Love, Marriage & Monogamy | Dan Savage & Esther Perel | Talks at Google

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This is amazing.

In Esther's book she takes a more sympathetic view of traditional monogamy, with emphasis on maintaining sexual desire.

Dan gives (imo) more pragmatic advice, a sort of acceptance of flaws in social monogamy, and therefor ready to redefine it. Esther is a professional counselor and seems to be less cynical, hoping to help couples cope with the consequences of that goal.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/AccusationsGW 📅︎︎ Feb 06 2016 🗫︎ replies

Esther's rant on sex ed in the US pulled some salt water out of my eyes. Other parts did too. So many people suffering so much because of dogma :(

It was a really good talk and convinced me to finally read her books, but I guess as usual it's still catering to the edgy wealthy white crowd (that I admittedly belong to), which left me a little uncomfortable.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/anvilfolk 📅︎︎ Feb 07 2016 🗫︎ replies

Thanks for sharing this, I love everything Esther Perrell has to say about relationships she is brilliantly passionate. I'll have to listen to this tomorrow.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Blackcurrantwine 📅︎︎ Feb 06 2016 🗫︎ replies
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LOGAN URY: Thank you all so much for coming. My name is Logan Ury. I am based in the Mountain View office, and I'm very excited to be here in New York for this special edition of our Modern Romance series. So this is a series I started in Mountain View last year, and this is our fifth event. And we're so lucky to have Esther Perel and Dan Savage here with us. They are excellent experts on modern romance. So you probably know a little bit about them, but I'll give you some more information about our guests. Esther is a practicing psychotherapist, and she's also a celebrated speaker. She's widely celebrated as one of the most insightful and provocative voices on personal and professional relationships and the complex science behind human interaction. She's also the bestselling author of "Mating in Captivity Unlocking Erotic Intelligence." She's a Belgian native, and she's fluent in nine languages. Her Ted Talks have also been viewed over 10 million times. Welcome, Esther. [APPLAUSE] And of course, we also have Dan Savage with us. Dan is a writer, a TV personality, and an activist best known for his political and social commentary, as well as his honest approach to sex, love, and relationships. He's the author of the widely syndicated sex advice column "Savage Love," and the host of one of my favorite podcasts, "The Savage Love Cast." He's also written several best-selling books, including "American Savage." Along with his husband, Terry Miller, he's the co-founder of the It Gets Better project, and their son, DJ. DAN SAVAGE: A co-founder of DJ. LOGAN URY: Yeah. I thought you would like that. [APPLAUSE] Welcome, Dan. So we're going to chat for a while, and then we'll leave 20 minutes at the end for questions. And we're also selling books, so don't miss out on that. So I want to start off with talking about infidelity. You've both written extensively-- DAN SAVAGE: You didn't see that one coming, did you? ESTHER PEREL: No. LOGAN URY: Who would have guessed? I just want you all to know what you're in for today. So you've both written extensively on this topic, and because there is no universally agreed upon definition of infidelity, researchers estimate that anywhere between 26% to 75% of people cheat during relationships. Let's start by talking about why you think people cheat, and what you think couples should do when there's been a betrayal. Feel free to jump in, either of you. ESTHER PEREL: You first. DAN SAVAGE: Me first? ESTHER PEREL: Yes. DAN SAVAGE: People cheat because it's a trap. People cheat because we've expanded the definition of what is cheating to such a ridiculous extent that everyone's essentially a cheater. People cheat because monogamous commitments are a fucking trap. I don't know. I'm not to be very articulate. This is literally the first time I've spoken aloud today. LOGAN URY: [LAUGHTER] DAN SAVAGE: People cheat because they're bored. People cheat because they're unsatisfied. People cheat because there's an opportunity. People cheat, as Esther points in "Mating in Captivity," to feel alive. People cheat for all sorts of reasons, not all of them-- and I usually, when I start talking about this these days, because I'm such a fan of Esther, start citing Esther extensively-- so you're going to have to sit here while I do this. People cheat because-- it's not always because they're not in love with their partner, that you can cheat on someone and still very much be in love with them. There are other reasons why people cheat. It seems to me, and the conclusion that I've reached after 25 years of writing "Savage Love" and being buried under emails-- that it's not that we are failing monogamy. It's that monogamy has failed us, and we need to rethink it. That doesn't mean that I'm opposed to all monogamous commitments, or I think everyone who makes a monogamous commitment or wants a monogamous commitment is a fool or fooling themselves. But the way we talk about monogamy sets up all monogamous relationships for failure because what we tell people is that sexual exclusivity is the most important marker of love and commitment, and a failure at that means the relationship entirely is a failure. And we tell people that if you are in love, you will not want to fuck other people, when we all know in our guts, and in our junk, that you can be in love, and you're still going to want to fuck other people. And the people that that lie damages the most are the people who really believe it because they are in love. They make a monogamous commitment. Suddenly, someone comes across their radar, or walks in front of them in the gym, or they have a crush on someone at work. They suddenly want to fuck somebody else. And if they believe because they've been told that love and desire is a zero-sum game, where if you want to fuck somebody else you must not be in love with your partner anymore, they will then act on that. That undermines a monogamous commitment. It destroys relationships. And finally, the last thing I'm going to say is we have to stop telling people that monogamy is the only thing that you have to execute perfectly 100% of the time to be regarded as good at it, that you can fall off a bicycle and still win the goddamn Tour de France. And you can fall snowboarding and still be an excellent snowboarder. We need to tell people that if you're with somebody for-- really, now, because of expanding lifespans, 50, 60 years, if you make a commitment in your early and mid-20s, or late 20s or 30s-- if you're with somebody for 50 or 60 years and they only cheated on you a handful of times, and you only cheated on them a handful of times, you were both pretty good at monogamy, not bad at it. [LAUGHTER] That's my thing, which is 30% your thing now. I keep reading you. LOGAN URY: Did he get it right? ESTHER PEREL: Lots. Yes, yes, absolutely. But it's very interesting because I think that one thing we have to be careful about is that in some way, the conversation about infidelity is not the same as the conversation about monogamy because infidelity occurs in consensual, non-monogamous couples too. So the first thing I would say is look what word we're using, "cheating." And when it's not cheating, it's betraying, and violating trust, and being unfaithful, and being adulterous. There is no morally neutral language to talk about this, first of all. So we are trapped in the words themselves that we use. Most of history, monogamy was one person for life. And at this moment, monogamy is one person at a time. And so many of us go around saying "I am monogamous in all my relationships," and that seems totally natural. For most of