Reference.com

Santorum (sexual neologism)

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Santorum is a sexual neologism proposed by American humorist and sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in 2003 to "memorialize" then US Republican Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania due to the controversy over his statements on homosexuality. Savage asked his readers to submit new definitions for the term; the winning definition was "that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." The word became a successful Google bomb when Savage created a website for it, which unseated the Senator's official website as the top search result for his surname on the Google search engine.

Background

In an interview with the Associated Press published April 20, 2003, Santorum grouped gay sex together with incest, polygamy, and zoophilia as deviant sexual behavior threatening society and the family. He further stated that he believed consenting adults do not have a constitutional right to privacy with respect to sexual acts.

Contest

Savage, who is openly gay and has had a history of political activism on behalf of gay rights, angrily addressed Santorum's comments in an op-ed published in the New York Times on April 25 titled "G.O.P. Hypocrisy". He linked Santorum's comments to the broader agenda of his party, saying "Mr. Santorum, who holds the No. 3 position in the Senate leadership, was only repeating what many Republicans have already said. Savage next handled the matter in his sex-advice column, Savage Love on May 8, saying:
Striking down an insulting, discriminatory, unconstitutional law will not, as Santorum fears, open the doors to incest, adultery, bigamy, and bestiality. Straight people blew those doors off their hinges long, long ago.
Savage then proceeded to answer a letter about incest, which he opposes.

Letters on the Santorum controversy began to arrive, "assuming correctly that the incident was right up Savage’s sex-politics alley", according to Liz Spikol of the Philadelphia Weekly. One writer lamented, under the pseudonym "Sex and Rick Santorum," that the controversy seemed to already be forgotten, and urged Savage to organize a reader contest to determine a definition for the word "santorum". The reader reasoned that since Santorum had invited himself into the bedrooms of homosexuals, they should be "inclusive" and name a gay sex act for him. Savage agreed, saying

There's no better way to memorialize the Santorum scandal than by attaching his name to a sex act that would make his big, white teeth fall out of his big, empty head. Savage noted that the column had previously succeeded in creating a sexual slang word, "pegging", by getting the definition to begin appearing in dictionaries of sexual slang. "I threw it out there to my readers," Savage later said.

Savage published several definitions suggested by readers in subsequent columns. The winning definition was submitted by "Wipe Up That Santorum, Anal Pokers" in the May 29 column. Votes were collected by e-mail, and the winning definition was announced June 12; Savage concluded by asking for questions about santorum, and urged his readers to get the word out. Savage has said that the winner was a "perfect fit", as there was no prior name for it. Santorum, he explained, is "unwelcome. If you’re doing [anal sex] right, it’s not gonna happen, and if it happens, it’s a bit of a killjoy, which is what it would be if the actual senator strolled into the room."

Web activism

Savage set up a website, santorum.com The site, also known as Spreading Santorum, gives the definition of the term "santorum," under which a brown, splattered stain appears on the otherwise-white page (see image). After this splash page, the site features letters to Savage tracking the dissemination of the term. The site includes a video of a person asking Santorum about the term at a town meeting-style forum and a letter that Satorum sent to a man in California outlining his objections to the "obscenity" of the website. Savage considered he had met his goal of "rubbing it in [Santorum's] nose".

As of July 2008, the site was the top Google result for the search term "santorum" as the result of a Google bomb.

Political impact

The Economist noted in January 2006 that "gay activists use [Santorum's] name to denote something indescribable in a family newspaper". In April 2006, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the "disgusting" definition was "spreading like kudzu on the internet." The Inquirer described the Savage coinage and other references to Santorum in The Sopranos and Veronica Mars as illustrating his name's evolution into "cultural shorthand ... for social conservatism". The regional gay newspaper Bay Windows said in August 2006 that Savage had "succeeded in turning [Santorum's name] into an oft-Googled slang term". According to the Philadelphia Weekly, writing in October 2006, the term "gained real traction" and "found its way into salacious dictionaries — and books published on actual paper", with Savage admitting that he "worked pretty hard" to get it out there.

Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign included the full definition in a reprint of an item from Gay City News. The article noted that Savage had donated $2,100 to the campaign of Santorum's challenger in the 2006 election, Bob Casey, but Casey had not accepted the donation. According to the Scranton Times-Tribune, Casey returned the money after hearing of Savage's promulgated definition of santorum, saying that what Savage had done went "over the line" demarking political civility. Savage gave the money instead to an anti-Santorum political action committee.

Subsequently, Casey won the election. Although a California weekly suggested that the campaign's "ripples were felt strongly by the outgoing senator himself in the recent midterm elections, and Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle declared that "Dan Savage helped kill Rick Santorum, Savage himself says "you can't really measure impact".

In a celebratory column, though, Savage wrote:

While Santorum would have been defeated even without a filthy, lowercase definition of his last name floating around out there, having a name that can barely be mentioned in polite company anymore didn't help.... We helped to make Rick Santorum into a national laughingstock — with an invaluable assist from Rick Santorum, of course.
Savage gleefully pointed to Kathryn Jean Lopez, conservative columnist and editor of the National Review Online, as an example of his success. In her election day column, Lopez described Santorum as "the politician most successfully victimized by nasty Internet political tactics" and predicted that "some angry people will get the chance to celebrate ... I don’t mean people who disagree with him on a federal marriage amendment. I mean people who think it’s pretty funny that when you Google the senator’s name, you get a repulsive lower-case version of his last name.

Recognition in media

The print journal Gay and Lesbian Humanist noted the contest in its Summer 2003 issue, but before a definition had been selected. At its annual meeting in January 2005, the American Dialect Society selected "santorum" as the Most Outrageous Word of the Year for 2004. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower later wrote in Slate, "This year the strongest contender was santorum.... We dismissed one potential problem — that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won — on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed... santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom.

The word has appeared as a humorous aside in college newspapers and even music reviews The term's popularity as a political epithet has extended to bumper stickers and t-shirts.

Tucson Weekly movie reviewer Jim Nintzel wrote in April 2006 that he introduced the word to Rob Corddry of The Daily Show, noting that "Despite his high-ranking position as a member of the media elite, Corddry wasn't aware of this important linguistic development.. Subsequently the show referenced the term in its July 12, 2006 and December 11, 2006 episodes. Google Current also covered the Google bombing of the term on July 15, 2006.

References

External links



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Monday July 21, 2008 at 17:20:55 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation