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Savage Love

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Savage/Love is also the title of a short play by Sam Shepard.

Savage Love is a syndicated sex-advice column by Dan Savage, appearing weekly in several dozen newspapers, mainly free city papers in the U.S. and Canada, but also newspapers in Europe and Asia. It started in 1991 with the first issue of the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. It can also be found on The Onion AV Club [1], The Chicago Reader[2] and its affiliated paper Reader's Guide to Arts & Entertainment.

The openly gay author uses the column as a forum for his strong opinions that often flout "family values"; he often encourages advice-seekers to pursue their fetishes. The tone of the column is humorous, and Savage does not shy away from using profanity. He is strongly opposed to both bestiality and incest. Though Savage encourages sexual experimentation, he does not encourage carelessness. He frequently makes use of his position — that of a columnist with a large and loyal audience — to spread AIDS awareness and to promote safe sex. In political matters, Savage occasionally shows a libertarian bent. He does however vote Democratic because he believes that voting for minority parties gives votes to the Republicans.

For the first six years of the column, Savage had his readers address him with "Hey faggot," as a comment on previous efforts to recapture offensive words. He was criticized for this by some gay activists.

Neologisms

During the run of Savage Love, Savage has popularized several neologisms.

Pegging

In 2001 Savage challenged readers of his column to name the sex act in which a woman uses a strap-on dildo to perform anal sex on her male partner. After multiple nominations and a reader vote, the verb "peg" was chosen (despite Savage's aunt bearing the name Peg) with a 43% plurality over runners up "bob" and "punt". Some say that the introduction of this neologism was successful in the community of non-vanilla sex, perhaps due to the fact that the practice of pegging existed prior to the neologism, but was unnamed.

GGG

Dan Savage and his readers often use the abbreviation GGG. This stands for "good, giving and game", and generally refers to Mr. Savage's ideal for healthy human sexuality: that a partner should be "good, giving and game" when presented with a person's fantasy, however kinky or unusual.

Santorum

Savage reacted strongly to United States Senator Rick Santorum's statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press published April 20, 2003. (See Santorum controversy for the details.) In the interview, Santorum describes gay sex as part of a class of deviant sexual behavior, including incest, polygamy, and bestiality, which he said threaten society and the family. Furthermore Santorum stated that he believed consenting adults do not have a Constitutional right to privacy with respect to sexual acts.

Savage was outraged by these statements. At the suggestion of a reader, Savage challenged his audience to come up with a sex-related definition for the word santorum as a satirical form of political protest for the express purpose of "memorializ[ing] the Santorum scandal […] by attaching his name to a sex act that would make his big, white teeth fall out of his big, empty head".

After Savage published several definitions suggested by readers, a vote was taken among the readers of his column. The winning definition: "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex" was announced in the June 12, 2003 column.

Fans of Savage (among others) have made a concerted effort to make the newly coined term a part of the English language, setting up a web site[3] for the purpose and employing Google bombing to drive that site to the first result slot for a Google search on "santorum".

At its annual meeting in January 2005, the American Dialect Society selected "santorum" as the "Most Outrageous" word of the year 2004. The Economist magazine referenced "santorum" in a January 5, 2006 blurb about Rick Santorum. The Daily Show also referenced the term in its July 12, 2006 episode.

ITMFA

For years, Savage has told his readers in bad relationships to "DTMFA", or "Dump the Motherfucker Already." In March 2006, Savage launched a "new website" to popularize "ITMFA", or "Impeach the Motherfucker Already," which "one of Dan's readers suggested he popularize". The ITMFA site is set up as a blog, with Savage as the main writer, showcasing how people have applied the ITMFA term to homemade tee shirts, signs, buttons and even license plates.

Doorknob licking and vote fraud

Salon.com assigned Dan Savage to write about Republican Gary Bauer's 2000 election campaign. Mr. Savage came down with the flu during the assignment, and alleges he attempted to sabotage the campaign by licking doorknobs, staplers, phones and computer keyboards so that the staffers might catch the flu as well [4].

Savage also alleges that he voted in the 2000 Iowa Caucus, although he was not lawfully registered to vote in that state.[1]


Links related to "pegging":

Links related to "santorum":

NOTES

  1. ^ Savage, Dan, Skipping Towards Gomorrah, Dutton, 2002, pp. 34-38; Stalking Gary Bauer, salon.com , Jan. 25, 2000
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