— They used to ask much different sex advice questions in the ’90s.
By Rich Juzwiak
Ah, the early ’90s: a simpler time. It was before reality TV revolutionized the entitlement of the masses who want to get attention and money for just … existing, before 9/11 and the safety theater of the TSA, before presidential candidates in the U.S. could run on an explicit platform of ending democracy. And it was a time when “What is a butt plug?” was a common question to write into a sex-advice column.
At least that’s how Dan Savage broke down a key difference between writing his advice column then and now during a recent phone conservation from his home in Seattle. “Butt plugs have a wiki page now—I don’t have to explain butt plugs anymore,” said the writer and podcaster, whose Savage Love advice column began publishing in 1991. Now everything is about “situational ethics,” he said, as people’s conception of sex has expanded through the years, thanks in no small part to Savage himself. “And those columns are harder to write—and easier to fuck up.”
“In the mid-’90s, I would say, ‘I write a sex advice column,’ and professors, journalists, researchers wouldn’t want to play in that sandbox because it was so demeaning,” Savage recalled. He said that’s much different now, as I can also attest as the co-author of Slate’s sex advice column, How to Do It. Another change: He said he receives far fewer gay-panic-related questions now than he did when he started, as well as fewer questions that ask in so many words, “Am I normal?” That’s a question, he said, he “worked hard to make go extinct.” There was also the rise of porn tube sites in the mid-aughts, which Savage credits to expanding understanding of the range of sexual practices out there (or, as queer theorist Gayle Rubin put it, “benign sexual variation”). As a result, “you just couldn’t be in denial anymore about how infinitely varied and subjective desire, arousal, turn-ons, kinks—all of that—was, and there’s just this collective shrug where everybody went, ‘We’re all freaks,’” Savage said.
The sex-advice column is a working example of how culture operates as a feedback loop, which is informed by the same public it goes on to inform. In Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education, David Gudelunas writes that “the primary function of an advice columnist is not to dispense interpersonal advice to writers but rather to serve as a cultural benchmark that both identifies and helps to shift social norms pertaining to human sexuality.” The focus of Gudelunas’ book is “Dear Abby” and “Ask Ann Landers,” so he argues that this role has existed for well over half a century. Writer Tristan Taormino, who said her diaristic Village Voice column Pucker Up (which ran from 1998 to 2008) was a direct result of the paper’s aim to expand upon Savage’s early success, pointed to the term “pegging,” which Savage coined via a 2001 reader contest. “And all of a sudden, ‘pegging’ is in all the advice columns,” she said. “I feel like the audience got savvier.” Taormino has watched the discursive profile of anal sex in general grow over the years. “When my book [The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women] first came out in 1998, people did not want to talk about it. And now, quite literally, there are anal sex columns in Teen Vogue,” she said.
Taormino wrote her own advice column, The Anal Advisor, in the Hustler offshoot Taboo from 1999 to 2014. These days a lot of her advice-giving takes place when she speaks on college campuses; she said she’s seen an increase in questions about BDSM but also a consistency in subject matter over the years. “There’s a through line of basic questions, which haven’t changed since the late ’90s. And that comes out of abstinence-only sex ed,” she said. “Once they get to college, all of a sudden they have the opportunity to ask these questions.”
Audience savviness—or lack thereof—has long been a guiding force of advice columns, and not just for how it has complicated questions. In Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age, Julia Golia writes of the communities that formed around newspaper advice columns of old, like The Detroit News’ Experience, which regularly featured reader input on questions, resulting in an “anonymous community in a mass-media form to ask for guidance, but also to be heard and valued.” As Golia told me, “That traditional model cannot be understood outside of the constant dialogue that happens on the internet.”
