I’m a recovering anorexic and I am still struggling a great deal to eat normal and healthy portions of food. A friend and I have recently become “friends with benefits.” He lives very far away, so we primarily indulge through IMs. He knows I have issues with food, though he doesn’t know to what extent. Normally, I try to be GGG, even trying out a bit of vore in our role-playing and making it a regular thing since he really enjoys it. Recently, though, he brought up adding pregnancy play to our games, and I’m terrified of trying it. Just the thought of it is a bit triggering to me, and I’m so scared that actually trying it will be even more triggering, not to mention my fear that, once we finally get together again physically, he will want to indulge in pregnancy play with me wearing one of those fake-stomach things.

Am I overreacting? Should I just try it at least once? How do I explain to him that I’m scared that something he finds exciting could send me right back into the starving hell I was dealing with just a month ago?

Fearing Erotic Deeds

“Where to start?” asks Brian, a straight, married Catholic guy who won the right to give advice in this space via Strangercrombie. (Yes, yes: Writing an advice column is a sacred trust—blah blah what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you-Savage blah—and letting some auction winner rummage through my e-mail is a brutal violation of that trust, etc., etc., and I’m a bad, bad man, etc., etc.)

“That you are having trouble eating anywhere close to normal shows that you have not fully recovered from your anorexia,” Brian continues. “And that you’re worrying about pregnancy play and its effects on your psyche tells me that you are not even in the recovering phase yet. Pregnant does not equal fat. I’m not even sure that fake pregnant equals fake fat, but that is beside the point. While pregnant women can become fat, and fat women can become pregnant, the two have very little to do with each other.”

Let me break in here for a second: Vore play, FED? Really? Is that wise? Vore, for the uninitiated, is short for vorarephilia, which involves fantasies about being eaten or eating. It’s hard to imagine a more potentially damaging fantasy role-play scenario for a recovering anorexic than vore, for crying out loud, particularly when that anorexic has only been “recovering” for a month.

“If strapping a plastic baby bump under your T-shirt is going to send you back to Starvingtown, USA,” Brian advises, “then you need to address these issues with professional counseling. GGG or not, you are no good to your current FWB, any future ones, or yourself if you don’t get past this.”

Dan again: Frankly, FED, I’d advise you to give sex a rest for the moment. You don’t have to be 100 percent recovered before you become sexually active again, of course, but I’m concerned about your judgment and that your FWB—who knows that you have “issues with food”—would pursue these particular fantasy scenarios.

My boyfriend and I have been together for two and a half years. We have a really great relationship and we talk out any issues that arise, but right now we have a problem that can’t really be talked out. He has a really close female friend whom he supposedly has no romantic feelings for whatsoever. I get along pretty well with her. But recently, he has started to get our names mixed up. The first time he did it to me, we were on the phone. He said, “I love you, [insert her name].” It was upsetting, but I brushed it off as a one-time brain fart. But since then, he’s done it a half a dozen more times. We’ve talked about it, and he says he has no idea why he does it and that it doesn’t mean anything, but it still hurts me so much when it happens. Is it possible that it really means nothing? How can I just ignore it?

Hurt And Confused

“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” asks Brian. “You are about to find out. Heads you cut him loose and move on; tails you pass off his name switching as a brain fart and don’t give it another thought.”

Brian isn’t serious about the coin toss; he just wants to draw attention to your predicament and the choice you face. At least I think that’s what he means. Okay, back to Brian:

“Either you believe they are just friends or you don’t. My suspicion is that you feel threatened by this girl. The tone of your letter also implies that if you did pressure him, you believe he would choose her over you. But maybe not—I really have no way of knowing.”

And that’s what separates the advice professionals from the auction-winning
amateurs. Now, Brian’s a lovely guy and he’s doing a great job—and he made a sizable donation to three worthy charities—but advice professionals never let not knowing stop us from making definitive pronouncements: Your boyfriend may have feelings for this other woman, HAC, and feelings for you that are just as strong or stronger. Whether or not you should DTMFA depends entirely on how strong your feelings are for him.

