Category Archives: Advice

Advice

On striking a nerve

Wow, nice vitriolic, angry response to that last question right after the letter about not letting our politics ‘come between us’ and putting divisiveness aside.

The more I read your words, Coquette, the more I realize how hypocritical and judgmental you can really be – and that’s incredibly disappointing. I’ve been a fan of yours for years, so I’ve witnessed your progress toward negative, holier-than-thou sanctimonious crap. And while I’m sure your instinctive response is how I’m too much of a ‘simple bitch’ or whatever to understand the complexities of your argument or some shit like that, maybe you should pause before you write me off like you do everyone else.

I used to respect your opinion as one both educated and unbiased, but frankly, the more I read you these days the more childish and up your own ass your thoughts sound. What once seemed confidence and knowledge now read like peacocking and presumption.

So here’s some unsolicited advice from a fellow bitch: maybe you should think a little more about what you’re saying, because you’ve got a lot of eyes watching these days, and your anonymity shouldn’t be used as a platform for thoughtless bullshit.

Damn, girl. Take a deep breath and slow your roll. Go re-read that last response. It wasn’t angry at all, and the only thing vitriolic is you.

I appreciate that you’ve been a longtime fan, but I think your memory is a little bit hazy. Go back to the archives. I’ve always been a shit talker. I’ve never been unbiased, and if anything, I’ve mellowed out over the years.

You’re obviously angry about something. Maybe it’s the election. Maybe someone in your life is making you feel small. Maybe you just had a shitty morning, but whatever it is, it sure as hell ain’t about me.

Do yourself a favor and try to let go of whatever disappointment you’re feeling. That shit is useless, and it will ruin your Sunday.

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Advice

On red state respect

I read your piece on red state/blue state relations and I agree with you. My problem is as a multi-racial, atheist, feminist, gay man in my mid twenties, I find it very hard to give respect where I feel such little respect is given to me. These are obviously only parts of my identity and there is more to me as a person, but these things are pretty fundamental to my person. Is there a way to be able to respect the people who are wholly against me on a personal level?

Sure, you can respect people without respecting their world view, but that shit takes a lot of enlightened patience, and I don’t recommend doing it unless you’re forced to spend time with certain folks due to geography or genealogy.

But hey, why make it about respect? Fuck ‘em. You don’t need their respect. You shouldn’t waste any negative emotion taking red state ignorance personally. Don’t make it about you or your identity. Save your energy for when you need to defend your civil and cultural liberties. That’s the hard line to draw.

The red staters can believe whatever backwards bullshit they want. What they can’t do is use their laws or their customs to try and force their beliefs onto you.

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Advice

On prop 34

It surprises me that you’re against the death penalty. If someone’s 100% WITHOUT A DOUBT guilty, why not kill them and use our taxes elsewhere?

Okay, now you’re just trolling, but still:

1. The state should not have the right to kill its citizens.

2. Ending the death penalty will save tax dollars.

3. Go fuck yourself for even asking this question.

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Advice

On prop 37

Why so against Proposition 37? Is it really such stupid hippie shit to want to know what’s in your food? Monsanto, Pepsico and other huge agribusiness interests have spent millions trying to convince voters that it is. It surprised me that someone as seemingly intelligent, liberal and politically well-informed as yourself would agree with them, implicitly disagreeing with the law professor (Stanford, UC Berkeley) who wrote the bill. There’s not really any reasonable argument against letting people know what it is they’re eating.

Also, other states can go ahead and make fun of California all they damn well please, if it makes them feel just a little bit better about the fact that they’re not California. This progressive hippie shit is what makes our state great. (Then again, I guess you do live in LA, and you’re probably a transplant. Fuck the Dodgers, by the way.)

Yeah, yeah. Fuck Monsanto and fuck the Dodgers, but also fuck you and your passive-aggressive use of the word “seemingly.” I call bullshit when I see it, and Prop 37 is stupid hippie bullshit.

Show me some good science that says a particular strain of genetically modified food has more allergenic or carcinogenic properties than its unmodified counterpart, and I’ll tell you to slap a label on products that use that particular strain. Is that what Prop 37 hopes to achieve? Fuck no. It’s not really about food safety. It’s about a political agenda.

Lumping all genetically modified foods into the same pile and slapping a warning sticker on them like they’re fucking cigarettes is just a ham-fisting scare tactic. It doesn’t provide hard data to help you think. It provides a soft label to help you feel. It’s a left-wing version of how the assholes at Fox News use the word “socialist,” and it’s total bullshit.

