I am pro-choice. But when those pro-lifers start banging on about abortion being murder and “your choice? what about the child’s choice?”- I hesitate… maybe due to years of religious brainwashing.

Help me be smarter about this?

When religious wingnuts chant on about how “life begins at conception,” what they’re really expressing is their ridiculous belief that White Jesus up in sunny heaven reaches down into every woman’s uterus the very instant that a sperm fertilizes an egg and magically imbues the resulting single-celled zygote with a fully formed human soul.

They really truly believe this, and you will never convince them otherwise, and that’s why this is a dumb-fuck religious issue instead of a pragmatic scientific one.

Here’s the thing, though. There is no Jesus. There is no magic. There is no soul. THERE IS NO CHILD.

More to the point, a zygote isn’t a child. It’s just a clump of cells. Same goes for an embryo, as it’s just a slightly bigger clump. Hell, a mid-term fetus still isn’t a child, even though it kind of looks like a squishy one. Only when we start talking about later-term fetuses that are viable outside the womb can anyone start making a rational argument that it’s a child, but post-viabilty abortions aren’t even an option unless the mother’s health is at risk.

So, why is any of this still controversial? Because babies are cute and make people emotional and America is full of half-wits who believe in magical Jesus baby souls.

That’s why you hesitate, because there’s enough irrational static out there to make you feel like somehow an innocent child is involved, but there isn’t, because THERE IS NO CHILD.

Hi, Coquette. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’ll be 26 in 2 months, I’ve dropped out of school hmmm… 4 times now? I’m in massive amounts of debt. I currently don’t have enough to make rent next month so I’m taking a bus from my dream city back to my hometown. I just got fired from the best job (on paper, at least) that I’ve ever had. The only serious relationship I’ve had was emotionally and physically abusive (that ended about 2 years ago). And I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, or how to dig myself out. I read a lot new age-y self-help stuff about staying positive and shit because I’ve dealt with depression on and off and it seems to help. But honestly, I just want someone to give it to me straight – is there any way out of this? I wasn’t always this way – I was a star student and the girl that was “going places”, and I just want to be productive and happy and driven again.

What the fuck? Fired from the only decent job you’ve ever had? Dropped out of school four times? New age self-help books? Ugh. You’re a fucking disaster.

You were never going places. You were never productive and driven. Get that public high school pep-talk bullshit out of your head, because you’re remembering yourself as happy during a time when all you were was innocent.

Stop romanticizing the past, because the brutal truth is that you were weak and unprepared. You couldn’t cut it in college. You can’t hold down a job, and now you’ve got a one way bus ticket back to what I’m guessing is one of your family member’s guest rooms.

Yeah, your life fucking sucks right now. You’re getting your ass thoroughly kicked by the real world, and you’re not even bothering to give me a list of excuses — probably because you know I’d call you out on them.

Please, do yourself a favor. Take all your stupid self-help books down to the local thrift store and trade them in for one decent Tina Turner album. I swear to everything holy that you’ll get more useful inspiration out of one of her B-sides than you will from an entire wall full of positive-thinking books.

I’m serious. Self help books are for fucking losers, and staying positive for people like you means living in a constant state of denial. Stop blowing sunshine up your own ass. Your life is a steaming pile of shambles, and a bunch of smiley-faced wish-thinking won’t make it any better.

The only way out of your situation is through slow and steady progress. It will not be easy. It will not be fun. You need to come to terms with the inevitability that you are going to have to work a shitty job, and since you’re a flighty mess, you’re going to have to summon all your willpower just to hold that job down.

You don’t get to sulk. You don’t get to whine. You have to be thankful and grateful and show up every day with a good attitude. (There’s your positive fucking thinking for you.) You will do this week-in and week-out for the rest of your life. Maybe you’ll meet a guy who doesn’t treat you like shit, and maybe you’ll squeeze out a rugrat or two, but odds are good that you’re never leaving your hometown again.

And you know what? You’ll be just fine.

You’ll make your way. You’ll have your set of friends. You’ll do some cute local Etsy shit on the side to occupy your spare time, and then one day you’ll wake up and realize that this is all there is to American adulthood. It’s all there ever was.

