American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  Sex is a powerful, primal force, and as much as we like to pretend that we’re in control of it—as much as we like to pretend we’re in complete control of ourselves—we’re not. Sex came first. Sex came before Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Buddha, L. Ron, and Joseph Smith. Before there was marriage, there was sex. Before there was religion, there was sex. Hundreds of millions of years before there were humans, there was sex. And sex will continue long after we’re gone.

  Humans created religion partly to channel sex, to sanctify and elevate it, to control and regulate it. I don’t believe that we should do away with any and all controls; nor do I believe that a particular sexual encounter can’t be greater than the sum of its sweaty parts. Sex is a powerful and potentially destructive force; sex can be deeply meaningful. But some of the controls we have placed on human sexual expression are idiotic and unworkable, products of a time when we didn’t understand human hair growth—not to mention why the sun came up every day—much less human sexuality.

  We have brains, of course, and the ability to make up our own minds, which means we’re no more helpless before our sexual desires than we are before the hang-ups pounded into our heads in churches or in our abstinence-only or abstinence-based sex-ed classes. But desire is like breathing: It’s a physiological process that we’re not entirely in control of. You may have an idea about how sexuality ought to work—how things ought to be—but if your boy junk or girl junk or erotic imagination has some other idea, well, I’m sorry, but you’re going to lose the argument nearly every time. You can try to convince yourself that sex is meant to take place solely within the bounds of matrimony, but very few people are virgins on their wedding night and a great many people wind up cheating on their spouse. You can try to convince yourself that you’re straight, but if you’re emotionally and sexually attracted to members of your own sex, then you’re going to have gay sex whether you like it or not. (And you’ll like it—trust me.) Fighting your sexuality is like holding your breath: It can be done, yes, but not for long (when it comes to your breath) and not forever (when it comes to your sexuality).

  I’ve been writing a sex-advice column for two decades and my e-mail in-box is stuffed with letters from teenagers. They don’t ask me about reproduction. They don’t ask me how to get a condom onto a banana or anything else. The questions I get from teenagers are almost entirely about sexual pleasure. They want to know how to find sex partners, they want to know what their sex partners will expect from them, and they want to know what they have a right to expect from their sex partners. They want to know how to tell if they’re good at sex or how to get better at sex if they suspect they’re bad at it. (Most are relieved when I tell them that no one is any good at sex at first; sex is a skill that takes time, practice, experimentation, and self-discovery to acquire.) They want to know what to do if they’re turned on by something odd but relatively harmless (stuffed animals, feet), and what to do if they’re turned on by something scary and invariably harmful (actual animals, children).

  Teenage girls write every day asking for tips on giving their boyfriends better blow jobs; teenage boys write every day wanting my advice—a gay man’s advice—about helping their girlfriends reach orgasm. (For starters, straight boys, the business end of the clit can be found on the outside, not the inside, of your girlfriend’s body.) Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender teenagers write with questions about sexual identity, gender identity, coming out, finding love, and giving and getting pleasure. Refusing to answer questions about pleasure and performance, sexual identity and sexual anxiety doesn’t make them go away. And if young people don’t have a place to take these kinds of questions—a place where they can get the kinds of answers that can help them create rewarding sex lives for themselves—they will look to pornography, their misinformed peers, or a random Google result for answers. Or, worse still, they won’t seek out answers at all.

  There are places other than Mr. Vernacchio’s classroom and columns like mine where teenagers can get any question answered. Scarleteen.com—“sex ed for the real world”—is an independent website that provides information and answers about sex to teenagers. It’s a wonderful resource, as is Planned Parenthood’s hugely informative website. But like my column (which is not required reading) and Mr. Vernacchio’s class (which is an elective), teenagers have to find their way to Scarleteen and the Planned Parenthood website on their own.

  Every teenager should be required to take a sex-ed class that imparts, yes, a comprehensive body of knowledge about disease, pregnancy, sexual and gender identity, and all relevant health issues. But an ideal sex-ed course would focus on student questions. Less sex-ed “disaster prevention,” more sex-ed symposium. Students won’t leave this kind of sex-ed class with all the answers, of course. But they will leave knowing how to ask questions and that they’re entitled to ask questions.

  We often tell young people that curiosity about sex is normal and natural, but the culture sends messages that are louder, less empowering, and more destructive. Girls are told that there’s something wrong with them if they’re too interested in or curious about sex, and boys are told that they’re supposed to know everything about sex. Girls feign disinterest and boys feign mastery, and the results—at least in the United States (again: highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world)—have been disastrous. Yet many American adults have convinced themselves that ignorance about sex is both a virtue and a spiritual force field.

  No single question asked in a classroom during a comprehensive and free-ranging sex-ed course will be as important as the asking of questions itself. When they have questions later in life, when they’re out in the adult world negotiating sex with other adult partners, a person who was empowered to ask questions as a child is likelier to keep asking questions as an adult.

