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- [00:01]
Gia Tolentino
The official White Lotus podcast is sponsored by Abercrombie and Fitch. Hey, White Lotus fans. Dream vacations call for dream wardrobes, minus the drama. Enter Abercrombie and Fitch. The long weekend collection offers effortless, elevated style, from mila dresses that transition seamlessly from day to night to classic skirts, skorts, and crisp linen shirts. New pieces drop weekly to keep your packing fresh. Pack your bags. Your wardrobe upgrade starts with Abercrombie and Fitch. Hi, everyone, I'm Gia Tolentino, and welcome to a midweek bonus episode of the White Lotus official companion podcast to season three. So White Lotus is always about desire and transgression and identity and what's buried and what comes to the surface. And so much of it bends itself around money. But because this is the show that it is, it all is focused around human relationships and specifically a lot of it around love and sexual. That's where you see the way people hide from themselves and reveal themselves and what they say they want and what they really want and how they lie and whether they lie, et cetera, et cetera. And so we thought, why not talk to Dan Savage, the author of Savage Love and the host of the Savage Love cast? He is someone whose work I have been consuming since, I don't know, 20 years ago when I was 16 and kind of learning about what sex could be other than what had been taught to me in high school. I feel like I spent so much of college reading Savage Love columns, and I, you know, one could argue that to whatever extent we have developed a kind of healthy, open sexual culture in adulthood, we owe a lot to dance work over the last few decades. So I was really excited to talk to him. You might have already heard him on the Look Back portion of this podcast, breaking down Ethan and Daphne's relationship. And so we're excited to have him back to talk episode seven. I'm so excited to talk to Dan Savage, who I've been a fan of for a really long time. Dan is, of course, the host of the Savage Love cast, author of Savage Love. Welcome.
- [02:34]
Dan Savage
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [02:37]
Gia Tolentino
Let's talk about all the fucked up psychosexual dynamics going on in season three of the White Lotus. You talked on the Look Back podcast about how, you know, season two. It was the bedroom forest. It was, you know, this was much more about sex and romance in season one. Where do you place season three on the spectrum?
- [02:54]
Dan Savage
Oh, my God. There's a lot of frustrated desire. Mook's desire for Guy Tox to be someone else, to be someone that she could possibly desire. But of course, the psychosexual drama that everybody's obsessed with is Sax and Lachlan, the brothers. And what we just saw happen, that was really teased.
- [03:16]
Gia Tolentino
And episode one. Episode one, yeah. Talking about fully grown genitals, et cetera.
- [03:22]
Dan Savage
Yes, yes.
- [03:23]
Gia Tolentino
Well, and it's like, I mean, who is here looking for love? It's kind of Belinda. Kind of. Or who has kind of found a real ish version of it? It's kind of Belinda. Guy Talk's looking for love. Mook is looking for a sufficiently aggressive man that can then arouse her sort of romantic loyalty or something.
- [03:43]
Dan Savage
Yeah. Somebody that she's almost. It's almost like she's begging Gytok to be the kind of man. She's a little afraid.
- [03:49]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [03:50]
Dan Savage
And it's odd that she has options. Like there are the bodyguards who are clearly signaling their interest in Mook to Mook. But they're scary in a way that Gytok is safe. But she wants Gytok to have that dangerous edge that there's too much of in the bodyguards and perhaps other people that might be available to her or have already signaled their interest in her. And so she kind of wants to have her bad boy, dangerous sort of adrenaline pumping love interest, but have the safety boy too. The nice guy too. She wants both in one package. And she's begging in episode seven, guy Talk to become that man.
- [04:30]
Gia Tolentino
Right. And it's as if she knows that she can't tame the bodyguards into being sort of emotionally available and forthright. But perhaps she could get Gytok to. I mean, she has the point in that, like, he does need to get better at his job. He's actually quite a bad security guard.
- [04:44]
Dan Savage
Oh, yeah. Who didn't say, why are you leaving a gun laying around?
- [04:49]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why are you gift wrapping it for suicidal patrons?
- [04:54]
Dan Savage
But in episode seven, he does prove that he at least has it in him to, you know, go on that secret mission to retrieve the gun.
- [05:02]
Gia Tolentino
Yes. Sweating bullets the entire time. Yeah.
