You Approved This Douche, Dan Savage?

Your guest columnist Eric needs to get a reality check.

I’m a 21-year-old female college student whose romantic (and social) life is slowly turning into shit and I need your advice. At the beginning of the fall semester, I signed on to write the sex column in my school’s daily, and I made the mistake of using my personal experiences to frame my advice (it’s not a Q&A column, it’s more like an “I need to tell you all something because this guy did a really poor job of eating me out last weekend” sort of thing). Since I started writing this thing, it seems like everyone I meet either wants to talk to me only about sex, wants to talk to me because they want to have sex with me, or they want to talk to my friends about whether or not they’ve had sex with me. Nobody has asked me out on a date in god knows how long and I just want to be treated like a normal person. I have one semester left to write this thing—is there anything I can do to get people to respect me a little bit more?

There Are Lots Of Gorges At This School

“Your letter complains about two things: that people always want to talk to you about sex, and that nobody wants to date you,” says Eric.

“The first sounds to me like an occupational hazard. If you’re well known for writing about something of general interest—and few things are of more general interest than sex—then you need to expect that people who read your column are going to want to talk to you about it. If you don’t want people to talk to you about sex, stop writing about it.

“On the other hand, your problem with people not wanting to date you seems like a purely self-inflicted wound. If you’re going around writing negative reviews of the performances of people you have sex with, I think you have to appreciate that it’s going to have a negative impact on people’s interest in having sex with you. You probably should have expected that. If you want to change that situation, you need to credibly commit to not writing about your personal life in your column in the future. The easy way to achieve that would be to stop writing your column, but assuming you don’t want to do that, your best bet is probably to publicly apologize in your column and say that you’ll refrain from discussing your personal life in your column in the future—and then stick to that.

“This will of course be embarrassing and won’t totally convince people (though the reason it’s convincing is that it’s so embarrassing), but it ought to convince enough people to let you get the occasional date.”

First off, I happen to know and love the feisty young thing who wrote in. Jenna writes for the Daily Sun at Cornell, which is a lovely open-minded Ivy institution just like my own, where sexually forward young women are totally accepted — nay, celebrated! — for their refreshing candor and cheeky prose.

Uh, not.

One would hope that in Savage Love of all places, a beleaguered sex columnist could get some practical advice. Nope. Not at all. A point-by-point deconstruction of the atrocious reply:

“If you don’t want people to talk to you about sex, stop writing about it.”
If doctors are accosted about various ailments in social settings, should they stop practicing medicine or are they due the courtesy of normal, non-medical conversations?

“If you’re going around writing negative reviews of the performances of people you have sex with, I think you have to appreciate that it’s going to have a negative impact on people’s interest in having sex with you.”
First off, I don’t know any sex columnist who writes exclusively negative things or names names, certainly not Jenna. Second, let’s face it: sex and relationships are not perfect. There’s good, bad, and everything in between. Someone out there has got to take risks and write honestly about all of the above. Otherwise, we get picture-perfect accounts of sex with no substance whatsoever. Jenna’s being brave, and what she’s getting in response is cowardice.

“Your best bet is probably to publicly apologize in your column and say that you’ll refrain from discussing your personal life in your column in the future.”
HAHAHAHA.

So lessons learned: other people can’t help asking you personal questions about sex, you ought to lie about how sex is great 100% of the time, and copping out is the only way to get people to treat you like a normal human being. Because you know, people who write about sex obviously shouldn’t be respected or god forbid, dated.

Better advice here.