Savage Love from A to Z: Advice on Sex and Relationships, Dating and Mating, Exes and Extras

By Dan Savage and Joe Newton

America's premier sex advice columnist takes on edgier-than-ever sex-positive topics with his signature candor in his first illustrated collection of adults-only essays, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Savage Love column.

Dan Savage has been talking frankly about sex and relationships for 30 years, and has built an international following thanks to his sex-positive Savage Love column and podcast. To celebrate this milestone comes Savage Love from A to Z, an illustrated collection of 26 never-before-published essays that provides a thoughtful, frank dive into Savage's trademark phrases and philosophies. This hardcover book is for anyone who's had sex, is currently having sex, or hopes to have sex!

Essays cover a variety of topics:

• B Is for Boredom

• F Is for F*ck First

• G Is for GGG (Good Giving Game)

• M Is for Monogamish

Whether he's talking about issues like compatibility or specific sex acts, you can be sure he's giving it to you straight. Short excerpts from his classic columns kick off each essay and cheeky illustrations by his longtime collaborator Joe Newton complement the topic at hand. Savage has moved the needle toward a more open discourse around sex, relationships, and intimacy, and this book will both inspire and inform his legions of fans. An ideal stocking stuffer!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sasquatch Books
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781632173836

Book preview

A is for ANAL

The best way for a straight man to demonstrate to a straight woman that anal sex can be mutually pleasurable—that it’s not (necessarily) about dominance and degradation—is to do the gentlemanly thing and let her fuck his ass first.

—AUGUST 14, 2008

Anal is for everybody.

Wherever you land on the gender spectrum, whatever your preferred erotic target (men, women, both, all the others, none at all), you have an asshole, and you can put something in your ass or invite someone to put something in your ass or put something in the ass of someone who has enthusiastically consented to you putting something in their ass.

While some people endure anal sex to give pleasure to their partners, lots of people—men and women and non-binary people, queer and straight, trans and cis—love having their asses fucked. And you don’t have to have a prostate gland to enjoy anal sex; everyone’s asshole is rich in highly sensitive nerve endings and close enough to your genital erectile tissues that your asshole is quite literally in play when you’re having intercourse, even if you’ve never once touched it or allowed someone to touch it. (Everyone has erectile tissues and everyone gets erections—male and female.)

Anal is democratic—since everybody has an asshole, anyone can do anal. While gay men are strongly associated with anal sex, not all gay men enjoy anal sex. The percentage of gay men who have anal sex is greater than the percentage of straight people who have anal sex, of course, but straight people so vastly outnumber gay people that in absolute numbers—real numbers, not percentages—there are more straight buttfuckers/buttfuckees out there than gay buttfuckers/buttfuckees. In other words, most of the anal sex that happens on any given Saturday night involves partners of the opposite sex.

Anal isn’t literally for everyone, of course, in as much as not everyone enjoys it. Some people never try it, others try it once and never again. But it’s available to everyone and that’s the point.

People have preferences and their preferences don’t always align with our expectations or assumptions. In addition to all the gay men out there who don’t like anal, there are straight guys who don’t like blowjobs, lesbians who don’t like eating pussy, and straight women who prefer anal intercourse to vaginal intercourse. There are also asexuals who don’t like anal or anything else, as well as asexuals who enjoy anal and everything else. (That some asexuals are both sexually active and enjoy sex is at first confusing, I realize, but there are probably things you enjoy doing for others that you don’t feel a burning desire to do for yourself. Like a lot of things, happily sexually active asexuals makes sense if you think about it for a minute before speaking or writing about it—a life lesson that, like a 16-inch dildo, I’m still in the process of internalizing.)

Anal sex also doesn’t require penetration. Anal sex can be stroking, licking, pressing, humping, or applying pressure in some other way. Anal can also mean laying a vibrator across the anus without ever pointing it at the anus and shoving it in—no, wait. I take that back. While you can enjoy anal play (which counts as anal sex) without penetration, force should not be applied to achieve anal penetration. Just like there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no shoving in buttfucking. To achieve penetration, apply a little gentle pressure—after the ass has been eaten and a generous amount of lube has been applied. The penetrated person should have control over the amount of pressure. The insertion toy—be it a finger, a dildo, or a dick—should enter slowly and gradually, giving the penetrated person plenty of time to breath, relax, and adjust; the actual ass fucking, if you’re actually fucking ass (and not engaging in some other form of anal sex play), should start very slowly. The slamming that you’ve seen in porn is not how it’s done—or not how it starts.

