Inside Episode 7: A Deeper Dive with Dan Savage

Hi, everyone. I'm Gia Tolentino.
And welcome to a midweek bonus episode of the White Lotus Official Companion Podcast to Season 3. So White Lotus is always about desire and transgression and identity and what's buried and what comes to the surface.
And so much of it bends itself around money, but because this is the show that it is, it all is focused around human relationships, and specifically a lot of it around love and sex. That's where you see the way people hide from themselves and reveal themselves and what they say they want and what they really want and how they lie and whether they lie, et cetera, et cetera.
And so we thought, why not talk to Dan Savage, the author of Savage Love and the host of the Savage Love cast? He is someone whose work I have been consuming since, I don't know, 20 years ago when I was 16 and kind of learning about what sex could be other than what had been taught to me in high school. I feel like I spent so much of college reading Savage Love columns.

And I, you know, one could argue that to whatever extent we have developed a kind of healthy, open sexual culture in adulthood,

we owe a lot to dance work over the last few decades.

So I was really excited to talk to him.

You might have already heard him on the look back portion of this podcast breaking down Ethan and Daphne's relationship. And so we're excited to have him back to talk episode seven.
I'm so excited to talk to Dan Savage, who I've been a fan of for a really long time. Dan is, of course, the host of the Savage Love cast, author of Savage Love.
Welcome. Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here. Let's talk about all the fucked up psychosexual dynamics going on in season three of The White Lotus.
You talked on the Look Back podcast about how, you know, season two, it was the bedroom forest. It was, you know, this was much more about sex and romance in season one.
Where do you place season three on the spectrum? Oh, my God. There's a lot of frustrated desire.
Mook's desire for Guy Talks to be someone else. Yeah.
To be someone that she could possibly desire. But, of course, the psychosexual drama that everybody's obsessed with is Sax and Lachlan, the brothers, and what we just saw happen.
That was really teased in episode one. Yeah.
Talking about fully grown genitals, et cetera. Yes, yes.
Well, and it's like, I mean, who is here looking for love? It's kind of Belinda, kind of, or who has kind of found a real-ish version of it. It's kind of Belinda.
Guy Talk's looking for love. Mook is looking for a sufficiently aggressive man that can then arouse her sort of romantic loyalty or something.
Yeah, somebody that she's almost, it's almost like she's begging Guy Talk to be the kind of man she's a little afraid of. Yeah.
And it's odd that she has options. Like there are the bodyguards who are clearly signaling their interest in MOOC to MOOC.

But they're scary in a way that Guy Talk is safe. But she wants Guy Talk to have that dangerous edge that there's too much of in the bodyguards and perhaps other people that might be available to her or have already signaled their interest in her.
And so she kind of wants to have her bad boy, dangerous, sort of adrenaline-pumping love interest, but have the safety boy too, the nice guy too. She wants both in one package, and she's begging, in episode seven, Guy Talk, to become that man.
Right, and it's as if she knows that she can't tame the bodyguards into being sort of emotionally available and forthright. But perhaps she could get Guy talked to.
I mean, she has the point in that, like, he does need to get better at his job. He's actually quite a bad security guard.
Oh, yeah. Who didn't say, why are you leaving a gun laying room? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Why are you gift wrapping it for suicidal patrons? But in episode seven, he does prove that he at least has it in him to, you know, go on that secret mission to retrieve the gun. Yes.
Yes. Sweating bullets the entire time.
Yeah. Gets the gun.
Yeah. Not yet the girl.
He hasn't gotten the girl, but he did get the gun, at least back. Yeah.
Yes. What do you make of Rick and Chelsea's? I love them personally.
I love them too. I want to see more.
Like I almost feel like there's part of their relationship that isn't shown to us that we've had to read in or infer, which is the joyful part of their relationship. You know, Rick is going through something really intense right now.
And it's almost like kind of forensic accounting that we can see that there was some joy in that relationship. Chelsea a couple of times says, when are we going to start having fun again? And so we know that they enjoyed each other's company or they were having a good time at some point.
But I just feel like I wished I'd seen more of the joy in their relationship because at this point, if I was Chelsea, I'd be out. Yeah.
Well, before we get to the Ratliff drama, I wanted to ask you about Frank and the monologue, this shocking, perfectly delivered. And that no one saw coming, right? And probably not Frank himself either.
We're suddenly in this bar in Bangkok and there's this character we haven't met before who winds up unspooling this story that is insane. And yet some people's sexual journey really is that complicated.
And there is a sort of fracturing of self in Frank's sexual experiences, sexual adventuring, where in some ways it's kind of beautiful.