- [05:05]
Dan Savage
Gets the gun. Yeah. Not yet. The girl. He hasn't gotten the girl. But he did get the gun at least back.
- [05:09]
Gia Tolentino
Yes. What do you make of Rick and Chelsea's? I love them. Personally.
- [05:16]
Dan Savage
I love them too. I want to see more. Like, I almost feel like there's part of their relationship that isn't shown to us that we've had to read in or infer, which is the joyful part of their relationship. You know, Rick is going through something really intense. Right now. And it's almost like kind of forensic accounting that we can see that there was some joy in that relationship. Chelsea a couple of times says, when are we gonna start having. And so, like, we know that they enjoyed each other's company or they were having a good time at some point, but I just feel like I wished I'd seen more of the joy in their relationship because at this point, if I was Chelsea, I'd be out.
- [05:55]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah. Well, before we get to the Ratliff drama, I wanted to ask you about Frank and the monologue this shocking, perfectly.
- [06:06]
Dan Savage
Delivered that no one saw coming. Right.
- [06:10]
Gia Tolentino
And probably not Frank himself either.
- [06:13]
Dan Savage
We're suddenly in this bar in Bangkok, and there's this character we haven't met before who winds up unspooling this story that is insane. And yet some people's sexual journey really is that complicated. And there is a sort of fracturing of self in Frank's sexual experiences, sexual adventuring, where in some ways it's. It's kind of beautiful. He talks about basically all these women that he's using, but then he sees maybe some narcissistic spark of humanity in other people because he projects himself into their experience and wishes to experience what they're experiencing. And maybe there's some crawling up your own ass, redemptive arc in there, because the type that the show keeps presenting to us, the losers back home, the bald, middle aged rich guys in Thailand with the hot girlfriends, it's indicting them and their consumption of. Of the women and the people of Thailand as sex objects. But there's something in that, in what Frank talks about where you see suddenly this not quite identification with them, but this desire to fully possess, perhaps a desire to ultimately own by claiming the experience, the lived experience, even the body of one of the people that he's having sex with and then fucking himself in that body.
- [07:55]
Gia Tolentino
Right.
- [07:56]
Dan Savage
Such a funhouse mirror around identity. There's a lot of chatter in Queer Land online about what this actually means. Not whether Frank is gay, but that's certainly something that people are going, okay, well, Mike White, who, you know, understands what it is to be attracted to men, and there's this sometimes this disconnect where do I want to be with this person or do I want to be this person? And that is something that you gay men are very familiar with. Sometimes we mistake people that we're attracted to as friends for romantic attraction. We have to unlearn that or learn how to recognize the patterns. But there is often this desire to be the thing that's why people talk about twin boyfriends in gay land to just, like, you want your double, you want your doppelganger, or you want to be the thing that you desire. I listened to Mike White's interview on Andrew Sullivan's podcast where Andrew Sullivan brought up the very contested concept of autogynephilia, which is an attraction to yourself as a woman.
- [08:54]
Gia Tolentino
Right.
- [08:54]
Dan Savage
So. So what exactly is going on with Frank? Who the fuck knows?
- [08:59]
Gia Tolentino
Nobody knows.
- [09:00]
Dan Savage
A lot of queer people saw themselves in it, and a lot of people who are deeply invested in the political debate about trans issues saw AGP or autogynephilia perhaps being represented in this character's. Although this character hasn't transitioned and doesn't seem to be making any plans to transition. And of course, in episode seven reverts to form where he's no longer identifying with these women, he seems to have returned to exploiting and using these, being.
- [09:31]
Gia Tolentino
The one that wants to fuck them. Yeah. And I think, you know, it speaks too, to also, like sex being a realm in which you can be something completely other. Right. Like, you put aside all the specific dimensions of him, you know, first exploiting and then thinking that he is an Asian girl or whatever, et cetera, et cetera. It's, you know, there is something within that, where it points to. It is a zone where none of the rules have to apply per se.
- [09:56]
Dan Savage
And there is something about human sexuality that I think it's hardwired, that there's something about our capacity for abstract thought and speech that lends itself to this thing that gets, you see, funneled through sex and desire, where there's often this desire or this real aching need to be outside yourself, to transgress against your performance of self. And you see that. I think that's relatable to almost everyone because you see that in women who are feminists and want egalitarian relationships, but then in the bedroom, in a consensual way, with a partner they trust, they want to be called a slut or slapped around a little bit or held down.
