I’m a young, black Muslim girl. I started wearing hijab last year and I’m still not used to the male-gaze/the white gaze. I get so uncomfortable, sad, and annoyed to have literally everyone stare at me constantly and make such weird attempts to grab my attention. I’m an introvert obviously. Other than the scarf, I dress not much differently than your average teenage girl. What do I do?

Question everything.

Question your religion. Question your morality. Question the Islamic culture that attempts to define female standards of modesty. Question the Western culture that attempts to define female standards of modesty differently than Islamic culture.

Question the male gaze that attempts to sexually objectify you. Question the white gaze that attempts to define your value in its own terms. Question every social institution that attempts to control you or label you as the “Other.”

Question your family’s expectations of you. Question the expectations you have for your life, and then once you’ve questioned everything, once you’ve come to terms with the way the world works, once you’ve freely and thoughtfully decided upon the kind of person you want to be, then you go and do whatever you think is best.

Whether you wear hijab is incidental. What matters is your freedom to choose, the depth of your choice, the courage of your convictions once you’ve decided for yourself.

Questioning everything is what gives you the inner strength to live your life however you damn well please, and tell anyone who doesn’t like it to go fuck themselves.

So wait, in one post you said both “We’re social animals with a biological imperative to reproduce. That’s it. That’s all. Love is a neurochemical response with a shelf life long enough to perpetuate the species.”  and “All we have in this world is relationships with other people. At this stage in our evolution, nothing else matters.”  I mean, yell at me all you want, but I’m confused.  Is love not a relationship with another person?  Does that mean it doesn’t matter or it’s all that matters?  I don’t get it.

Both. It’s both, my friend. Love doesn’t matter, and yet it’s all that matters.

This doesn’t have to be confusing. You just have to be willing to accept the premise that nothing matters. We’re all dust. Not just our individual selves, but the entirety of the human experiment. It’s all going to be a pile of ashes one day.

Most people recoil at the thought of annihilation. It terrifies them. They invent silly gods and ridiculous myths of armageddon or eternal life, all to stave off the creeping inevitability of the nothingness to which we will all return.

Don’t recoil from your own impermanence. Accept it. Embrace it. Gaze into the abyss, and let the abyss gaze back into you, because if you can let go of your fear while maintaining eye contact with nothingness, the singular importance of love will crystalize right in front of you. It will be an unavoidable revelation.

Love doesn’t matter, and yet it’s all that matters. The contradiction melts away once you come to terms with not just yours but everything’s eventual annihilation. Sure, love is just a neurochemical response with a shelf life long enough to perpetuate the species, but so what? It’s all we’ve fucking got.

Forgive me for my ignorance, but what’s a Bugatti?

A Bugatti is a multi-million dollar, ultra-exotic sports car under an Italian marque built by a French manufacturer owned by a bunch of Germans.

Bugattis are hideous. They look like a Porsche wearing an angry motorcycle helmet. They’re obviously designed to appeal to coked-up Saudi Princes, but hey, if you wanna get date raped after a night of clubbing by the douchebag son of a billionaire, the Bugatti is definitely the car to do it in.

Last year some hoodrat Florida rapper jumped off of Rick Ross’s dick long enough to produce an embarrassingly bad auto-tuned mess of a track featuring the lyrical hook, “I woke up in a new Bugatti.” It was a huge hit, and now Bugatti has replaced Maybach as the vehicular status symbol most fetishized by people who don’t know any better.

Of course, for her latest single Brit-Brit needed something that rhymed with “hot body,” and since “Illuminati” would have been inappropriate, she went with “Bugatti” and “Maserati.” You know, because two Italian sports cars and visible abs represent the aspirational limits of her fan base.

Britney’s new “Work Bitch” video makes me think of you.

Really? Because it makes me think of popular culture’s conspiratorial role in perpetuating the myth of social mobility as a function of conspicuous consumption during late-stage capitalism.

You want a Bugatti? You want a Maserati? Well, it doesn’t matter if you work, bitch. You will never have those things. You will not live fancy. You will not live in a big mansion. You will not party in France.