history, faithfulness, fidelity, had nothing to do with love. It basically was an imposition on women by men in order to know who gets the cows and whose children are mine. And it was about patrimony and lineage, and it was only a double standard. It was apply to women, and rarely to men, actually, even if in the text it's written. But when I think about infidelity, the first thing I often think is, you know, it's the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible, once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. So somebody understood that the human inclination is not necessarily so singular and monogamous. But why we go outside-- I would say like this. But I am a therapist, and in that sense, I still very much work with couples all over the world, and there are a few things that are very clear to me-- is that the vast majority of people who cheat in my practice are actually not your chronic philanderers. They are not the ones that are continuously cheating. They are often people who have been faithful for decades. And then one day, they cross a line, a line which often, indeed, they never thought they would cross because they are often monogamous in their values but plural in their behavior. And they experience a conflict between their values and their behavior. And these people are sometimes going to risk everything they've built for years. And then, you say, for what? And then, the word you picked up, which when I wrote it in "Mating" it was quite a few years ago. Now I've gone around the globe with this, this one word that people will tell me when they have an affair. I'm not talking just about fucking and sex. I'm talking about something actually probably a little more involved, and sometimes a love story. It's that they feel alive. And that word, "alive," actually goes beyond just sex. It's about trespassing one's own limitations, the boundaries of the life that one has lived, the constraints of the marriage that one is in, the mortality that is hitting at the door. The essence of infidelity is transgression. It's actually about breaking rules, including one's own rules, internal and external. And that transgressive power actually makes people feel alive, free, bold, autonomous. When you have an affair, when you cheat, as in when you do something that is just for you, then you know that you are not taking care of anybody else, not being good citizen, not being so responsible. And we've always had two sides to us, the sides of us that wants to be good, and compliant, and obedient, and proper, and the side of us who thrives on breaking rules. Just watch kids play. LOGAN URY: So that's [INAUDIBLE]. DAN SAVAGE: I would add one thing to all of that, is that monogamy was for millennia imposed on women. There were huge double standards. And about 100 years ago, we began to make marriage fairer and more egalitarian. ESTHER PEREL: But instead of giving women more rights, we took the rights away from the men. DAN SAVAGE: Instead of extending to women the same license that men had always enjoyed and abused, we imposed on men the limitations that we had always imposed on women. And it's been a disaster because men are as bad at it as women are. ESTHER PEREL: Or reverse. Women are as roaming as men. Give the woman a car, and then we look at her true nature. DAN SAVAGE: There's all this talk about-- [LAUGHTER] ESTHER PEREL: Just let her leave the house. DAN SAVAGE: There's all this talk about sex-- about women with low desire, and this is being medicalized, and there are pills coming out to treat low desire, and there's all these therapists and sex researchers working on the problem of low desire. And one thing that keeps coming up is that they'll work with this person, and the low desire-- no sex in the marriage is destroying the marriage. And the woman-- it's often the woman, but not always-- has no desire, no desire, can't get it back. The marriage is in peril-- is working so hard to get it back. Nothing works. There's a divorce. Suddenly, she's fucking horny again because she has this opportunity now to be free again, and she didn't have that opportunity to be free in her marriage. And we have to find a way to give people freedom in their marriages and that autonomy within their marriages so that that desire for freedom or autonomy is not eating away at and corroding their marriages. ESTHER PEREL: May I add something? LOGAN URY: Yes. ESTHER PEREL: [CLEARING THROAT] Sorry. I think I am totally-- the problem is we don't disagree that much. But if you listen carefully, there are places-- DAN SAVAGE: We're in violent agreement over here. ESTHER PEREL: No, it's not just actually if she divorces. I think that there are two things I would-- the first one is something that you said earlier, which I do want to emphasize. The romantic ideal that we are very much participants at-- that is about 150 years-- is that I'm going to be the chosen one and I am it, and I'm irreplaceable, and I'm indispensable. And I'm the one, and when I'm the one, it means that you don't think, or want, or look at anyone else again. Hence, if you have everything you need with me, there's no need to go looking elsewhere. Hence, if you go looking elsewhere, it means that there is either something wrong with me, wrong with you, or wrong with us. And this is the current model of infidelity, is that it's a deficiency model. It only happens because there's something missing, and it's general-- But I always say that you can't-- millions of people can't all be pathological, after all. So turn it into a disease or a disorder when it is a phenomenon. And that, combined with this secret truth that is only beginning to come out, which is that in committed relationships, actually, women get bored with monogamy much sooner than men. Males' desire goes down very gradually. Women's desire often plummets. And it's not the fault of the partner, and it's not the fault of marriage. It's that the institutionalization of the relationship, the familiarity with the partner, and particularly, the desexualization of the roles. There is not much sexy to wife and to mother. And so whenever she has an opportunity to change the plot, her hormones change too. And it's that piece that actually has been mistranslated. It's been decided that because she loses interest, her sex drive is less strong. First of all, we can question the concept of drive. But it's not that her drive is less strong. It's that in order to want sex, it needs to be six that is worth wanting, and it's just not interesting enough in her role-- not with the partner, but in her role. DAN SAVAGE: Can I add something to that? LOGAN URY: Yes! Let's chat. ESTHER PEREL: We going to-- Logan! [INTERPOSING VOICES] DAN SAVAGE: That idea that someone has to be all things-- you used the phrase "the one," and that's a phrase that drives me crazy. And I'm always yelling at people but there is no "the one." And you know that's a lie about you. Why aren't I all things to you? Because you're looking at someone that you know isn't all things to you and can't be. And the best any of us can hope for is a 0.64 that we round the fuck up to the one. And that's an act of will, and an act of love, and regard, and care for someone to treat them as if they are this thing that does not actually exist in the world, which is your perfect match, or someone who can be all things to you or that you can be all things to. And if we can walk away from these myths and these lies, it doesn't destabilize our relationships. It doesn't make them less valuable. It actually makes them stronger. It's really hard to look at somebody every day and live a lie. It's easier to look at somebody every day and say you aren't the one. There is no one, but I treat you like one and the one. And in my treating you that way and you treating me that way in return, we are being so good, and kind, and loving to each other, and there's value to that, and a greater value to that than there is some