- [10:37]
Gia Tolentino
Don't I know it. Dan Savage.
- [10:39]
Dan Savage
And that takes.
- [10:40]
Gia Tolentino
You want to be the opposite of what you are.
- [10:41]
Dan Savage
Yeah, you want to be the opposite. And that can go into. Really. For many people, I think most people, that goes to an easy place that's easily groked. Right. I'm a feminist, but I want my hair pulled and to be held down, in fact. But for some people, that can continue to a place that most other people's need to transgress against self or play as the opposite erotically, their erotic imagination goes to a whole other dimension where it's desire to be the opposite gender, desire to be another species, desire to be everything that you're not, or an additional thing that you're not. And someone who wants to be freed from the self, from the prison of how they're perceived and how they present that can progress to a point where the character of Frank makes sense.
- [11:34]
Gia Tolentino
Wow, Frank. I mean, all of this from two minutes of a monologue.
- [11:37]
Dan Savage
We've all been there, we've all said, so what's new to a friend? And you're, like, gotten the wind knocked out of us.
- [11:45]
Gia Tolentino
I wanted to ask you about the mommy, daddy, save mommy from daddy origins of Greg's cuck fantasy. When Chloe explains, you know, very rationally, like, oh, you know, actually it's just because he wants to, you know, he wants to take his mother back from his father, and that's why we need to fuck in front of him. And then he'll surprise us. The two choices are either that he has actually, like, unearthed from his true childhood, like a gem of originary sort of sexual experience and given to a girl that he doesn't have a. I think they have kind of a wonderfully functional relationship, but not a tremendously deep one, or he's just making this up because he wants to see his hot girlfriend fuck this hot guy.
- [12:26]
Dan Savage
Is Greg a cuck? Like, they never give Greg a cuck. Is he a cuck?
- [12:30]
Gia Tolentino
I don't think they use the word cuck, but, yeah, they don't.
- [12:32]
Dan Savage
They don't use the word cuck, but that's a kind of, you know, they were making. Putting an Oedipal spin on a cuck dynamic where it was about his mom and dad. Kinks aren't that easily sort of explained. Yeah, so many people want to, you know, look back deep into their childhoods to explain away something that turns them on in adulthood. And the explanations we come up with are often rationalizations, and we have no way of knowing. They can't. They're unfalsifiable.
- [13:02]
Gia Tolentino
Right.
- [13:03]
Dan Savage
You talk to people who are into spanking and say, why are you into spanking? And half of them tell you that they were spanked as a child, and there was something about the intimacy of the moment or something about it that just, like, crossed a wire in their erotic imagination and became eroticized. So I'm into spanking because I was spanked. And then you ask the next person at the spanking party, and there are such things, why they're into spanking. And it's because they weren't spanked.
- [13:24]
Gia Tolentino
Right.
- [13:24]
Dan Savage
And they were sort of morbidly fascinated hearing about other kids getting spanked. And it's just we're not reliable narrators.
- [13:30]
Gia Tolentino
You can retrofit any fantasy onto.
- [13:33]
Dan Savage
Yeah, yeah. We're not reliable narrators of our own sexual interest. There's something about Greg and Tanya's relationship that is recognizable to me as a gay man my age. I'm 60 years old, and I watched a lot of people partner up during the AIDS epidemic with people they thought were about to die, as Greg was about to die in episode one, or with people when they thought they were about to die, as Greg was in episode one. And then along came protease inhibitors in 1996. And all these guys who thought they were gonna die or thought their partners were gonna die were st Suddenly going to live. And it changed the calculus around the relationships they were in. There were a lot of breakups. And what Greg had, you know, Tanya funded his treatment, some experimental treatment, saved his life in the flesh of that. They married. And then Greg realized, oh, this is somebody I could stand for a year. This isn't somebody I can stand for decades. Which is what a lot of guys who got off their deathbeds in 1996, they called it Lazarus syndrome in 1996. Guys getting off their deathbeds, suddenly we're like, oh, I can I. I loved this person when I thought I was on my way out.
- [14:47]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [14:47]
Dan Savage
And I can't. And I could love this person for three months. I can't love this person for 30 more years. And that's where Greg found himself with Tanya. But there was half a billion dollars on the wall, Right.