The whole time you thought you were “digging yourself out,” that was actually your life, and sure, it could’ve been easier, and it would’ve been nice to have more money, but really, on the whole, it wasn’t all that bad.

Five years ago I was a happy hooker in Manhattan living a carefree existence and dating an amazing guy. Easy going, funny, caring, hot as fuck, same playful worldview as me. When he had to move away for a few months I decided to let the relationship fade as letting it run its natural course would likely have ended in heartbreak (at 25 he said he had at least a decade before wanting to settle down; at 31 I knew I wanted a child at some point and didn’t have 10 years to wait to start).

Enter 42 year old handsome ad exec client of mine. We start dating, I quit my job, quit partying, and re-entered the 9-5 workforce. We have endless conversations about my ability to be monogamous (I can) because he’s been cheated on. We fall in love fast and in less than a year decide to get pregnant and move in. All seems to be running smoothly until 2 months after our son is born when I come across evidence that he had lied about a past divorce (2 not 1) and then a few weeks later that he had been seeing sex workers for the last year. Over the course of a few months and therapy I decide to stay. He says it was self destructive behavior because he thought my pregnancy-induced ambivalence towards him (I was) meant I would leave him (I wouldn’t). Things got better, but we never recovered fully. A year and a half later he was offered a job in Portland and I said – fuck it, new start, new adventure.

We’ve been here a year and a half and I have no regrets about the decisions I’ve made. I obviously ignored some large red flags, but I love my son. I love Portland. If we broke up I would be happy to stay here (as in, wouldn’t feel trapped).

But we constantly go through the following cycle:

1. He confuses my introversion for indifference and becomes a cranky bastard.
2. I pull away because my father was a very cranky bastard.
3.  I fantasize constantly about the guy who I dated just before him. He was a beam of fucking light.
4. At this point the distance between us is tangible.
3. Blow up. The end is near. Silence. Agree to sort it out. Family unit. Blah blah.

Rinse. Repeat.

His worst fear is that I am only with him because he is generally sensible and responsible, has a good job, etc.

That’s why I’m with him.

I love him but if he was a loaf or a shitty dad I would have been gone a long time ago. The lust has faded and other than our shared love of our son I don’t know how much we actually have in common.

There’s not even a question in there. I want you to read the tea leaves I suppose.

It seems as though you’ve split the difference between settling and settling down. In that sense, you’re like most women who marry in their thirties for the sake of having a child.

Also, you’re right on schedule for the lust to have faded. That happens to all couples after a few years, especially when you throw parenthood into the mix.

You acknowledge your faults (ambivalence to near indifference) and you acknowledge that he is a good husband and father in some generic, outwardly visible sense. That’s all good stuff to know about yourself, but what you don’t seem to recognize is how easily you’re able to change your own history for the sake of your present emotional state, especially with regard to your prior relationship.

I promise you, beam-of-fucking-light guy wasn’t all that special. He was just young and wild. Hell, so were you. I’m not trying to insult your memory of him or denigrate the relationship. What you two had together was very real, and I’m sure he was a great guy, but he wasn’t magical. You were just in love, and now you’re heaping all your “what might have been” fantasies onto your memory of him.

You’re making beam-of-fucking-light guy out to be much better than he actually was. (Yes, you are.) That’s not fair to you, that’s not fair to him, and that’s not fair to your husband.

Now, as for your husband, his worst fear is NOT that you’re only with him because he is a good provider. That’s merely your interpretation of his inherent low self-esteem, which he otherwise is well-practiced at hiding.

His worst fear is that he is unlovable.

This is a man who throughout his life has regularly and continually paid women for sex and affection. You were one of those women, and believe me when I tell you that there is a dark sticky place in his psyche that you’re never allowed to see where he has some major issues with women, and that part of him is tied directly to his fear of being unlovable. (I can’t even begin to explain all the mommy issues involved here.)

If it weren’t for your son, it’s plainly obvious that the two of you would already be divorced — his 3rd apparently — and you would have already fallen in love with someone else. (That’s your larger pattern, interrupted only by motherhood.)