one out there. And so if people just knew-- of course he looked elsewhere, or she looked elsewhere, or they want to fuck other people, or you want to fuck other people. Or sometimes you go to friends for emotional fulfillment that you can't get from your partner, and that's OK. Two people can't be all things to each other. ESTHER PEREL: We should let Logan [INAUDIBLE]. DAN SAVAGE: I know. Sorry. LOGAN URY: I'm enjoying it, yeah. So I think that you're both in violent agreement that monogamy maybe isn't the right answer, and I know, Dan, you are-- OK, I'll let you answer that. But I think you're famous for your idea of monogamish relationships, which you can discuss. But if you could redesign marriage from scratch with any different kind of contracts-- maybe you rethink it every five years-- how would you redesign marriage? DAN SAVAGE: You go first this time. ESTHER PEREL: Well, redesigning marriage depends first and foremost on power. After all, marriage is an institution that stabilizes power, basically, and obligations-- little freedoms, but mostly-- so I would not have the same answer when I am asked this question in North America, and if I'm asked this question in Turkey. So this is a very global question with a localized answer, OK? In our context, I don't know that we actually need marriage. Marriage used to be an economic enterprise. And by the way, infidelity was an economic threat. Now marriage or committed relationships are a romantic arrangement, and so infidelity is a romantic threat. That's really what shifted. So in this romantic arrangement, we have replaced-- it's like in the larger economy. It used to be marriage was a part of the production economy, and you made children, and you created assets and all of that. Now marriage is part of the service economy. Like the general economy, the service economy is intimacy, trust, affection, sex. That's service in the best sense of the word, right? Hence, trust has become so central as well. I don't know that we need marriage. I think that-- but of course, you need a state that then takes care of things. That's where the Europeans marry way less than the Americans. Americans love to marry, by the way. They love to marry, and they can marry multiple times. And you can sit in an audience and say you're divorced three times, and nobody blinks an eye. But if I was to ask you here, "Has anybody here been unfaithful or been cheated on?" not many of you would answer publicly because the stigma has shifted. It used to be divorce. Now it's infidelity. So I would redesign marriage. First of all, there needs to be equal power. There needs to be a system in which maternity leave is not a disability leave. There needs to be a system where there is affordable child care and where there is family leave that is for both people. Then we can start to talk about relationships that are not going to crumble under pressure or where the supposed equality suddenly topples completely the moment you have children, which is, after all, the primary thing for marriage. It needs to be a system that is fluid and flexible, like any other organism. It doesn't survive if it doesn't straddle well stability and change, homeostasis and novelty. But if it does too much novelty and it's too unstable, it will be chaotic. And if it is too much stable and too much not changing, it will be fossilized. There is very little fluidity in marriage. Most people are creative, and imaginative, and pursuing, and active, and all of that before they marry. And then once they're married, many, many times they will settle into a state of complacency, in which you do the least amount. People treat their friends much better. They behave much better at work. They dress up much nicer when they go out with others. Literally, the partner is often-- the home is often the place where many people bring leftovers, actually, not the best of themselves. So it needs to be reevaluated every few years, this idea that we live twice as long but we're going to stay with something's that undoable. And most people these days are going to marry two or three times in the West anyway, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. DAN SAVAGE: I would say that marriage has been redefined, and it would be wonderful if everyone was up to speed on how thoroughly it's been redefined. During the marriage equality debate in this country, we, the homos, were accused of wanting to radically redefine marriage. And the truth was that straight people had already radically redefined marriage to an extent that no logical, secular case could be made for excluding same-sex couples from the institution as straight people redefined it, lived it, and practiced it. It is now, after millennia of being something very different-- in the West, in this country-- the legal union of two autonomous and equal individuals. Period. The end. And the marriage is only as patriarchal as those two people in it choose to make it. A marriage can be monogamous or not. It can be for life or not, children or not. It can have a religious component or not. It's up to that couple. Every marriage is its own universe, and gay people-- same-sex couples, not all gay-- said we want that too. And it's no longer a gendered institution. There don't have to be children. Children aren't required. Otherwise, Pat Buchanan's not really married to his [INAUDIBLE] wife. And if I were going to change anything about the definition of marriage, it's not so much of a change that definition. I'm very comfortable with that definition of marriage. I would change people's expectations around what marriage means over the long haul. As someone who is-- as a gay dude-- has been open about the fact that my husband and I are not monogamous, much to the consternation of some gay rights groups that were fighting for marriage equality and gay parenting organizations, because we're also parents, I'm often really offended by what you talk about, people who've been married two or three times, people who are monogamous in all of their relationships-- those people will look at me and say I am not seriously in love with or committed to my partner because we are not monogamous. And then, the next thing out of their mouth is, "I've been monogamous in every relationship I've ever been in. All of my marriages, plural, have been monogamous. That's how committed I am, not to my partner, but to monogamy." And I find that idiotic. And if there's anything I would like to redefine or get into people's heads is that marriage, particularly if it's for the long haul and the long term, it's going to evolve. There are going to be stages. It's going to change. What's very, very important a year in may not be so important 20 years in. You can reassess. You can reevaluate. That idea of having to opt back in after a few years-- that shouldn't just be opt back in for that partner, but opt back in for everything that you guys talked about being important to your marriage or definitional, or what you wanted from your marriage. That stuff changes over time, and we have to roll with, if indeed we're going to be more committed to commitment than we are to never touching anyone else with our genitals ever again, which to me seems like a ridiculous and very limiting definition of marriage or commitment. But for many people, that's it, that loyalty is something we only show with our genitals. Any other form of loyalty, any other way of expressing it, has less value than have you touched anyone else with your dick ever again if you're a guy. And I find that I'm often accused of putting too much importance on sex, too much emphasis on sex. I think that puts too much emphasis on sex, when you say that's the most important way of expressing love, commitment, loyalty is with your genitalia. So if I was going to redefine it, I would yank that out. But it's not in the definition. That's just an attitude that people have. LOGAN URY: Definitely. ESTHER PEREL: One of the [INAUDIBLE] that