This week saw Dupre's second foray into advice-giving, and she appears to have settled into a groove of slightly bent cliche. To a 19-year-old in love with a married man, she says,

[Y]ou are very young! Take this time to focus on yourself, your friends and your body. Working out and staying healthy will give you the self-confidence you need to go out there and find a man who's all yours.

Her slightly odd exhortation to "focus on your body" notwithstanding, Dupre is just as pro-monogamy as advice columnists with more conventional pasts. She tells a cheating wife, for instance, "Try to figure out what caused you to carry on a six-year affair in the first place. [...] Whatever it is, it needs to be fixed" — all of which sounds very "Dear Abby." Of course, Abby doesn't usually answer questions like "Does size matter?" Nor is she likely to give this kind of response:

[I]t's all about exploring and finding the positions that make you not ever wanting to stop.

At least Dupre's erratic grammar implies that she's working without the benefit of a ghostwriter. But while Palin ghost Lynn Vincent isn't known for her sexual permissiveness, I still think she might have come up with more creative advice than this, directed at a woman looking to spice up her marriage:

Don't say a word to him other than, "Lie down on your back and let me do the rest."

Trust me, he'll take notice, and it will definitely wake him up. He'll be like, "My wife is out of control . . . but I like it!" Keep things fresh and interesting. Sometimes it's good to be a bad girl.

Dupre also offers a holiday edition of her bad-girl advice, in response to a wife who wants to get a special gift for her husband:

If you have kids, send them anywhere but home. Go to Abracadabra and buy a Santa's helper outfit. A few nights before Christmas, cook a great dinner, open a bottle of wine, light some candles and play some romantic, cozy winter music. Then, welcome him home by opening the door in your new outfit. That's the only present you need to get him. Oh, and if you want, throw in some lines like, ‘Have you been naughty or nice this year?' It's funny, cute and bound to make it a Christmas he'll never forget. Perhaps make it a new tradition?

While the sexy Santa's helper routine would be pretty much guaranteed to make any man I've ever dated vomit and then die, I also recognize that the bottle-of-wine-plus-sexy-costume advice is standard spice-up-your-marriage fare. Which is exactly the problem. In her first column, Dupre argued that both men and women were simple, and she seems to be proceeding from the notion that some relatively basic human consideration and an occasional night of extremely light role-play are enough to keep a relationship strong. This is sort of reassuring, but it's not that entertaining, and entertainment is really what advice columns are all about. Nobody turns to Abigail Van Buren or Cary Tennis or Ashley Dupre for actual advice — or at least, they shouldn't. Rather, we're looking for the newspaper equivalent of a soap opera, and Dupre's scandalous past probably made her seem like the ideal person to provide it. Unfortunately, it seems like she's trying to prove how non-scandalous she really is — and the result isn't very much fun.

Ask Ashley: Man Is Married? Move On! [New York Post]

Earlier: Women Of The View Unsure Whether To Slut-Shame Ashley Dupre

We can't rate all the advice columns on the internet (and we had to eliminate some for reasons of bias), but the following is a representative sampling. The grades, like advice, are totally subjective.

Dear Prudence, by Emily Yoffe
Unlike, say, Prudence Farrow, Emily Yoffe does not put up with any nonsense. Nonsense includes: masturbating too much, "using up [a woman's] most fertile years," and having doubts about a generally decent boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Though she sometimes provides a refreshing kick in the pants, or gets mad on behalf of people who aren't mad enough ("You're a generous and forgiving person. I'm less generous and forgiving"), but she also name-checks Emily Post a lot and seems creepily in favor of settling. She's not quite Dr. Laura, but she might be a little bit Lori Gottlieb.
Favorite topics: bad manners, terrible family secrets, silly relationship problems (his toupee!)
Words of wisdom: On masturbation — "Get a grip and give it a rest. Maybe if you make the decision to do something else with your hands (whittling? knitting? flossing?), you'll find you aren't so obsessed with your urges. Then masturbation will become a pleasurable thing you do sometimes instead of a twice-daily necessity."
Grade: B-

Friend or Foe, by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Friend or Foe focuses on friend drama, mostly of the female persuasion. Since Rosenfeld has only written three columns, it's hard to tell how she'll turn out, but as we've mentioned before, her column is predicated on a pretty competitive view of female closeness. Then again, her advice-seekers aren't doing anything to dispel this view. One writes that her so-called friend "swiped a significant amount of my Crème de la Mer" even though said friend "is beautiful, wrinkle-free, and rich-and I'm so not any of the above."
Favorite topics: back-stabbing, moisturizer thievery, and the baby as status symbol
Words of wisdom: "Clearly, your friend Haley was jealous and didn't know how to deal with your expanding belly. Similarly, the appearance of her own potential sperm donor has made her less threatened by the sight of all those Build-A-Bears strewn across your living room floor."
Grade: C

