Ask Anything, Tell All

The second rule in Savage ethics is autonomy. To a scruple-plagued “feeder” (someone aroused by the excessive eating of a partner, known as a “gainer”), he wrote that she and her boyfriend should “negotiate an explicit ‘power exchange agreement’ where his diet and weight are concerned” in order to keep their shared fetish within some reasonably healthy limits. Even so, he points out, “our bodies are our own . . . they’re ours to use, abuse, and since we’re all going to die one day, they’re ours to use up.”

Reciprocity constitutes the third rule of Savage’s ethical worldview. A heated contretemps in his column—one of many over the years—concerned the relationship between low libido and monogamy. “You can have strict monogamy or you can have a low libido, ladies, but you can’t have both,” he wrote, adding, “Oh, and guys? You need to accept those tide-you-over blowjobs and handjobs just as cheerfully as she gives them.” People who want to open up their relationships are told that the opening must work both ways, and Savage has spent more than one column teasing out what precisely constitutes a mutual departure from monogamy.

Fourth, Savage has consistently advocated a minimum standard of performance for each partner in a relationship. His knack for turning catchy maxims into acronyms and abbreviations struck gold with GGG, a bullet-pointed ideal of mutual sexual satisfaction: “Think ‘good in bed,’ ‘giving equal time and equal pleasure,’ and ‘game for anything’—within reason.” Obstinate failure in these areas is grounds for one partner to DTMFA (Dump the Motherfucker Already). His metaphors, always vivid, can become straightforwardly commercial on this point. “Oral sex is standard,” he has repeatedly said. “Any model that comes without it should be returned to the lot.”

Underlying all of Savage’s principles, abbreviations, and maxims is a pragmatism that strives for stable, livable, and reasonably happy relationships in a world where the old constraints that were meant to facilitate these ends are gone. Disclosure is necessary, but not beyond reason. “Honesty [is] the best policy and all,” he advised a guilty boyfriend, but “each of us gets to take at least one big secret to the grave.” Stuck with a husband whose porn stash has grown beyond what you thought you were signing up for? Put it behind closed doors and try not to think about it. Who knows how many good relationships have been saved—and how many disastrous marriages have been averted—by heeding a Savage insistence on disclosing the unmet need, tolerating the within-reason quirk, or forgiving the endurable lapse? In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. “A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted,” he advised one very uptight spouse, “all leavened by the occasional orgasm.”