took place is that you used to marry 'til death do us part, and now you marry 'til love dies. That is a fundamental shift, and divorce laws have fundamentally changed as well. You need to be able to leave in order to be able to choose to stay, and that is not always the case. I think that on many levels, there are certain freedoms that you-- like the redefinition of monogamy as a primary emotional commitment that may or may not be including sexual exclusiveness is one of the most important things that straight couples can learn from gay couples because in the straight discourse, that is always considered impossible. And it's not impossible intrinsically. It's not biologically impossible. It's culturally become impossible over millennia, and there is tremendous freedom that can come from-- DAN SAVAGE: Well, if there's anything that straight couples can borrow from gay couples-- ESTHER PEREL: Lots. DAN SAVAGE: --it's that monogamy for gay male couples has always been an opt-in conversation. And so you don't get gay couples realizing 5 or 10 years into the relationship that they're on very different pages about this. But for straight couples, because monogamy is this default setting and it's assumed, you get people who've two years in, five years in, realize that they've either made a commitment that they're incapable of honoring because they just were dragged along by the cultural undertow, or they've committed to someone who was incapable of honoring that commitment because they couldn't have a conversation about whether that was a commitment that they wanted to make, or that monogamy was something that they were going to do. And in almost all gay male relationships that I've been witness to, and all the studies bear this out, monogamy is not important enough to destroy a relationship over and everything else in that relationship. ESTHER PEREL: Sexual exclusiveness. DAN SAVAGE: Sexual exclusivity. LOGAN URY: Do you think that the legalization of gay marriage is going to change that? DAN SAVAGE: No. LOGAN URY: OK. Do you want to talk more about that? DAN SAVAGE: I get asked that a lot. Now that we can get married, are we gonna all march off into the suburbs and die? And I don't think you see that borne out. I haven't witnessed it in the last six months since [INAUDIBLE], but we'll see in 10 years. I don't think that gay people being open about who we are and being accepted is changing gay people. I think our acceptance and the truth we're telling about our lives and our experience are changing straight people. You do see a lot already in straight culture that has basically been ripped off, borrowed, renamed from gay culture. We had tricks. You guys hook up. We had fuck buddies. You have friends with benefits. It's always so much more polite went straight people try [INAUDIBLE]. The way that most straight people live now into their late 20s, early 30s, is the gay lifestyle as sort of condemned and sex-panicked about by social conservatives 30 years ago-- moving to urban areas, having many multiple sex partners, having many relationships, not settling down, not becoming an economic unit and cranking out the next wave of human consumers. That delaying of marriage and parenthood, as people are doing who are straight now, is-- basically what you see is straight people all over the country living the gay lifestyle until they're about 33 and then going off and living the "straight life." So what we know now is there was nothing gay about the gay lifestyle, nothing straight about the straight lifestyle. It was just which boxes people were herded into. ESTHER PEREL: But you know, family life has changed enormously, and the configuration of family from single-parent family, blended family, the gay family, commuter family. We have really developed a multiplicity of models for family, but we remain very monolithic for couple. I actually wouldn't say marriage, per se. I would even say couple. And even though marriage as an institution has always been in transition, but coupledom-- once romanticism enters we became really doggedly devoted to it. It is one of the most tenacious, mystifying stories that has sat over Western culture. DAN SAVAGE: Stephanie Kuntz's book, "Marriage-- A History, the Triumph of Love over Marriage" is a great read, and it's sometimes shocking for me to learn that social conservatives oppose vigorously marrying for love, that that was undermining what marriage was actually about 250, 300 years ago. You married for property. You married for status. You married for legitimate offspring. You didn't marry for anything as fleeting as lust, or desire, or sexual passion, or even love. You had a spouse that was recognized in law, and you had loves. ESTHER PEREL: Actually, what she says is that adultery was the space for love. Marriage was too mercantile an institution to go seek love in it, and so you went outside to find love. But now that we've brought love into marriage, adultery destroys it. That's a major shift. LOGAN URY: That was great. Thank you. I want to shift gears a little bit. Dan, one of the topics that you're very passionate about is sex ed, and how you find abstinence-only education very dangerous. So if you could design a class, either in high schools or online, that every person would be required to take before entering into adult relationships-- ESTHER PEREL: Can we start at age four, please? LOGAN URY: Yes. At age four, preschool, what-- ESTHER PEREL: Like it should be done? Not high school. LOGAN URY: OK, yeah. Let's hear. What would you want to teach people about-- DAN SAVAGE: There are people in high school with four year olds. It's too late in high school. LOGAN URY: OK. Preschool, day one. What should people be learning about healthy adult relationships? DAN SAVAGE: Oh, my God. I'm a terrible person. A sex ed course needs to be comprehensive. It needs to be-- it needs to start very young, and it needs to be age appropriate, but that terminology is so subjective. Who's going to define what age appropriate is? There are people out there-- many of them-- who believe that a kid who's 18 is not yet ready for comprehensive sex ed because then that kid is going to want to have sex. If I were going to design the program, it would be ongoing, lifelong, comprehensive. It would be queer-inclusive. It would address kink. It would address the 99.99% of the sex that people are having over the course of their lives, which is not procreation. It's recreational sex. Even what a lot of us liberals and-- as I sweepingly gesture to the room, assuming we're all liberals and progressives-- even often what we hold up as an example of really good sex ed-- when you look at it and you dig into it, it's just reproductive biology, and you can cover that in about 11 minutes. Any idiot can make a baby. Bristol Palin made two. What trips people up is not fallopian tubes, and zygotes, and spermatozoa. What trips people up is consent, desire, what it means, and the 99.99% of the sex people are having, which is sex for pleasure. And we need to educate young people about the options that most adults who have worked past the vaginal or anal intercourse obsession know, which is that it's not all vaginal or anal intercourse. There's a lot that young people can do sexually that creates those feelings of intimacy, and release, and that bond that don't involve the high bar, high stakes, high risk that comes with penetrative sex. But imagine a sex ed course. It's [INAUDIBLE] 15 year olds, 14 year olds, and 13 year olds. First boyfriend, first girlfriend, first non-binary friend-- maybe you masturbate together, roll round have oral sex. You don't have to worry about birth control if you're not having vaginal intercourse yet, and there's plenty of time for that. Learn each other's bodies, and learn your own body, and enjoy them. And you can wait on that. Good sex ed empowers people not to necessarily have sex, but to make their own choices, their own decisions about when