FAKE AND FAKER

By Dan Savage

Hey Dan: Shortly after our wedding my wife informed me that she would be handling our finances and making all financial decisions for us as a couple going forward. Additionally, she had already arranged for my paycheck to be automatically deposited into an account that only she had control over. I would henceforth get a meager weekly allowance for personal expenses. During that same conversation my wife informed me I would get sex only when I had earned it. I love her, and I reluctantly agreed to this. We have been married for ten years. I do all of the housework, and I rarely get sex. My wife tells me I have no one to blame but myself, since I agreed to all her terms from the beginning, which caused her to lose all respect for me as a man. I did not realize how difficult this would be. Is it normal for a wife in this kind of marriage to enjoy giving her husband pain? She is almost sadistic. She spanks my ass with a spatula and tells me I am a sissy. Is this normal?

Sorry I Somehow Said Yes

Sure, it’s perfectly normal — in the sense that it’s perfectly normal for a certain kind of deeply frustrated kinky straight guy to beat off while writing me a fake letter about the kind of sexual relationship he’s always fantasized about having but has never actually had before tacking on a fake question on at end in the hopes that I’ll respond and then he’ll able beat off to the whole thing all over again. Zooming out for a second… the fake questions I get aren’t the same as the dozens of fake questions YA writer Bennett Madison managed to get published in Slate’s “Dear Prudence” over the years, and they’re different than the presumed-to-befake questions to Slate’s “Care and Feeding” that Ben Dreyfuss has so hilariously picked apart on his substack, CalmDownBen. What distinguishes the fake questions I get at “Savage Love” from other fake questions submitted to other advice columns is the obvious fapping that was going on when the letter was being drafted.

There’s a lot in SISSY’s letter that screams fake — a normal person would’ve instantly filed for divorce, there’s no way she could’ve “arranged” to have his paycheck automatically deposited into an account she alone controlled unless she somehow managed to bring his employer in on this conspiracy, that the best question he could come up with was the most banal question asked of sex-advice columnists (“Is this normal?”) — but what screams fake the loudest, the absolute deadest giveaway, is that this was sprung on him after his wedding. Now, female-led relationships (FLR) are definitely a thing, and there are certainly some men out there in female-led relationships, and some FLR have elements of TPE (total power exchange), FD (financial domination), DD (domestic discipline), and mild FF/S (forced feminization/ sissification) tossed in. But those men — to a man — had to ask for those things. Most had to beg for it. Because creating a FLR is almost never the wife or the girlfriend’s idea. It’s something a man fantasizes about and sometimes succeeds in talking his wife or girlfriend into experimenting with, but it’s not something anyone’s brand-new wife has ever sprung on him at the reception.

“From my research, and from the emails and DMs I get about how to set up an FLR, the askers are overwhelmingly male,” said Key Barrett, sex researcher and author of Surrender, Submit, Serve Her, a book on FLR. “And I have never heard of an FLR that was started unilaterally, or out of trickery, that managed to be successful.”

Like a lot of people with fantasies rooted in power exchange, it’s hotter for SISSY to think about it being imposed on him. Because then he’s the victim, not the pervert, because then his submission is pure and unadulterated. But why send a fake question to a sex-advice column? Because getting his fantasy published makes it feel real. Or feel realer. Or, hell, maybe in some alternate everything/everywhere kind of universe, it actually becomes real.

Hey Dan: I am a straight white man. I had been single and divorced for a long time. Then I met a lady, 23 years younger than me, and we started dating. Soon, she suggested I move in with her to save money and I agreed. I knew her 17-year-old daughter lived with her. One Saturday, I was home alone with my girlfriend’s daughter. In fact, she was walking around with no bra wearing just an unbuttoned men’s shirt and panties. I could not take my eyes off her. She saw me looking and came and sat on my lap. As soon as she had my dick in her pussy this other man walked in. Yes, it was a set up. I was caught having sex with an underage teen. The man who walked in turned out to a Black man who was known to my girlfriend. In fact, he owns the house she lives in, and he was my girlfriend’s actual boyfriend all along. They announced that I had to agree to pay them $1,000 a month or they would go to the police and I would go to prison. After signing a confession, I was then forced to suck the cock of the man who wasn’t just my girlfriend’s boyfriend all along, but also her daughter’s boyfriend. He took pics of me doing it. That is where I am now. Now this man is also fucking my ass. And both girls know it. I am trapped.

This Really Awful Personal Predicament Ensnared Divorcé

None of this happened — that will hopefully be a comfort to readers who were upset by the underage sex and racialized sexual stereotypes that featured so prominently in TRAPPED’s fake question. His unfulfilled fantasies revolve around a straight white man victim; first, he’s victimized by his lying girlfriend, then by an awful teenage girl who somehow managed to hoover up his dick, and finally by an insatiable straight Black man who’s already sleeping with both the white women in the story but wants that old straight white guy’s ass, too. Because, as everyone knows, old straight white guy ass is irresistible to straight Black men — or it is to the kind of straight Black man who exists only in the imaginations of white dudes who send me fake questions about their forced bi fantasies.

Hey Dan: I’m a gay man in his forties with a gay man fiancé in his twenties. My fiancé just informed me that he has cheated on me with many others. He didn’t tell me until after we had announced our engagement, set a date, and sent invitations to both our families and friends back home in Chicago, where I grew up and we met while training for a marathon. We now live in Los Angeles, the city where we moved so he could pursue his career as a model. He is young and very beautiful and while I was the aggressor at the start of our relationship, he gradually asserted himself and is now the more controlling person in the relationship. Things have to be his way. He wishes for me to remain faithful to him while he continues to enjoy the sexual attentions of other men. I am a handsome man who is frequently approached by attractive young men, but I have always declined their advances because I am devoted to my gay man fiancé. Cancelling the wedding would be embarrassing but the thought of marrying him knowing he has so freely given himself to other men and will continue to do so has broken my heart almost in half. My fiancé holds me while I cry myself to sleep at night. The dilemma I face: Do I break off our engagement and leave him and cleave my heart completely in two? Or do I marry him knowing he will never change?

Feeling Insecure And Needing Clarifying Edicts

So, it’s not just deeply frustrated kinky straight men who send me these kinds of fake questions. (“Help! Help! This terrible thing I’ve been furiously beating off about all my life has suddenly happened to me!”) As FIANCE’s letter demonstrates, sometimes it’s a deeply frustrated kinky gay man who’s out there beating off while he writes me a letter. And on rare occasions, I get a fake question from a woman — and something about this letter (its idealized images of gay men, awkward phrases like “gay man fiancé”) has me thinking it might’ve been written by a woman who has read too much and/ or authored to much and/or illustrated too much shounen-ai manga and/or yaoi manga.

But whoever wrote this obviously fake question, it shares the same fakey-fake-fake DNA with the other two fake questions in this week’s column: a power-exchange kink like FLR, forced bi, cuckolding, etc., all kinks likelier to be proposed by a submissive (because most people into these kinks fantasize about being in the sub role), was in this case — this very special, very exceptional, and very hot (to the letter writer) case imposed by a cruel wife, girlfriend, fiancé, etc.

I get a lot of letters like these and, in all honesty, I don’t mind reading them; I don’t share them often — I don’t get many columns out of them — but they do provide me with a fascinating glimpse into the sexual inner lives of a very special subset of my readers. But guys… SISSY, TRAPPED, FIANCE, and all the other guys out there whose fake questions didn’t make it into this week’s column… if you were to put half as much effort into finding partners who want what you want and/or partners who might grow to like what you want as you out into writing and sending me fake questions… you might actually get to live out some of those fantasies of yours.