Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?

By Benjamin J. Dueholm

All the same, behind Savage’s pragmatism stand some fairly strong claims about how sex relates to selfhood. Whatever else he ends up advising a correspondent to do, Savage tends to insist that sexual inclinations—from high libido and a desire for multiple partners to very rare kinks and fetishes—are immutable and even dominant characteristics of any personality. Some desires may be impossible to fulfill, others are flagrantly immoral, and most any can be destructive when pursued without regard for the kinds of ethical guidelines Savage lays out. But for Savage, no matter how we direct its expression, our sexual self is our truest self.

In recent years Savage’s moral elevation of sexual fulfillment has been bolstered by his embrace of popularized accounts of evolutionary biology, which purport to find our true human nature in the primordial past or in our evolutionary cousins, the randy bonobos and aggressive chimpanzees. Last year Savage cowrote one week’s column with the authors of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, calling their book “the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey.” It caused a stir among his readers, so he followed up with his own comments. “What the authors of Sex at Dawn believe—and what I think they prove—is that we are a naturally nonmonogamous species, despite what we’ve been told for millennia by preachers and for centuries by scientists.” Culture—represented here by hectoring, fanatical preachers, and hectoring, misguided scientists—is a long postscript, an imposition on our true selves. People should live up to their monogamous commitments, which, after all, have the form of a mutually negotiated contract. But they should not expect anything unrealistic from themselves or each other, since such agreements, however binding, are unnatural. Sex will have its way with us one way or another—either by shaping our commitments to the form of its fulfillment or by making us miserable. For Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. For Dan Savage, we are what we enduringly desire.

As it happens, this vision fits rather well in a society built around consumption. If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services. No false advertising, no lemons, nothing omitted from the fine print: in the deregulated marketplace of modern intimacy, Dan Savage has become a kind of Better Business Bureau, laying out the rules by which individuals, as rationally optimizing firms, negotiate their wildly diverse transactions.

Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in the global economy, and for many of the same reasons. It takes into account only a narrow range of our motivations, overstates our rationality and our foresight, downplays the costs of transactions, and ignores the asymmetries of information that complicate any exchange of love or money. For society as a whole, it entails a utopian faith in the capacity of millions of appetites to work themselves out into an optimal economy of sex—a trading floor where the cultural institutions of domesticity once stood. And for the individual, it may only replace the old sexual frustrations with new emotional ones. People who think they are motivated only by lust may end up feeling love; people who forswear any strings may feel them forming; and perfect transparency may prove an ideal no less unattainable than perfect monogamy. I think of a heartbreaking letter in 2010 that illustrated many of these problems at once. A man who saw a woman every other week for four months heard from her, two months after ending things, that she had gotten pregnant and had a miscarriage. Savage was all but certain that the woman’s story was false. But regardless, he said, “your emotional obligations to her ended when the relationship did, and your financial obligations ended with the miscarriage.” Savage’s advice may have been practical, but it had all the warmth of a legal waiver of liability.

My own history as a reader of “Savage Love” is perhaps somewhat unique. Like many of my friends, I began reading his column in my early teens (in Madison, Wisconsin, where Savage got his start); and the deregulated world of intimate relationships that he writes about is the one where I grew up. Now, as an adult, I find myself in a line of work where I too occasionally counsel people about their relationships: I am a Lutheran minister. As a pastor in a young, upwardly mobile neighborhood in Chicago, I still read Savage fairly regularly. And often the questions he takes up are more relevant to the people in my pews than the arguments over contraception, cohabitation, divorce, and homosexuality that still roil some parts of the church. Those debates are largely over here on Chicago’s North Side. I have yet to marry a couple that wasn’t living together before the vows. 

And even where resistance to these changing mores remains fierce, the goal of a happy sex life has come up in the world. For all the talk one finds in Savage’s columns and comment threads about Puritanism, repression, and sex-negativity, we live in a culture that is almost uniformly and explicitly devoted to sexual satisfaction as a very high, if not necessarily the highest, good. Advertisements for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra air during prime time (“Will you be ready?” one of them asks), and even conservative Christians have a substantial niche-publishing industry catering to their intimate needs. Items that not long ago were either illegal or at least pretty challenging to acquire are now available in posh storefronts on Chicago’s Milwaukee Avenue. This does not always reflect, as some would have it, a slouching toward Gomorrah—an unequivocal decline in moral standards—but often a more positive evaluation of the good that flows from sexuality expressed in happy and forthright ways. It’s not so surprising, then, that a sex columnist of Savage’s scope and talent would hold the commanding heights of a culture that grants erotic satisfaction such a central role in its view of the good life.

On the big question of whether human sexuality is a destructive force to be minimally accommodated or a source of human flourishing to be properly ordered, there is surprisingly little disagreement. The debates that continue over pornography and open relationships are driven less by positive or negative attitudes toward sexual satisfaction per se than by differing views of how sexual satisfaction relates to everything else in life. And this is where Savage’s ethics make their most problematic claims—by separating and elevating sexual satisfaction above other things people value.

Consider the case of a correspondent from late in 2009. A straight male in his late twenties, the writer felt indicted by a distinction Savage had drawn in a recent column between being an “honest nonmonogamous dude” (HND) and a “cheating piece of shit” (CPOS). “I have a girlfriend of several years whom I live with and love very much,” he writes.

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Benjamin J. Dueholm is a writer and Lutheran pastor working in Chicago.

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