and how. I always compare the sex ed that we get-- and speaking of abstinence, I was so thrilled in 2008 during Barack Obama's first inaugural address when he said we're going to return science to its proper place. I thought that meant no more money for abstinence education because the science has shown that not only doesn't it work, it backfires because kids who've had abstinence-only sex education may delay sexual activity by about six months, but much less likely to use protection, so much likelier, once six months later than their peers they're having sex, to have an unplanned pregnancy, to contract a sexually-transmitted infection. I thought it would be the end of it. But Republicans bundled up quarter-billion dollars worth of funding for abstinence education with Obamacare and put Obama in the position then of having to veto Obamacare to stop funding absence education. And so it's still out there, and in many places it's the only sex ed kids get. And it's destructive, and it destroys the lives not just of straight kids, but also of queer kids. And it's got to stop. Particularly the reproductive biology. I always compare it a driver's ed class, where they teach you how the internal combustion engine works, but not how to steer, not how to break, and not what the red hexagon at the end of the street means. And so you give somebody keys to the car after that sex ed-- or after that driver's ed, and they're going to run over someone. And yet that's our sex ed. Here's how your internal reproductive combustion engine works. Here's the keys to your pants. Now go. LOGAN URY: Esther, what do you think? You have a very global perspective on what people-- ESTHER PEREL: I'm even more extreme than this. Look, I'm married 30 years. I have two boys, and I was going to make them not become casualties of the American system. We have comprehensive sex education. It starts at age four. It doesn't talk about private parts. It's not a plumbing class. It looks at-- it is somewhat more procreative, but it connects-- it talks about pleasure. It talks about love. It talks about relationship. This is the book you read for the four year olds. It talks about how it compares with other living creatures. It is-- the one that I'm thinking of is definitely a heterosexual story, but it plants the seeds very clearly of this is part of how we relate. This is part of how we express our love, our connection, our fondness. This is pleasurable, et cetera, et cetera. And it establishes from the start freedom, autonomy, respect, pleasure, connection, that. I had one kid in public school in Manhattan. He had two hours of sex education. It went like this. Two people came in. One said, "When you have sex you get AIDS. The other one said, "I had sex. Therefore, I have AIDS." That was the end of his sex education. Very respectable public school in Manhattan-- the other one was really, really lucky. He had actually a very good program that I could look through it. But still, it was about disease. It was about the dangers. It was about dysfunction. Here's what's wrong in the United States. This is the only country that doesn't have a public health policy on adolescent sexuality in the West. Therefore, as a result of the abstinence campaigns, activity starts two years before the liberal Dutch, eight times more teen pregnancy than all of EU and 35 other countries combined, and a proliferation of STDs. There is on the one hand a complete madness around the politics of safety and the precautionary principal and all the assault stuff that you have on campus, and then you just swipe and you go and you fuck the next stranger. Here you can't talk to anybody. And here, there is this-- and these two extremes are typical. It's always a combination of repressive tactics and complete, massive excess, with nothing that is just simply an integrated topic because in the US, sex is the risk factor. In Europe, being irresponsible is the risk factor. Sex is a natural part of life. As a result, you have posters all over the place about the fact that 14 year olds, 15 year olds will have sex and should use protection in order to be able to enjoy the sex, not in order to avoid getting sick. It's actually a very different conception. I can't even tell you where to begin with this. It's wrong from the start. It's wrong from the moment you have pink and blue. There's still the distinction. It starts from the fact that everything-- that masculinity here is-- if you don't have sports, for God's sakes, most men would never be touched. At this point, most-- [LAUGHTER] This is all for me sexuality. Sexuality is not about doing the act, sex. It's about being sexual people. It's about a way that you-- it's the distinction between violence and everything else. It starts with the fact that-- ugh, I can't go. I can go on and on. It's really so bad. The majority of boys at this point in the US get their sex education starting around age 11 from one source only, and that is porn only. Porn is perfectly fun, but it is terrible sex education. It's really lousy sex ed. And if you leave a vacuum, you always get the people that come in that will take advantage of the vacuum. And then, when you get a good English teacher here that starts to teach sex education to the class, you get people coming in saying you shouldn't be doing this. It's a public health issue. It's not even-- it touches at every level because sexuality in every society is the place where you're going to find the most archaic, the most entrenched, the most rooted values of a society, and it's also the place where you're going to find the most radical, progressive changes. It's really a lens into a society, and especially around violence. And so the fact that you don't have real, comprehensive sex education-- and it's at age four. Why four? Because at four, you begin to know, where does grandma go when she dies? And so you have a conception of death. And once you know where we go, you also need to know where we come from, most of us. That's the first place, why it is so young. But this is also a country who thinks that you only should start learning foreign languages in high school. [LAUGHTER] LOGAN URY: Whew! [APPLAUSE] Dan, it sounds like-- DAN SAVAGE: I think the problem goes back to that Australia got the convicts, Canada got the French, and we got the Puritans, that it was a shitty deal. LOGAN URY: So Esther, you mentioned masculinity, and there was something that I heard you say in a podcast that really fascinated me around women and perfectionism, how women really need to feel sexy in order to have sex, and a lot of desire and passion is around the woman feeling sexy, and that's at odds with perfectionism because the woman has a voice in her head that's always critical of herself. And I think this is a high-performing audience, and a lot of women here are trying to be the perfect employee, the perfect mother, the perfect spouse. Can you speak a little bit about femininity, and desire, and perfectionism? ESTHER PEREL: Whoa. [CHUCKLING] But I'm going to rephrase this a little. I'm going to say that being self-critical is one of the most effective tools of a consumer society, and it's not just a privilege of women, actually. I think men have their own list of things about which they can feel not good enough, or insufficient, or inadequate. So in that sense, I would say something different. And I think that that's probably-- you need to tell me what you think about this because we've actually not talked about this one. If you think about sexuality-- I'm going to take a tiny detail. If you think about sexuality and the experience of letting go, right? Letting go in order to be able to enjoy, in order to be able to experience pleasure and all of that-- you would think, then, what is it that are the blocks that prevent letting go? In a straight narrative, you will often hear a man say nothing turns me on more than for her to be turned on. Yes? Because if she's turned on, then