  We should think of our sex lives like hostage situations in which we are at once the hostage, the hostage negotiator, and the hostage taker. No one escapes his or her sexuality—just google “Ted Haggard, male escorts” or “David Vitter, female escorts”—but we can learn to live with and take pleasure in our sexualities, while at the same time minimizing the risks for STIs, unplanned pregnancies, and emotional harm (by being considerate of others’ feelings and by insisting that others be considerate of ours). But to do that you’re going to need to learn to communicate, and communicate honestly, with yourself. And then with your partner or partners. And you can’t do that if you’re incapable of asking and answering questions.

  But, young or old, don’t delude yourself. You don’t have sex. Sex has you.

  Buckle up.

  4. The GGG Spot

  Maggie Gallagher doesn’t think straight people—particularly impressionable young straight people—should take advice from me.

  Gallagher is the former president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and currently chairs that rabidly anti-gay organization’s board of directors. Gallagher doesn’t approve of my column, doesn’t like my podcast, didn’t care for my show on MTV, and I doubt she’ll have nice things to say about my follow-up TV project. But if Gallagher were serious about strengthening the institution of marriage, she would encourage young people, gay and straight, to read my column and listen to my podcast. (Spoiler alert: Gallagher isn’t serious about strengthening the institution of marriage.)

  Gallagher should get behind one particular piece of advice I regularly give: People in committed romantic relationships should be “GGG” for their partners.

  GGG stands for “good, giving, and game,” as in, “good in bed,” “giving pleasure without expectation of immediate reciprocation,” and “game for anything—within reason.” GGG is about both partners in a relationship being honest and open with each other about their sexual interests and making a good-faith effort to meet each other’s needs. It’s popular among straight people: You can find GGG on thousands of straight personal ads at dating websites like OKCupid and Match.com. (Someone recently sent me a photo of a car in Iowa—Iowa—with “I AM G
GG” license plates.)

  Gallagher disapproves of the GGG concept. Not only that, she thinks I should be disqualified from giving sex-and-relationship advice to heterosexuals for the same reason she thinks I should be disqualified from marriage: I’m a great big gay homosexual.

  “Savage, [for] all his experience, does not know what women are like,” Gallagher wrote in a post on NOM’s blog. “The possibility of taming one’s sexual desire for the sake of another, or of a vow, is not in the Savage moral imagination. Libido will have out, and honesty about that is the best policy. He brings, in other words, the best of gay sexual ethics and experience to a straight audience, with potentially disastrous results.”

  Where to begin?

  I know what women are like. I may not know what women taste like, as I’ve never gone down on one. But I know what women are like. My mother was a woman; my sister is a woman; my aunts are women; lots of my friends, neighbors, and coworkers are women. Many of my favorite bartenders are women, and like a lot of gay men, I lost my virginity to a woman. (If I’d lost my virginity to a man, the anti-gay haters would insist that I had been “seduced” into homosexuality. If seduction worked the way the haters claim, I would be straight.) And as someone who is and always was attracted to men, as someone who has sex with men, and as someone who is in a successful, long-term relationship with a man, I know what men are like too.

  You know who really doesn’t know what women are like? Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. The eighty-five-year-old pontiff has never had a girlfriend, despite the fact that he didn’t become a priest until he was twenty-three years old, and rules a tiny kingdom of male celibates. And yet the pope is full of advice for straight couples. No premarital sex, no birth control, no masturbation, no abortion, no oral, no anal, no facials, no pearl necklaces, no cybersex, no phone sex, and on and on. I wasted an hour on Google trying to find any evidence that Gallagher, a practicing Catholic, had ever told the pope to butt the fuck out of straight people’s sex lives. But Gallagher has never, so far as I was able to discover, told that fabulously attired old queen in Rome to stick a cassock in it.

  As for the “possibility of taming one’s sexual desire for the sake of another,” that definitely exists in my moral imagination. But so, too, does broadening one’s sexual horizons—upping your game, expanding your repertoire—for the sake of another.

  In a sex-negative culture, the less sexual partner in a relationship—the partner with a lower libido, the partner with fewer sexual interests—is always seen as more virtuous. The more sexual partner—the partner with a higher libido, the partner with more sexual interests—is always seen as less virtuous. The more sexual partner is expected to round her libido down to her less sexual partner’s level; the partner with more sexual interests is expected to go without having his fantasies fulfilled. Should a relationship end due to conflict about sex (frequency, repertoire), the more sexual partner gets the blame.

  There are, of course, cases where the more sexual partner is at fault. Some are unrealistic, cruel, selfish, or insensitive (and I regularly call out the unrealistic, cruel, selfish, and insensitive in my column); some are unwilling to compromise. But, in many instances, the less sexual partner is at fault. Needs that could have been met, weren’t; small frustrations that didn’t need to grow into relationship-threatening resentments, did. Subjecting someone to constant sexual rejection is cruel, selfish, and insensitive. (If you didn’t want to fuck your partner, or you’re not interested in sex at all, why did you marry your partner?) Expecting your sexually neglected spouse not to fuck around on you—excuse me, not to seek release or intimacy elsewhere—is highly unrealistic in a world with Craigslist, AshleyMadison.com, and good ol’ fashioned jack shacks.