- [14:59]
Gia Tolentino
So what else is he going to do? He's going to tip her. He's going to tip her over into that. That dark water.
- [15:04]
Dan Savage
There's that episode in season two where I think it's clear that Greg was involved in Tanya's murder. Set it all up where he gives Tanya, like, the Italian day of her dreams, gets the Vespa, the crazy outfit. And you can see on him, like, he feels conflicted about what he knows he's about to do, and he wants Tanya to have one last great day before he ends her life through the mechanism of the evil gaze.
- [15:31]
Gia Tolentino
Well, also, you know, like, all sort of profoundly devastating contexts around this society. In a lot of ways, it's so much easier to love someone when there is a time limit. It's easier to embrace them and accept them. So you basically so you think this is too neat for you? It's giving. Like, he has concocted this to get Chloe to fuck a hot guy in front of him.
- [15:55]
Dan Savage
Or does he recognize that he can have a girlfriend who looks like Chloe, but he can't have that girl all.
- [16:02]
Gia Tolentino
To himself, and he's not gonna, so he might as well own it in the form of desire.
- [16:06]
Dan Savage
Right? And hot wifing is sometimes a kink. Cuckolding is a kink. In hot wifing scenarios, it's the man sharing the possession of his wife or girlfriend with another man. And that's different from cuckolding where he's being, you know, cheated on in a consensual way, but it's humiliating that his wife is having sex with somebody else. And it's about him being disempowered in that way because he's being wronged in a hot waving scenario, which this is what could be going on with Greg. It's still about control and power because he would be giving.
- [16:37]
Gia Tolentino
He's saying, I'm allowing you. I'm picking the target. I want to watch you do it.
- [16:41]
Dan Savage
This thing that you did behind my back, you're now going to do in front of my face at my request to sort of make it all something I was in charge of to soothe his ego and to give him back the power that was taken from him when she ran off on that boat with those boys.
- [16:59]
Gia Tolentino
Speaking of. I guess let's talk.
- [17:01]
Dan Savage
Oh, God. Can we acknowledge how dexterous Lachlan is that he can jack off his brother, take off his pants?
- [17:07]
Gia Tolentino
I know there's all sorts of polyrhythms going on. Yeah.
- [17:10]
Dan Savage
Oh, my God. Syncopated rhythm. I think the bigger plot, the bigger dynamic is the sibling dynamic. The very first one of the earliest scenes with the Ratliffs is this rivalry between Piper and Saxon for the attention or the affection of Lachlan.
- [17:28]
Gia Tolentino
Right. Or the indoctrination of the indoctrination.
- [17:30]
Dan Savage
Like, who's he going to wind up being closer to at the end of this vacation? There's this competition for Lachlan between the two alpha siblings. Basically Piper, who's pushing her family around, and Saxon, who's the repository of the daddy issues in that family going back generations. And what a man means, what a man is supposed to be. Saxon is living up to that. Piper is rejecting that. Which way is Lachlan gonna go? And Victoria has her focus so on Piper that she's not even. And Piper wandering off and basically separating from the family that she's not even. She doesn't even realize that Lachlan may be on his way out too.
- [18:14]
Gia Tolentino
Mm. And, you know, one thing that I wanted for Saxon from the second he started, you know, tossing off these mantras about how people just wanna be used, people just wanna be dominated, whatever. And then the student became the teacher.
- [18:29]
Dan Savage
Right.
- [18:30]
Gia Tolentino
Like Laughlin's, like, one day, I'm gonna take you down or whatever. I wonder if you can just talk about what is going on.
- [18:36]
Dan Savage
I don't even know what to think about it yet. And the person who really took the. What really took Saxon down was being humiliated by Chloe and Chelsea.
- [18:48]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [18:49]
Dan Savage
Being rejected by Chelsea repeatedly and then being. Being informed by them what happened.
- [18:57]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [18:57]
Dan Savage
Right. And, like, humiliated in this way, broken in this way. And it's. I can't quite wrap my head around it yet. Right. I have brothers. I would sooner put my hand in a blender than put my hand on my brother's dick. On either of my brother's dicks. Like, I can't wrap my head around what Lachlan wrapped his right hand around.
- [19:22]
Gia Tolentino
Right.
