Dragging in your deep shag. Yes, fine, I am a Dan Savage groupie. For any of you poor saps who missed his interview in the A.V. Club, he makes a really interesting argument regarding straight-male sexuality, one that whole-heartedly agree with. Yes, yes, I am a big ol' feminist, but I have to agree with Betty Friedan that machismo kills. Here, Savage reiterates an argument we've been batting around every since Susan Faludi came out with Stiffed. Straight-male sexuality is defined in the negative by everything he's not: He's not a "fag" and not a "woman," so who is he?

I feel so sorry for straight guys. Because their sex lives are a terror, and are really circumscribed by straight guys policing the behavior of other straight guys—"Hey, you're a fag"—and by gay guys policing their behavior, and straight women. Paradoxically, straight guys run the world, but sexually, they're so imprisoned and it's not just a prison of their own creation. A girl goes to college and eats a little pussy and gets over it, and nobody thinks she has to be a lesbian because she did that disgusting pussy-eating thing once or twice. A straight guy goes to college and once or twice gets drunk and goes down on another guy, and if it gets out there, nobody's ever going to think he's straight, ever. It doesn't matter how much pussy he eats after that, or how many kids he fathers by a woman, he's secretly a fag. There's a problem with straight-male sexual identity where it's just a mass of negatives. It's not defined really by anything positive. Being a straight guy is not being a fag, not being a woman, and not doing anything that fags or women do, like have feelings or sit-ups or anything.

Half my mail sometimes is just straight guys going, "She put a finger in my butt. I liked it. Am I gay?" because he was penetrated. Or from women going, "I put my finger in his butt. He liked it. Is he gay?" And it's very sad. You wonder why straight guys are all so endlessly perverse. Like I said earlier, all the poo-eaters are guys. And it's just because there's so much more pressure laid on men about male sexuality that just squeezes out in weird, perverse ways. It's kind of tragic. It's also tragic that straight guys have so little access to sex. And it's always their fault....And men do sort of bear all responsibility—whatever's going wrong is completely their fault, women are always the victims. I just think there's no respect for male sexuality in this empathy culture that's shaped by and defined by a female perspective on relationships and emotions. I believe that if you marry somebody and you're gonna make the commitment to be faithful, you should be faithful. If your wife doesn't have sex with you for five years, I think you should fuck somebody else. [Laughs.] And it's not your fault if you're cheating at that point. You get a pass. Women are told that being in love means you don't want to fuck anybody else, so I get all this mail from all these women who are freaked out 'cause their boyfriend or lover or husband looked at some Internet porn. "Oh, he's got me, why would he look at Internet porn?" 'Cause he may have you, but he wants more. The measure of a man's devotion isn't that he doesn't want to fuck other people. It's that he doesn't fuck other people.

Also, Hell yes!

I actually think the solution to homophobia is eradicating misogyny. I think a lot of homophobia is hatred of women repackaged, 'cause gay men seem to preoccupy homophobes the most. It's usually about anal sex, and gay men are perceived as taking on the woman's role, and women are despised. The woman's role is less-than. And in a male-supremacy culture, men who take on the woman's role willingly kind of freak out some of the dudes. If you could eradicate misogyny, homophobia would evaporate. That's why I always tell women, "If you're dating a homophobe, you're dating a guy who's secretly a misogynist, who secretly hates you. And you shouldn't."