Rules of misbehavior: Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?

• Author: Dueholm, Benjamin J.
• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Five months after the death of Esther "Eppie" Lederer in 2002, the bulk of her estate--a sprawling Chicago apartment's worth of furniture, photographs, papers, and memorabilia--went up for public auction with some fanfare in Elgin, Illinois.

Lederer, who was better known by the pen name Ann Landers, had for almost fifty years written America's foremost newspaper advice column. With an estimated 90 million readers, the self-described "nice Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa," was often counted among the most influential women in the United States. What was most remarkable about that influence was its breadth: she advised teenagers about pimples and presidents about missile defense--and the presidents often wrote her back.

Before her death, Lederer made clear that the Ann Landers pseudonym, which she had inherited in 1955, would die with her. But that did not prevent would-be successors from seeking to assume her mantle in more symbolic ways. On the auction block that November were Lederer's writing desk and typewriter, on which she had composed her responses to correspondents like Desperate in Denver and Nervous in Nevada. When the bidding was over, an advice columnist named Dan Savage happily walked away with them. Today, the desk sits in Savage's office in Seattle, where he serves as editorial director of the city's alternative weekly The Stranger and writes his own hugely successful weekly sex advice column, "Savage Love." His correspondents have included a woman signing off as "Fucking Asshole Idiot Losers" (FAIL), who faced a very modern problem. "My husband and I have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy when we're apart," she began.

"A few months ago, I hooked up with a guy on a business trip who said he and his wife have the same arrangement. He was lying. His wife found out and started harassing me on Facebook. I truly feel horrible. How can I know if someone is really in an open relationship when they say they are? I am so done."

Savage pointed out, "The only way to verify that someone is in an open relationship is to speak to that person's partner--and as that would constitute 'telling,' FAIL, it would be a violation of a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.

"But even a couple with a 'please ask, do tell' policy probably has a rule against 2:00 a.m. calls from drunken hotel-bar pickups. So you'll have to trust your gut, FAIL, which failed you here. dust remember this on your next business trip: The further a married person is from home and the drunker that married person is, the likelier it is that that married person is lying to you."

Suffice it to say, Savage is not the most obvious heir to Landers's ultra-mainstream legacy. His columns answer a Chaucerian panorama of correspondents: gay Mormons, incestuous siblings, weight-gain fetishists, men yearning to be cuckolded, and otherwise ordinary Americans grappling with an extraordinary range of problems and proclivities. By the standards of a family newspaper, his advice is not only explicit but broad-minded to the point of being radical, encouraging people to embrace or at least tolerate previously unmentionable sexual inclinations in their partners, praising open relationships, and celebrating behaviors that might cause even the most intrepid reader to balk.

When he isn't offering advice, the openly gay Savage has also made a name for himself by serving as a kind of gonzo avenging angel for the nation's sexual minorities. In 2000, he went on assignment for Salon.com to cover the presidential campaign of the Christian right's boutique candidate, Gary Bauer, while suffering from a bad case of the flu. After listening to one of Bauer's harangues against gay marriage, Savage decided to pose as a campaign volunteer and infect the candidate by licking doorknobs, coughing on staplers, and slobbering on pens around Bauer's Iowa headquarters, making that the subject of his dispatch. Then, in 2003, Savage went viral in a different way, after Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum compared same-sex marriages to "man on dog" relationships. In response, the columnist held a contest among his readers to redefine the word "santorum" as vividly as possible as a new term in the sexual lexicon. The winning definition--unforgettable and unprintable--quickly spread so widely online as to eclipse the Google ranking of the senator himself. Which was, of course, the point. Santorum lost his seat in 2006. Landers, who struggled with accepting homosexuality and whose idea of tough language was "kwitcherbellyachin," probably would not have approved.

And yet, Savage took pains to clarify that his purchase of Eppie Lederer's desk was not meant as an act of desecration. "While it's highly ironic that the world's smuttiest advice column will now be written at the same desk where the world's most mainstream (and most popular) advice column was once written," Savage wrote, "I intended no disrespect." Indeed, he said, he had been a devoted fan of Ann Landers ever since boyhood. And strange as it may sound, Savage is increasingly playing the kind of culture-bestriding role that Ann Landers once did.

After twenty years of churning out "Savage Love," the Seattle writer can lay a legitimate claim to being America's most influential advice columnist. He is syndicated across the world in more than seventy newspapers--mainly alternative weeklies in the United States--with well over one million in total circulation. Online, he reaches millions more readers. He is a frequent contributor to the popular radio program This American Life, and a "Savage Love" television show on MTV is said to be in the works. His podcast has a higher iTunes ranking than those of Rachel Maddow or the NBC Nightly News, and his four books have sold briskly (a fifth is due out in March). And when it suits him, the range of his commentary has become increasingly broad. In the space of one column--the one where he announced his purchase of Ann Landers's desk--Savage offered advice to a thirty-year-old woman who wanted to sleep with a seventeen-year-old coworker ("It would be illegal for you to GO AHEAD"), fielded a question from a man with a childbirth fetish, and then, for good measure, advised the Bush administration to take a harder stance on Saudi Arabia.

Savage's ability to mobilize legions of readers has also matured beyond the lobbing of incendiary Google bombs. Last fall, a streak of suicides by gay teenagers across the country inspired Savage and his husband, Terry, to post a video testimonial on YouTube. The two men recounted their difficulties growing up bullied and harassed, then held up their adult lives--and happiness as a couple--as...