December 16, 2009

By Dan Savage | December 16, 2009 | 6:00am

Aux Features Savage Love

I’ve been married four years and have a beautiful baby boy with my husband. I enjoy sex a lot, even a bit of BDSM. My husband, on the other hand, isn’t “driven by sex,” as he likes to put it, and will try tying me up if that’s what I “really want.” You’d think if he wasn’t driven by sex, the few times we did have sex, he would last for a while, but he lasts at best five minutes. On the occasional blue moon, it’ll be about 10 minutes. My problem is, all I can think about is getting fucked by some stranger with no strings attached so I can get rid of this heartbreak, for lack of a better word. But I always back out, because I don’t want to risk my family or my husband’s happiness. I don’t want to be a cheater, Dan, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life having missed out on my “sexual prime” because my husband already experienced his. I should mention that he’s 35 and I’m 23. I also have a few poly friends who are kinky, and they preach to me that being monogamous is a mistake and I can seek out kinky play with others without it being sexual. Please be as brutal as possible.
Permission 2 Explore Please

Before I get to your question, P2EP, a programming note: FUCK OUCH DAMN IT CHRIST! I’m suffering from some sort of carpal-tunnel/repetitive-motion/too-much-beating-off injury, and it feels like my right arm is on fire. Every letter I type sends a blast of white-hot pain up my arm and into my head and FUCK OUCH DAMN IT CHRIST! Since I’m in a great deal of pain here, I thought it only appropriate that I give the column over to letters about BDSM. That way, someone—my kinkiest readers—can enjoy my suffering.

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Okay, P2EP, you have my permission. Not to explore, as it’s not in my power to grant you permission to do that. You have my permission to go and demand permission to explore from your lazy, selfish, inconsiderate husband. Renegotiate your deal. You have needs, they’re not being met, and he doesn’t seem interested in meeting them. Tell him that you will remain sexually exclusive—only his cock gets near your holes (for now)—but you want and need and demand permission to at least explore erotic-but-not-fully-sexual kink with others. Sell it to him as something that relieves him of the burden of having to do this stuff—kink—with you and/or feeling bad about not doing this stuff with you.

I’m a straight man, age 26. I was just dumped by a married couple. The wife was very sadistic, and the husband did not enjoy pain. When we got together, she would hurt me (TT, CBT, flogging) before fucking him. The wife asked if I wanted to play alone sometime, and I said yes. When she asked her husband and told him that she had already checked with me and I was willing, he said that I had violated our agreement. It isn’t easy finding people into SM where we live—the Bible Belt of Canada—and playing alone was her idea, not mine. What do I do?
Dumped Up North

You move. The husband is blaming you because it’s less consequential than blaming the wife. But he’s clearly not comfortable—FUCK OUCH DAMN IT CHRIST!—having your black-and-blue ass around anymore, due to the wife’s actions, and so you’re out. Unfair, yes, but there’s not a lot you can do about it. Besides move.

I am a 22-year-old bisexual male who goes to a small, prestigious liberal-arts college in the Midwest. I’ve had boyfriends, girlfriends, and one-night stands, but I have never really felt like sex worked out as well as I imagine it could. I have a dominant personality, and people tend to follow me. Perhaps for this reason, I have fetishized submission. I imagine I would be into bondage and domination. I think I am a bit more attracted to women and would love to find a woman who takes a strong, dominant role in our relationship. I feel like I am always expected to make the first move with women, which has led me to prefer hooking up with men. I just wonder if there is anything I could do to find a woman who’d be into dominating me.

I don’t really like making the first move, but I’ve found just waiting and looking pretty doesn’t work too well with women. Are there some ladies I could approach, and after the initial flirting, the dynamic would change and they would take the lead? How would I know who these people are?
Not Sure What I Want

There may be one or two young women kicking around your small, prestigious liberal-arts college who fantasize about taking the lead, about tying up and dominating their boyfriends, NSWIW, but they’re not going to be tottering around campus in high-heeled boots and latex and leather. And even dominant women who are out tend to observe/succumb to the same cultural norms/practices that you find frustrating, i.e., they expect the male to make the first move, even in kinky environments.

But back to the young women you’re likely to encounter at your prestigious college: A lot of women with naturally dominant and/or sadistic streaks—women who will one day really enjoy BDSM—don’t realize it until that first submissive boyfriend draws it out of them. So if you want to get tied up, pegged, and bossed around while you’re at college, NSWIW, you need to be paradoxically assertive about your submissive tendencies. You may have to ask four or five girls, or a dozen, before you hit the jackpot (before you ask a dominant girl), but you will have to take the lead.

I am a 24-year-old lesbian who has been out for five years. I am also hot, vain, in shape, and kinky as all hell. I suppose I’m what you’d call a “lipstick lesbian.” In any event, I like being thrown around, tied up, gagged, etc. One of my all-time favorite fantasies is the lesbian equivalent of pegging, i.e., being done up the ass by a hot woman with a strap-on. I like the vanilla stuff as well—holding, kissing, cuddling, dyking it up—but what I’m really into is bondage. And my last girlfriend dumped me when I mentioned that I liked to be tied up. My question is, are there other young, kinky, sexaholic feminine lesbians/bisexual women out there? Am I a complete freak? Or am I just being a sexually selfish boor? Should I just try to let go of my kinks?
Domination Yearnings Keep Encounters Stimulating

P.S. Thank you so much for all the times you’ve emphasized that straight men who are into pegging are just that—straight. It helped me to accept that my own pegging fantasies don’t make me any less a lesbian, because so much of their appeal comes from the fact that it would be a woman doing the pegging.

Only a small percentage of women are lesbians, DYKES, and an even smaller number of that already-small number are kinky. Your best strategy is to be out about your kinks from the start, so that you don’t waste any more of your time and vanity-inducing hotness on women who won’t tie your ass up.

And finally: FUCK OUCH DAMN IT CHRIST!

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