Fun-Sized Advice

On fun-sized advice

He said he loved me. Then he left. What to do?
Have some breakfast.

Why do I measure my self worth by the quality of men that I date?
Because you live by an unspoken rule that the value of a woman is determined by men.

Your ego has fooled you into believing that you can sometimes kill it.
No. My ego fools itself into believing that I exist in the first place.

Maybe it’s way too early to ask…but you might get to it later. How do you feel about Trevor Noah?
It’s different, but it’s working.

The girls at the MAC counter were rude to me. What would coketalk do?
I would teach them a hard lesson about which side of the counter they were on. (The Catch-22 is that they aren’t rude to the kind of people who know how to teach them that lesson.)

I am planning on having sex. I love the guy. I don’t know if he loves me. We might break up soon. I am not doing it to save my relationship. But I would like to have sex with someone special to me for my first time. And I know if we end, I’ll have loads of sex with other men. Views?
Yeah, okay. Be safe.

What is your perfume/fragrance of choice lately?
At the moment, I’m kinda into Cinema by Yves Saint Laurent.

Why do so many working class white people in rural areas vote against their best interests?
Because they’ve been institutionally conditioned to use their vote as a means of justifying their belief system rather than protecting their interests.

Do you also feel like punching all the social media accounts in the world that perpetuate the nonsensical shit term “on fleek”?
Violently, but don’t worry. “On fleek” is well past its saturation point. It will be gone by the holidays.

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31 thoughts on “On fun-sized advice

    • Ava says:

      Figure out what personality traits are inherent to you, and the things you’re skilled at. Value yourself for how you use those two things together to your personal satisfaction. Do things you like doing just because you like them, and not what anyone else might say. Their opinions don’t matter.

      And make the hard choice to be autonomous, when the easy choice is to just meld with whoever you’re close with at the time. Note that being autonomous should not be equated with being single; just with being independent.

      But to do all that you have to really know yourself well and really grow to like the person you are. It comes with time.

  1. Clark says:

    As a 23 year old, I never felt more irrelevant than when I debated with a group of high school students I work with about why “fleek” is not a thing.

    • MN says:

      “Fleek” is very much a thing. It was a part of AAVE lexicon until it was appropriated, over used, and mercilessly beaten into oblivion by white girls on Twitter who draw in their eyebrows.

      • Clark says:

        Those are the ones I was debating it with, actually. In the Bay Area, interestingly enough. I had never heard it until I started working at a high school.

  2. Perspectivator says:

    Lingo like “on fleek” is like a bacterial infection. Unless you sterilize, it will be present in some portion of the population. I site Bay area slang such as “beezy” for example.

  3. Jonathan says:

    Regarding white people in rural areas, it might simply be that their estimation of their own best interests is different from what you think is best for them.

    To expand just slightly, the implied missing word in the question is “economic”, following the What’s Wrong with Kansas argument (unless I’m mistaken). People have interests other than the economic.

      • compagno says:

        amen. “The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally.”

        Karl Marx. _Capital Volume One_, Chapter 28

    • No, it’s economic.

      I have seen it numerous times here in the conservative Midwest. Poor people who become enraged at the idea that the wealthy might pay more in taxes. Defending corporations and their tax breaks. Looking down on people on assistance and pulling the “bootstraps” line.

      It’s astonishing. Even my MIL, who was poor herself and helped my disabled husband get on food stamps and SSI, bought into a lot of it.

  4. Anna says:

    “I would teach them a hard lesson about which side of the counter they were on.”
    Oh yeah, symbolic class violence is a nice way to settle everyday problems.
    I’d just go for a quiet calm “please do not be so condescending to customers, it’s disagreeable and it’s bad for business”. Usually people are stunned into silence, but if that doesn’t work call a manager. However, please stay polite and respectful at all times (that’s in everybody’s reach, whatever your class or socioeconomic status).

    • idk says:

      There are plenty of ways to teach salespeople a ‘hard lesson’ and none of them involve symbolic warfare. Even you admit you would call a manager in a particularly egregious case of rudeness. Just a couple of months ago I had a cashier at a drugstore call me “retarded” because I was suffering facial paralysis from the removal of a very large brain tumor. I won’t lie, I tried to get her fired. As far as I know she still works there though, I haven’t returned to that location.

