I love Dan Savage, editorial director of Seattle’s The Stranger and curator of the “Savage Love” sex-advice column that runs in scores of alt-weeklies around the world. We are not one of those alt-weeklies — much as I love the guy, his column is as graphic and raw as it gets (take a look for yourself at www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove). And were we to run it in this market, I might get arrested for violating community standards of pornography and/or indecency. And I would definitely hear about it from advertisers.
That’s what happened in Fayetteville, Ark. Last month when that city’s Free Weekly, in a push to become more “alternative,” began running Savage’s weekly column. The experiment lasted exactly one week, when a column offering advice about… non-traditional sex… incurred the wrath of the owner of a Subaru dealership, who called the paper and said, “Hey, I don’t want to be anywhere near anything like that again.” Me, I read his column every week. But trust me when I say most of you out there couldn’t handle it.