All that being said, I don’t care whether Prop 37 passes. It’s stupid, but who gives a fuck? The only proposition that really matters is Prop 34, so whatever else you do tomorrow, vote yes to end the death penalty.

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Advice

On being straightforward

Dear Coquette,

When I married my husband I introduced him to a guy friend of mine and they became very fast friends, but since then the guy friend has become a complete and utter pig, to the point that it makes me uncomfortable that my husband is around him. My husband acts and speaks very differently when they are together and he suddenly morphs into this complete asshole.

I am not the controlling type and don’t want to cause a fight and try to tell him they can’t see each other anymore, but it bothers me to see my husband acting like someone I never would have married. What do I say to tell him how much this bothers me without sounding like I am trying to control who he hangs out with?

First of all, yes, you are the controlling type. You’re just not very good at it, because instead of communicating directly about what bothers you, you get passive-aggressive. I’m sure it drives your husband nuts.

Second, your guy friend has always been a complete and utter pig. He may have acted differently in the past, but he’s not the one to have changed since you got married. You are.

You’re pretty vague about the details of the behavior, but the crux of the problem here is that when your husband is in the company of this friend of yours, they both act in a manner that you consider to be disrespectful to you in some immediate way.

Well, the obvious solution is to tell them both to stop it. (Yes, it really is that simple.) You’re afraid to do that for some reason. Maybe it’s because you don’t have the force of will, or maybe it’s because you don’t want to seem like a nag, but you need to get over yourself.

Start being direct about what bothers you. Quit being passive-aggressive. (Yes, you are.) Don’t make it about who your husband hangs out with. Make it about a standard of behavior, and be straightforward about your expectations.

When in doubt about what to say, just say what you mean. Start with, “I’m not trying to control who you hang out with, but this behavior bothers me, and it is unacceptable.”

Use your words, darling. Grow a backbone and tell them both to their faces to stop acting like assholes. That doesn’t make you controlling. That just makes you someone who won’t put up with disrespect.

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Advice

On your past

I was raped as a child and spent about ten years battling depression, heroin addiction and sex work. I have semi got my shit together recently but I feel a wall between me and other people as I feel I am keeping ‘the real me’ from them if they don’t know this. Though I wouldn’t want to be thought of us a just this, so why do I let it define me? Do I have to tell people this? Am I being deceptive? I feel that if I was in a relationship with a guy and he found out, he might possibly not want to be with me any more and so that makes me feel like I must tell people to find out if they really like me for me. Please help. Even just a sentence, I have never felt so alone.

Don’t tell people about your past to find out whether they really like you. That’s not fair. If you choose to tell someone about your history of trauma, it should be an act of intimacy, not a test of loyalty.

Remember, you are not your past. Your past is nobody’s fucking business unless you want it to be. You don’t have to say shit about shit. That’s not being deceptive. It’s merely being private.

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Advice

On being undecided

What if I’ve decided to not vote for either candidate for President? I deeply believe in the democratic system but can’t bring myself to stand behind either candidate. Am I wrong for thinking that I’m better off voting for a third-party candidate, even though ultimately it won’t change the outcome? I just want to be able to stand proudly behind my decision and even though it’s insignificant and won’t matter in the end, make my voice heard.

If you can’t get behind a candidate at this point, then please just fuck off and die. All your hand-wringing and indecision is just a pathetic ploy for attention. You want to feel a fleeting sense of relevance as hardcore believers try and woo you to their side.

Well, fuck you. I’m not gonna give you the satisfaction. You’re a mealy-mouthed piece of shit, and you don’t deserve to make your voice heard.

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Advice

On dating a man-child

Dear Coquette,

My boyfriend and I have an open relationship. Last week I decided to go for dinner with a guy I met the other month. It wasn’t anything crazy, and I wasn’t looking for it to be a date or anything. During dinner my boyfriend calls, and I tell him I’m having dinner with the guy. He seems totally fine, and doesn’t care just like I’d expected. Forty-five minutes later he calls again and is kind of drunk and short with me. When I leave dinner I give him a call. He answers the phone normally, but then in the middle of our conversation out of nowhere he flips out on me.  He says he hates me, I’m disrespectful, and that he’s never going to speak to me again. Then he screens my calls the rest of the night.