Okay, now back to Brian. It turns out that he is serious about a coin toss: “Go to the nearest vending machine,” Brian says, “and buy a can of Coke for 75 cents. Use the quarter you get back for that coin toss. If you find out later that your decision was wrong, then so be it. But to live in a state of paranoia about a name slip seems silly.”

In your advice last week to Lonely One Seeks Ties you said, “Munches are informal gatherings hosted by and for straight folks into BDSM…” I’ve attended various munches on a regular basis, and I’d have to say that over half of the regular attendees at each of them are not straight. The folks at the monthly munch I attend include my Husband/Owner (pansexual trans man), a gay male couple, a straight male/bisexual female couple, a lesbian possibly accompanied by one of her female partners/submissives, a hetero couple (at least as they present straight), a single bisexual man, a crossdressing male, and a straight man with two bisexual female submissives. Munches are for everyone!

Bad Dan’s Silly Munchconception

Sorry about that, BDSM.

I’ve actually never been to a munch, and the people I know who go are straight or, um, “straight presenting.” The fags I know into BDSM—hey guys!—have a much easier time finding partners than my straight kinky pals, which perhaps makes munches less necessary for gays, if no less welcoming of gays. Straights tend to be more invested in “normal”—and quicker to freak out about kinks—than proud-to-be-abnormal homos.

But I stand corrected: Munches are for everyone. I should’ve checked with a regular munch-goer, and someone really ought to punish me for screwing this up.

Any takers?

HEY, READERS: Why not be like Brian and make a donation to a worthy charity? The people of Haiti could really use your help. I made a donation at www.redcross.org. You should, too. And fuck Pat Robertson and his vile, hateful, santorum-spewing mouth.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.

mail@savagelove.net

115 replies on “Savage Love”

  1. The name switching guy…
    The context is what worries me. If it were just, you know, “where’s the remote?” then that’s different. But the important question is, has she seen any other evidence troule? Say, him not wanting her to hear his phone conversations with said friend. Or the two of them laughing too hard at each other’s jokes. You can often see a thing like that, once you stop being determined not to see it. And if there’s nothing to see? Then get over the name thing, correct him teasingly when he screws up. If you are wrong and he’s cheating…well, it’ll come out. It’s not a secret that can be kept forever.

  2. Coin toss is a scientific way to solve problems. It is mathematically fair. All you need is a coin, it’s easy, and a tad bid faster than rock, paper, scissors.

    Perhaps this should be considered more seriously for future advice.

    Thanks!

  3. I thought the coin idea was a fantastic metaphor. A way to say “it’s fate, chance and out of your control so don’t worry about it”. Brilliant advice!

  4. HAC- don’t read too much into it. I have ONE daughter and i find myself calling her my sister’s name, her brother’s name , or anyone else’s i may have had a fleeting thought of during the day.

  5. HAC – A while back, one of my bosses was a friend (along with his wife). He was giving me instructions one day by cell phone while driving and ended the call with, “I love you, bye!” Naturally, I started giving him grief as soon as he got back to the office and he had zero recollection of saying it. He was just distracted. These things happen. I’d say on it’s own it’s not enough reason to ruin a relationship.

    And doesn’t anyone else think FED’s “friend” with the vore fetish is getting off especially BECAUSE she has an eating disorder??

  6. To HAC: I agree with all those here who have pointed out (1) when your husband slips up and calls you someone else’s name, it is always the same person’s name and that is worrisome. It’s not a mix of his mother’s name, his sister’s name, or the cat’s name. He doesn’t go through a list of relatives or people he hasn’t seen in years. Those examples have NO risk of becoming sexual if he’s not careful. With your husband however, it’s always the same female friend, that is not good, and (2) it’s even when he’s saying intimate things like, “I love you.” This is not a casual phrase. It is NOT easy to slip someone else’s name into THAT phrase. It’s as if he has said it to her many times before. That is very worrisome.

    Plus, you are clearly defensive. What other clues have you spotted?

    If he has developed feelings for this friend, why don’t you have a direct conversation about it. See if he has been finding it difficult to bond with you for some reason, or if he’s getting too connected to her and may be about to cross a line, if he hasn’t already, and needs to back off her. You’re married, you get to ask these questions and negotiate these kinds of boundaries together.