That doesn’t mean you two can’t have a happy marriage. You can, and it doesn’t have to end in divorce. The good news is you two on some fundamental level have always respected one another. Even at the ass-end of one of your blow-up cycles, neither of you have lost respect for the other.

That’s your saving grace. You can build on that. I recommend you two start seeing a relationship therapist regularly to help the process, but it’s time for you both to start a new kind of partnership, one in which you both shift and refine your ideas about love.

You need to mutually acknowledge that lust fades over time. You need to mutually accept that the two of you have complex sexual and emotional needs, and it’s unreasonable to expect that all those needs can be met by just one person. Furthermore, you need to mutually acknowledge that just because your spouse doesn’t meet all of your sexual and emotional needs, that doesn’t mean you two can’t be a healthy, loving couple.

I promise, you can. As long as there’s mutual respect, you can make it. You may have to fly in the face of tradition, but given your mutual histories, I doubt you’ll have much problem with writing your own rules to your marriage.

I love you for everything that you have been to me all these years, I guess you get that a lot, but I am sincere nonetheless. I’ve submitted questions before and you’ve kicked my ass, you’ve also been nice and constructive and just perfect. I don’t know where to begin, I write to you with a very heavy heart.

I was violently abused the last time I had a long term boyfriend, and left him in October 2013. It’s been almost two years since, but it feels like a different life. After that, I fell in love with someone and he was only going to be here for three months. He was polyamorous, and the drive towards polyamory came from him. I decided that is what love was, that I would love him unconditionally despite everything, and he even encouraged the fact that I see other people. I was hurt in  the beginning and then I grew to love it. The honesty and faith we shared really transformed me, I fell for his best friend, and he was the one who provided us with the condom. That was the time I decided that I was, in fact, polyamorous. The both of them left for home. It was over by then. We remain friends still.

I believed monogamy leads to abuse or some kind of violation given the dishonesty involved, towards your desires, needs etc. I don’t know if it’s a fair assumption. I just make it because I saw it careened to its vulgar extreme; I was twenty years old and found at my college farewell with a black eye, meeting suspicious and even pitiful stares. I don’t know if I am still over it. It’s only after that I became polyamorous. Then I was the other woman for a few months, and faced the emotional consequences, followed by feeling completely unthreatened or at a loss, grateful for everything he did for me, and was to me. I left when the time was right. I finally met someone who felt like the one for me.

This was in December. We bonded over our shared ideas on polyamory, love for music, spirituality, literature, philosophy, we even have the same cultural family background, it’s a long running a joke between us, that if we ever found that we were cousins, it would be the end of the world.

Except. He doesn’t use condoms, and my health is fucked because of birth control. Another thing, is that he was screwing some local b-grade porn star last year, and she messaged him around the 10th of July stating that she wanted to spend a week with him, and go on a weekend holiday because it’s her birthday, and that she would like to stay with him. He even said that she could live with him! Fuck on the same bed that we do. I learnt he hadnt told her about me yet, or my significance in his life. I urged him to come clean and let her know. It’s only then that he did, he didn’t feel the need to do it otherwise. When he finally told her, she lost her shit and said stuff like ‘whoever your fuck buddy is, what do you expect to happen, when she comes over, a fucking orgy?’ then later apologized for reacting and persisted in turning up here nonetheless, she is staying at a person’s place, who is a common friend of mine. They still fuck though, and he loses his shit when I say that it’s better he doesn’t see me while he is with her, even if it’s just a week. Also, I would rather he took a VD before he slept with me after doing her. It’s nothing personal. Just precaution.

Now, the act of sex does not bother me, it’s just that she is who she is, and I don’t judge people for their life choices, but it makes me wonder who he is, if he can be with someone like her, and someone like me at the same time. Does that make him sexually diverse? Or just lacking in a self-concept, standards, integrity? She might just be better in bed, whatever, I don’t care.

I’m feeling strange about this because I have never experienced anything like this before. I am alright with one off sexual encounters that he might have with other people (he is a bit of a local celebrity, a musician, he tours, so I’m cool with it. I have slept with other people too, and we have been honest about things). I am not okay with someone having this space in his life, feel like she can get her way by throwing a tantrum. Hell, I’ve never once thrown a tantrum around him. I believe it’s important to be decent, no matter how trying the situation might be.

