Savage Love Extra - January 30, 2008
Note: All the responses to the letters below
were written by Eric Rescorla, a reader who won the right to answer
questions in Savage Love in a charity auction. —Dan Savage
I'm in a committed, loving relationship with
a man I completely trust. We're very open to each other about our
sexual desires and needs and are a GGG couple. Recently during phone
sex we both started talking about a rape fantasy and became equally
turned on by the idea. In a following conversation, my boyfriend
brought up the idea of wielding a knife at me during the scene, which I
found kinky and hot.
We want to take this fantasy off the
telephone and into real life, but be safe while doing it. We've
discussed safe words and limits, but what really has us hung up is the
knife. He wants to make sure that I'm safe in any possible situation,
as do I. Are there any kinds of props made for these kind of fantasies
that don't look like a plastic Halloween nightmare? Any suggestions as
to how we could play out this scene without sacrificing the kink but
still keeping the safe?
Thinking About
Knifes
"I would suggest first beta-testing the rape
scene without the knife," says Eric. "That way you have an opportunity
to find out if it's actually kinky and hot or not, without having
nervousness over the knife get in the way. Once you're comfortable with
the basic scene, you can introduce a knife.
"As far as the knife goes, yeah, you can get
realistic rubber martial-arts training knives (just Google for "rubber
knife"). They're semi-stiff, so you wouldn't really enjoy getting
stabbed with one, but as long as you're careful about the face and
eyes, they're relatively safe.
"Of course, you may eventually find that
part of the kink is the risk of the knife itself, but this will give
you a chance to practice in a safer, controlled environment first."
I'm a 33-year-old man, in a three-year
relationship with a 32-year-old bi woman. My concern in this case comes
from your past advice to your readers. Specifically, the recurrent "if
you don't satisfy your partner's fantasy, that is eventually going to
make your partner unsatisfied/look somewhere else, thus the
relationship is threatened." That is indeed if your partner has just
ONE fantasy, or a couple, but what happens if lots of fantasies are
satisfied but one?
Though my lover has a lot of fantasies that
I join in on and enjoy, there is one I am not able to follow to the
end: hard sado. It's not that often, not even every three months, and
it happens only in some circumstances. In the fantasy, she is the
torturer, but the level of the game is too high for me. She wants real
screams of pain and gets them through knives and fire. Though I have
tried, eventually I find myself unable to endure more pain and must
give up. She tells me it's okay, and I tell myself it's just one
fantasy among many, but the concern is there: Will it grow to be The
Fantasy? Will this turn into unsatisfied sex for her? And if it is so,
is there any way to get into this kind of sado so that I can resist my
pain or transform it into pleasure like other
fantasies?
Our Uses Concern Hurt
"No matter how GGG you are, you're not
obligated to endure serious pain in order to satisfy your partner,"
says Eric—and I agree 100 percent. "What you describe sounds very
much like it falls into that category. This definitely isn't something
you should feel bad about not being willing or able to do for her.
"As for whether this will become a
relationship-destroying issue for you two, that's harder to predict. I
hope it's not true that all your fantasies need to be satisfied for you
to be sexually satisfied. If not, millions of geeks who are never going
to sleep with Natalie Portman are going to lead extremely unfulfilled
lives. On the other hand, a kink this extreme doesn't come out of
nowhere and so (1) it's probably pretty important to her, and (2) there
are probably a bunch of related kinks that you won't be able to
accommodate, either. So, it may not just be something she can do
without. On the other hand, it sounds like you've been far more GGG
than average and she knows it and is willing to try living without that
one fantasy. You should take her at her word, at least for now."
I'm a 21-year-old female college student
whose romantic (and social) life is slowly turning into shit and I need
your advice. At the beginning of the fall semester, I signed on to
write the sex column in my school's daily, and I made the mistake of
using my personal experiences to frame my advice (it's not a Q&A
column, it's more like an "I need to tell you all something because
this guy did a really poor job of eating me out last weekend" sort of
thing). Since I started writing this thing, it seems like everyone I
meet either wants to talk to me only about sex, wants to talk to me
because they want to have sex with me, or they want to talk to my
friends about whether or not they've had sex with me. Nobody has asked
me out on a date in god knows how long and I just want to be treated
like a normal person. I have one semester left to write this
thing—is there anything I can do to get people to respect me a
little bit more?
There Are Lots Of Gorges At
This School
"Your letter complains about two things:
that people always want to talk to you about sex, and that nobody wants
to date you," says Eric.
"The first sounds to me like an occupational
hazard. If you're well known for writing about something of general
interest—and few things are of more general interest than
sex—then you need to expect that people who read your column are
going to want to talk to you about it. If you don't want people to talk
to you about sex, stop writing about it.
"On the other hand, your problem with people
not wanting to date you seems like a purely self-inflicted wound. If
you're going around writing negative reviews of the performances of
people you have sex with, I think you have to appreciate that it's
going to have a negative impact on people's interest in having sex with
you. You probably should have expected that. If you want to change that
situation, you need to credibly commit to not writing about your
personal life in your column in the future. The easy way to achieve
that would be to stop writing your column, but assuming you don't want
to do that, your best bet is probably to publicly apologize in your
column and say that you'll refrain from discussing your personal life
in your column in the future—and then stick to that.
"This will of course be embarrassing and
won't totally convince people (though the reason it's convincing is
that it's so embarrassing), but it ought to convince enough people to
let you get the occasional date."