I’ve always had these urges to hurt people. I don’t really know how to describe them. They aren’t sexual, and I don’t like the idea of other people being in pain, but I really want to cause pain. I haven’t acted on them since I was too young to really understand what I was doing, but I’m terrified that one day I’ll act on them again and hurt someone because I don’t have enough self-restraint. What should I do, Coquette? I’d like to get rid of these urges and become a good person, but the more important thing is I keep myself from actually hurting anyone.

Relax, dude. You’re not some psycho. You’re not even a bad person. You’re just undiagnosed OCD, and you’re suffering from a garden variety set of harm obsessions.

Find a shrink in you area who specializes in obsessive-compulsive disorder, and get a little treatment. You’ll be fine.

I’m terrified of going into mounds of student loan debt if I go back to school to finish my degree. It mostly has to do with the fact that what I want to do with my life doesn’t require a degree but I want to finish school for the sake of finishing and the experience. Any advice?

If you can safely assume not having a degree won’t negatively affect future career opportunities in your chosen field, then “finishing college for the experience” is really no different than “flying off to Paris for the experience.”

Lots of things have experiential value, but would you go into mounds of unbankruptable debt for a vacation to Paris? Fuck no.

A college degree is no longer worth the burden of a shit ton of student loans. The scales tipped on that cost/benefit equation at some point in the last decade, so unless you can point to something specific with enough value to justify going into debt, don’t fucking do it.

I have this idea that my dad (my parents were never married and I lived with my mom most of the time, visiting my dad every other weekend) having Playboy calanders up when I was a child has fucked me up. I have been in a relationship (2 years was my shortest) since I was 15, I am terrified of not being someones girlfriend, I am desperate to please my boyfriends sexually, afraid they’ll leave me or grow to dislike me if I don’t comply, and I have not worn a bikini in public since high school (I am 27) because I feel like if I don’t look Photoshopped and I’m not completely hairless, I might as well keep my clothes on.

Do I have to go to therapy to grow beyond this?

To grow beyond what, exactly? You strike me as a garden variety neurotic, a typical self-absorbed girl with a few unhealthy relationship habits and the usual mixed bag of mild-to-moderate body/abandonment/daddy issues.

Sure, your parents screwed you up a bit. That’s what parents do, but I’m not picking up anything in the way of legitimate childhood trauma. Basically, you’re just a drama queen with a victim mentality who uses words like desperate and terrified without any real sense of desperation or terror.

You want me to save you a bunch of time and money? It wasn’t the Playboy calendars that fucked with your head. It’s the fact that your dad was a selfish man-child who only hung out with you a couple of times a month. Boom. There’s your big therapeutic breakthrough. Whoop-dee-fuckin’-doo.

Now stop “complying” with your boyfriend, and wear a damn bikini if that’s what you feel like doing.

“Actual racism involves a system of race-based group privilege”

If I wanted to say that “Bicycle” means a three wheeled vehicle, it wouldn’t matter how many people I got to agree with me. The word still means the two wheeled vehicle concept that is attached to it.

Racism, means discrimination based on race. Adding another wheel doesn’t change what the word means, it just means you’re using it wrong.

Just because it props up your philosophy, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Whatever, fucknuts. The concept of race-based group privilege is literally Sociology 101. Just because you don’t have a college freshman level understand of racism, that doesn’t mean the bicycle has three wheels. It means you’re trying to play checkers on a chessboard.

That’s fine. Your colloquial connotation of racism isn’t necessarily false. It’s a simple and safe way for children to learn, but if you wanna get into a semantic fight with someone like me, you’d better come correct with more than a fucking wiffle ball bat, because I’m over here with a Louisville Slugger.

Coquette—I got my first paycheck.  I’m still in high school, and I feel like I have the rest of my life to pay off college loans so I bought a pair of great shoes.  Should I feel bad (as in return them and add the money to my college fund)?

Nah, it was your first paycheck. Go ahead and splurge. Enjoy the novel sensation of completing the cycle of consumer capitalism, because that shit gets real old once you have to start paying bills.

Why is reverse racism not “real?”

Simple. What most people call reverse racism in America is merely prejudice against white people. That can be real, but it’s not racism. Racism includes an element of systemic or institutionalized oppression, and the dominant cultural group is, by definition, not oppressed.

I’m getting static from an ex for “demonizing” him. No interesting story here. I loved him, he didn’t love me, I got dumped and I’m pissed because I can’t have what I want. Told him I’d have to hate him for a while. He says I’m being immature because I’ve only had two real breakups (one of them after NINE YEARS). He says “it won’t help things” but I don’t see how I’m supposed to fall out of love with him while being empathetic and putting myself in his shoes. Thoughts? Am I doing it wrong?

He says you’re being immature? Fuck him and his shoes. He dumped you. He doesn’t get to dictate how that’s supposed to make you feel.

Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Keep doing what you’re doing, and in a few months when you’re finally over him, you’ll realize how emotionally manipulative he was this whole time.

I’m 19 years old and my parents are two people who never should have been married in the first place. They’ve been divorced for over 15 years now but I’ve spent my whole life as their tool for getting back at each other over petty shit. Now, as an adult, what is the most respectful way to tell my two financial providers to suck it up and stop channeling their frustrations at each other through me?

Don’t tell them to stop channeling their frustrations through you. Simply stop being a channel. Do not allow yourself to be a conductor of their negativity. You’re an adult (kind of.) You are responsible for your own behavior, and you don’t have to participate in their bullshit.

It will eventually manifest in words. You’ll end up telling them to back the fuck off in your own way, but the words themselves will be less important than the fact that you’ll be emotionally standing your ground.

This isn’t something you say. It’s something you do.