But by all means, work bitch. Slave away for your hourly wage so you can save up enough disposable income to purchase a bottle of Britney’s Hidden Fantasies perfume or a Beats by Dre Pill Speaker. I mean, are you fucking kidding me with that product placement?

Just look at this image. It’s the most brilliant and insidious visual metaphor I’ve ever seen in a music video. Voiceless and obedient, silenced in voluntary bondage to a plastic pop culture artifact. Push the button and Britney’s latest club hit spews forth from her mouth instead of original thoughts and opinions.

You know who that is? She’s you, bitch. You’re the one wearing a bit gag. You’re the one being whipped. You’re the one chained up by a millionaire on top of an inverted pyramid. And of course, you’re the one who thinks it’s all so hot.

“You better work, bitch” isn’t a suggestion. It’s not encouragement. It’s a fucking order, one that you blindly follow in the hopes that some day you might earn an invitation to the sexy Vegas dance party in the sky.

Well, guess what? That will never happen.

Now get to work, bitch.

You’re blond, right? I don’t know why I think that, maybe you put a photo or something once, but it’s relevant… OK, so here it is. Do you think there is an age where a woman should stop dyeing her hair blonde? Or she should slowly do a darker hue? I’m in my mid 30s and have been a (well done) bottle blonde since my late teens. My mother is in her 60s and still going blonde, and I think it looks tacky and graceless. When should I change mine? Should I go brown or just a darker blond?

Sorry for the stupid question, but this is the internet.

I will neither confirm nor deny my status as a blonde, but I will tell you that this is not a stupid question. It may seem superficial, but there’s a lot going on here, so strap the fuck in, because we’re gonna go pretty deep.

First, a word about my grandmother. She was a wily old lady who loved to gossip, and perhaps my favorite of her many quirks was to comment loudly whenever someone she knew changed their hair.

“A woman’s hair is her crown,” she would say. “If she’s doing something different with her hair, that means she’s doing something different with her life.” My grandmother was right, of course. It could be big or small, internal or external, but a change in your hair always reflects a change in your life.

That brings me to you and your mother, two bottle blondes from two generations, both dealing with two of life’s major transitional phases. There’s a reason marketing demographics break down into ages 18-34 and 35-55, and it’s no coincidence that you’ve been blonde from your late teens up to now when you’re in your mid-30s.

You are passing from young adulthood to middle adulthood. It is a significant transition into a completely different stage of psychosocial development, and of course, it’s the reason you’re asking this question about your hair color.

Your mother is also passing from middle adulthood to late adulthood. It’s just as significant a transition, one she might not be prepared for yet. Her resistance to that change is reflected in her refusal to be anything but blonde, which is why you think her choice to keep the same color is tacky and graceless.

For each of you, your blonde hair represents a part of your identity. You seem ready to acknowledge the changes in your life. Your mom, not so much. That’s fine. You should both do whatever the fuck you want to do with your hair, but since I can tell how these things are gonna play out, let me go ahead and predict your future.

After reading this, you are going to go significantly darker with your hair. You won’t go all the way brown, but you won’t be blonde anymore either. Your friends will say it makes you look younger. Your mom will say it makes you look older. (For the record, you’ll look pretty much the same.)

After a few months of minor adjustments where you go a bit darker, you’ll settle into the new color. Eventually, you’ll catch yourself looking at pictures when you were blonde and you’ll wonder what in the hell you were thinking.

At some point, your mom will turn up with brunette hair. She will credit you as her inspiration for going non-blonde. This will be true, but not for the reason you think. She will refer to her new look as her “natural” color, which is kind of ridiculous, but you’ll let her get away with it, because that’s what daughters do.

Are you proud to be an American?

No. I have a deep appreciation for the privileges my citizenship affords me, but I am highly suspect of the tribal nature of the human condition and I consider nationalistic pride to be a particularly ugly and regressive emotion reserved for simpletons and the charlatans who hope to take advantage of them.

Humans are born selfish, therefore equality/end of discrimination will never be achieved, and we should stop working towards it. Your thoughts?

Humans are born wailing shit puddles of weakness and need. You know what happens? We grow. We develop. We become a little less weak, and if we’re lucky, we improve, both as individuals and as a species.