In her book, Golia draws a parallel to the subreddit Am I the Asshole?, a crowd-sourced Reddit advice column for the modern age that effectively amputates the central personality of the traditional model for something more democratic. Carolyn Hax, who has published a now-daily advice column in the Washington Post since 1998, regularly integrates reader responses to questions in her answers. She told me this was in part a product of an active online community in the comments section. Once a week, Hax sits out and her column is devoted entirely to reader responses. Hax’s column is more about general relations than sexual ones, though she does occasionally broach the topic. Previously, she was less confident about opining in an area of specialized knowledge, but now, “I’m much more comfortable with the idea of just being sex-positive,” she said. “My understanding of this has gotten so much better over the years—of what works and what doesn’t work and what comes with a with a side of shame, which complicates everything and makes it worse. That’s just time and experience.”
Feedback has been a mixed blessing for Savage. “A lot of us learn to stop reading our mentions,” he said. And yet, he’s learned and grown from being “yelled at” by readers—sometimes literally. He recalled running into writer Kate Bornstein on the streets of Seattle in the ’90s, who took him to task for something “jokey stupid” he wrote about gender-confirmation surgery. Their meeting spawned a column, which introduced the gender theorist to many of Savage’s readers. And all “because I fucked up,” Savage said. “And because I was receptive when Kate Bornstein said, ‘You fucked up.’ I didn’t tell her to fuck off. I didn’t do a Netflix special about how much I hate her.” Still, when Savage started writing in print, his archive wasn’t instantly accessible as it is today. “There was this understanding that writers and columnists were still thinking and reassessing and revising their opinions as more info or life experience came in,” he recalled. “And somehow the internet destroyed people’s ability to perceive that or allowed bad actors to argue that that’s not what you did. They will hold up the bloody shirt of something you wrote 25 years ago, and you’re like, ‘Have you read anything that I’ve written in the last 20 years about literally that?’”
As forebears to the modern advice column like Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Loveline’s Dr. Drew Pinsky did on television and radio, respectively, many of today’s self-styled dispensers of advice have expanded beyond the written word, using TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts. (Savage’s Savage Lovecast turns 18 this year.) This is another mixed blessing, according to Dr. Debby Herbenick, professor and director of Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. “I think there’s a lot of upsides to video-based sex education, and sex information coming out,” said Herbenick, who has written several advice columns, including Kinsey Confidential for the Kinsey Institute from 2001 to 2018. “It can be entertaining, it can be engaging, it can get it to lots of different sources. On the other hand, there’s also not a lot of eyes on it for fact-checking. When you don’t have something that’s kind of written out there that people can parse and go through, it really does kind of become a little invisible.”
Taormino noted that the market for sex podcasts is “saturated—and we’re all vying for the same ad dollars.” She contrasted the post-Savage boom that saw the birth of her “Pucker Up” column and countless others crop up with the current censorious state of media, in which writers and sex workers are penalized for talking about sex on social media. Herbenick recalled a drug-store chain dropping an unnamed magazine she wrote for as the result of her writing about sex. “I had to fight to talk about HPV and sex toys,” she said. “And I didn’t always win those fights. And when I did, those publications were taking a risk.”
Shrinking and obliterated newsrooms only add to the difficulty of writing about sex (at least, writing about sex and getting paid for it). A certain strain of common wisdom states that “people don’t read anymore,” and so it’s only natural that a lot of the public sex discourse has poured into audio and visual media, or pithy comments on crowd-sourced advice columns like r/amitheasshole. Yet the written sex-advice column persists.
For Savage’s part, he remains just as engaged as he was 33 years ago. “I’m getting questions now from the middle-aged children of the people I gave advice to before they had kids,” he said. “If I had to write ‘What’s a butt plug?’ over and over and over again, forever, I’d probably lose my mind. The trouble that people get themselves into seems to constantly be interesting. And the situational ethics, there’s an infinite number. One genre of sex advice is, ‘What’s a butt plug?’ There’s an infinite number of ways that people can shit the bed and fuck up their life and need help or need validation or need to be told that they’re not the asshole or be told that they are the asshole. And so I think it is still interesting. And I still get questions that surprise me.”
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