he talks about basically all these women that he's using but then he sees maybe some narcissistic spark of humanity in other people because he projects himself

into their experience and wishes to experience what they're experiencing. And maybe there's some crawling up your own ass redemptive arc in there because the type that the show keeps presenting to us, the losers back home, the bald, middle-aged, rich guys in Thailand with the hot girlfriends, it's indicting them, right? And their consumption of the women and the people of Thailand as sex objects.
But there's something in that, in what Frank talks about, where you see suddenly this not quite identification with them, but this desire to fully possess, perhaps a desire to ultimately own by claiming the experience, the lived experience, even the body of one of the people that he's having sex with and then fucking himself in that body.

It's such a funhouse mirror around identity.

There's a lot of chatter in queer land online about what this actually means.

Not whether Frank is gay, but that's certainly something that people are going,

okay, well, Mike White, who understands what it is to be attracted to men,

and there's sometimes this disconnect where do I want to be with this person or do I want to be this person? And that is something that gay men are very familiar with. Sometimes we mistake people that we're attracted to as friends for a romantic attraction.
And we have to unlearn that or learn how to recognize the patterns. But there is often this desire to be the thing.
That's why people talk about twin boyfriends in gayland to just like to you want your your double you want your doppelganger or you want to be the thing that you desire i listened to mike white's interview on andrew sullivan's podcast where andrew sullivan brought up the very contested um concept of autogynephilia which is an attraction to yourself as a woman woman. So what exactly is going on with Frank? Who the fuck knows? But a lot of queer people saw themselves in it.
And a lot of people who are deeply invested in the political debate about trans issues saw AGP or autogynephilia perhaps being represented in this character's arc. Although this character hasn't transitioned and doesn't seem to be making any plans to transition.
And of course in episode seven reverts to form where he's no longer identifying with these women. He seems to have returned to exploiting and using these women.
Being the one that wants to fuck them. Yeah.
And it speaks, to also sex being a realm in which you can be something completely other, right? Like you put aside all the specific dimensions of him first exploiting and then thinking that he is an Asian girl or whatever, et cetera, et cetera. It's – there is something within that where it points to – it is a zone where none of the rules have to apply per se, right? And there is something about human sexuality that I think it's hardwired, that there's something about our capacity for abstract thought and speech that lends itself to this thing that you see funneled through sex and desire where there's often this desire or this real aching need to be outside yourself, to transgress against your performance of self.
Totally. And you see that, I think that's relatable to almost everyone, because you see that in women who are feminists and want egalitarian relationships, but then in the bedroom, in a consensual way with a partner they trust, they want to be called a slut or slapped around a little bit or held down.
Don't I know it, Dan Savage. And that tension.
You want to be the opposite of what you are. Yeah, you want to be the opposite.
And that can go into really, you know, for many people, I think most people that goes to an easy place that's easily grokked, right? I'm a feminist, but I want my hair pulled and to be held down, in. But for some people, that can continue to a place that most other peoples need to transgress against self or play as the opposite erotically.
Their erotic imagination goes to a whole other dimension where it's desire to be the opposite gender, desire to be another species, desire to be everything that you're not, or an additional thing that you're not. And someone who wants to be freed from the self, from the prison of how they're perceived and how they present, that can progress to a point where the character of Frank makes sense.
Wow, Frank. I mean, all of this from two minutes of a monologue.
We've all been there. We've all, like, said, you know, so what's new with you to a friend? And the wind knocked out of us.