  8. Oh and about FED: she needs to stop courting people that challenge her food-related insecurities. Make no mistake, she is the one perpetuating this. If she really feels it is dangerous to continue this relationship, she should stop at once, but what I believe is that she is seeking out ways to feed into (bad choice of words) her “-ism”. The whole “vore” thing is like bloody handwriting on the wall. I suspect this unfortunate soul will heed no advice and continue her IM flings with this man to the point that it makes her sick with worry, and sicker with her “-ism”. SAD.

  9. @HAC: i have been in the same situation as the dude, been in a long relationship and started seeing someone else on the sly when things got too comfy and boring. i would purposely say the other person’s name to gauge a reaction from my boyfriend because i was too chickenshit to break things off with him because we had been together for so long and didn’t want to hurt him. i’m not saying this is the case, but it seems weird that he says the other girls name in the context of saying “i love you”

  10. I too have worked in humanitarian aid for many years in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. I agree — do not give to the American Red Cross — they suck and they are conservative. Medicins Sans Frontieres suck too, and they are progressive (and arrogant). I’m not religious, so have a visceral reaction to religious charities, although Catholic Relief Services often does great work. I’d go with the mainstream agencies, such as CARE, Save the Children or Oxfam. They know what they’re doing and will ensure that over 90 cents on your dollar gets to where it needs to be.

    And Dan would love to punish you. Just say where and when (in Africa now, but will gladly cross the ponds for the opportunity).

  11. HAC, uttering a name isn’t as powerful as those fantasy/SFF novels would have you believe and slip-ups aren’t as Freudianly important as the therapists tell us.

    I have 3 kids, 1 husband, 1 dog. I routinely mix up the names of all five of them. In fact, I’m more likely to get the name I want wrong than right. Ha, ha, big joke around here. Even though I find my inability to grab at the right name annoying, everyone else thinks it’s “cute” which is a blessing, I guess.

    But here’s the important bit: I’ve never slept with my kids or fed my husband dog food. I’ve never had the urge to put a leash on any of the humans (it’s not my kink) so it’s never like I mix their identities, just the pesky names.

    I do have to keep my mouth shut during sex. Don’t want one of the kids running in saying “why are you calling me?”

    BTW, it’s a family trait. My sister, brother and mother do the same thing. My sister’s theory is that we have verbal dyslexia.

  13. HAC, I’d like to talk to you about the year my ex-boyfriend used the wrong gender pronoun in reference to me (he instead of she). That was also the year he started calling his girlfriend (now wife) by my name and me by her name. That was all sorts of weird. But it was just strange wiring in the brain he eventually fixed.

  14. Brian’s a twit. Coin toss? Srsly? That’s fucked up…

    HAC, your BF needs to man up and knock that shit off. You need to make sure he knows how much it bothers you when he calls you by this other woman’s name. Then he needs to tattoo your name on his hand or whatever it takes to *call you by your real name*. It’s possible he’s got a thing for this girl, but not so much of one that he’d leave you for her. It’s not like he’s never going to find another person attractive ever again now that he has you. If he can’t be honest with you about it, that’s a bigger problem than just confusing your names. I think you need to tell him it’s not the end of the world if he finds her attractive but *still* needs to call you by your real name.

  15. Support the American Red Cross? Not until they change their homophobic unscientific policies and allow gay men to donate blood. When they decide to put science ahead of prejudice, then they may be worthy of our support. Until then, my money is going to Doctors Without Borders. Shame on you Dan!

  16. Here’s something FED should think about: did her “friend with benefits” evince a strong interest in fetishes centered around eating and body expansion before or after he found out that she had issues with food?

    If the answer is “before,” then he’s probably just an oblivious and/or insensitive guy with some very obscure fetishes, who’s so happy to have found a GGG partner that he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and worry about her psychological well-being. But if the answer is “after,” then it seems possible that there’s something more sinister going on here — that what FED’s “friend” really gets off on isn’t vore or pregnancy, but messing with a vulnerable woman’s most painful insecurities.

