Thread by @doctorow

Like so many, I started reading @fakedansavage for prurient kicks - every week, I'd pick up @nowtoronto and check the club listings, movie reviews, municipal scandal reporting, and then I'd look around the subway car before turning to his Savage Love column.

1/

Savage's sex advice column exposed (!) me to a much wider spectrum of human sexuality than I encountered even in the radical, politicized, sex-positive, queer-friendly circles I ran in, and Savage's frank, fully, raunchy and EMPATHIC replies were even more eye-opening.

2/

That's Savage's brilliant bait-and-switch: come for graphic sexual content, stay for thoughtful and well-thought-through philosophy - a philosophy that is forgiving when it needs to be (see, e.g., Savage's famous tolerance for cheating as more normal than anyone admits).

3/

But also blistering when warranted, as with Savage's catchphrase "Dump the motherfucker already" (abbreviate to DTMFA to preserve space in his syndicated column), with which he chides people who are trying to make it work with someone who is fundamentally unworkable.

4/

For more than a decade, Savage has run a wildly successful and even more entertaining podcast version of his column, the Savage Lovecast, featuring guest-experts, recorded audience reactions, and Savage's acerbic and charming narration.

savage.love

5/

With his frank sexual language and graphic descriptions, Savage is an unlikely culture-maker, but also a wildly successful one. Just consider the many coinages he's introduced to everyday English.

6/

These include the political ("santorum: the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex," named for homophobic senator Rick Santorum) and the sexual ("pegging: when a man is anally penetrated by a woman wearing a strap-on dildo").

7/

But most of all, Savage-isms are about the place where relationships and sex meet: "GGG" ("good, giving and game"), "the campsite rule" ("older partners' responsibility to leave younger partners in at least as good a shape as they were in when you began your relationship").

8/

These get to the core of Savage's mission and the secret to his enduring success: they acknowledge that sex is important to most adults' lives, and set out to make people happy about their sexual selves, by being kind to the people they have sex with.

9/

Beyond his columns, podcasts and film-festivals, Savage has published many books about sex and relationships, but his latest, "Savage Love A-Z" is my new favorite.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/669583/s…

10/

As the title suggests, the book is an illustrated, alphabetical tour through the concepts and tropes of Savage's decades-long corpus of sexual wisdom, humor and learning (including many frank admissions of where he got it wrong, listened to critics, and got better).

11/

I was skeptical of the alphabetical organizational structure - it's an awfully arbitrary way to put together a lighthearted-but-deadly-serious manual for a happier, more satisfying, kinder way of living.

12/

But the structure won me over: after all, our relationship and sex problems are chaotic and blended, too - if sex was just a matter of this thing and that thing rubbing together, there'd be no problems.

13/

The thing that makes sex so difficult isn't the mechanics, it's the entanglements - our imaginations, our expectations, our shames, our fears, our hopes. Logistics. Vocabulary. Secrecy. The endless complexity of OTHER PEOPLE and all their inscrutable, inexpressable STUFF.

14/

It all happens at once, and none of it can be cleanly distentangled from the rest of it. The commonplaces of sex and relationship advice are, on their face, nonsense.

15/

Our cultural consensus is a contrafactual upside-down world in which love is primarily monogamous and lifelong, men don't look at porn, women don't like sex, everyone has one true love, and a good sexual partner just KNOWS what you want without ever having to discuss it.

16/

Savage invites us to treat that consensus with the contempt it deserves, and to join him - and his readers, whose words and voices are always present in his work - in the far more delightful, weirder, more fun, and NICER reality.

17/

Most of us are woefully ill-equipped for reality, misinformed by the ways religion, sex-phobia, and fairy tales "put a zap on our heads" (another Savage-ism). Savage is quartermaster for our journey to the world as it really is - and guide to the better world it could be.

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avo…