It’s making me feel like a terrible feminist, and even more so, it’s shattered my sense of identity. I don’t know who I am, or what I want. If I am not okay with monogamy, and I am not okay with his kind of polyamory, then what is it that I am okay with? I don’t want to be the person who restricts his impulses, and he isn’t aware of how I feel about this. I’ve just been playing it cool and blaming my emotions on going away (I got a scholarship to go to Paris for further studies, but neither of us are taking it too well). He says I am his first true love and he has never shared anything as meaningful with anyone in his life before. I’ve had his ex girlfriends chase me down, and insult me. I’ve lost friends to jealousy, I’ve lost the friendship of someone I loved deeply because I was with him, I’ve faced public ridicule, and social humilation and never given a fuck because I had faith in him and the love we shared. Everything was fine, those people became my friends again because they saw he loved me too. He did everything that was required of him.

I’ve made every sacrifice because I know there would rarely be another instance when I would love someone with this kind of innocence and honesty again. I feel like I am the one who deserves this space in his life, and that woman can’t just randomly turn up demanding to share the same quarters with him and take him away from me for a week. Please help. I am so torn, these last few weeks have been sheer torment. I am 22, he is 28, she is 35, if that is significant. She dumped her last boyfriend because he would fuck around. Though she says to him, that she is okay with the situation between the three of us. I don’t believe her, especially after the tantrum she threw that day. I have a feeling that is significant in your assessment of the situation.

Should I just end it with him while I am about to go abroad to study? Take time to know who I am? Understand why I consider it beneath my integrity to compete for a boy’s time with a miserable, almost middle aged woman? There is so much shit involved. I just want to cry.

My faith in you, dearcoquette, is unshakeable. Please help me.

Polyamory is not love. It is a modality for experiencing love, and the context in which you were introduced to polyamory (during a rebound from an abusive relationship) suggests that you might have gotten into polyamory for the wrong reasons. You need to understand that monogamy wasn’t the problem in your abusive relationship. Your abusers violence and dishonesty was.

I’m not suggesting you be monogamous, nor am I saying there’s anything wrong with you being polyamorous. I am suggesting that you need to have the self-awareness to understand why you’re choosing either lifestyle, and you’re struggling right now because you’re simply not there yet. Don’t worry. You’ll get there.

Here’s a sneak peek at the process you’ll go through in your mid-twenties: At the moment, you associate monogamy with physical abuse and betrayal. In a few years, you’ll come to associate polyamory with emotional abuse and general douchebaggery. (I promise this will happen.) Eventually, you’ll come to realize neither monogamy nor polyamory are ideal, and you’ll have enough experiences (both shitty and wonderful) to pick the best elements from both lifestyles and chart your own middle course. The way you choose to love may end up being hard to define, but it will work perfectly for you and your partner(s).

In the meantime, I highly recommend you move on from your current relationship with the musician. I get a super sketchy vibe from the picture you’ve painted of him. He seems selfish, crudely manipulative, and the no condoms thing is a huge red flag that he’s also emotionally abusive. I know you can’t see it yet because you’re young and in love, but there will come a day when you realize this guy is a gigantic douchebag. (It’s okay. At 22, it’s hard not to end up dating douchebags.)

So yeah, I think it’s a great idea for you to let your travel abroad be the natural end to the relationship. Go. Be single in Paris. Have romantic and spiritual adventures. Take all the time you need to learn who you are, and if there’s one single piece of advice I could give you to take on your journey, it’s to stop making sacrifices for the men in your life. Love is not sacrificial. No part of you needs to be destroyed in fulfilling a man’s purpose. Ever. Period.

I’ve been with my boyfriend for three years and I love him so much. He’s truly my partner in everything. We adopted a dog recently and we’re moving into our own place in a few months. Everything is sort of gliding effortlessly forward and that scares me for some reason. I’ve never had a relationship last this long that didn’t have some serious red flags by now. He is so supportive and reliable. Since I met him my life has become much more calm and stable, but sometimes that also seems boring. It’s like we’re too comfortable with each other, which I know sounds like complaining that my jewels are too heavy. How to I keep from becoming ungrateful for this life we have together? How do you keep this sort of thing fresh?

