dan savage’s advice that cap (the young man who had lost two girlfriends because they felt his 4.5-inch penis did not penetrate enough for sufficiently “sensational” intercourse) should avoid surgery is right, but it shows Savage’s crudely misanthropic underlying propensity to reduce human beings to empty sex objects (Savage Love, 11/10).

Savage, who sometimes derides married heterosexuals as “breeders,” fails to read into CAP’s cri de coeur a more basic, and more human, concern about being able to successfully reproduce (attracting and holding a suitable mate, having to rely on one of her previous amours to breach her hymen, being able to impregnate her with healthy children).

Savage should have told CAP his anatomy is unusual but not, in the vernacular of ethics, a “departure from the plan of creation” so as to be grotesque, and that the women who dismissed him for it are prima donnas who would likely be unwilling to accept other aspects of him as well. That is, he is better off parting ways with them before he invested more time and commitment.

Savage should have told CAP to look for a woman with her own physical insecurities, such as a flat front. Such a woman might have trouble nursing her infant, but both members of such a partnership would be mutually empathetic to one another’s being not quite physically optimal.

Then he should have suggested CAP consider having responded by sweeping each of his former girlfriends off their feet into a standing or kneeling “69” and, regardless of whether she reciprocated, bringing her to sensation without any penetration, a kind of unverbalized reductio ad absurdum of her prior complaint, which might win for him at least some respect from each of them.

Michigan Park