I wanted to ask you about the mommy-daddy, save mommy from daddy origins of Greg's cock fantasy. When Chloe explains, you know, very rationally, like, oh, you know, actually, it's just because just because he wants to you know he wants to take his mother back from his father and that's why we need to fuck in front of him and then he'll surprise us the two choices are either that he has actually like unearthed from his true childhood like a gem of originary sort of sexual experience and given it to a girl that he doesn't have a I think they have kind of a wonderfully functional relationship but not not a tremendously deep one or he's just making this up because he wants to see his hot girlfriend fuck this hot guy is Greg a cuck like they never use the word cuck is he a cuck I don't think they use the word cuck but yeah they don't they don't use the word cuck but but that's a kind of, you know, they were putting an Oedipal spin on a cuck dynamic where it was about his mom and dad.
Kinks aren't that easily sort of explained. Yeah.
So many people want to, you know, look back deep into their childhoods to explain away something that turns them on in adulthood. And the explanations we come up with are often rationalizations.
And we have no way of knowing. They're unfalsifiable.
You talk to people who are into spanking and say, why are you into spanking? And half of them tell you that they were spanked as a child. And there was something about the intimacy of the moment or something about it that just crossed a wire in their erotic imagination and became eroticized.
So I'm into spanking because I was spanked. And then you ask the next person at the spanking party, and there are such things, why they're into spanking.
And it's because they weren't spanked. And they were sort of morbidly fascinated hearing about other kids getting spanked.
And it's just, we're not reliable narrators. You can retrofit any fantasy onto, yeah.
Yeah. We're not reliable narrators of our own sexual interests.
There's something about Greg and Tanya's relationship that is recognizable to me as a gay man my age. I'm 60 years old.
And I watched a lot of people partner up during the AIDS epidemic with people they thought were about to die, as Greg was about to die in episode one, or with people when they thought they were about to die, as Greg was in episode one. And then along came protease inhibitors in 1996.
And all these guys who thought they were going to die or thought their partners were going to die were suddenly going to live. And it changed the calculus around the relationships they were in.
There were a lot of breakups. And what Greg had, you know, Tanya funded his treatment, some experimental treatment saved his life.
In the flush of that, they married. And then Greg realized, oh, this is somebody I could stand for a year.
This isn't somebody I can stand for decades, which is what a lot of guys who got off their deathbeds in 1996, they called it Lazarus syndrome in 1996, guys getting off their deathbeds, suddenly were like, oh, I can, I loved this person when I thought I was on my way out. And I can't, and I could love this person for three months, I can't love this person for 30 more years.
And that's where Greg found himself with Tanya, but there was half a billion dollars on the line. So what else is he going to do? He's going to tip her over into that dark water.
There's that episode in season two where I think it's clear that Greg was involved in Tanya's murder, set it all up. Yeah.
Where he gives Tanya like the Italian day of her dreams, gets the Vespa, the crazy outfit, and you can see on him like he feels conflicted about what he knows he's about to do and he wants Tanya to have one last great day before he ends her life through the mechanism of the evil gaze. Well, also, you know, like all sort of profoundly devastating context around the society is in a lot of ways.
It's so much easier to love someone when there is a time limit. It's easier to embrace them and accept them.
So you basically, so you think this is too neat. For you, it's giving like he has concocted this to get Chloe to fuck a hot guy in front of him.
or does he recognize that he can have a girlfriend who looks like Chloe, but he can't have that girl all to himself? And he's not gonna, so he might as well own it in the form of desire. Right.
And hot wifing is sometimes a kink. Cuckolding is a kink.
In hot wifing scenarios, it's the man sharing the possession of his wife or girlfriend with another man. And that's different from cock holding where he's being cheated on in a consensual way, but it's humiliating that his wife is having sex with somebody else.
And it's about him being disempowered in that way because he's being wronged. In a hot wifing scenario, which this is what could be going on with Greg, it's still about control and power because he would be giving.
He's saying, I'm allowing you. I'm picking the target.
I want to watch you do it. This thing that you did behind my back, you're now going to do in front of my face at my request to sort of make it all something I was in charge of to soothe his ego and to give him back the power that was taken from him when she ran off on that boat with those boys.
