Dan Savage is neither his generation’s Dr. Ruth nor his generation’s Ann Landers. Though he famously works from the latter columnist’s old desk, Savage is fully and completely his own man — a maverick who’s taught entire generations how to talk about sex. Since his first days as an advice-giver, back in 1991, he’s helped straight, gay, poly, bi, queer, and transgender people find new levels of acceptance for themselves (and from others). He’s dubbed widely used terms like “monogamish” (the idea of being committed with some exceptions) and developed a massive platform to empower LGBTQI youth. He’s also gone to great lengths to destigmatize kink, and with it the shame-connection prevalent in America’s sexual consciousness for so long.
Over the summer, Savage launched a new podcast titled Hot Mic. The format allows him to riff on stories told by a wide range of comedians and yarn spinners, without having to be in fully empathetic columnist mode. It’s a nice compliment to the author/speaker/activist’s nationally syndicated column Savage Love and the Savage Lovecast. Through it all, Savage does what he’s always done best: Destigmatize sexuality, throw out judgement, and remind us that as long as sex is consensual and legal, it doesn’t have to be so goddamn serious.
This week, we sat down with Savage to talk about the new podcast, the evolution of sex, and how conversations about sex are shifting.
Tell me about the podcast and what the background of it is.
Well, they approached me, the folks at Audible, looking at all of these storytelling shows, sex and relationship storytelling shows, across the country, drawing the best stories from them, and patching them together with my commentaries on the stories, which is the, I guess, the added element, and doing this show that draws attention to all these great shows like “RISK,” and and “Bawdy Storytelling.”
Ultimately, it allows me to, instead of giving advice on the questions of listeners, driving the show, like with the “Lovecast,” it allows these storytellers and their experiences to drive the shows without giving advice and just thinking thoughts.
At this point, is it almost like your brand is “Sexual Philosopher” in some ways?
Oh, I don’t know. That’s a little grand. Sex is a subject that everybody feels like they’re an expert on. In a way, each of us is an expert on their own sexuality. I don’t think that I’m any more of a sexual philosopher than anyone else who’s burdened with a sexuality.
As human sexuality evolves, which it’s, obviously, just always naturally going to do, you have been this voice for a sort of sexuality that seems to finally be having its moment. This idea of being your good, giving, and game, the idea of this deep level acceptance.
It does seem that people have finally come to the understanding, maybe the majority of people, that when it comes to human sexuality, variance is the norm. I used to get … Every question was, “Is this normal? Am I normal? Is my boyfriend normal? Is what I’m being asked to do normal?”
The answer to that question is always, “No, you’re not normal. No, that’s not normal.” We now know that “normality,” when it comes to sexuality, was a myth, that what we hold up as normal is freakishly abnormal.
When you ask people, “What’s normal sex? What’s a normal relationship,” they’ll tell you, “Missionary position. Vaginal intercourse between married, opposite sex couples in the middle of the night, the lights off, and their kid’s asleep down the hall.”
That is the minority activity, if not the minority taste. People finally seem to have come to an understanding of that.
You almost think that part of it is … Has to do with our exploding population, and the fact that, is sex being looked at as a recreation more than ever?
Well, you don’t hear that anymore. I have to remember when you did hear people debating “recreational” versus “procreational” sex. Outside of conference rooms in the Vatican, you don’t hear that debate so much anymore. Everyone sort of understands that the vast and overwhelming majority of the sex that any individual has had over the course of their lives is recreational. Even the most dedicated Catholic sperminator like Rick Santorum has sevenish kids, but has presumably had more sex than that.
I think people are finally understanding that sex is … It plays a role in human culture and in our lives, in addition to procreation. There’s a reason we don’t go into heat. There’s a reason ovulation is hidden. There’s a reason we produce so much sperm. That reason is, the other stuff that human sexuality does, and sexual expression does, sexual attraction does, and our relationships do. It’s in that social bonds, bonds intimacy, not just bonds of reproduction, bonds of scrambling DNA together, and shitting out kids.
You do such a good job of mixing the high-brow, and the fact that you … Not only are you deeply accepting, but I also think that you have a real affection for humanity, then, being able to be deeply funny. Is that always the motor, do you think, that has made it so natural for the nation to go to you to talk about sex?
You know, I’ve given advice to some of the children of people I was giving advice to before these children were born. But, not yet the grandchildren. I haven’t quite reached late-stage Ann Landers territory. One day. Yes, I will. They will one day pry my column from my cold dead hands just like they pried hers. What was the question? I lost the thread.
I guess just, do you see that as part of what has made you at the forefront of this conversation, is your ability to be funny, while also going deep, while also putting people at ease. You can almost argue that that’s the essence of sex right there is to be fun, and be meaningful, and put people at ease depending on the situation.
