I want Dan Savage's Seattle-sexologist arms wrapped all around me in some columnist's heaven of deadline-free orgasm and totally expensive lubrication.
As author of the nationally syndicated advice column Savage Love (and a really cute guy), Savage has made a name for himself for knowing the ins and outs of fisting, fingering and fucking. And he happens to be pressed right next to me in this very publication. So, if I squeeze my Weekly hard enough, it's like we're having sex.
I managed to get Savage on the horn for a quickie because by now he's a B-list celebrity, popping up on this and that cable clip show. He's a hero of sorts. Or at least a talking head (insert joke here).
And because this is a phoner, I don't even have to wash my hands.
Unfortunately, though, he's not the go-go-boy lust-whore I want him to be.
"I'm a total workaholic," he defines my polar opposite. "It helps that I have a boyfriend who is not. He's not a slob or anything, but he does do my laundry."
I have a boyfriend and all of my clothes stink like bars.
"Your subject matter, salacious as it is ... you must get some complaints," I lick my phone.
"I do. Mostly, there's a lot of editors at a lot of papers that think it's too obscene for their markets, but they bite the bullet and they run the column and the people love it. It turns out that most people are more sophisticated about sex than their editors give them credit for."
Note to my editor: You aren't very sophisticated about sex, now are you? And if so, why haven't you had sex with me? Well, you know what? You couldn't even have me. Hmmph.
"The people most concerned about it are the blue-nosed, pantywaist dickweeds, and I don't care about them."
Precisely the people I tend to fuck.
"I think people get offended by reading some of the sick shit," Savage shits sickly. "I think they think that fetishism is something that you read about or hear about one day -- then you have it. I've been writing for years about people who are into vomit or piss or shit. And I'm not into any of those things."
Oh, come on. When the forecast calls for golden showers, don't even tell me you run for an umbrella. "What really gets you off?" I inquire, or Enquirer.
"I'm really into my boyfriend."
"Like all Hallmark-and-chocolates, sweet nothings, and, well, nothing?"
"Not really Hallmark," he hints at a darker side that he would never let me near. Dammit.
"With a little time and experimentation, a little thoughtfulness and patience (from both the indulger and the indulgee), people who were disturbed by cross-dressing or anal sex or humiliation find that, hey, they enjoy it too," Savage recently advised in his column.
You know, I think Ann Landers would have written the same thing. Then played bridge.
But Savage has grown into the no-nonsense arbiter of Gen-X sexuality, and for that he's become a household name.
"I think you just keep banging away, and then people start to notice," he bangs away. Ouch. "I've been doing the column for 13 years, and there are people who were reading me when they were 22, and now they're working at VH1."
"I wouldn't peg you for more than 25, Dan," I flirt, while washing my hands.
"I wouldn't peg me at all."
I would. "So what exactly is it that makes you such a sexpert? Were you divinely blessed with orificial knowledge at a very young age?"
"I don't take sex too seriously. And I have no qualifications beyond speaking my opinion." He's pretending that a last name like "Savage" isn't qualification enough. "Look up advice in the dictionary and it says literally saying what should or shouldn't be done. It says nothing about being a Pope, a priest or a therapist."
"And do people who write in ever complain?"
"People who write me, read me."
People neither write to nor read me. "I don't get how people come up with the acronyms for their names."
"Things like Sue Ann Miller for S&M, you get it."
"I guess people are creative."
"Or bored and in possession of a thesaurus."
"So how is it that you get looped in with the celebrity culture bit, considering you're a lowly weekly scab like myself." I have soooo much to say about Britney Spears, I can't even take it. But nobody wants to hear it.
"I'm not that obsessed with celebrity culture. But we're so immersed in it, you can't avoid having an opinion about it, unless you're comatose in a hospital."
I've tried that. Didn't work. "It's kind of disappointing that you're a nice guy."
"I know, I should be a raging bitch!" he ragingly bitches. "I'm really not, but people think I am. You know, whenever you have a problem, you go and ask your friends. And the very first thing your friends do is make fun of you."
"Do you feel the need to be polite? Y'know, because fisting is never polite."
"That's true," he washes his hands. "I just use the language that people use when they talk to their friends about sex, and the attitudes that they use when they talk to them."
"But is it ever too dirty? Like even for your dirtiest friends with ass stains on their wrists?"
"Well, you know, what's dirtier than eating poo?" He sends me on an intellectual journey I've never taken. What's more philosophical than thinking about eating poo? "I've had letters from people who are fucking their mothers."
Gross.
"A lot of people are just justifying their behaviors. Like, 'It's OK.'"
With your mother? I'm pretty sure that's not OK. At least not if you do it more than once.
"But people write to me, expecting me to say, 'It's OK.'"
I think I'd rather eat vomit while hosting five fingers in my backside.
That's OK, right?