Savage Love, by Dan Savage
Dan Savage has been hugely influential, and we bet lots of college kids have traveled the trajectory from reading his columns aloud and laughing at the "freaks" to realizing that kinks don't make you bad or crazy, and accepting said kinks in themselves and others. Savage has added several important terms to the American sexicon — concerned yet time-strapped friends can now tell their deluded buddies to DTMFA. And he was using his column to raise awareness about gay marriage and gay rights long before Prop. H8 came on the scene. But he also subscribes to some troubling stereotypes — that only girls can be bi, for instance, or that black people are more homophobic than whites. He's also not particularly sympathetic to people who gain weight while in relationships. So while Dan Savage is a pretty good guy to have on your side if you're a superhero fetishist, he's not so good if you are, say, a bi black dude with body image issues — or if you believe, like Megan, that "a columnist who is all about letting people know the safest way to drink other people's urine" should be a little more open-minded about things like male sexual fluidity.
Favorite topics: open relationships (for), coprophilia (against), sexual word coinages ("santorum"), dumping-the-motherfucker-already
Words of wisdom: "Look, SAD, this isn't a relationship. It's a hostage situation. Your boyfriend is an asshole. Wait, maybe I'm not being fair-to assholes, which are as delightful as they are functional. Your boyfriend is a piece of shit, a loose stool, a santorum slick. And you, my dear, have the worst case of lousy-relationship-induced Stockholm syndrome that I've ever encountered."
Grade: B

Since You Asked, by Cary Tennis
I have to admit that Cary Tennis, with his long, loopy, and sometimes frankly unhelpful answers to equally long and loopy queries, has a special place in my heart. Maybe it's his acknowledgment that advice usually says more about the advice-giver than the problem at hand, or his unwillingness to come down hard on one side of any issue — until, when you least expect it, he does. Cary is kind of like a dithering, slightly dotty grandma — she goes off on tangents a lot, and sometimes she doesn't even answer your question, but she knows that life is complicated, being a good person is tough, and ultimately the only advice she can give is her own totally fallible opinion.
Favorite topics: writing, alcoholism, vague dissatisfaction, ennui
Words of wisdom:On the creative life — "But the work, that is another thing. The real work is staggering; the real work is work. It is not dream. It is pushing against the wall; it is hearing what we do not want to hear; it is doing the numbers; it is learning the new terms as they come along; it is sitting through evaluations and self-evaluations. It is an eternal object lesson in our powerlessness and our smallness. The real work is grinding and slow. "
Grade: A-

Obviously the primary point of any advice column isn't really to help advice-seekers — it's to entertain and soothe the readers, who, while we may not share the exact problems discussed, still have various shitty things in our lives that we want to feel better about. The guy who slept with his stepmom and the woman who likes oral sex from her dog make our own dilemmas seem smaller, but what really separates the great advice column from the so-so is its ability to make us feel that life is livable, that we are going to be okay. And sometimes the best way to do this is not to tell people what to do, but to acknowledge that we live in an uncertain universe, and that we all need to learn, in our own way, how to cope with that uncertainty.

Since You Asked [Salon]
Friend Or Foe [Double X]
Savage Love [The Stranger]
Dear Prudence [Slate]

Earlier: Dan Savage: Cool With Drinking Piss, Weird About Bisexuality
Dan Savage Has Stopped Blaming Black Voters For Prop 8

Writes the anonymous person:

Is it true that a woman with a short hairstyle is subconsciously indicating that she does not want sex? My wife had a drastic haircut four days before our wedding and our sex life was a damp squib from the start. The erotic side of our marriage has died completely. My wife considers me childish and says that as all other elements of our relationship are fine, I should not want more than this.

First, a few questions: While the sexual and anthropological importance of hair is well-documented as an indicator of health, beauty and desirability; and while long, lustrous hair is equated with youth, femininity and wanton sexuality; and while short hair is sometimes perceived as either asexually androgynous or I-give-up mom style... really? Is he serious? Second: did they not have sex before their wedding? When did this "damp squib" start? Because if it was pre-wedding, then it seems highly circumstantial to blame the haircut (and maybe they should have addressed these issues beforehand); and if not, there's not much basis for comparison. Is he just looking to the haircut as a means of figuring out whether he can actually blame his wife for this? How long have they been married? Do they have kids? Has her hair grown out or has she continued to cut it? I think it also needs to be asked: was she happy with the haircut, or did it go horribly wrong and make her feel unattractive? Inquiring minds want to know.

The actual advice columnist doesn't seem to be bothered by this lack of information. She says,

Cutting one's hair does not necessarily point to an avoidance of sex, although deliberately reducing one's attractiveness in a spouse's eyes may well signal some desire to push them away. You sound angry and full of longing for a fulfilling sexual relationship - and that is understandable.

Wait, "not necessarily?" I get that advice columnists — especially of the respectable, clinical psychologist variety, probably try not to judge and there are so stupid questions, but this question was idiotic, conveying as it did a certain reductive lack of self-insight and, if you want to go all out, anachronistic homophobic undertones. Besides which, doesn't it seem unlikely that anyone would strive to make herself deliberately unattractive in anyone's eyes at her own wedding? Anyway, does she know he hates her haircut, or is this some weird passive-aggressive thing, where this guy prefers to write anonymously to a stranger and pretend his marriage's deep problems can be summed up by a few inches of keratins? Connolly suggests sitting down and talking — without judging — and find out what's really behind the sexual issues. Sure. But if he thinks the clues to his marital problems lie in a trip to the salon, maybe a set of extensions would be more to the point.

Sexual Healing [The Guardian]

[Image via Moviecritic.com]

The trials and tribulations of living as a country-club wife. [Washington Post]

Memo to "N.Y.": Maybe you shouldn't have gotten engaged to the guy before, well, getting to actually know him. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

Hopefully, after reading this, Madonna will finally stop pretending she's British. [Daily Mirror]

Women like us may get to combine our two (sometimes conflicting) tastes for Howard Stern and Oprah Winfrey with the reported XM/Sirius merger. [NYPost]