Lucido Johnson wrote about her journey into polyamory in Many A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love Loves. And Sadie Smith wrote about her journey into polyamory and Open all the Way, confirming confessions from My Open Marriage. And I could go on. Lots of the exact same people, some of them awful but some of them sympathetic, jumped online this week to make the same point about West's memoir that they made about Winters. It wasn't her idea initially. Opening up the relationship was his idea. Natalie Davis, who's going to be a guest on the podcast soon, wrote about her journey into polyamory and saying, yes, my adventures in polyamory. And in Davis's case, opening up the relationship was his idea, just like it was in West's and Winter's. It was her husband's idea, an idea that only occurred to Davis's husband after she caught him cheating twice. It seems that a lot of journeys into polyamory, at least the ones we read about in memoirs, begin when the husband or boyfriend demands an open relationship or gets caught cheating and doesn't want to stop. Now, I haven't read all the books I just mentioned. I didn't even list all the Pauli memoirs currently out. So I don't know if all these journeys started in the exact same way. I don't know if poly was his idea in all of these cases. But there is something or something else that all of the big poly memoirs that have come out in the last decade or so have in common. All written by women, written by women who were puds, at least at first, Poly under duress, but who eventually came around and embraced polyamory. There are a lot of married people out there, married women out there in poly relationships that they love. People like West, Winter and Davis who. Who were all puds at first, now notallpuds. Not all women who reluctantly agree to an open relationship or polyamorous relationship wind up falling in love with polyamory or embracing it or even staying with the person who demanded it of them. If I had to guess, I would say there are probably more divorced former puds out there than puds who woke up one morning and thought to themselves, hey, this thing that was imposed on me that I hated at first is actually the thing I wanted all along. But puds that stay unhappy get divorces. So they aren't the ones writing memoirs about their journeys into polyamory because they didn't journey in. They journeyed the fuck out. Emma Camp, an opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal who's working on a book about Gen Z and sex. Gonna be a short book considering how little sex Gen Z is having. I look forward to reading all 20 pages of it. Camp wrote a piece headlined, polyamory isn't progressive. I don't read the Wall Street Journal, and I don't want to give Rupert my money, so I can't read the piece. But Camp summarized her thoughts in a tweet. The dust up over Lindy West's new memoir brought into public view an uncomfortable truth. Almost always when a straight couple opens their relationship, it's because the male partner is using the polyamorous label to launder his desire to cheat. Almost always that may be true, and if you're going from just the memoirs, it certainly seems to be true, at least of the memoirs that published. But it's really hard to quantify. Almost always. And I don't think, actually I know for a fact that opening up a straight relationship isn't always his idea. I get calls every week from men who are puds. I get calls every week and letters from straight women trying to figure out how to ask their straight male husbands for an open relationship. But when I looked around for a poly memoir written by a guy, when I looked for a book written by a male pud, all I found was open by Andre Agassi, which turned out to be a memoir about tennis, not polyamory. Now, the memoir, the confessional memoir, the memoir about feelings and relationships, that's a genre dominated by women. Women write memoirs, women read memoirs. But to combat the impression or correct the misimpression created by all these poly memoirs written by women, I really feel like the next poly memoir that gets published, maybe the next two or three needs to be written by a man. And then once we've balanced the scales, once we've corrected the impression that it's always his idea or even almost always his idea, which it is not, maybe we take a break from writing, reading and reviewing poly memoirs for a while. And PS I get way more calls and letters from people who could be described as monogamous under duress, but no one writes think pieces about them for the Wall Street Journal. All right, coming up on today's show, a polite, submissive woman wonders how to set boundaries with an over demanding dom or doms. And the caller wants to know what I thought of Pillion, the new DS Dom, starring Alexander Skarsgard. Well, I am going to tell you. And a man who loves kissing more than anything finds himself married to a woman who has discovered long after the wedding that she hates kissing more, more than anything. And speaking of kissing, our Magnum guest this week, evolutionary biologist Dr. Matilda Brindle returns to the show, who's here to tell us about some new research she's done into the evolution and the evolutionary purpose of kissing. Oh, and we now know, thanks to her research and others, that your great great, great, great, great great great grandmother times 10 had a thing for hairy Neanderthal dudes. And is there kink in the animal kingdom? Dr. Brindle has the answer. All that coming up on today's show. Nancy, hit me with that first call. This episode is brought to you by Field, an app where curious people come to connect. Download Field on the App Store or Google Play and find out why so many of my listeners are already using it. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, makers of the best mattresses ever. And right now my listeners get 27% off site wide when you go to helixsleep.com savage this episode is sponsored by Sundays for Dogs Dog food using the same ingredients and care you'd use when cooking for yourself and your family. And really dogs part of the family. Go to sundayfordogs.com savage50 and get 50% off your first order or just use code savage50 at checkout.