he knows he's not hurting her. She's into it. He can bypass the mainframe obstacle for men, which is the predatory fear. If she's into it, if she likes it, then he doesn't have to worry. This is actually what he gets on screen. The woman on screen always likes it, never has a headache, always says me too, always says more, more, more, and he doesn't have to feel neither inadequate, nor afraid of rejection, nor worried if she likes it, which are the three most important internal experiences for men, psychologically, sexually. What is it for her? Why do I say the predatory fear? Because I think that the obstacle in sexuality is the opposite of the social role. If you are raised to be a protector, than the obstacle has to be that you need to free yourself from the role of being a protector in order to be able to enjoy, to play, and to have fun. For her, it's the parallel, same one. It's the taking care. She doesn't say nothing turns me on more than to see him turned on, or her turned on, for that matter. It doesn't make a difference. If she's not into it, he can stand there with the biggest hard on, makes no dent. Shop is closed. Nothing's going to happen. What turns her on is to be the turn on, and that's the big secret of female sexuality is that it is massively narcissistic. It's the opposite of the caring for others, of feeling responsible for others. If she can think about herself, then she can be into it. And in order to think about herself, she then needs to like herself. Hence, she can't be in a critical voice. That's the perfection piece. If she starts to think about everything about her that is not good enough, that she doesn't like, she will shut herself off. Before you ask a woman if she will make love to a man or to another woman, ask a woman if she would make love to herself. If she doesn't want to make love to herself, she won't let anybody else do it either, and that's where the perfection piece comes in. That voice is harder for her to extinguish because it is more self-reflexive than it is for him. And I think that between two guys, the predatory fear is not present in that same way, that you have a level of freedom because of that. You're not busy making sure, "Is the other person OK?" You know it when they are and when they're not, not because they're excited just physiologically, not because of dick. You have the communication because she also-- she's spent so many thousands of years making sure that she doesn't let it be known that she likes it because if she likes it, she's going to be slut-shamed, whatever the language was for that before. So she has to wrap it in five layers of relatedness to make it clear that she likes it, so she doesn't know what she likes. So all she ends up saying is what she doesn't like. That, she knows very well. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] You get it? Am I-- I don't see you. Is this-- am I speaking-- this is-- yeah, somewhat? DAN SAVAGE: I agree. LOGAN URY: One thing I did want to talk about was-- ESTHER PEREL: Do you agree on two men, that it takes-- that the predatory fear is less present? DAN SAVAGE: Not always because there can be differences around-- sometimes when people say two men together, they picture two men of sort of equal physical stature, age, social power, everything else. There can be a radical power imbalance where then you begin to feel bad. Are you OK? Are you OK? Are you OK? Some of those dynamics can be replicated, I think, in same-sex relationships. LOGAN URY: So this is somewhat related to the sex ed question-- DAN SAVAGE: [INAUDIBLE]. LOGAN URY: So we're at Google, and google.com has the homepage. I'm sure you've been there many times. And billions of searches happen on that page every day, and sometimes there's a line of text under it promoting a new product or a new service. If you could take over the google.com homepage for a day and leave one message for people around the world, potentially about sex and relationships or not, what message would you want to get out there? DAN SAVAGE: If I could take it over for a day, I would just shut it down because Google really fucked up my sex advice column. LOGAN URY: Go on. DAN SAVAGE: Because 25 years ago, half the questions I would get were "what's a butt plug?" and "fisting-- how do you do that?" and those things have wiki pages now, and those were really easy columns to write. A butt plug-- it looks like a lava lamp. It goes in your butt. And so all the mail I get-- and people would write me like, "Where is the swingers club in my neighborhood?" and that was kind of specialized knowledge 25 years ago. You'd have to have these magazines, these swingers magazines, with PO boxes listed in the back, and you would then give those to people. And that was half the mail then. Those were easy columns to write. All the mail now is situational ethics. I did this. They did that. This terrible thing happened. Who's right. Who's wrong. Please cut this baby in half. And those columns are much harder to write, so Google made my job much more difficult. And if I just had it for a day, I would shut it all down so I could get some of those "what's a butt plug" questions back. LOGAN URY: I think Google also made somebody else's job a little more difficult. DAN SAVAGE: Whose? LOGAN URY: Rick Santorum. [LAUGHTER] DAN SAVAGE: Yes, it did. But Google investigated actually and declared that it wasn't a gaming of the algorithm. It wasn't any sort of Google bomb. It was just the legitimate first return for about 12 years. LOGAN URY: I think it's a good lesson. Don't piss off Dan Savage's fans. DAN SAVAGE: Readers. LOGAN URY: Readers. DAN SAVAGE: People always credit me for the Santorum Google bomb, but a reader suggested the contest. A reader came up with the new definition, and readers picked that definition from a field of 10 other definitions. So I was just getting out of the way of my genius readers. LOGAN URY: So no one's taken out their phone yet, but if you're not familiar with this, I recommend googling it after this talk. DAN SAVAGE: Who isn't familiar with Google Santorum? All right then. Good. LOGAN URY: Great. Esther, what about you, if you could take it over? ESTHER PEREL: I would probably shut it down too, but for a different reason. DAN SAVAGE: We are never getting invited back. ESTHER PEREL: Just to [INAUDIBLE]. I think at this point, I would probably close up a lot of things for a while to give us the space to reclaim back our own imagination. I think that we are being robbed of our imagination because everything is served up so immediately and we don't even know. We don't even know. Once people had much richer fantasy lives than they have today. I'm not just talking about sexual fantasy lives, but erotic fantasy lives, yes, and that's why I would close it, to reclaim the power of the erotic in our own imaginative space. LOGAN URY: OK, so the headline is "Esther Perel and Dan Savage Say Shut Down Google." ESTHER PEREL: That's right. LOGAN URY: Great. Got it. DAN SAVAGE: Google's done. LOGAN URY: On that note, we'll open up the questions from googlers, see how they feel about this. So if you have a question, just line up at the two mics right here. ESTHER PEREL: [INAUDIBLE] LOGAN URY: Yeah, let's do that. DAN SAVAGE: I guess I should be totally honest. I would shut Google down for everyone else but me because I use it every day. LOGAN URY: Yeah. That's true. We haven't thought this through. Any questions? I have more I can ask. AUDIENCE: Howdy. I'm curious what maybe the 98th percentile of monogamous, exclusive relationships look like, the best case scenario. Does anyone actually pull it off? ESTHER PEREL: Yes. OK, so I-- yes, of course. And I think that monogamy is a continuum, right? I say it a little bit differently than when Dan says you've been good at it. I think that today-- we used to marry and have sex for the first time. Now we marry and we stop having sex with others. So when you arrive to committed relationships, you