And since anal sex is purely about pleasure—and should always be about mutual pleasure—it forces us to contemplate what sex is really about, what sex is actually for.

For millennia preachers, teachers, and parents told us sex was about procreation. Sex was only permissible—it was only forgivable—when it involved two members of the opposite sex who were married to each other and the act was open to conception. Some groping and rolling around was allowed at the start, maybe a little oral after 1964, but at some point the husband’s penis had to find its way into the wife’s vaginal canal. And there the man’s penis had to remain until he deposited his semen in the woman’s vagina—the vagina being the only place a man should ever deposit his semen (esophagi, recta, and tube socks need not apply)—and the rest was up to God.

But if sex is purely utilitarian…if it’s just about grimly making babies…why does it feel so good? Why do we think about it so much? And why do we have so much of it?

I was in the fourth grade when a nun explained to me and my horrified classmates that the intensely pleasurable feelings of sex were not the point. And anyone who had sex or even masturbated for the sake of those intensely pleasurable feelings, she continued, was abusing themselves, their partners, and the one and only God. (Our God, naturally, the Catholic one.) Even thinking about it was a sin. So why would God make sex pleasurable? If pleasure wasn’t the point and you weren’t allowed to do it just for fun by yourself or with anyone else (even your spouse!), why make it fun? She had an answer: the pleasure of sex was an incentive and a reward. It was an incentive to make more Catholics and a reward for our efforts to do just that. Added bonus: the temptation of having sex merely for pleasure and/or sex outside of marriage and/or sex that didn’t end with the husband’s penis in his wife’s vaginal canal was an opportunity to resist sin. If you did it right, it felt good and you felt good about it. But if you did it wrong…if the sex was premarital…or if it wasn’t open to conception because wrong hole or protected hole or no hole…it might fleetingly feel good but you would definitely feel bad about it afterward. If not in this life, then definitely in the next.

I will concede to Sister Margarite that sex is about procreation. I mean, obviously. Each of us is the product of a discrete sex act, if not always a discreet one. (Some of us were conceived during orgies that our parents were kind enough not to tell us about.) As a species, sex built us through a process of natural selection and spontaneous mutation that unfolded over hundreds of millions of years. (Toward the end of that process, our ancestors apparently fucked a few Neanderthals, because why not?) While the females in other mammal species go into heat and only mate when they’re ovulating, that is, they only mate when conception is highly likely, human females don’t go into heat. Ovulation is hidden. We mate and mate and mate and mate and every once in a while sperm and egg are in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the wrong time.

What is sex for? It’s for making babies, yes, and it arguably was solely for that once upon a time. But what is all that extra sex for? The sex we have when we can’t make babies—the sex people who can make babies have when they can’t make babies because she’s not ovulating or he’s not fertile or the fertilized egg, for whatever reason, can’t successfully implant itself on the wall of the uterus? The wet dreams, the horniness?

Is all that wasted mating an accident? Or does it have a purpose? While sex is about making more Catholics, of course, as well as making more Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. we only have to contemplate our own experiences for a moment before everything else sex does becomes clear. While sex is about making babies once or twice or a dozen times, the rest of the time—most of the sex, most of the time—sex is about connection and intimacy, pleasure and release. Like humanity itself, sex branched out. Sex creates bonds that last for an hour, bonds that last for months or years, and sometimes bonds that last for a lifetime. We are social animals and any honest assessment of how sex actually functions in our lives would lead us to conclude that while its original purpose was purely reproductive, we long ago—eons ago—repurposed it in ways that conferred evolutionary advantages that weren’t solely about passing on our genes. You were likelier to survive and your offspring were likelier to survive if you were liked, and you were likelier to be liked if you gave good head.

Our desire to engage in anal sex and oral sex and all nonprocreative sex acts exposes our preachers, teachers, and parents as liars and hypocrites, which is one reason why so many of them are uncomfortable with any honest conversation about not just the practice of anal sex and other forms of nonprocreative sexual pleasure but the legitimacy of it. Since anal isn’t exonerated by the possibility of intentionally or accidentally making a baby, we’re supposed to see it as wrong. It isn’t wrong. It’s just as right as PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex we have when the woman isn’t ovulating or the man isn’t fertile or the zygote, if one is created, fails to implant.

While some people work hard to get