  But in addition to pushing GGG on my readers, I also push POA on them, or the “price of admission.” POAs—or what it costs to ride this ride—are the sacrifices, large and small, “for the sake of another,” if I may borrow Maggie’s phrase. POAs make long-term relationships possible. And, yes, the price of admission for more sexual partners often involves “taming one’s sexual desire.” If anal sex is something you enjoy but you’re in a monogamous relationship with someone who doesn’t enjoy anal sex, then going without anal sex may be the price of admission you have to pay to be with that person. If you’re not into monogamy but you fall in love with someone who insists on it, then monogamy may be the price of admission you have to pay to be with that person. No one gets everything he or she wants in life, in love, or in the sack, and while I have given some of my readers permission to cheat, I have urged just as many—more—to tame certain sexual desires, to let some stuff go, to pay the price of admission for the sake of otherwise solid and loving relationships.

  But I also urge my less sexual readers to at least try to meet their partner’s needs. I don’t tell people to do things that leave them sobbing on the bathroom floor for hours afterward. Each of us should, however, be open to expanding our sexual repertoires for the person we love. The more sexual partner shouldn’t always be the one who has to pay the price of admission. If you fall in love with someone who’s into anal sex, giving anal sex a chance may be the price of admission you have to pay to be with that person. If you’re into monogamy but your partner is not, some allowance for outside sexual contact may be the price of admission that you have to pay to be with that person.

  I do believe that “libido will have out in the end,” but “libido will have out” doesn’t translate into “anything and everything goes.” Two people in a long-term, committed, loving relationship should be open and honest with each other about their sexual interests, their turn-ons, their libidos—they should communicate with each other—not because that crazy fag with the sex-advice column told them to, but because sexual compatibility and sexual satisfaction are important aspects of a successful long-term relationship.

  According to a California State University study on the role of sexual desire and sexual activity in romantic relationships, sexual activity “was related to self-reported satisfaction for both sexes,” and “participants who reported higher amounts of sexual desire for their partners were more satisfied, were less likely to think about ending the current relationship, and were less likely to consider beginning a relationship with a new partner than participants who felt lower amounts of desire.” In other words: The more sex a person has with his or her partner, the more desire someone feels for his or her partner; and the more people desire their partners, the less likely they are to leave them. The impact of frequent and satisfying sexual activity on men was especially pronounced: “The greater number of sexual episodes involving the partner in which a man engaged, the less anger he felt for that individual and the less often he thought about ending the relationship.”

  It seems obvious to me that being sexually satisfied by your partner, and satisfying your partner in turn, is particularly important if you’re in a sexually exclusive relationship. If you and your partner are each other’s sole source of sexual intimacy and release, it might be a good idea to err on the side of more sex, not less, and meeting needs, not frustrating them. And any decent advice columnist would err on the side of advising people to err on the side of more, not less, meeting, not frustrating. Because, again, when people are happy with their spouses, when their needs are being met, they’re less likely to cheat, less likely to divorce, and less likely to turn their children’s lives upside down. (Think of the children, Maggie.)

  Openness and honesty—putting your libido out there—don’t automatically translate into everyone getting everything he or she wants. Not all sexual needs can be met; not all sexual needs should be met. (I wouldn’t leave my husband if he announced tomorrow that he was an apotemnophiliac, but I like all four of his limbs too much to chop any one of them off for thrills.) But even if you can’t have the sex you fantasize about, even if you have needs your partner can’t meet, being heard isn’t too much to ask. And, if someone is going to go without, say, anal sex for the
rest of his or her life, being given some small measure of credit—along with being given a green light to jerk off to anal porn every once in a while—makes it easier to go without. It makes going without anal sex virtuous, something that reflects well on the going-without-anal partner’s character. It’s a receipt that says you paid the price of admission.

  For some couples an open and honest dialogue about sex leads to something Maggie Gallagher would no doubt regard as a disastrous result: permission for limited outside sexual contact. An example from my column: The husband wanted to be tied up and dominated; the wife, while not disgusted, had no flair for it and no interest in doing it. Gallagher would urge the husband to sacrifice his kinks for the sake of his marriage. They tried that, and it didn’t work. The husband grew resentful, the wife annoyed, and they were on the verge of divorce. Yes, over something so seemingly trivial as a sexual kink. (Kinks are only trivial to those who don’t have them.) Exasperated, the wife told the husband to go see a professional dominatrix. Which he did. He didn’t have to go without; she wasn’t being pressured to do something she wasn’t interested in. He was happy; she was happy. The wife, who wrote to me, credited this small accommodation—small, if pricey (dominatrices don’t come cheap)—with saving her marriage.

  Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.

  These are my sexual ethics, I’m sticking to ’em, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly gay about them. Openness and honesty, doing your best to meet your partner’s needs, your partner doing the same for you, a little flexibility about needs that can’t be met, a willingness to make a reasonable accommodation—all of that works as well in straight relationships as it does in gay ones.