Savage Love
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 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 words like "fuck." In political matters, Savage occasionally shows a leftist/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 admonished for this by some gay activists.
During the run of Savage Love, Savage has attempted to popularize two sex-related neologisms.
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 term "pegging" was chosen (despite Savage's aunt bearing the name Peg) with a 43% plurality. 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.
Savage reacted strongly to United States Senator Rick Santorum's statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press published April 20, 2003. In the interview, Santorum describes homosexual acts 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 Constitutionalal right to privacy with respect to sexual acts.
Savage was outraged by the Senator's comparison of gay sex to incest, bestiality, rape, bigamy and adultery, and by his position on the right to privacy. 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, a smear campaign 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 suggested definitions in his columns, a vote was taken among his readers. The winning definition was "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex," and fans of Savage (among others) have apparently made a concerted effort to make the newly coined term a part of the English language.
Neologisms
Pegging
Santorum
External links and references