- [19:23]
Dan Savage
Right. Like, what happened in that moment? What was drug induced. There's gotta be a scene where they process what happened and why it happened. Or maybe there's not gonna be a scene where they process what happened and why. Which is one of the things I love about Mike White is. Is what he doesn't do, what he doesn't give us. The three friends out getting drunk with the Russians in the bar that entire night, primed by 40 years of consuming movies and film television. I was waiting for them to be punished. I was waiting for that night to go south and someone to get hurt. And it doesn't happen. Everybody gets back to the pool. Nobody gets sexually assaulted. Nobody ODs. And we're so used to kind of this punitive, puritanical punishment of characters for doing, quote, unquote, the wrong thing. And one of the things I. And in reality, like, people get away with stuff or they're better for having gotten away with it, which was. Cameron and Dabney's relationship is presented as the fucked up relationship. And then we learn it's actually the healthier relationship.
- [20:30]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [20:31]
Dan Savage
Because there's some distance and sense of individuality. It's Harper and Will's relationship where we never lie to each other, where there's no distance, there's no mystery that is being damaged by this.
- [20:42]
Gia Tolentino
Being choked, stifled.
- [20:43]
Dan Savage
Right. So what's gonna happen with Lachlan and Saxon? You know what I want? After 40 years of watching television and Film is that confrontation. I want them to explain themselves to each other and to me. And the genius of Mike White is. I'm probably not gonna get that explanation. I'm gonna get something more satisfying than that explanation.
- [21:03]
Gia Tolentino
It occurred to me that Saxon's perpetual externalization of his mantras and his philosophy is a result of the opposite on the inside. That in fact, he takes one drug, he takes one pill, he loses the slightest amount of control, and he actually, underneath, he's pliable and he's malleable, and he's the one waiting for someone to use him, kind of. Right.
- [21:28]
Dan Savage
Because his father has used him.
- [21:30]
Gia Tolentino
Right. He has this helplessness. Like the way he even looks at Chelsea, like the way he's kind of trailing behind the girls, being like, someone help me. Someone give me direction. Someone tell me what to do. Whereas Lachlan, in his outward life, you know, he's following people around, looking for a philosophy or looking for a love that will draw him in. He loses one layer of inhibition and he's like, you know what? I'm gonna have a threesome with my brother. I'm gonna jerk him off. Whatever, man. So, you know, like, Lachlan actually has something inside him that Saxon does not. He actually has more of the instinct that Saxon has been trying to, like, inculcate in him.
- [22:03]
Dan Savage
And was Lachlan jerking off his brother? Because that's what Lachlan wanted to do, which maybe we got a hint of in the first episode when Lachlan couldn't take his eyes off his brother's body? Or was Lachlan doing what a lot of heterosexual men will do in a. Mm threesome where there's some incidental same sex contact performed for the woman to entertain, to arouse the woman 100%. And that could be what was happening at that moment. But I do think it's interesting that there's this person that Saxon is pretending to be. And what we're getting watching the show is Lachlan is the person that Saxon has been pretending to be.
- [22:44]
Gia Tolentino
Right. Cloaked in a Lachlan outside.
- [22:46]
Dan Savage
Right. That the disguise that Saxon is in is less convincing than the disguise Lachlan is.
- [22:52]
Gia Tolentino
Right, right, exactly. Well, and what you were saying about, you know, either he wanted to, or he's kind of doing this sort of straight male threesome performance. And I thought.
- [23:02]
Dan Savage
Which.
- [23:02]
Gia Tolentino
The kiss.
- [23:02]
Dan Savage
The kiss definitely was right.
- [23:04]
Gia Tolentino
Totally right. It's like it's a gag. Yeah, it's.
- [23:07]
Dan Savage
And Lachlan is the one who isn't afraid of it.
- [23:10]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [23:10]
Dan Savage
Saxon is afraid yeah.
- [23:11]
Gia Tolentino
He's like, why the fuck not? Yeah.
- [23:13]
Dan Savage
And there's that thing that sometimes Saxon acts like Lachlan's a pussy because Saxon knows he is. But if he points a finger at the kid across the room and says, look at that pussy over there, no one's gonna see Saxon for the pussy that he knows himself to be. And I used pussy there the way Saxon would use pussy. I'm not endorsing the framing of pussies this week. I think pussies are strong. Pussies chew up dicks and spit out humans. They're powerful. Right. But not in Saxon's world.