 
The relationship isn’t boring. Life is boring, and you’re just now noticing for the first time as an adult because you aren’t being distracted by some youthful flavor of chaos.

If you want to keep from becoming ungrateful, do some serious soul-searching and identify exactly what’s missing in your life now that you’re in a stable, healthy relationship. “Things aren’t fresh anymore” isn’t a good enough answer. Be very fucking specific, and very fucking honest with yourself. Remember, fresh isn’t the same thing as exciting, and excitement isn’t the same thing as chaos.

If you can’t come up with a specific and valid problem other than the mild state of boredom known as everyday life, then guess what? This is as good as it gets. Take that as good news or bad. Either way, you’d be wise not to go searching for a taste of chaos. That shit isn’t a spice.

He’s a twenty-nine year old business owner with an enormous personality, well traveled, well read too. He’s incredibly nice but he’s ring leader of his wild circus of asshole friends.

I’m a twenty-three year old college dropout who’s back in school and just came through the tail end of my depression. I’m nice, I read, but am a very good (boring) girl who over thinks everything.

Please just tell me why it’s not going to work out before I fall tits up in love with him and his Ewan McGregor smile? I want to think that in time I can become a contender but that seems…unrealistic. Give it to me Coquette; hurt me so he can’t.

 
If you need me to point out a bunch of red flags and tell you why a particular relationship is doomed, I can do that, but that’s not what you’re really asking me. You just want me to say the magic words that will protect you from emotional vulnerability. Sorry, kiddo. There’s no such thing as magic.

Pain is inevitable. Relationships end. You are going to get hurt — maybe by this guy, but definitely by someone you care about, and there’s nothing you can do but accept it. If you live your life trying to avoid the possibility of future pain, you will end up a numb and timid creature without any stories worth telling.

Go ahead and fall tits up in love. Enjoy the feeling while it lasts. Just promise me you’ll quit thinking of yourself as a contender. That mindset is poisonous. You are worthy of him. Timing and circumstance might prevent you two from ending up in a relationship, but no matter what else happens, you are fucking worthy of him.

Did you watch the Bruce Jenner interview? Will you watch his tv series when it comes out? Please tell me what to think about all that.

 
Out of respect for the transgender community, I bit my tongue on the night of Bruce Jenner’s interview. I support his decision to transition — I support anyone’s decision to transition — but where everyone else seems to have witnessed an exercise in courage, all I saw was a display of calculated narcissism, albeit through a masterful manipulation of the mainstream news.

Go ahead and call me a cynic, but let’s not forget that first and foremost, Bruce Jenner is still very much a rich old white Republican from the ultimate family of loathsome fame whores, and as likable and charming as he may have appeared during that interview, any person who openly proclaims that he was “put on this earth” to “change the world” through nothing but his own shallow fame isn’t doing it because he’s courageous.

Of course, we still live in a world where a certain measure of courage is required for anyone to come out as transgender, but Bruce Jenner will be transitioning from a safe and privileged position of personal celebrity, financial security, and unconditional love and support from those close to him. He is very, very lucky.

I can’t think of a single other transgender person who began their transition with that much privilege, and now Bruce is the one with the TV show. That’s what bothers me the most.

Honestly, I’m a little bit terrified that Bruce, the Jenner family, and a handful of reality television executives at E! are gonna be the ones who frame the largest discussion of transgender issues in American popular culture to date, because that’s what’s about to happen.

This upcoming TV show is going to be huge, and while I’m all for more transgender representation in the media, I’m also wary, because these same people are responsible for a decade’s worth of pop cultural pollution, and I just don’t know if they’re up to the task of handling this kind of subject matter with the grace and gravitas it deserves.

Then again, maybe they’ll pull it off. Who knows? I hope they do. This shit is too important for it to wind up another cartoonish reality shit show.

Why do I have a problem with porn? I didn’t used to think about it but the more I read about it the more I feel uncomfortable with it, like men are getting off over women being degraded and it makes me feel sick. But then I think maybe I’m just being a bad feminist? It’s confusing :/

 
Porn isn’t inherently degrading to women any more than sex is inherently degrading to women. What makes things degrading is patriarchal and misogynistic power dynamics.

Some porn is obviously very degrading to women, but there’s also quite a bit of porn these days that is empowering to women. What gets tricky is that some porn is both, depending on where you’re standing. You have to pay attention to the power dynamics at play, not just on-screen, but within the larger context of how and by whom that porn is consumed.

As with any aspect of the sex industry (or any industry, for that matter) if there’s a situation where you need to do a feminist gut check, just ask yourself, who is profiting? Who is in control? Who has the power? If the answer is men at the expense of women, then you have every reason to react negatively.

Whatever problem it is you have with porn, recognize that it’s actually about those misogynistic power dynamics, and adjust your opinions accordingly.

I’m a stripper, and I recently had a guy I’ve been sleeping with say I can come over after work, but only if I “shower off all the lapdances first.” I ride my bike a lot, sometimes to work, and I asked if it was about being sweaty (just to absolutely clarify) and he said that my sweat in his bed was encouraged, but that other men’s was not. What the fuck is his problem? That doesn’t even make sense. Why does me showering make him feel like somehow I didn’t just get done lap dancing for money?

Oh and PS. I’m also the girl from Redneck problems. My husband and I didn’t work out, but I DID take your advice and get a degree. He is happily remarried and I am happily educated and stripping in Portland, OR. Thank you!

 
Happy to hear from you, babe. Glad that it all worked out. (That marriage was never gonna make it, but getting your degree was important.)

Here’s some brutal truth. The guy you’ve been sleeping with is an ignorant misogynist who likes the idea of fucking a stripper, but doesn’t respect you or what you do for a living.

He asks you to take a shower because he secretly believes that you are an unclean woman. Not literally. Figuratively. He thinks you’re a dirty whore, and making you shower off after your job is his weirdo way of keeping you as his whore but getting rid of the dirty part. It’s outrageously disrespectful and more than just a little bit creepy.

Don’t put up with that kind of negative bullshit for one damn second. Call him out for being disrespectful, and if he gives you even the slightest bit of attitude, stop fucking him.

Say it with me now: Good dick is never worth disrespect.

Good dick is never worth disrespect.

I’m indian-American but when I wear bindis and shit people treat me differently (negatively, like terrorist or poor deli owner or generally ugly to look at—I’m hot as shit, btw, in western clothes more people like it, w/e). When my white girlfriends borrow my clothes they look “sooo beautiful”, which is true kinda. I mean, they’re beautiful but not all indian clothes compliment their skin tone and it shows so sometimes the “you’re beautiful” is really “you’re so cultured” and I dunno. I guess I am mostly complaining because I’m cultured too, and pretty and it just bothers me, how can I change this?

The only way to change this is to build a time machine, travel back to about 1600 and become a pirate queen in the Bay of Bengal, capturing all the various Dutch, Portuguese, and English trade vessels and establishing your own private armada so that the Mughal Emperor has no choice but to allow you to invade Elizabethan England, preferably in November of 1605 so as to take advantage of the tumult and treason of the failed Gunpowder Plot.

Your invasion force would need to jail or execute everyone in the House of Lords, depose King James, and install nine year old Elizabeth Stuart as the puppet queen while forming the foundation of what would eventually become an Indian protectorate, directly controlling all trade with the rest of the world from your seat of naval power in the new Indian province of Britain.

You would need to rule with an iron fist, actively spreading art, fashion, and Hinduism throughout Europe through a massive campaign of Indian enculturation, thus altering the nature of colonial imperialism to such a degree that four hundred years later, a complete inversion of our current cultural hegemony has taken place.

I know it seems a bit extreme, but that’s really the only way you can change the way things are now. As an alternative, I suggest you wear bindis and traditional Indian fashion whenever you damn well please, because you are hot as shit, and fuck what anyone else thinks.

Believe me, I understand how frustrating it is to suffer racial microaggressions. It bothers you, and it damn well should, so if someone treats you like a terrorist or a poor deli owner for wearing traditional dress, just remember that not only are you beautiful, but you’re also a motherfucking pirate queen, and you should feel free to take that asshole’s head.