Facebook
Twitter
Features
Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?
In 2000, Savage answered a letter from a fifteen-year-old boy who was using both meth and heroin and engaging in a regular ménage à trois with his girlfriend and an adult man. The question the teen posed to Savage was not, needless to say, whether he should be having sex before marriage (or high school graduation). Nor, for that matter, was he asking whether it was advisable to take part in a legally risky threesome, or to dabble in hard substances. Rather, the boy’s question was whether he, “a big hippie,” had an obligation to tell the man, “an avid anti-drugger,” about his use of meth and heroin. Savage was not exactly affirming in his response:
“You are an idiot. The drugs you’re doing, young skank, are dangerous and, however careful you are with needles, sooner or later they’re going to kill you,” he wrote. “What should you do about your drug-phobic, statutory-rapist fuck buddy? Well, I’d say that like any good hippie you should be open, honest, loyal, brave, and true. Tell him what the holes in your arm are all about, and give him the option of staying or going. You say you have feelings for this guy, and if that’s the case, you owe him the truth. If that’s not the case, well, then you might as well go ahead and steal his stereo and TV set now.”
Savage’s advice here faintly echoes the presumptions against hard drug use and teenage risky behavior that prevailed in Ann Landers’s day, but it pivots on the boy’s obligation to disclose any and all information of relevance to a sexual partner—the first ground rule of Savage’s ethics. Full disclosure is a minimal standard, but one that many who have sought Savage’s advice fail to meet. “This sounds more like a question for The Ethicist, a charming new advice column in The New York Times Magazine, but since you asked, I’ll give it a go,” he wrote in 1999 to a young man living with a woman he didn’t love because he couldn’t afford his own place. “You are an asshole … You’re allowing this woman to make assumptions—false assumptions—about your intentions for your own gain.” Meanwhile, he encouraged a correspondent with a long history of sexual infidelity to become an honest woman—by telling her partners about her need to stray: “Where there are no lies of commission or omission, SKANK, there’s no deceit. And where there’s no deceit, there are no boys whose hearts are broken when they find out they are being cheated on.” The configurations involved in these questions, from simple cohabitation to three-way relations to old-fashioned cheating, are not at issue. The obligation of each questioner to be up front about what they want and do is what drives the ethical dilemma in each case.
The second rule in Savage ethics is autonomy. To a scruple-plagued “feeder” (someone aroused by the excessive eating of a partner, known as a “gainer”), he wrote that she and her boyfriend should “negotiate an explicit ‘power exchange contract’ where his diet and weight are concerned” in order to keep their shared fetish within some reasonably healthy limits. All the same, “our bodies are our own … they’re ours to use, abuse, and since we’re all going to die one day, they’re ours to use up.” A “high-functioning regular heroin user (not quite an addict)” wrote to ask whether drug use is a civil rights issue along the same lines as gay rights. After some hemming and hawing, Savage fell back on the same principle at work in the feeder/gainer scenario. “Yeah, the freedom to use drugs can certainly be viewed as a civil-rights issue: It’s about the right to control what you do with your own body, and that argument resonates with others advanced by gay-rights advocates and advocates of reproductive choice.” It’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of a junkie-rights movement, but it’s hard to withhold if recreational erotic weight gain is also ethically protected by self-ownership.
Reciprocity constitutes the third rule of Savage’s ethical worldview. A heated contretemps in his column—one of many over the years—concerned the relationship between low libido and monogamy. “You can have strict monogamy or you can have a low libido, ladies, but you can’t have both,” he wrote, adding, “Oh, and guys? You need to accept those tide-you-over blowjobs and handjobs just as cheerfully as she gives them.” People who want to open up their relationships are told that the opening must work both ways, and Savage has spent more than one column teasing out what precisely constitutes a mutual departure from monogamy. He has even waded into the field of housework. “If there’s some semblance of balance, if there’s cheerful reciprocity, then why not do his damn laundry?” he tells a woman concerned about her otherwise-stellar boyfriend’s poor housekeeping habits.
Fourth, Savage has consistently advocated a minimum standard of performance for each partner in a relationship. His knack for turning catchy maxims into acronyms and abbreviations struck gold with GGG, a bullet-pointed ideal of mutual sexual satisfaction: “Think ‘good in bed,’ ‘giving equal time and equal pleasure,’ and ‘game for anything’—within reason.” Obstinate failure in these areas is grounds for one partner to DTMFA (Dump the Motherfucker Already). His metaphors, always vivid, can become straightforwardly commercial on this point. “Oral sex is standard,” he has repeatedly said. “Any model that comes without it should be returned to the lot.”
Underlying all of Savage’s principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone. Disclosure is necessary, but not beyond reason. “Honesty [is] the best policy and all,” he advised a guilty boyfriend, but “each of us gets to take at least one big secret to the grave.” Stuck with a husband whose porn stash has grown beyond what you thought you were signing up for? Put it behind closed doors and try not to think about it. Who knows how many good relationships have been saved—and how many disastrous marriages have been averted—by heeding a Savage insistence on disclosing the unmet need, tolerating the within-reason quirk, or forgiving the endurable lapse? In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. “A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted,” he advised one very uptight spouse, “all leavened by the occasional orgasm.”
Ella on May 07, 2011 4:47 AM:
The "it gets better" videos on YouTube are beautiful.
Sarah Marshall on May 07, 2011 6:12 PM:
Wow, Savage has really "opened the doors" to the discussion of sex. Kudos on the article as I really had no idea how far he has gone. Maybe Savage is making us a bit more open in general to the varieties of life and living it.
Brenda Helverson on May 08, 2011 8:12 PM:
Whether you like Dan or not, The Stranger is far and away the best newspaper in Seattle. I trust their political writing and rely on their election endorsements. Dan's leadership in the political arena is an asset to Seattle.
As far as his sex advice is concerned, I'm a bit too old to join in. So to paraphrase Earl Butz, I no play-a the game, so I no make-a the rules.