E-Mail This Article to a Friend Regrets only BY DAN SAVAGE

Any regrets about 2004?

One Concerned Dude

Regrets? I’ve had a few — I mean, I must have had a few, right? But thanks to short- and long-term memory loss (I drove a nail into my own head in fourth grade — really), I couldn’t recall any off the top of my head. So just for you, OCD, I pulled the last 52 installments of "Savage Love" from the vaults and read through all of them. And here, in no particular order, are my regrets for 2004 ...

I regret dedicating two columns to the freakish phenomenon of women passing gas sitting up, with their ass cheeks clenched, which apparently forces the gas to bubble forward, past their vaginal lips. In some tragic instances, this phenomenon sets vaginal lips a-flappin’, and the sound is identical to the one made by a regular, ol’ butt-cheek-flappin’ fart. I regret twice burdening my readers with that mental image. (Three times, if you count this column.)

I regret not telling the obese guy who was attracted only to petite women to lose some weight.

I regret that some people have grandmothers who jerk off parakeets.

I regret touching on the sensitive subject of the epidemic of GLH, or "girl love handles," so shortly before the craze for skintight, low-rise jeans that put so much GLH on display passed into history. This unfortunate fashion trend was still being debated in my column weeks after the last teenage girl in North America had sent her last pair of low-rise jeans off to Goodwill.

I regret not including necrophilia in my original list of perversions that I will never, ever be able to sign off on, along with scat, pedophilia, and bestiality. And I regret to inform the non-animal fuckers in my readership that I received tons of e-mail from animal fuckers who thought my anti-bestiality stance oppressed them and their beloved pets.

I regret the emotional torment that so many of my readers experienced when I wrote a column about sounding (the shoving of a metal rod up a man’s urethra), but I don’t regret writing in that same column about the fine line of e-stim products produced by the good folks at ErosTek (www.sextek.com), who were so grateful for the mention that they sent me some of their fine e-stim products as a thank-you. If the good folks at ErosTek (www.sextek.com) want to thank me for mentioning them, their fine products, and their Web site (www.sextek.com) in my wildly influential sex-advice column yet again, I think an assortment of the new attachments would make an appropriate gift.

I regret advising one reader back in July that a staple gun could solve the problem of condoms slipping off her boyfriend’s cock during sex.

I regret three things about the column I wrote after George W. Bush won the election on November 2. First, I regret writing it in a drunken stupor. Second, I regret uncritically accepting the "gay marriage cost John Kerry the election" hysteria that was flying around the day after the election. (That supposed fact, drawn from the same exit polls that showed Kerry winning in a landslide, has been thoroughly debunked.) Finally, I regret not making it clearer to my straight readers why, for gays and lesbians, contemplating/threatening a move to Canada after November 2 wasn’t, and isn’t, just sour grapes. We live in a country in which one political party — the one that happens to control all branches of the federal government — "activates" its base by demonizing, scapegoating, and actively persecuting homos, a tiny and relatively defenseless minority group. Republicans tell the fundies in their base that the existence of gays and lesbians is a threat to the American family, Western civilization, and, as one bigwig R recently put it, "the survival of the earth." At some point the Rs are either going to have to make good on their rhetoric and actually do something about all the homos out there imperiling the survival of the planet (hey, maybe we’re responsible for global warming?), or they’re going to have to knock it off. I suspect/hope that the Rs will eventually knock it off. But the off chance that the Rs will one day decide to make good on their anti-gay rhetoric — by amending the US Constitution to ban gay marriage, say, or by rounding us all up and putting us in camps (I’d like to be sent to Boy Scout camp, please) — makes the thought of moving to a big, sane, nearby country where gays and lesbians are full and equal citizens extremely tempting.

While we’re on politics, I regret being so mean to Republicans in my column — even going so far as to say that people shouldn’t fuck them — for two reasons: first, I have a lot of readers who are Republicans, as it turns out, and they me send long, wounded letters whenever I suggest that they’re unworthy of sexual release. (Dear Republican Readers of "Savage Love": I trust you also send long, wounded letters to the prominent Republicans who suggest that I’m unworthy of equal treatment under the law.) Second, Republicans rule the world now, and it’s probably not a great idea to be on their bad sides. So I take it back: we should all fuck Republicans — they’re fucking us, after all, so why not?

I regret boring my many readers in Canada with a lot of blah blah blah about American politics. I tried to make it up to my Canadian readers by heaping compliments on their sensible positions on God, ganja, and gays. But some of my columns probably didn’t make for riveting reading up north. Sorry about that, Canada, and I promise to bore my American readers with at least one column about Canadian politics in 2005.

I regret writing back in April that men who get sex-change operations have "their dicks cut off." This is not the case, according to at least one angry tranny who wrote in. What happens is this: the dick is sliced open, the erectile tissue is scooped out, and then the hollow, empty tube that used to be the penis is pulled up inside the body to create a vaginal canal. The head of the penis is somehow relocated to the spot above the entrance to the new vagina, stitched into place, and the newly created female bits are almost fully functional — the new woman is even orgasmic! — and she is not, as I implied, a genital-less freak. According to the angry tranny who wrote in, reading about how dicks are sliced open, hollowed out, and their heads stitched into place is somehow less disturbing than reading the phrase "have their dicks cut off." I regret the error.

I regret suggesting that all goth girls are fat. There are many slim goth girls out there, including one who sits in the cubicle right down the hall from me.

I regret that in last week’s column I neglected to tell the woman who encountered crap in her boyfriend’s ass that there were proactive steps he could take to make sure his bowels are empty before she sticks her arm up there, from a few moments on the can to a fiber-rich diet to a full-blown enema. I was too busy making jokes about Braille dictionaries and twice-baked potatoes to offer her much useful advice.

And finally, I regret announcing a GGG contest way back in November. I thought hordes of my kinky readers would nominate their "good, giving, and game" vanilla partners for a GGG Award. I was wrong. In the end, I only got two — two! — nominations, and two contestants does not a contest make. So the GGG Awards are off. I will be sending both people who bothered to nominate their partners one of the lovely GGG T-shirts for sale at www.extraugly.com. (Extraugly.com’s GGG T-shirts make lovely gifts, great consolation prizes, and they’re a great way to advertise your GGG status.) I’ve still got a trip for two to Las Vegas to give away, and if anyone has a suggestion for a fun, dirty contest that people will actually enter, I’m all ears.

Dan Savage can be reached at mail@savagelove.net