have not been monogamous. So in some strange way, monogamy only exists in reality. It doesn't exist in your fantasies, and it doesn't exist in your past. A relationship that opts for the choice, that chooses to practice monogamy-- and it may change. It may be 10, 15 years of something and then another 15 years of something else; it's really not static-- is a relationship in which people understand the erotic freedom of the other person and decides together what will be a line that we will create about that freedom? That means that you have memories. That means that you may have your own fantasies. That means that sometimes you may flirt with people. That means that you may not flirt with people. That means that you may have friendships with the people from the other sex. You're asking about straight couples here, or all couples that are monogamous. AUDIENCE: I only care about the straight couples, but yeah. [LAUGHTER] ESTHER PEREL: Because the friendship with the other sex is different in the same-sex couples. That's why I'm going to make the distinction. But basically , the first thing I would say is that hetero couples who have good monogamous relationships are couples who have talked about it. They didn't just assume it. They've negotiated it, and their negotiation was a little more than just "I catch you, and you're dead," which is the majority conversation in most straight couples. The only time straight couples talk about this stuff is after the shit hits the fan, when there's a crisis, when I suddenly discover I have herpes that I wasn't meant to have, when I suddenly discover a slew of texts in your phone that [INAUDIBLE], et cetera, et cetera. So the first thing is, it's a conversation. It's a conversation when things aren't good. It's a conversation that doesn't invite the other person to lie. And that tells you that-- because we can complain about the other person being a liar, but we sometimes need to check to what degree am I a lying invitee, right? I set it up in such a way that you're never going to tell me the truth. Third, I respect that your entire sexuality-- that doesn't mean the act of sex, but your entire erotic world-- doesn't belong to me because we are married. You are still a sovereign, autonomous person. Fourth, there is permission-- very much what Dan said-- to recognize that you may have desires, attractions, crushes for other people, and it isn't instantly translated as "I'm not enough." And it is revisited over time, and it's that. And it's couples who maintain a good erotic connection with each other, which has nothing to do with how often they have sex, how many orgasms they have, how hard, how long. It's really a way of being with each other that makes them remain adult, sexualized people, which is different from family. You can become monogamous in the family, and often that also becomes a kiss of death because really, if your head is screwed up when on your shoulders, you do not want sex in the family. Your partner is not your mama, your daddy, your best friend. Your partner is your partner, and that ability to see them as other is essential to the maintaining of an erotic connection in a monogamous relationship. Yeah? DAN SAVAGE: Yeah. ESTHER PEREL: Good start? DAN SAVAGE: That's a great start. Usually, people would define the 98th percentile, the best case scenario, as two people made a monogamous commitment and honored it. They never fucked anybody else, ever, and they got to be together 50 years and dropped dead one day. And that's the marriage victory finish line. Somebody dies. ESTHER PEREL: But Dan, sex doesn't start just when you fuck. DAN SAVAGE: No, I agree. I completely agree. I'm just being intentionally reductive. I'm being a jerk on purpose. But that-- you can say-- if I told you there was this couple and one cheated on the other, the other cheated on the other, and they were together 35 years, and there was a handful of infidelities, and there's this couple together 50 years, and neither ever cheated on each other, which is the successful-- going off that, which is the successful relationship and the successful marriage? And everyone's going to say, without asking for any additional information, the 50-year, perfectly executed monogamy. That's the loving, committed, successful relationship. OK, alcoholism, physical violence, child abuse, and on, and on, and on in this relationship, not in that relationship. Now which one's the more successful? I just think that it's reductive to hold up monogamy as the most important measure of love, commitment, or success. But to answer your question, what would it look like? It would look like two people who made a monogamous commitment and didn't cheat. And a lot of people think they're in that relationship and are not. ESTHER PEREL: No, no. I'm sorry. For me, monogamous doesn't just mean-- the idea is not just how not to break the rules and not how now to violate the trust. It is also how to be together as an erotic couple. It's not enough not just-- DAN SAVAGE: And doing everything that you talked about makes successfully executing a monogamous commitment likelier, by giving each other permission to desire others but not act on that desire, not policing each other's sexuality or erotic life entirely, not regarding pornography when discovered as an infidelity or as evidence of an impending infidelity, or defining it as cheating, or getting on a cam show once or twice, or whatever else technology's made possible for us. The more strict and insane your definitions of cheating are, the likelier you are to be cheated on. You want the lowest bar definition of cheating if you want to be less likely to cheat or be cheated on, of course. [INAUDIBLE] Sorry. LOGAN URY: I think you were waiting for a while. AUDIENCE: Yes, I am. So I guess I had one question regarding the discussion on sex ed. So I guess in a way, it almost comes as a surprise to me that we need sex ed now with the internet in place. Empirically, obviously, there's a terrible case for that because for example, as Dan brought up earlier, there's this result that says if people get abstinence-only sex education, then it does measurably take them longer to start having sex. So basically, clearly we do have some degree of influence. But I guess-- I don't know. In my own personal case, when I was 12, I found "Savage Love," and that was a big part of how this development happened. So what would you say about-- essentially, should we expect that people will-- because of tools like the internet, start to develop this stuff more independently? DAN SAVAGE: You would think that the availability of so much really good sex ed online-- not just "Savage Love," but all these other sites-- Planned Parenthood sites, Scarlet Teen. There's a lot of great sex ed information out there. But we also have kids growing up in a really sex-negative culture that puts it in their heads that if they go looking for that information that they're dirty sex monsters and there's something wrong with them, and there's virtue in ignorance, and there's virtue in sex happening naturally and impulsively. If you lose control, that means there's so much love, passion there, and it sort of exonerates you for the dirty thing of having the sex. So the intentionality, the planning of it, the thinking about it in advance for a lot of kids is the barrier to accessing the information that seems so easily accessible. ESTHER PEREL: This is so important. Really, listen to this. DAN SAVAGE: I have a 17-year-old son, right? And we were hyper about sex ed with him. And particularly, a young teenage man, a boy, in this country, also particularly very hyper about consent and what it meant and what it looked like, and that's something they do not teach in sex ed because that's basically teaching young people how to talk people into fucking you. How do you get to yes? What does a yes look like? What does a no look like? And what does an implied no look like? Very