- [23:41]
Gia Tolentino
Right. So let's talk about the three ladies and Valentin I was thinking about. There's that part in season two where Ethan tells Cameron, like, it's a kind of similar thing to what's going on with Laurie and Jacquelyn. That, like, Ethan's like, whenever I wanted to hook up with someone when we were younger, Cameron would just, like, swoop in and hook up with him first. And he talks about mimetic desire, et cetera. And you kind of get a sense with the Jacqueline Laurie, Valentin thing, you know, you feel like Jacqueline's like, Laurie, like, you're single, you're single, you shouldn't hook up with him. It's kind of because she wants. She's just being a little condescending towards single Laurie. But then she fucks him, of course. And Laurie's like, you always do this.
- [24:23]
Dan Savage
A little credit to her, because people's motives can be complicated. She knows Laurie has gone through a divorce and is single. And there may be part of her that wants her to hook up.
- [24:35]
Gia Tolentino
Absolutely.
- [24:36]
Dan Savage
With Valentin because she empathizes with her friend, wants good things for her friend.
- [24:41]
Gia Tolentino
Totally.
- [24:42]
Dan Savage
But, of course, the things she wants for her friend, she also might want for herself.
- [24:45]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah. I mean, what do you think is going on? Like, I mean, I. For the record, it's like, I agree. And I also have a kind of identification with the Jacklyn. I was like, maybe that's exactly what I would have done.
- [24:58]
Dan Savage
Like, if you're not gonna fuck him, I'm gonna fuck him.
- [25:00]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah. I mean, that's very gay, right? Yeah.
- [25:03]
Dan Savage
Somebody's gotta fuck this guy.
- [25:04]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah, somebody's gotta fuck this guy.
- [25:06]
Dan Savage
It's gonna be one of us. And it's interesting that we see Jacquelyn fuck Valentine after she has a hard time getting a hold of her husband, which she's told us, told her friends that they're obsessed with each other.
- [25:20]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [25:21]
Dan Savage
And that's Also interesting. And then we get that call in episode seven from the husband where it does seem like everything she said about their relationship is true. And so maybe there was some deep sense of insecurity in her that Valentin's attention at that moment acted as a bandage for. But there's a reason these three Fens ended up in New York, Austin and la. That as much as they liked each other and as much history as they have, they had to retreat to separate parts of the country or they would kill each other. Right. That they can get through maybe three or four days together before old tensions are surfaced and rivalries and jealousies. And all friendships involve some degree of competitiveness measuring against each other. There's that quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, it's not enough that I succeed. All my friends must fail.
- [26:15]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [26:16]
Dan Savage
And not that they're all wishing for each other's failure, but they're all measuring each other clearly. And that's what's so beautiful about that. Sort of the evolving breaking off into twosomes of that group of three friends, where then there's the trash talking of each other, which creates, you know, the bond between them is pairs. There's three different pair bonds there in that triad relationship, that triad friendship. And they're all nourished by that very feminine, female coded thing of picking other people apart.
- [26:51]
Gia Tolentino
And, of course, you in the guise of love and caring.
- [26:53]
Dan Savage
Yeah. But, like, it's the people you love the most that you have the good and the insight into. And. Yeah, the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them, as they say. Avenue Q. Right. And I do think that these three women do love each other, but they can't live in the same time zone for a reason.
- [27:17]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah. And there's like, they all want to be the Jacqueline too. Right. It's like they all kind of want to be the one that the most desirable one of the Russian men desires, you know?
- [27:28]
Dan Savage
Yeah. And what is it? And did Laurie get the second best of the Russian dudes in episode seven?
- [27:33]
Gia Tolentino
I think so. I think so. Vlad, he can't recover from that shirt, you know, with the angel wings on the front of the shirt.
- [27:39]
Dan Savage
Oh, my God. And this is why I love Mike White's writing so much. He starts to pull that scam on Laurie to try to get $10,000 off of her.
- [27:49]
Gia Tolentino
He's like, I take Cash app.
- [27:50]
Dan Savage
And then his girlfriend bursts in the door, and he instantly goes from, oh, male menacing Russian gangster, to literally being slapped in the dick by his girlfriend, who is pissed. And so he's not the man. Just like Saxon isn't the man that Saxon would like us to believe that he is. This dude isn't the man that even circumstance would suggest that he might be.