Speaking of, I guess, let's talk about... Oh my God.
Can we acknowledge how dexterous Lachlan is? That he can jack off his brother, take off his pants? I know, there's all sorts of poly rhythms going on there. Yeah, oh my God, oh my God.
The syncopated rhythm. I think the bigger plot, the bigger dynamic is the sibling dynamic.
The very first, one of the earliest scenes with the Ratliffs is this rivalry between Piper and Saxon for the attention of the affection of Lachlan. Right, or the indoctrination of.
The indoctrination. Like, who is he going to wind up being closer to at the end of this vacation? There's this competition for Lachlan.
And he won. Between the two alpha siblings, basically.
Piper, who's pushing her family around, and Saxon, who's the repository of the daddy issues in that family going back generations. Right.
And what a man means, what a man is supposed to be. Saxon is living up to that.
Piper is rejecting that. Which way is Lachlan going to go? And Victoria has her focus so on Piper that she's not even, and Piper wandering off and basically separating from the family, that she doesn't even realize that Lachlan may be on his way out too.
And, you know, one thing that I wanted for Saxon from the second he started, you know, tossing off these mantras about how people just want to be used, people just want to be dominated, whatever. And then the student became the teacher, right? Like Lachlan's like, one day I'm going to take you down or whatever.
I wonder if you can just talk about what is going on. I don't even know what to think about it yet.
And the person who really took – what really took Saxon down was being humiliated by Chloe and Chelsea. Yeah.
Being rejected by Chelsea repeatedly and then being informed by them what happened. Yeah.
Right? And like humiliated in this way, broken in this way. And it's, I can't quite wrap my head around it yet.
Right? I have brothers. I would sooner put my hand in a blender than put my hand on my brother's dick on either of my brother's dicks.
I can't wrap my head around what Lachlan wrapped his right hand around. Right.
What happened in that moment? What was drug-induced? There's got to be a scene where they process what happened and why it happened. Or maybe there's not going to be a scene where they process what happened and why.
which is one of the things I love about Mike White is what he doesn't do, what he doesn't give us. The three friends out getting drunk with the Russians in the bar, that entire night, primed by 40 years of consuming movies and film, television, I was waiting for them to be punished.
I was waiting for that night to go south and someone to get hurt. And it doesn't happen.
Like everybody gets back to the pool. Nobody gets sexually assaulted.
Nobody ODs. And we're so used to kind of this punitive, puritanical punishment of characters for doing quote unquote the wrong thing.
And one of the things I, and in reality, like people get away with stuff or they're better for having gotten away with it, which was Cameron and Daphne's relationship is presented as the fucked up relationship. And then we learn it's actually the healthier relationship because there's some distance and sense of individuality.
It's Harper and Will's relationship where we never lie to each other, where there's no distance, there's no mystery, that is being damaged by this melding. Right, it's being choked and stifled.
Right, so what's going to happen with Lachlan and Saxon? What I want after 40 years of watching television and film is that confrontation. I want them to explain themselves to each other and to me.
And the genius of Mike White is I'm probably not going to get that explanation. I'm going to get something more satisfying than that explanation.
It occurred to me that Saxon's perpetual externalization of his mantras and his philosophy is a result of the opposite on the inside. That in fact, he takes one drug, he takes one pill, he loses like the slightest amount of control.
And he actually underneath he's pliable and he's, he's, he's malleable and he's the one waiting for someone to use him kind of right. And he, and he like he, this sort of father has used him, right? He has this helplessness, like the way he even looks at Chelsea, like the way he's kind of trailing behind the girls being like, someone help me, someone give me direction, someone tell me what to do.
Whereas Lachlan in his outward life, you know, he's following people around looking for a philosophy or looking for a love that will draw him in. He loses one layer of inhibition.
And he's like, you know what, I'm going to have a threesome with my brother. I'm going to jerk him off.
Whatever, man. So, you know, like Lachlan actually has something inside him that Saxon does not.