important. And all of my conversations with my son, he did not want to have. I know that. We don't have to talk about that. But I couldn't know that he knew that because I knew that he would tell me he knew it because he wanted me to stop talking to him about sex, so I had to have those conversations with him whether he wanted to have them or not, and whether he needed me to have them with him or not because I couldn't know for sure that he didn't actually know. So I made an outline, and I was like, "Here are the things we're going to talk about. The more you fight this conversation, the longer it takes." And so we had those talks. But kids are really inhibited about seeking. You would think-- particularly, people in this room probably are seekers of information and ran out there and accessed it even as young people. And a lot of young people-- particularly young women and girls-- that they will-- they slut shame themselves in advance of seeking the information they may need. LOGAN URY: I think you two should pair up and teach a sex ed class online. That'd make a lot of people-- DAN SAVAGE: But then we have to compel people. That's why we need the national standard in actual sex ed curriculum, and we can't even have a national curriculum about geography without the right wing shitting its pants every day. ESTHER PEREL: Here's two things that you don't get when you go online, and it's also a problem with the sex education, that is. Sex education as I know it, everybody's in the class at the same time. It's not the boys get their education, the girls get their education. That's number one. Second of all, you learn to relate. You learn to listen to the nuances. The problem of the whole debate about consent is that it's become-- it's part of a culture that has lost the ability to read nuances and to travel ambiguities. Relationships are ambiguous. They're not fuck/no, in/out, yes/no. Life is not like that in the extremes in the relationship, and that you do not get from a screen. LOGAN URY: So we have time-- DAN SAVAGE: And the other thing-- a quick point about sex ed being mandatory and across the board is that we can be really proactive about educating our kids about sex, but our kids aren't going to sleep only with other people's-- the kids of other parents who are hyperactive about educating their kids. It's the stirring into the general population of kids who know nothing about sex that imperils all of our kids, whether they have good or decent some sex education or not. LOGAN URY: So we have time for one more question, and then I don't want to miss out on book signing in the back, so go for it. AUDIENCE: So when you think about it and rationalize the idea of no more monogamy, it makes sense. However, the feelings and emotions do not follow, with being wired by the society to feel bad about it over decades. So how do you cut the wire and make emotions match the thoughts, and how was the process for you? DAN SAVAGE: You're referring to jealousy, particularly? AUDIENCE: Yeah, and other feelings [INAUDIBLE]. DAN SAVAGE: People often say, we get conversations about non-monogamy or monogamish-amy or whatever, they bring up jealousy as a disqualifier somehow, that these feelings of jealousy mean that we shouldn't have this kind of relationship, or I'm incapable of having this kind of relationship, or that because there's jealousy within our relationship that we as a couple obviously can't be non-monogamous. I don't think every couple needs to be, or should be, or would be happier being non-monogamous. I'm not prescriptive about it. But it has been my experience that processing that jealousy and talking it out and working through it is how we demonstrated to each other that this was the right model for us, that we were capable of doing this. So it was in the handling of this thing that a lot of people think is some sort of disqualifying kryptonite that we developed the emotional tools, and really the connection, to do this thing. So I don't think jealousy as an emotion and as an experience means you can't or shouldn't do it. It's how you process that and how you handle It. And it's case specific. For some people, jealousy is too powerful, and too strong, and too destabilizing, and too risky, and so maybe a non-monogamous thing isn't the best idea for you-- not the best idea for you now. The first four years of my relationship with Terry, we were strictly monogamous because he was very, very jealous and a little insecure about everything and about it. But who he is now is very different from who he was 21 years ago. The relationship is now old enough to drink in all 50 states. ESTHER PEREL: But differently, maybe, for me-- if I have a position, it's that we need multiple models. We need something that breathes, and that's alive, and that changes and thrives. And if for you you say "I like one person," if there's no passion, generally it's monogamous. Passion doesn't share well. It's after. When you're passionate, you love single-mined. You're very, very focused on one person. And when you have had lots of insecurity in your life and massive trauma in your life, sometimes it makes you want to just have somebody that is there for you that's reliable, stable, secure, and you do not want to have to deal with the unknown of multiples. We have lots of different pieces of us that come to this question, and the goal is not for you to try to see how can I be non-monogamous. If your nature, if your sensibility is one that is more single, stay like this if you like it, if it works for you. If one day you change, then go accordingly to that. Don't align yourself with an ideology. The problem of the conversation of open/close monogamy is that it becomes very quickly ideological and fractured and polarized. I don't think that's right. I think we need a conversation. Monogamy has evolved all along. I think that premarital sex was an inconceivably thing not too long ago, and today having sex inside the relationship with others is to some people inconceivable, but it is the same line. It all happened because somebody democratized contraception, by the way. Without that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So you stay true to your sensibility and to your-- DAN SAVAGE: While recognizing your sensibility may change, and what's working for you now may be something you need to revisit later, and you have that ability and that power to revisit later. This gets me into trouble with the non-monogamy proselytizers when I say this. But in my-- all anecdotal but tons of mail and tons of eyewitness stuff-- in my experience, the relationships that were non-monogamous out of the gate usually don't "succeed." And we can argue what's the definition of success in a relationship. Together until you're both dead or 'til one of you is dead is the idea. If you're together for three months, six months, two years, 10 years, 20 years, and you part and you both learned, your both grew, there's still affection there, it was a low-conflict relationship, and you both survived it, I think those relationships also have to be regarded as successful relationships. But if what you want is a long-term commitment, someone by your side long haul-- in my experience, and borne out by the mail and borne out by what I've seen in my communities, is the ones that are non-monogamous that first week aren't long-haul relationships-- not necessarily unsuccessful, but not long-haul. LOGAN URY: That's all we have time for, but thank you so much. This was a fascinating conversation. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 413,395
Rating: 4.7882986 out of 5
Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Love, Marriage Monogamy, Dan Savage, Esther Perel, dan savage monogamy, dan savage interview, esther perel interview
Id: s7E9ASb3LfE
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Length: 62min 13sec (3733 seconds)
Published: Thu Feb 04 2016
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