Also, to be thoughtful about it. When I started “Savage Love” in 1990, we were talking about in ’91, it premiered, the column, the whole idea, besides I was going to be a gay guy giving sex advice to straight people and making fun of straight people, was that we would let people use the language they actually use in print, the language they usually talk about sex with their friends because up to that moment in almost all places, you had to switch into a medical jargon-laden speech when you talked about sex. You couldn’t be funny and serious about it.
When you think about, you can go to your friends and talk about your sex life and you seek their advice, the person may just make fun of you, and everybody laughs because … Everybody has laughed because sex is just so incriminating and indicting of us all and desire makes fools of us all. We all look ridiculous in pursuit of it, look ridiculous doing it, feel ridiculous immediately afterwards, and, then, are at it again, like an hour later we want to be ridiculous all over again.
You have to laugh. People talk about humor as a weapon of the powerless in confrontation with the powerful. Sex is a power in our lives. It’s more powerful than we are. We have to deploy humor to defend ourselves and steal back a little bit of its power and undermine it. Sex, I like to say, it built us. Natural selection and spontaneous mutation, sex built us. It’s building whatever’s coming after us. It’s older than we are. It’s 500 million years old, I think sexual reproduction is. Our species is a quarter of a million years old, 200,000 years old? The idea that we’re in charge of sex is ridiculous. We are a lot less powerful than sex is.
I would imagine a listener of the new podcast can get a scope of the idea of what you feel a healthy sexual being is. Where does that stand now? What is your 2017 picture of a person entering their sexual prime being on point, especially in an era where we’ve had serious problems in the past couple years with consent. There are huge —
Or an acknowledgment of the problems we’ve always had with consent, more of a discussion about it.
Yeah. Well put. Well put. Touche. And we’ve finally seen it coming to a head.
So where do you see 2017, like the young person’s … What’s your ideal of healthy sexuality, I guess?
It’s someone who accepts themselves, and accepts their sexuality, and is also gracious and compassionate in accepting others’ sexualities, and isn’t terrified of their sexuality, whatever it might be. That doesn’t mean someone necessarily is having sex, even. They can be asexual, and perfectly content, and self-actualized without sexual intercourse or intimacy.
It really is someone who knows themselves and is brave enough to be themselves, who knows themselves and is brave enough to be themselves, and wants only that others in their lives be their authentic selves, as well, whether that means they’re someone you can be with sexually or romantically, or if that disqualifies them. You want them to be who they are.
That’s sort of amorphous and vague, but human sexuality is so diverse that there is no one standard. There used to be a lot of — and maybe I, 25 years ago, trafficked in this a little bit — this attitude that if you’re not having sex, you’re damaged, where if you’re having a lot of sex, different kinds of sex that certainly gay people got that for not having straight sex, you’re damaged.
That’s not true anymore. Are you content? Are you happy? Is your partner content, or are your partners content? Are they happy? If the answer to that is “yes,” then, great. Sometimes people talk about sexless marriages. I talk about sexless marriages a lot. Whenever I’m on a panel where this comes up, I always jump in at some point to say, “There are a lot of wonderful sexless marriages out there. The only time sexless marriage is a problem is when one or the other of the persons in it are miserable.” If there’s a sexless marriage, a companion marriage, and it’s joyful, and no one feels deprived, or neglected, or trapped, we can’t look at that marriage and say, “It’s defective because there’s no sex,” because marriage isn’t just sex or isn’t really sex. We don’t look at a couple of married 90-year olds who are in an old folk’s home together and not banging it every night and say, “Well, you’re not really married now that you’re not fucking.”
You’re the guy I feel like who the most in the public sphere has really embodies that idea, that Walt Whitman idea, that we contain multitudes and have encouraged people over the decades to be accepting of it. Obviously, our culture has so many acceptance problems, especially post-Trump, they’ve, at least, bubbled to the surface, or come to a head the way a pimple might.
Do you feel like we are becoming more accepting of one another as human beings? Is that happening?
Well, I could hope so, although it seems a bit whistling past the graveyard as to say it at this moment with the alt-right on the rise, Nazi’s marching the streets, to say we’re more accepting. We seem to have gotten past the idea that queer people aren’t human beings, most of us, the majority of us. We seem to be more accepting of legitimacy of non-monogamy, or open marriages, or relationships than we used to be. I like to think that I helped contribute to that on both scores.
I think you’re huge, obviously, on both counts.
I do think that the gay rights movement deserves a lot of credit for this, the LGBT civil rights movement. Gay people came out and started telling a difficult truth about our sexuality, about our sexual orientations, our sexual expression, owning it, and, then, not apologizing for it, even the aspects of it that shock idiot straight people and sometimes even more idiotic queer people. We created a space, or we set an example, for straight people to begin to tell the truths about their sexualities because heterosexuality wasn’t what everyone was pretending it was.
