http://www.dakotastudent.com/2.5855/columnist-gives-und-a-real-lesson-in-sexual-education-1.1348756
Graphic and incredibly honest west coast relationship advice columnist Dan Savage took questions from a UND audience on March 3rd. Attendees’ questions ranged from wondering why they had gotten dumped to a discussion on monogamy.
Savage has a widely popular blog, “Savage Love,” and a podcast under the same name.
For anyone unfamiliar with Savage, he is about as far from your mother’s advice columnist as you can get. Savage didn’t arrive at UND with anything in mind to speak about; his format is completely crowd-sourced. He began by saying, “I have no agenda. We are going to talk about what you want to talk about. Wherever we go, you took us there.”
Audience members wrote their questions down on index cards and had them collected by members of the Multicultural Awareness Committee, who sponsored the discussion.
Savage took the first question, “My boyfriend dumped me for school but a month later he’s dating someone else?” Sitting there, I thought it was going to be a sugarcoated reply, sparing her feeling; it certainly was not.
Savage answered every question without hesitation, honestly and intelligently, in ways most UND students have never heard.
Sometimes they were obvious truths you never hear: “Nobody is ever shy about being heterosexual.” Sometimes, and this is where Savage really shines, they were status quo-challenging suggestions: “We should treat monogamy like sobriety. I’m monogamous right now, but I did fall off the wagon a while ago.” Savage had more to say about the m word. “Monogamy is something we, as primates, didn’t evolve for and socially are not good at. We need to be realistic. Look at the odds. You need to decide when it happens, are you going to be Hilary Clinton or Jenny Sanford about it?”
Interesting point, however as a male I had to assume I was automatically biased toward crowing him the Sex Ed Messiah, so I decided to get the fairer perspective. A female UND student said this about the event: “I liked his ideas of not looking at sex, as just sex, but as all the possibilities. I also really liked when he talked about how he wished females could ejaculate. I thought that was really funny.”