My boyfriend says he loves me, but only wants to see me like once or twice (max) a week. We both have shit going on in our lives, so sometimes this just ends up being status quo, but it hurts me when he passes on proposed plans because we’d seen each other the day or two before. Am I being too needy? Should I just chill the fuck out and be happy that he wants to hang when he does?

Okay, stop. Let’s take a step back from what you think is the problem, and let’s attempt to reframe the way you think about pretty much everything.

First, let’s examine your phrasing: “Am I being too needy? Should I just chill the fuck out and be happy that he wants to hang out when he does?”

These questions typify how you think with regard to your relationship, and it’s not healthy. The implication is that your boyfriend’s behavior is both appropriate and inflexible, and that if your emotional needs aren’t being met, it’s because there’s inherently something wrong with you.

That’s a fucked up way to look at the world. Would it ever even occur to you to use phrasing like, “Is my boyfriend being too aloof? Should I just put my foot down and demand that he hang out with me more often?” I’m not suggesting that’s the best approach, but you need to hear what it sounds like to not be a doormat.

At the very least, you should start thinking in terms of mutual needs and compatibility. The question you should really be asking is, “Are my relationship needs compatible with his relationship needs?”

Maybe they are, and you guys just have a lot of shit going on right now. Maybe they aren’t, and the relationship is too low a priority for him. Either way, convenience and inertia can’t be the only reasons you’re sticking around. If you aren’t getting what you need, have the emotional maturity to ask for it, and if it’s not likely to change, have the self-respect to move the fuck on.

What do you think about all the people who don’t understand feminism? Especially the women who supposedly “are against feminism because they don’t hate men”? Should we argue or is it a lost cause?

No, we shouldn’t argue. We should teach. We should enlighten. We should in the friendliest of spirits and without the slightest trace of condescension drop so much fucking knowledge on those people that it crushes their flawed and simplistic understanding of gender politics.

We should be patient in the face of ignorance until we know for sure that it is willful. We should give them every opportunity to change their minds, because at the end of the day, very few people are built around a core of malignant, incurable misogyny. Very few people have a world view so grotesque that they actually believe women should be subjugated. Very few people will openly admit that equality isn’t a noble pursuit — especially women for whom so often their only fault is being misguided about the fundamental concepts.

No one is a lost cause until we find out for sure that their identity is tied to an aggressively misogynistic belief system, and when we come across those broken souls, we don’t argue. That’s wasted breath. We simply mark them with red flags and keep them at arm’s length, because those are the ones who aren’t safe to be around.

What do you think about the claim that lesbian couples have a higher incidence of domestic violence than straight couples?

I don’t think much of anything about statistical claims without a source, and regardless of the numbers (or the methods used to determine those numbers), I’m much more interested in whatever underlying belief would cause a person to cite a given statistic.

So, here’s the better question: If lesbian couples do, in fact, have a higher incidence of domestic violence than straight couples, what does that make true for you? What belief does it reinforce? What belief does it refute? What does that say about you as a person?

This is the kind of statistic that a gay rights activist might use to highlight a need for more social services with regard to a particularly underserved segment of the population. Okay, fine. I can get behind that.

Unfortunately, this is also the kind of statistic that a men’s rights activist might use to reinforce his belief that women are more culpable than men with regard to their roles in domestic violence. If that’s the angle, then dude needs to step the fuck back.

Point is, if somebody is coming at you with statistics, it’s because they literally have something to prove. Make them prove it and then make them tell you why, because the numbers themselves are almost always less important than the reason someone wishes they were higher or lower.

Do you think you’re a good person?

Sure, but that’s not the right question.

I’m human. I’m capable of both good and evil, to the extent that those concepts even have meaning beyond our limited moral comprehension of the universe. I do what I can to alleviate suffering and add some measure of benefit to this bizarre little experiment we call a world, but it’s all ultimately insignificant.

It doesn’t matter whether I think I’m a good person. It only matters whether I am good to other people.

Ugh coke, what happened to you? you used to be witty and funny in your cynicism. now you just sound like a jaded old dried out cunt whose lost her thunder.

I was never a cynic, fucknuts. There just happened to be a moment when you and I disliked the same things, and during that time you thought my writing was witty and funny.

Now that we don’t dislike the same things anymore — or more likely, we happen to disagree on one particular issue — I’m suddenly a “jaded old dried out cunt whose [sic] lost her thunder.” How convenient. (Keep reaching for those clichés, by the way.)

Over the past five years, I’ve grown very in tune with the cyclical nature of both building and maintaining a large base of readers. Most people think growing an audience is a steady upward climb. It’s not. The metrics are far more fascinating than that. What actually happens is that you gain readers in discrete bursts and you lose readers in discrete bursts. It’s an elaborate wave function.

Folks who pay attention to this stuff are usually satisfied to gain as many readers as they can during a positive burst and lose as few readers as they can during a negative burst, thus ensuring the maximum readership over time.

This type of behavior consists of two basic public relations postures that are fairly easy to spot. During positive bursts, the posture is one of relentless self-promotion followed by repetition of whatever gained popularity (otherwise known as “publicity.”) During negative bursts, the posture is one of apologetic self-flagellation followed by relative silence (otherwise known as “damage control.”)

So yeah, aside from the consistent output of quality content, the only trick to engaging your largest possible audience is knowing when to say, “Look at me!” and when to say, “I’m sorry.” (I’m not going to discuss deliberate attempts to gain readers in discrete bursts. That’s called marketing, and paying for it is called advertising. Either way, it’s artificial growth, and people can tell when you’re doing it.)

Now, I bring all this up, because while most people who do this kind of thing are interested in building the largest possible readership, that’s not always the goal. It’s certainly not why I do what I do here. Sure, I love having a large audience, but large is not the same thing as wide. I’m much more interested in keeping the right readers over time than I am in keeping the most readers over time.

The trick to doing this is in my ability to spot the negative bursts as they happen and then use them to my advantage. Case in point: Yesterday, I dashed off an angry response that ended with, “You should kill yourself.”

Despite the fact that I was being sarcastic in the face of outrageous misogyny, I immediately felt the initial rumblings of a negative burst. (So be it. You can’t control when these things happen, but I do find it hilarious that no one seems to remember that I ran an entire side-blog called “Just Kill Yourself” back in the Dear Coke Talk days.)

If my goal had been to maintain maximum readership, I simply would have replaced the, “You should kill yourself” line with, “I hope you die in a fire.” (This in itself would have been a subtle dig at the silly whims of political correctness, because while it may be fashionable to scold people for joking about suicide, no one gives a shit about the delicate sensibilities of burn victims.)

I abhor political correctness, and tumblr is awash in hashtag activists and social justice warriors who take immense delight in their duties as semiprofessional finger waggers. Those are exactly the kind of people I don’t want hanging around, so later that afternoon, I loaded the top three answers of a fun-sized advice with incendiary language to provoke a deliberate response. Right on cue, my inbox fills up with whiny self-righteousness. I picked the submission that best represented a certain type of person, and then crafted an ad hominem attack specifically designed to personally offend that certain type of person.

It worked. It always works. (If you’ve read this far, you’re probably a regular reader, and you can remember any number of occasions when I left my ring on during a bitch slap.) Point is, I’d much rather have a say in the type of readers I lose when it inevitably comes time to lose them. I lost a couple hundred followers with that last post, and probably pissed off a thousand more. That’s fine with me. I’m glad they’re gone.

This isn’t something I do because I disagree with a particular point of view. It’s something I do because every once in a while, it’s good to clear the echo chamber of all the whiners. It becomes so much easier to hear the relevant conversations when they’re not around.

What’s the difference between being kind, being good, and being nice?

Being kind is a matter of altruism. Being good is a matter of morality. Being nice is a matter of etiquette.