I think a straight person who stumbles onto the Gay Pride Parade, the lesson they take away is, “I’m going to look at all the different ways to be gay, or queer.” Here’s the Dikes On Bikes, and here’s the Gay Man’s SM Group, and here’s the Queer Christian Organization, and here’s the Trans Contingent, and here’s the people who work at Amazon marching down the street. The takeaway is, “Wow. There’s so many different ways to be gay. Why is there just one way to be straight?” I think that’s what the LGBT civil rights movement put in the heads of many, many straight people, that in freeing ourselves from the pressure to be straight, we’re freeing straight people from the pressure to be straight in just one way.
Wow. That really opened up the idea that, “Sex itself — regarding of whatever your orientation or preferences are — is diverse.”
Yes. Just as gay sexuality can be expressed in a million different ways, so should straight sexuality be, or so is straight sexuality. That burden of “normal” fell. Once you said you were gay, you were free. “Normal” was irrelevant. You already weren’t. You were disqualified. The burden of “normal” was on straight people. I don’t get questions from gay people saying, “This is what I want. Is that normal” because they knew they weren’t. They didn’t have to obsess about that anymore, but straight people did. Now, straight people, I think, have it in their heads that they’re not normal either. They don’t have to carry those chains.
We’re seeing much more mainstreaming of what you had initially called “monogamish,” or relationships with a little more vague boundaries as far as exclusivity and openness. Definitely, I think that it’s certainly come into the mainstream pop culture, at least. Where’s your head on that now, and do you feel some bit of pride for helping people wrap their own heads around it?
I do feel a bit of pride in helping people wrap their heads around it. I don’t think we see more of it now. I just think there’s more truth about it now, more truth telling about it now. It’s something I used to hear a lot, and I hear less these days. Anytime I told a married couple to go have that three-way, or the married straight couple, I’d get all this pull back from people saying, “Everybody I know who’s ever had a three-way or been in an open relationship wound up getting divorced.” My response was always, “Those are the ones you know about. You know people who’ve had three-ways that didn’t break up, but you didn’t hear about the three-ways because they didn’t break up.”
Straight people weren’t out about being non-monogamous unless it contributed to the end of the relationship, whereas gay couples who are open are like, their friends all know. Their families often know, right, but straight couples all too often were closeted about being successfully non-monogamous. Straight people only heard about the failures. Then, because their sample was skewed, concluded that it was always the death, the beginning of the end.
Now, not so much. Now more and more straight people are honestly open about how open they are. The idea of monogamous isn’t just openness. It’s also an acknowledgement that even if you are in a monogamous relationship, you’re still going to want to fuck other people. One of the lies I’ve been fighting since I started writing the column was that being in love means you don’t want to fuck other people. You can be in love and still want to fuck other people. You will want to fuck other people, and so will the person who’s in love with you. Monogamous means you will refrain from fucking other people, but you’ll still want to. So much conflict is generated in people’s relationship when evidence would surface which both should just accept to be true. “Oh, my God. You checked out that waiter.” “Well, of course I did. The waiter’s really hot.” “You want to fuck the barista.” “Yeah, of course I do, but I’m not going to because I’m in love with you. I’ve made a commitment, but, of course, I want to fuck the barista.”
“You want to fuck your personal trainer?” Who in the whole history of personal trainers has ever hired a personal trainer they didn’t want to fuck? In all my life I was talking personal trainers, I was, “Yeah, dude, of course your wife wants to fuck her personal trainer. The question is, is she going to fuck her personal trainer?” That’s where the commitment comes. If monogamy was a natural extension of love, we wouldn’t make a monogamous commitment. It would just be a default setting. We wouldn’t have to talk about it.
I think that by bringing some of these ideas out in the mainstream, now the argument against these people who aren’t naturally calibrated to be monogamous, but then pretend to be that way, and is, “Look. You could have fucking said something. You owed it to your partner to say something in the beginning, or to renegotiate after 10 years of marriage, or whatever.” You’ve brought people out into the limelight who are really having these tough conversations.
We call that, “Use Your Words.” Use your words. Tell the truth. Ask for what you want. Tell them who you actually are, but the culture puts an enormous slap on people’s heads. You have to be good. This is what we define as good, and if you fall short of good, you should try to be good. People don’t want to self-identify as bad. A lot of it gets heaped up on straight guys. Women are naturally monogamous, the keeper of the flame, more interested in intimacy and commitment, and men are dogs and pigs.
What we know now is, women are as dogish and pigish as men. The difference is that women have to deal with violence, and slut-shaming, and are controlled and constrained by those forces, but left to their own devices and a world without violence or slut-shaming, women would act just like men do if they were as entitled and empowered. A lot of “Men are pigs. Men are awful”… That puts a seed in guy’s heads: They’re guilty about their sexuality.