I figure that he’s drunk and just being crazy, and by morning he’ll be fine. The next morning he comes home to his house (where I am staying, but I also have my own place, and he had been staying at his parents’ the night before) and is sober and just so cold and proceeds to kick me out, saying that if I don’t leave he’ll call the cops. He drops me off at my house with all my stuff and says we will talk later. The rest of the day he is hot and cold with his phone calls. We meet up later and he acts like everything is normal again. When I bring up what happened he says he’s embarrassed about how he acted, he’s sorry and blamed it on the alcohol. He said he made a bigger deal out of it than he should have, and that he would never want me to feel like I couldn’t go out for dinner with someone.

I feel like the openness of our relationship might be something he isn’t as comfortable with now as he was in the beginning. Do you think this is the case? He has never acted jealous at all in the past, so his behavior was out of character. My friends think that our age difference (I’m 22 and he’s 41) might have him feeling nervous if I’m going out with someone he perceives to be an actual threat.

Please help me understand this behavior 🙂 Thank you!

Your boyfriend is a middle-aged man-child with a drinking problem who had to spend an evening with his elderly parents while you were off being twenty-two with another dude. Are you so much of a gentle idiot that you can’t do the math on this situation? Come on — this one is a big fat DUH.

This isn’t really about you or your open relationship. This is about your boyfriend’s relationship with his parents and their failed expectations of him as a son. I guarantee that’s what sparked that particular evening’s negativity, and the alcohol just helped it explode. His behavior wasn’t an expression of jealousy so much as it was a temper tantrum. He lashed out at you in a predictable fit of misdirected rage at the emptiness of his life and the inevitability of your break-up.

That’s right. Sorry, babe, but you two aren’t gonna live happily ever after. It doesn’t matter how much you think you love him. One day, you’re gonna grow up and move on. He knows it, and it’s starting to bother him. Your boyfriend has a textbook case of Peter Pan syndrome, and he doesn’t like being reminded by time spent with his parents that he won’t always be able to date women half his age.

Fair warning: this kind of silly chaos going to turn into a pattern of behavior. He’ll throw drunken temper tantrums every once in a while, and then he’ll scramble back to you embarrassed and apologetic. Eventually, you’ll get fed up with it, and you’ll be the one to break it off.

Maybe then, you can both start dating adults.

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Advice

On life choices

Dear Coquette,

My 19-year-old sister recently told me that she is pregnant. She is unemployed, hasn’t graduated and has been with her boyfriend for about two months.

The rest of my family is being really supportive, as are many of her friends, but I can’t find the energy to be supportive. I recognize that she has every right to have children, but as a feminist and children’s advocate, I don’t believe the environment and situation she is bringing this child into are healthy or fair to the child.

Am I being a really awful sister by telling her that I don’t think she is making a good choice? Should I just back this decision 100 percent like the rest of my family?

Hell no. Don’t you dare back her decision. You know damn well she’s not ready to be a mother, so be strong and lay down some brutal truth. Don’t just tell her that she’s making the wrong choice. Help her through a very tough decision, and be there for her every step of the way if she changes her mind and decides to terminate her pregnancy.

You’ve only got a couple of months before it’s too late. This is one of those “speak now or forever hold your peace”-type situations, so get in there and plead your case. She is an unwed, uneducated, unemployed teenager about to turn a guy she hardly knows into an accidental father. She is in desperate need of a reality check, so do your best to show her she’s making a massive, life-defining mistake.

Tell her how incredibly selfish it is to bring a child into the world when she isn’t prepared to properly support it. Tell her that she has plenty of time to become a mother after she gets her life together. Tell her that you love her, but that she’s just not ready.

It’s ugly stuff to have to say, but your sister needs to hear it. If it causes a rift between the two of you, so be it. Remember, supporting your sister isn’t the same thing as supporting her poor life choices.


I believe my main purpose in life is to become a mother and raise children. Am I a shameful 21st-century 20-something woman for not wanting the high-flying career over babies?

Don’t let anyone shame you for choosing motherhood instead of a career (or vice versa). If you know what you want out of life, go get it, girl. Be the best damn mother you can possibly be, and ignore the politics. All that “mother vs. career woman” crap is a false dichotomy anyway. Feminism (and life) are way more complicated than that.


I have a friend whose company I really enjoy, but who permanently lets me down and is not there for me when times are hard and I’m not my best. I don’t believe in bearing a grudge and I do like having this person around, so when I’ve got myself back together again and the inevitable apology comes, I accept and then I am surprised/hurt when it happens again. Do you have any advice?

Quit being surprised.

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