      • Anna says:

        I’m sorry you suffered such a rude, distasteful, and ignorant attitude attitude from that salesperson but I think that your situation was quite different from coquette’s example. In the latter you have one person from a working class performing class discrimination against the customer probably bc the customer is also working class (coquette did say that “they aren’t rude to the kind of people who know how to teach them that lesson”). It’s pure bourgeois ideology, they divide the working class to better reign. Mac is marketed to a certain type of clientele, for the girls behind the counter snubbing anyone who isn’t part of that clientele gives them a feeling of power -but not actual power, as coquette states they’re still on the other side of the counter. So I’m not in favour of a solution that reinforces that violence affirms division where there should be none.
        However in your case you had a medical condition, the cashier did not, and you had no obligation whatsoever to stay calm when dealing with her ignorant and discriminatory bullshit. I hope that the manager have a satisfactory response, and that this episode did teach her a lesson.
        Also my best wishes for your recovery <3

    • The Coquette says:

      Ugh. Your freshman level Marxism is insufferable. There’s a difference between class and station, Anna. Not everything is a battle between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Your heart is in the right place, but you need to rescale your politics, because you’re making class divisions where there aren’t any. Everybody at the mall is proletariat. Everybody. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — we’re all American peasantry.

      • Anna says:

        OK so I haven’t had a full night of sleep I’m still going to answer, but first I’d like to preface this comment: I love you coquette, however harsh I may seem. You were one of my biggest inspirations during difficult teenage years and you inspired my first threesomes, and I’ll forever be infinitely grateful for that.
        Firstly, I know French isn’t your language, but unless you are talking about a specific group of people that are bourgeois, you should use the word bourgeoisie to designate that class and that ideology. Bourgeois is an adjective, bourgeoisie is the corresponding noun.
        Which leads us to the second point : you don’t need to be bourgeois to perpetrate bourgeois ideology. Actually most of the proletariat perpetrates bourgeois ideology in the post industrial world.
        You, however, are particularly good at emulating upper classes. The marketing of this website (ie the reason the whole internet including myself have consistent wet dreams about you) is based on the premise of petit bourgeois induglencies (eg upscale parties and cocaine). You have a high paying job, I guess, and you have at least enough capital to consider buying property in LA. So you’re proletariat for sure but also buying into the petit bourgeois mentality. That’s why you have no difficultly affirming your position on the better side of the counter.
        I think I understand the difference between class and station, but if you believe we are the 99 percent, why would you want to remind so of their station in a violent manner (“hard lesson”) literally putting them back in their place, and substituting trade relations (ie client/salesperson) for hierarchy (“on which side of the counter”).
        Another objection, I am not familiar with the American mall. I’ve had a limited access to English suburban shopping centres when I was a child but I don’t remember much of those. However it does appear fascinating and I will visit one the next time I come to the states (which happens every ten years on average).
        Also, your Mac products are definitely less expensive than in continental Europe, maybe I got the north american Mac sociology wrong, our Mac shops/counters are probably more chic than yours.
        While we talk about american/European differences, is American peasantry equivalent to American proletariat ? I know that you had a non homogeneous industrialisation between the north and the south, followed by a rapid deindustrialisation, but in Europe if you equate peasantry with proletariat you’ll have serious problems with most Marxists, Stalin and the Ukrainians!
        To tie this up (bc I’m rambling)… Well there isnt much to say. Your response was sharp in delivery as always, but lacked sustenance. I’m completely fine with you calling me a freshman Marxist, bc I haven’t studied history or philosophy or social sciences since high school, and I’ve spent the last 2 years since high school working 10 hour days every day for my medical studies alone (add to that selective md PhD program + job that pays actual money+ activism). Also as a political and social activist, I speak to actual people, most of which are very much working class (fyi working class is different from proletariat for most ppl), I prefer to speak in simple terms, which suits the internet too. I’m trying to open a discussion here, not shut ppl down, what the fuck are you doing ?
        Another thing, my politics are my politics and they are adapted to the country I live in. I’d almost like to applaud you as an American for being a leftist social democrat with intellectual petit bourgeois tendencies (go Bernie!), but I’d actually prefer to shit myself in the mall (trying to live the American dream in my imagination, that’s all I could come up with).
        Again, I love you coquette, please don’t be cross at me for this comment 🙂

        • The Coquette says:

          Not at all cross. I love that you’re trying to open up a discussion. I want to encourage that kind of behavior in my comment sections, and I fully support anyone bringing thoughtful ideas and opinions to the table.

