Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist [Paperback]

Dan Savage (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998

Welcome to the hot new wave of writing about sex: Savage Love. Columnist Dan Savage has hand-picked over 300 letters from six years worth of "Savage Love," a no-holds-barred syndicated sex-advice column which runs in 16 papers in the United States and Canada, including The Village Voice and the San Francisco Weekly. An original and funny thinker, thrashing around in the playground of human sexuality, Savage advises on a wide range of titillating topics: * What is the best seduction music? * How do I come out to my fundamentalist parents? * What is so wonderful about intercourse, anyway? Forget Anka Radakovich and Isadora Altman. Tune in to Dan Savage as he answers these questions and much more in his own uniquely irreverent and sexually spunky style.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Sex advice columns provide enlightenment for the erotically challenged as well as voyeuristic entertainment, and the aptonymic Savage delivers on both counts. Channeling Dr. Ruth through the acid pen of H.L. Mencken, he leaves no fool unskewered while delivering startlingly frank, howlingly funny, and consistently excellent guidance for the intimate dilemmas of straights, gays, and everyone else. With his six-year-old column now syndicated in 16 newspapers, Savage maintains that his gayness gives him an advantage in his craft. Certainly his large hetero fan club?as well as this book?testify to his catholic skills. Dingbat-lovers, beware. Savage does not use four-letter words so much as wear them, with considerable and appropriate impact. The unique effect is of old-fashioned common sense, unconstrained by political correctness and cloaked in ultraradical lingo. Especially recommended for libraries in urban and university locations and wherever Savage Love is syndicated.?Martha Cornog, American Coll. of Physicians, Philadelphia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Plume; First Edition edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452278155
• ISBN-13: 978-0452278158
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #326,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

108 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Look, it's just an advice column. But a very funny one., February 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist (Paperback)

Opinions on this book seem to fall into one of three categories:

1) Dan Savage is a god and his advice is perfect. Everyone must read these pearls of ultimate wisdom.

2) Dan Savage is entertaining, and people with a sense of humor about sex should read his book.

3) Dan Savage is a sick, twisted, perverted moron. No one should touch his disgusting book.

Well, since that's pretty much the spectrum of opinions about sex, too, no surprises there. But who is right?

Well, Dan Savage is not a god, and he's not always right. Pay attention to the introduction, where he explains his, um, qualifications. Pay attention to the parts where he explains his take on this - that it's advice, not orders, and it's done for entertainment, not enlightment. Pay attention to the columns with stupid mistakes, folks, 'cause he included them for a reason.

And while I'm not gonna make any judgement call about Dan Savage's moral state (he may well be sick, twisted, perverted, whatever), nor can I make any calls about his mental state (maybe he is just a moron with a really good editor), I can say this: he's answering the letters he gets from his readers in the way that his readers like. So obviously his audience can handle this content and this style. If you aren't in his audience, why are you buying this book? To burn it later? What a waste of good paper, and, incidentally, what a good way to hand money to a guy you apparently hate.

I incline to the second opinion category. It is funny - the answers have the right ratio of wit to information (20:1), and the letters are usually hysterical. (Even Savage, who often manages to make honesty sound like an ego trip, admits that the letters he gets are usually funnier than the responses he writes.) Honestly, haven't you wondered who writes to advice columnists? And haven't you wondered, reading advice columns, how some of these people ever manage to find the toilet without help, let alone getting a pen and paper and actually writing something? Well, Savage says to them in print what you've been saying in your head for years. And that's great fun.

Don't buy Savage Love as the ultimate guide to sex. Most of his advice is either exceptionally basic, something everyone knows except young teenagers and members of certain religious groups, or it's exceptionally esoteric, something only a few people would ever want or need to know. Certainly don't buy it if you're one of those deathly dull people who takes sex seriously all the time, because you'll be offended by every page of this book. And don't buy it if it's going to make you rant about perversity, because that's pointless, since no one is listening except people who agree with you already.

Buy it for the style - read a few of his columns first to make sure you like the style - or buy it for the joy of laughing at people who think like you did when you were 13.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cranky, crass and wildly funny., September 22, 1999

By 

Christian P. Johnson (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist (Paperback)

I've been reading Dan Savage for several years now, and couldn't have been happier than to see so much of his writing assembled in one convenient package (toting around all those back issues of the New York Press was getting my hands all newsprinty...).

Dan isn't particularly groundbreaking in his advice. Fortunately, that isn't necessary; most of the people who write into him seem to be candidates for the Darwin Awards. When he's mean, it's usually deserved.

The wonder is in the humor. Yes, the column is usually more about Dan Savage than anything else, but of course that's the subtext of most good essayists and all good comedians. Were we as interesting or funny as Dan we might also be paid to write about ourselves, but since we aren't, we put our efforts into macrame or geneology or philately. Or dreadful websites that make family Christmas letters look like Henry James.

The oddest criticism, however, is the suggestion he has no morals. (The real criticism, of course, is that his morals are different from the reader's, but that point always seems to escape these people.) In fact, Dan wears his morals on his shirt sleeve, and they're often not that much different from a lot of folks': honesty, fairness, fidelity, prudence.

My only question: why hasn't he moved to New York? He'd fit in much better here. I should know, I left Seattle!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wish I'd had this book when growing up!, March 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Savage Love: Straight Answers from America's Most Popular Sex Columnist (Paperback)

What guts Dan Savage has! Finally, someone who will actually give real answers to people's questions. Sex is one of our most basic instincts, the driving force behind sports, love, romance, daily activity and most relationships. Most people pussyfoot around reality, asking indirect questions and getting less than direct answers. Dan gets to the real issues and gets people to talk about what they're really worried about. Every high school student in America would be well-served to have such information available, in my opinion, and I wish I'd had this book to read when I was growing up. The book is so very funny - I picked it up in Cleveland last fall and for awhile carried it with me on business flights. I had to stop reading the book on planes because I was causing such a comotion with my spontaneous outbursts of laughter. If you only read the book for the humor it's worthwhile but if you don't use the information and take it to heart, you're a fool. Excellent book!