  17. @66:

    The Red Cross isn’t a perfect charity by any means (I ultimately chose to donate to another earthquake relief effort), but they’re not the ones responsible for the ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. That bit of institutionalized homophobia is courtesy of the US FDA, which passed a regulation in 1983 classifying men who have had gay sex at any point after 1977 as “unsuitable blood donors.” The regulation is still in place, and the Red Cross (like every other blood collection agency in the US) cannot legally accept blood donations from gay men.

    In fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly petitioned the FDA to end the ban on gay male blood donors, but so far with no success.

    I regularly donate blood to the Red Cross, and I strongly believe that every qualified (from a health standpoint) blood donor should do likewise, even if it means lying about your sex life.

  19. FED: as a pregnancy/belly/expansion fetishest myself, I want to warn you, this is a dangerous relationship for you! While I do not know the guy you are seeing, or exactly what you have told him (“I have issues with food” does not sound the same as “I was recently starving myself to death”), it still concerns me that you are seeing someone who fetishizes eating. While the fake belly is a safe/sane way for him to work out his fantasy, if it makes you upset, it is bad for your recovery. Because the idea of you eating/being swelled up/being heavy turns him on, that will be part of your sex life. He may even believe this is helpful, because he is “accepting you”, but the reality is that it is unethical for voreophiles/pregfans to mess with girls who have distorted body images. It can border on being predatory in fact. Safe, sane expansionists should break it off once they find out the girl has weight issues. That he won’t raises serious alarm bells.

    In short, get a shrink, stay away from the expansion scene. We don’t want to see you hurt for the sake of our fetish 🙁

  21. About a month after my BF and I started dating, he called me by his ex-gf’s name. He was mortified and apologized over and over until I finally said, “it was a brain fart and it’s okay. I’m not mad – let it go.” And then the next night when we were going to bed, I wore my name tag from work just so there wouldn’t be any more awkward moments. When he laughed and laughed I knew he was the man for me.

    Once is an accident. And it’s NOT the same as your mom calling you your sister’s name at all. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. DTMFA.

  22. I’m one more person from a big family whose mom would routinely run through every child’s name — and the pets’! — before she finally got to the one she meant. I’ve got it, too — I routinely mix up my students’ and siblings’ names unless I’m really concentrating, and I spent one year calling my partner of 5 years (at that point) by his best friend’s name — and I am neither attracted nor close to said best friend. Just a weird neural misfire.

    So I’m seconding (thirding? whatever) the “forgive him if he looks horrified” advice. If my partner hadn’t realized it was unintentional and laughed it off (for a whole year!), we would have missed out on the 5 great years since then.

  24. Hurt and Confused: Many of my friends in my younger years were guys. To many girlfriends of my guy friends, I was ‘the BF’s close female friend.’ The relationship I had with their boyfriend was completely platonic. If you’re not confident enough to deal with being in a relationship with a man who has close female friend(s), do him a favor and remove yourself from it. If on the other hand he’s sending signals that he’s entirely too fond of a particular female friend, do yourself a favor and find someone who’s not using you or her as plan B.

    That said, his calling you by her name isn’t necessarily a sign of current/impending/emotional infidelity. Some people just can’t keep names straight. On a regular basis, I call all of my kids (4) by one another’s names – the boys/girls by one another’s name, the girls by the boys’ names and vice versa.

    I could tattoo their names on their heads. I’d still screw them up. Frequently.

    There’s probably some psychobabble term for this, but whatever it is, I’ve got it BAD: I have called my husband ‘mom’ and my mother by my husband’s name on multiple occasions. I’ve even called my (male) boss by my husband’s name and my husband by my boss’s name.

    It’s typically in those situations where you’re saying something like, ‘Yeah, but Bob, listen for just a sec…’ but there’s a more common theme: My mother, boss and husband are my ‘most commonly spoken to adults,’ despite that I have very different relationships with all of them. My kids are my ‘commonly spoken to kids,’ despite that there’s a 16 year age span between them all.

    Don’t read too much into it. If he was accidentally calling you Justin or Mark or Peter, would you be worried that he was fucking Justin, Mark or Peter?

  26. FED: I’d bet a quarter that boyfriend has a pretty good clue what your “food issues” are, especially if you’re still rail thing. He may be trying to play “shrink.”

    It’s possible he’s trying to be “helpful” via using sex to get you to eat, and using the pregnancy belly as a way of making you feel comfortable being a larger size than you are now.

    Or he’s just an asshole who thinks you have some mad desire to pig out, and that your holding back is some “barrier” he wants you to break though.

  27. Name mix-ups are not as much about what you mean to the person generally, but what you mean to that person in that moment. Like when my sister gets irritable: you are no longer an individual, you’ve become “the idiot who is wrecking my day”. There’s a place in her head for one such figure and anybody can slip into or out of the role.

    It suggests a self-centered person – a person who doesn’t always pay attention to the real you, but takes mental shortcuts by fitting you into prefabricated roles.

  28. I would advise HAC to pressure him. Find out who he cares about more no matter what way he goes, and end up with either a better relationship or out of a bad one.

  29. Munches may be for everyone but as a gay leatherman with friends in the het community I can tell you there are a lot of munches that, even though they are called “pansexual” are often attended by mostly straight people. So don’t be too HARD on Dan, it was an easy mistake to make.

  31. I have two different women at work who call me by their husbands’ name on a fairly regular basis. We are pretty close friends — at work — but don’t see each other at all outside of work. I’m a partnered gay man. I’m flattered by the name calling, but I don’t think it means anything more than that the women think of me fondly.

  32. A better group to give money to than the Red Cross is Partners in Health (www.pih.org). They have been on the ground, training doctors in Haiti and doing HIV and tuberculosis care and public health in Haiti for more than 20 years! Not like these other groups that don’t know what’s going on and are only just getting there.

  33. Dan Savage you rock! Greetings from Austin Texas. I have read all your books, great stuff!
    Every week I wonder “how can this question possibly be answered?” and you just nail it.
    I wish you and your family peace and joy.

    Sorry readers to distract from the conversation.
    From: long time caller first time listener…..

  34. @FED : I’m with 32, dump the guy and find someone else whose kinks don’t involve food or pregnancy. He knows that you have problems with food, and he still brings up vore and fat-suit roleplay ? It’s a red flag. Do not come clean to him about your anorexia, he’ll use it to fine-tune his control over you. DTMFA.

  35. To HAC. The brain is a fucked-up thing. Yes, he may be attracted to her. He may even want to fuck her. But he is still (we’re hoping) just her friend. Platonic relationships can still have an element of sexual tension to them. That does not mean that sex will take place, or anything else.

    On that note, when dating my current wife, I often used my ex-wife’s name instead of hers, and it was pretty humiliating. I eventually stopped doing that. The choking was getting to be too much. 🙂

  36. i’m a girl with a male friend who constantly calls his gf by my name. the male friend and i aren’t even super close, let alone having any crushes on each other. he just sucks at names!

  37. @ Pat Robertson and his vile, hateful, santorum-spewing mouth –

    what would Tiger’s wife or your wife find texted and sexted to your personal cell phone or email inbox or any other inbox of yours?

    be careful what you say old man because your god appears to have a long memory and a nasty way of settling the score sometimes…

  38. Re HAC, I agree with #78. Sometimes it’s not about the person, it’s about the emotion. So if my boyfriend occasionally annoys me, but my coworker Always annoys me, then I may slip and call my boyfriend by my coworker’s name IN THAT ANNOYING SITUATION.

    But when my ex had a super close but non-sexual friend-girl, he called her by my name and me by her name. Both names start with S, he’s dyslexic, etc… But that didn’t bother me because it was in practical conversation, NOT “I Love You ___”.

    AND he still sucked because his close friend-girl was #1 and I was #2.

    So, I DTMFA.