          As for your argument, I understand everything you’re saying, but your entire premise still rests on the assumption that there is a “better side of the counter.” My larger point is one that reframes the issue: There is no “better side.” In fact, there’s very little difference at all, especially with regard to class, and even more especially within the context of an American mall.

          • Nona says:

            I’m back from a week in San Francisco, didn’t have any problems with the salespeople at Macy’s (Clinique and Mac), did get a little pissed at the H&M fitting room people for being rude.
            What really surprised me about the Bay and California was how goddamn gorgeous and rich of natural and cultural beauty it was. You Coquette, and most other Americans are really underselling the place. I knew about the desert climate, the prolificness of tech startups, the gentrification of the city and the homelessness problem. I didn’t know that you could get lost in the hills attempting to walk to the Castro, with fog looking like a goddamn hat on the top of the hill. I didn’t know while freezing my toes off in the Financial district that I would afterwards get sunburn in the Mission (I’m mixed – CVS aloe vera lotion and SPF sun cream was part of the discovery). I didn’t anticipate how much the street art – popular, politically actual and resonant – would affect me; just like I wouldn’t have predicted my reaction (tears of joy) to the fresco of the Women’s Building. I probably spent more time trying to make friends with the birds and smell half wild roses than reflecting on how weird and crazy your society is.
            And it is weird and crazy. While talking about how people in SF like to drink in dark dingy dens of shame, Mum and I went down for a cigarette one evening, found a group of seemingly panicked teens from East Asian extraction who had been drinking, one of them was lying on the ground. As someone with training, I went in calmly to position the guy securely, and provide counsel. I then found myself in a completely new paradigm, with one of the pals seeming very angry at me and the person calling an ambulance: the n word was used, something about not being homies – basically he was scared this would cause his friend thousands of dollars of medical debt; I left them with basic instructions and personal worry. I felt extremely disappointed by my reaction to the situation. It felt like a taste of warzone triage, except there was no logistic reason to put an actual cost on that guy’s life. I went into the medical profession because I want to help and heal and leave people in good care. Your healthcare system does not seem compatible with human decency as it has been developed even in third world countries such as Cuba. You have the worst of liberal medicine as well as the worst of socialized medicine, and nobody since Obama in 2008-2010 seems to be tackling the real problem.
            Conclusion: I loved California, and SF is one of the only places on earth where I can honestly say I’d move there tomorrow, if only the country as a whole weren’t so fucking psychotic. I understand it’s a young federal union, and perhaps the Trump administration is projecting some overcast. But there is that ticks me in your collective vision of republicanism (the idea, not the party). As an immigrant I support the notion of assimilation, but it’s not something I could sincerely try to do in the United States.

        • RC says:

          Interesting. Is it possible to be a true leftist while enjoying petit bourgeois indulgences? Luxury goods, like cocaine and Louboutins, are luxury goods precisely because they’re exclusive. Few can afford them.

        • Alexis says:

          This thread is old, but I wanted to add: I don’t think Coquette is implying that the asker and the MAC girls are on different sides of the counter (figuratively, obviously). The asker and the MAC girls are on the same side of the counter in the sense that they are all at the mall (“American peasantry”), they are all part of the 99%, and it’s laughable when anyone in the 99% tries to pretend they’re superior to someone else in the 99%– you will just end up making fun of yourself. When the MAC girls are rude to the asker, they are essentially rude to themselves. The MAC girls are practicing false consciousness, and the asker should “teaching them a hard lesson” by reminding them.

          I think the MAC girls are the ones displaying the “petit bourgeois mentality” by being rude to people who are at the same mall they are at, not the asker.

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