Guest Post: Dan Savage at Radford

On Tuesday night the Women’s Studies Club co-sponsored an event to have guest, Dan Savage, creator of the Emmy winning “It Gets Better Project”.  His career as a sex-advice columnist began much earlier than the project though, in the early 90’s and provides a subjectively humorous and crude outlook on sex.  We were offered the opportunity to ask anything we wanted prior to the show, but that being said we were unaware until late in the game that this would be a completely Q&A style presentation.  So while the actual content of his appearance was primarily based upon our questions, perhaps a bit of preparation on his end would have helped guide a better discussion. 

Savage received questions such as how to maintain good relationships and have good sex.  Surprised when, ‘Love’ was not only missing from his initial response, but also the rest thereafter, he generated subpar relationship advice in which sex remains the most central component.  According to Savage,  if one was to orgasm at least twice a week by the same partner, your brain will biologically begin to realize the association of orgasm (sex) with that partner, and this will strengthen your feeling of love and make up for all the other frustrations.  This sounds more like sexual manipulation, than hidden secrets of successful relationships.  Affirming his views on the stereotypical hyper sexual tendencies of gay men primarily and heterosexual men in addition, he justified many sexual misnomers by yet again making sex the most important component of relationships for men.

Even when asked how he knew that he was gay, Savage explained that to know you are gay you must essentially ‘listen to your dick’ rather than any other part of your mind or soul, seemingly forgetting that gay and sex are not synonymous with ‘male’.   His opinions were incongruous and an obvious role of male authority plays part in the content of his answers.  During a preface to a question he claimed to not being partial to generalizations about males and females as a whole, which threw the audience for a loop once he then began making one after the other gender based stereotypes.  Examples of this being that, men also have it coded in them to want to fall asleep directly after sex, and also if, ‘you are the one getting fucked’, if you are a girl, actually being the one ‘getting pounded’ then that is why females are less inclined to consent to sex than males. Much of this about women was to further prove his earlier point that every sexual act should be considered ‘sex’, because, ‘the more that is considered sex the more sex you will be having!’.  All in all Savage seemed to be biased towards justification of men wanting to have sex all the time, including and especially gay men. 

Savage disagrees with the mistreatment of gay people, but obviously is blinded by his position as a male, and lacks little concern for the mistreatment of women.  Many questions were answered in a light of unawareness of the social implications to the audience in which he was speaking; such as when he explained that “objectification is sexy” to create another source of socialization.  He often times addressed issues concerning gay men, and straight couples, very rarely did he mention or accommodate, lesbian or transgendered people, or women really at all not in terms of a male, in his presentation. (Oh except for that comment about ‘big girls’ and ‘skinny bitches’, that was nice for the women.)  An overall underlying offensiveness was unveiled which had me wanting to stand up and either speak up or leave multiple times throughout the event.

Unfortunately he did not cover what I thought to be the point of the night until the very last question, in which he explained the purpose of the “It Gets Better Project”.   The “It Gets Better Project” is an LGBT oriented initiative to help struggling LGBT teens in developing realistic outlooks on their future lives, once they have worked through the coming out process.  The project showcases many user created videos of inspiration, hope and real life experiences which demonstrate that life is worth living, and success and happiness is on the way. It was only discussed in brevity but the success of this project is inspirational and you can still be a part of this great act of support through backing our LGBT youth, and future LGBT generations by joining the movement @ www.itgetsbetter.org .

-Olivia Thompson

The Blog: One Year Later

It’s been a little more than a year since Alyssa Archer, Alison Armstrong, Candice Benjes-Small and I started this little venture that we call the Radford University Women’s Studies Blog.  And, while we have not yet set the interwebs ablaze, we have had a respectable amount of traffic.

According to Blogger, as I write this post, we have had 1860 page views from 10 countries. The vast majority of this traffic has come from Google searches; Facebook posts are a distant second.

Our most popular post has been Anita Hill, 20 Years Later: Sex, Power, and Speaking Truth, with 143 views to date. Second to that, and dear to my heart, is RU’s calendar of Women’s History Month events for March 2012. The popularity of these two posts suggests that we are reaching folks on both local and global issues, as we had hoped.

Some areas for improvement as we head into our second year are: more followers would be nice, right now we have 8, four of whom are us. And, we hope to recruit more guest bloggers. We were very pleased to have LeeAnn Dye write for us last year, and, her post about Eating Disorder Awareness Week is our fifth most read (out of twenty-seven total). Clearly others liked her work, too.

That is pretty much my perspective on the successes and to-do-betters of our first year, dear readers. What comments, criticisms, or suggestions do you have for us?