  39. “I’m a bad, bad man, etc., etc”

    You sure are…”Brian” ;). That poor Catholicism.. Tsk, tsk. Jesus wants his inground pool back. Oh, and absolute and total bull**** for scenario number one incidentally.. Kind of you for your generosity for the priviledge of advice. Good advice. Good job.. Not bad for being “a bad, bad man., etc” 😉 (whether it’s your quotes or not).. (lol ;-D)

  41. HAC, does your boyfriend mix up other people’s names? Note that all these examples people give of mixing up names involve more than just two people. If yes, then it’s a brain fart, but you can ask him to try to not do it again because it hurts you. And he *should* try. It’s generally polite to call people by the right name, so he shouldn’t be making any excuses.
    If he only mixes the two of you up, and you don’t have very similar sounding names, then this is a red flag, and your suspicions are valid, especially with a phrase like “I love you.” Confront him and tell him you’re hurt and suspicious. If he doesn’t do everything he can to alleviate your suspicions, then either he was cheating on you, or he doesn’t care that much about you, and you should DTMFA.

  42. I frequently call my son my brother’s name. The names aren’t similar, but I suspect they may be stored adjacent in my brainwires, filed under the category “younger male family member.” I don’t confuse them with each other, and I don’t confuse my roles in their lives. HAC’s guy’s mistake may mean nothing more than having accidentally filed their names together under “women I talk to a lot.”

    Also, if he’s near my age, he may be finding his name-recall software less reliable than it used to be. Maybe HAC should see if there’s some other indication of trouble before giving up on the guy.

  43. Last week I went to give Doctors w/o Borders $50 cos they are a cool organization. I was pissed that they forced me to pick a title, but found out they were EXTRA cool when I could choose
    the following:

    Mr and Mr
    Mrs and Mrs
    Ms and Ms

  44. HAC –DTMFA. He ain’t your brother sister husband father. $10 says he’s a infatuated fool thinking about the other chic all the time and you’re the door mat. Find someone whose crazy about YOU.

  45. I frequently call my son my brother’s name. The names aren’t similar, but I suspect they may be stored adjacent in my brainwires, filed under the category “younger male family member.” I don’t confuse them with each other, and I don’t confuse my roles in their lives. HAC’s guy’s mistake may mean nothing more than having accidentally filed their names together under “women I talk to a lot.”

    If he’s of a certain age, he may be finding his name-recall software less reliable than it used to be. Maybe HAC should see if there’s some other indication of trouble before giving up on the guy.

    What @92 said.

  46. I will never forget the day my father called my mother “honey”–in front of his second wife.

    My husband, my son, and many of my close male friends have three-letter names. When I spend time with them, I mess this up. Frequently. And I have signed off with an “I love you” to all of them, sometimes meaning to, sometimes not. Truth is, I do love them all, in different ways. My husband is smart enough to know that he is always my top priority (and only bedmate), and doesn’t get into childish games about who my BEST best friend is at any given moment. Instead, he seems to think it’s kind of funny that I’m a dingbat. HAC might want to adopt a similar philosophy.

  47. To add to what #10 says, yes, some of the various church aid organizations have a long-standing presence in Haiti. The director of the entire Methodist Committee on Relief died in the quake because they were already there, working to improve medical care in Haiti in general.
    http://new.gbgm-umc.org/umcor/

  48. Has anyone mentioned that the GF of the guy who’s calling her the wrong name might wanna watch and see if he’s screwing up other names and words as well? There are subtle but real medical conditions that cause people to mis-say things even though they know, in their head, what they mean. I think one of them is called “aspasia”. Don’t dump him until you’re sure this isn’t a symptom of something!

  49. HAC should try to lighten up. Name switching is sooooo freaking common, it’s almost meaningless.
    How many people have joked about their mom or their granny mixing up the kid’s names when they call them, or even throwing in a pet’s name? But no one takes that to mean she’d prefer the dog as a son. I have two young daughters, and at least a few times a week I call one by the other’s name.
    If the three of them are talking often, if he is conversing, saying the other girls name in innocent conversation often enough, he may just toss out the wrong name sometimes. It happens. What matters is what he consciously chooses, his actions.

  50. one factor i’d take into consideration with the name-slip:

    how similar are the names? i once had a close dude friend who routinely mixed up the names of the principal females in his life (2 best girl friends + 3 consecutive girlfriends)…but that’s kind of what happens when you have an m.a., an emily, a maddy, and an emma. too many Ms make a boy’s tongue a little bit crazy.

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