Dan Savage Apologizes (Sort Of) About Beth Ditto

A month ago I wrote about Dan Savage dinging Beth Ditto about her making a comment about gay fashion designers and him responding about fat people, calling them “dumb motherfuckers” who apparently are getting what’s coming to them, beauty-wise anyway.

Well "Savage Love" this week is ALL about fat people and I think it’s pretty much as close to an apology as Beth and his readers are going to get (or at least a retraction about his previous comments). The very first letter is a man (which I’m pretty sure is a spammer/troll, the letter-writing equivalent of a crank-caller) saying that despite the fact he only dates/has skinny athletic women as girlfriends, fundamentally he’s attracted to poor, dumb, fat, ugly cowish women (whom he finds in the suburbs). Dan rips him a new one and then the rest of the column is about the sexual attractiveness some fetists find in fat people.

None of the letters are directly about Beth Ditto, her comments, or Dan’s column about her. But my guess is he got a lot shit because of that column and this week is sort of “inspired by all the anger I got because I called fat people ‘dumb motherfuckers.’” (The very fact the first letter is about someone claiming fat women are dumb is a tip-off, also why I think the letter isn’t even real, although not because Dan himself wrote it).

This non-apology-apologist move is something I’ve seen Dan do previously, which I went into details in the comments. I’ve not heard a word from Dan either on his podcast or on the slog about the Beth Ditto comments, but I bet he got a shitstorm about them.

UPDATE: Brian at Red No. 3 has the low-down on Savage Love's long history of poorly-written comments about fat people, and fat women in particular, that I eluded to in comments here.