Achieving equality isn’t the point. Neither is the end of discrimination. What does that even mean, anyway? Are you talking about equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? And discrimination isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of groups who deserve whatever discrimination comes their way. Men who catcall, for instance. People who wear finger-toed sandals. Anyone who voted yes on Prop 8.

The human condition is one big fucking tragedy, but that’s no reason to stop working towards something better. You don’t get to give up because of the inherent flaws in our nature. That’s the worst kind of weakness.

How do I explain to someone why Zimmerman is guilty of manslaughter when they say “listen, let’s remove race from the equation and all of these facts logically point to not guilty”? In fact how do I protest against “let’s remove race” when it seems clear to me that it’s crucial to this situation?

Quit wasting your breath. Zimmerman isn’t guilty of manslaughter, because six Florida women who couldn’t get out of jury duty said so. Sure, a different jury with a different set of instructions hearing different arguments might very well have convicted him of manslaughter or worse, but that’s not how it played out.

Point is, don’t get bogged down in the legalities. That shit will make your head explode, especially if you’re arguing with a privileged blowhard. It’s much easier to say that what George Zimmerman did was wrong, and a system that would declare him not guilty is broken.

Any system that would allow George Zimmerman to legally carry a concealed weapon, legally hunt down a teenager he felt was suspicious, legally confront that teenager against the instruction of authorities, and then legally use deadly force in the resulting altercation — I mean, come on — any system that would legally allow all of that is fucking broken.

As for removing race from the equation, that’s a giant red flag. Anyone who says “let’s remove race” is arguing from a place of white privilege. Call them out on that bullshit.

Race is integral to this killing. Whether intended or not, everyone with any kind of opinion on this case uses race to help justify it, and let’s not kid ourselves, race is the reason that George Zimmerman profiled, followed, and confronted Trayvon Martin in the first place.

You can’t remove race from this case any more than you can remove the gun, and it’s irrelevant whether Zimmerman’s actions fall within the textbook definition of manslaughter, because he was found not guilty.

The larger point is a simple: what George Zimmerman did was wrong, and the broken system that acquitted him is a glaring example of the racism that only idiots think can be removed from the equation.

Just because white people have always been the dominant cultural group in most societies does not mean that reverse racism doesn’t exist. If you look at this as an example; a white couple get told they “don’t belong” in an Asian restaurant, that is discrimination against a ‘race’ or group of people in society, which is “by definition” racism. So, yes, reverse racism does exist and white people do experience discrimination and segregation, just not to the horrifying extent that black people, and people of other races have and still do. Racism doesn’t have to be institutionalised or on a mass scale to be classed as racism.

Stop. Just stop. You’re wrong about this. So, so wrong.

A white couple in America being told they don’t belong in an Asian restaurant is not an example of racism. At best, it’s an example of racial discrimination. (Most likely, though, it’s an example of a white couple acting like assholes.)

Racial discrimination is not the same thing as racism. They are interrelated concepts, but they have separate definitions. People trying to color the world with eight fucking crayons often get confused at the distinction, but those of us who came to class with a Crayola 64-Pack understand that actual racism involves more than just anecdotal instances of racial discrimination.

Actual racism involves a system of race-based group privilege, and not to break it off in your ass, but your assertion that “white people have always been the dominant cultural group in most societies” is the real example of racism here.

Do you have any idea how ridiculously privileged that statement is? The fact that you’re capable of saying something that stupid while trying to define reverse racism is evidence of how insidious the real thing can be.

Disagree with me all you want. Feel free to keep throwing around a bullshit term like “reverse racism” as if it actually means something, but you’re fucking wrong about this — semantically, conceptually, and motherfucking spiritually — you’re just plain wrong.

Kale chips – like most foods baked, grilled, or fried in the right kind of oil – are actually delicious. If you don’t buy them at whole foods.

Are you fucking kidding me? Kale chips taste like the concentrated body odor of a thousand dreadlocked lesbian hummus farmers. You could fry kale chips in bacon grease, sprinkle them with powdered orgasms, and eat them while making eye contact with Ryan Gosling, and those revolting flakes of satan’s dandruff would still have the flavor profile of sun-dried dog shit.