He actually has more of the instinct that Saxon has been trying to like inculcate in him. And was Lachlan jerking off his brother because that's what Lachlan wanted to do, which maybe we got a hint of in the first episode when Lachlan couldn't take his eyes off his brother's body? Or was Lachlan doing what a lot of heterosexual men will do in an MNF threesome where there's some incidental same-sex contact performed for the woman to entertain, to arouse the woman? 100%.
And that could be what was happening at that moment. But I do think it's interesting that there's this person that Saxon is pretending to be.
And what we're getting watching the show is Lachlan is the person that Saxon has been pretending to be. Right.
Cloaked in a Lachlan outside. Right.
That the disguise that Saxon is in is less convincing than the disguise Lachlan is in. Right.
Right. Exactly.
Well, and what you were saying about, you know, either he wanted to or he's kind of doing this sort of straight male threesome performance. And I think it's kind of both.
Which the kiss definitely was, right? Totally. The kiss was a dare.
It's a gag. Yeah.
And Lachlan is the one who isn't afraid of it. Yeah.
Saxon is afraid of it. Yeah.
He's like, why the fuck not? Yeah. And there's that thing that sometimes Saxon acts like Lachlan's a pussy because Saxon knows he is.
But if he points a finger at the kid across the room and says, look at that pussy over there, no one's going to see Saxon for the pussy that he knows himself to be. And I use pussy there the way Saxon would use pussy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not endorsing the framing of pussies this week.
I think pussies are strong. Pussies chew up dicks and spit out humans.
They're powerful, right? But not in Saxon's world. Right.
So let's talk about the three ladies and Valentin. I was thinking about there's that part in season two where Ethan tells Cameron, like, it's a kind of similar thing to what's going on with Laurie and Jacqueline, that like, Ethan's like, whenever I wanted to hook up with someone when we were younger, Cameron would just like swoop in and hook up with them first.
And he talks about mimetic desire, et cetera. And you kind of get a sense with the Jacqueline, Laurie, Valentin thing.
You know, you feel like Jacqueline's like, Laurie, like, you're single, you're single, you shouldn't hook up with him. It's kind of because she wants to.
She's just being a little condescending towards single Laurie. But then she fucks him, of course, and Laurie's like, well, you always do this.
A little credit to her, because people's motives can be complicated. She knows Laurie has gone through a divorce and is single, and there may be part of her that wants her to hook up.
Absolutely. With Valentin because she empathizes with her friend, wants good things for her friend.
Totally. But of course the thing she wants for her friend she also might want for herself.
Yeah. I mean, what do you think is going on? Like, I mean, I, I, for, you know, for the record, it's like, I agree.
Like I, and I also like have a kind of identification with Jacqueline. I was like, maybe that's exactly what have done like like if you're not gonna fuck him i'm gonna fuck him yeah that's very gay right yeah like somebody's gotta fuck this guy yeah it's gonna fuck this guy it's gonna be one of us and it's interesting that we see jacklyn fuck valentine after she has a hard time getting a hold of her, which she's told us, told her friends that they're obsessed with each other.
Yeah. And that's also interesting.
And then we get that call in episode seven from the husband where it does seem like everything she said about their relationship is true. And so maybe there was some deep sense of insecurity in her that Valentin's attention at that moment acted as a bandage for.
But there's a reason these three fans ended up in New York, Austin, and L.A., that as much as they liked each other and as much history as they have, they had to retreat to separate parts of the country or they would kill each other at some point. Right? That they can get through maybe three or four days together before old tensions are surfaced and rivalries and jealousies.
And all friendships involve some degree of competitiveness, measuring against each other. There's that quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, it's not enough that I succeed, all my friends must fail.
And not that they're all wishing for each other's failure, but they're all measuring each other clearly. And that's what's so beautiful about that sort of the evolving, breaking off into twosomes of that group of three friends where then there's the trash talking of each other, which creates the bond between them as pairs.