- [28:18]
Gia Tolentino
Right. He's switched twice in, like, the span of 90 seconds in the scene, right?
- [28:21]
Dan Savage
Yes.
- [28:22]
Gia Tolentino
He's gone from lover boy to con artist to like to beta male with your, like, you know, jiu jitsu trained girlfriend. Do you think there's. I mean, there is something interesting, because I was wondering when I knew that this season would be set in Thailand. Like, you know, there is a backdrop of transactional and exploitative. Like, straight up exploitative sex hovers behind and around this whole season.
- [28:48]
Dan Savage
And we're just seeing the highest end of it.
- [28:49]
Gia Tolentino
Right, Right.
- [28:50]
Dan Savage
We're seeing the. The elite transactional sex.
- [28:55]
Gia Tolentino
Right. We're seeing paid girlfriends that are making out really, really, really well.
- [29:00]
Dan Savage
Yes.
- [29:00]
Gia Tolentino
And not the vast, like, actually criminal, depraved. And I kind of, you know, we don't. I don't think we need a documentary version of that on White Lotus. Like, nobody wants that. But it's there. We all know it's there. And I guess sex has been transactional in every season, you know, and of course, season two, you have our iconic gal pal duo fucking all over the hotel, et cetera, getting paid for it. But I don't know, do you feel that sex is working a little any differently in this season with the sort of losers back home? That Alexei scene where he's like, I take cash app.
- [29:39]
Dan Savage
I think all relationships are transactional.
- [29:42]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [29:43]
Dan Savage
We both pay in. And you pay with. If it's not an explicitly financially transactional relationship, how do you purchase the time, the attention, the affection, the devotion commitment of a partner? Will you pay in with time? Attention, affection, devotion, prioritization. There are lots of ways that you pay in. And if you stopped. If I stopped paying my husband in that way, the relationship would collapse. But it's in. In some ways, and maybe this makes me very. A terrible person that no one should listen to about sex or relationships. But I. I do think at some base, fundamental level, all relationships are transactional. It's just some are more starkly so and more. Some are more exploitatively so. And I think that's a thread that runs through all three seasons. And yet, because Mike White won't let us have anything be black or white or uncomplicated or not ambiguous, you do see, even in those transactional relationships, human connection.
- [30:50]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah.
- [30:51]
Dan Savage
That's kind of reaching through or around.
- [30:53]
Gia Tolentino
Yeah. Like, one thing that I think is so clear is that Chelsea and Rick's relationship seems like the most transactional of any of the guests when they step off the boat, right? You're like this, here's this hot girl, here's this older guy who's really cranky. Like she's kept around for vibes and cheer and like her hot girl, cute, beautiful self. And they have the most sincere and on her end, the most thorough and lasting and unbelievably committed in 11 dimensions. Whereas as society would have it, the relationship between Tim and Victoria Ratliff is putatively the most, you know, it's like they're loving, like long term, whatever, and they have nothing but the money that he has given her and the sense of self satisfaction, you know?
- [31:38]
Dan Savage
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [31:40]
Gia Tolentino
Well, thank you so much for talking to me. It was so. I truly have been longtime reader. Learned everything I needed to know about sex in college from reading your column, so.
- [31:49]
Dan Savage
Well, thank you so much. Thank you.
- [32:05]
Gia Tolentino
The White Lotus Podcast is a production of HBO and Campside Media. This episode was hosted by Gia Tolentino. Natalia Winkelman is the managing producer. Our associate producers are Allison Haney, Anthony Piccillo and Aaliyah Papes. Sound design and mix by Ewin Lai Trimuin at Campside Media. Our executive producers, Josh Dean for the HBO podcast team. Our executive producers, Michael Gluck, senior producer Allison Cohen Siroch and producer Kenya Reyes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The official White Lotus Podcast is sponsored by Abercrombie and Fitch. Every great getaway deserves a wardrobe to match. That's where Abercrombie and Fitch comes in. Their long weekend collection keeps you stylish at every event from weddings to brunch. Featuring Mila dresses and the A and F Collins suit. In athletic or slim fit to suit any height. For your next vacay, keep the plot twists minimal and the style top notch. Pack your bags with Abercrombie and Fitch.