Two podcast MOTs this week. I am a long-term listener of sex and relationships podcast Savage Love, hosted by Seattle-based Dan Savage. And tuning in to his most recent instalment, I can confirm it is still fabulous.
A quick primer for those not familiar: Savage is famous for giving the world such gems as ‘monogamish’ (mostly monogamous; Savage and underwear model husband Terry were monogamish before becoming poly), ‘fuck first’ (do the deed before, not after, your huge romantic meal), and ‘DTMI’ (dump the motherfucker). Savage’s intelligence, mellifluous voice, encyclopaedic knowledge of kinks and sexuality, intriguing politics (a true man of the left, he has lost patience with cancel culture and the endless labels through which people refract their identities) and occasional gusts of impatience with callers, make it a winner.
In the past, I found Savage went a bit too far with his libertine agenda: at times he seemed to be over-praising porn and taking a stance so kink-positive one sometimes felt anxiety for being so vanilla.
Savage used to do brilliant political monologues at the start, laying into the hypocrisies of the American right, from local government to church to judiciary, on matters of sexuality and abortion. Lately, however, that blistering opener has been replaced by lighter material. Checking in on the latest episode, I was amused by his soliloquy on a new reality TV show called Milf Manor, featuring hot moms being paired up with the sons of the other hot moms. The age imbalance between older women and young men wrongly make people uncomfortable, smacking of double standards. Savage takes a light subject and beautifully coaxes out the serious point.
In terms of callers, this episode was tame. Several calls were about group sex (a woman with herpes is told to go forth if outbreak-free; a straight man who struggles to get aroused in front of other men is told to relax, you can’t force everything). A woman considering leaving her husband of 30 years to pursue a better sex life prompts signs of Dan’s evolution. Instead of telling her to get the heck out of Dodge because sexual incompatibility is a death sentence for a relationship, his ‘more conservative side’ reminds her that 30 years means something. ‘Loving each other in that day to day way’ and ‘all the other intimacies other than sex, romantic passion’ are worth a lot too.
Savage’s mercurial brain and deft politicisation of sex makes his podcast a long-term love affair, while his political common sense renders it all the more appealing to listeners who might otherwise balk at the pro-sex, pro-sex work, pro-porn advice of a left-winger from Seattle.
Sam Harris’s acclaimed podcast Making Sense rumbles on with his trademark mix of the arcane and the slightly vague and dreamy, as if he is musing from bed. The latest episode is a conversation with University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum, the eminent feminist philosopher and legal scholar, widely recognised as one of the brainiest women alive, with bodies of work ranging from objectification theory to animal vulnerability.
Harris and Nussbaum have a wide-ranging conversation, with large amounts of dense discourse from Nussbaum, in answer to sometimes pretty elementary questions. A flavour: Harris asks Nussbaum about the perennial tension in liberalism: how to negotiate the toleration and inclusion of religions that have beliefs, sometimes leading to actions, that are not commensurate with the secular liberalism that frames the society. Nussbaum is practical and interesting in her response. ‘You have to forge ahead and see how far you can get’. She notes that religions evolve because ‘most people want to live on good terms with their neighbours’. Muslims in America, she notes, do not try to enforce an honour code.
This is a good episode for those with a yen to anchor some of the squeal and noise of current politics in a longer, stronger framework of political philosophy.
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