There's three different pair bonds there in that triad relationship, that triad friendship.

And they're all nourished by that very feminine,

female-coded thing of picking other people apart.

And of course you-

In the guise of love and caring.

Yeah, but it's the people you love the most that you have the goods on and the insight into. And yeah, the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them, as they said in Avenue Q.
Right? And I do think that these three women do love each other, but they can't live in the same time zone for a reason. Yeah.
And there's like, they all want to be the Jacqueline too, right? It's like, they all kind of want to be the one that the most desirable one of the Russian men desires, you know? Yeah. And what is it? And did Laurie get the second best of the Russian dudes in episode seven? I think so.
I think so. Vlad, he can't recover from that shirt, you know, with the angel wings on the front of the shirt.
Oh my God. And this is why I love Mike White's writing so much.
He starts to pull that scam on Laurie to try to get $10,000 out of her. He's like, I take cash out.
And then his girlfriend bursts in the door and he instantly goes from, oh, male menacing Russian gangster to literally being slapped in the dick by his girlfriend who is pissed. Yeah.
And so he's not the man, just like Saxon isn't the man that Saxon would like us to believe that he is. This dude isn't the man that even circumstance would suggest that he might be.
Right, he's switched twice in like the span of 90 seconds in the scene, right? Yes. Gone from lover boy to con artist to like, it's a beta male with your like, you know, jujitsu trained girlfriend.
Do you think there's, I mean, there is something interesting because I was wondering when I knew that this season would be set in Thailand. Like, you know, there is a backdrop of transactional and exploitative, like straight up exploitative sex hovers behind and around this whole season.
And we're just seeing the highest end of it, right? Right. We're seeing the elite transactional sex.
Right. We're seeing the paid girlfriends that are making out really, really, really well.
Yes. And not the vast, like, actually criminal, depraved.
And I kind of, you know, we don't – I don't think we need a documentary version of that on White Lotus. Like, nobody wants that.
But it's there. We all know it's there.
And I guess sex has been transactional in every season, you know, and of course, season two, you have our, you know, our iconic gal pal duo, you know, fucking all over the hotel, et cetera, getting paid for it. But is there, I don't know, do you feel that sex is working a little any differently in this season with the, you know, the sort of losers back home, the sort of, that Alexi scene where he's like, I take cash off.
I think all relationships are transactional. Yeah.
We both pay in and you pay with, if it's not an explicitly financially transactional relationship, how do you purchase the time, the attention, the affection, the devotion, commitment of a partner? Well, you pay in with time, attention, affection, devotion, prioritization. There are lots of ways that you pay in.
And if I stopped paying my husband in that way, the relationship would collapse. But in some ways, and maybe this makes me very a terrible person that no one should listen to about sex or relationships.
But I do think

at some base fundamental level, all relationships are transactional. It's just some are

more starkly so, and some are more exploitatively so. And I think that's a thread that runs through

all three seasons. And yet, because Mike White won't let us have anything be black or white or

and And I think that's a thread that runs through all three seasons. And yet, because Mike White won't let us have anything be black or white or uncomplicated or not ambiguous, you do see, even in those transactional relationships, human connection.
Yeah. That's kind of reaching through or around.
Yeah. Like one thing that I think is so clear is that Chelsea and Rick's relationship seems like the most transactional of any of the guests when they step off the boat, right? You're like this, here's this hot girl.
Here's this older guy who's really cranky. Like she's kept around for vibes and cheer and like her hot, cute, beautiful self.
And they have the most sincere and on her end, the most thorough and lasting and like unbelievably committed in 11 dimensions, you know, whereas as, as society would have it, the relationship between Tim and Victoria Ratliff is putatively the most, you know, it's like they're, they're loving, like long-term, whatever. And they have, they have nothing but the money that he has given her and the sense of self-satisfaction, you know?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for talking to me.

It was so, I truly have been a long-time reader,

learned everything I needed to know about sex in college from reading your column.

So, you know.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. The White Lotus Podcast is a production of HBO and Campside Media.
This episode was hosted by Gia Tolentino. Natalia Winkleman is the managing producer.
Our associate producers are

Allison Haney, Anthony Pacillo, and Aaliyah Papes.

Sound design and mix by

Iwan Lai Tremuwen.

At Campside Media, our executive producer

is Josh Dean.

For the HBO podcast team, our executive

producer is Michael Gluckstadt,

senior producer Allison Cohen-Sorokach,

and producer Kenya Reyes.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.