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

Here's DREAD's situation: She stepped outside of a party for a moment with her ex-boyfriend. He pushed her against a car, began making out with her, tried to take her pants off, and pulled his dick out. She pushed him away, said "no," and "I can't," but he persisted. She says, "I was afraid of a confrontation because he and I have been friendly since we broke up. I eventually discontinued my attempts to pull my pants back up because I figured the easiest way to get out of this situation was to let him finish."

Now her current boyfriend "is angry because he thinks I had a part in it." Dan tells DREAD that she was raped, and that if her current bf can't understand that then he's no good for her. Decent advice. Most of the commenters agree — although, unlike Dan, they suggest that DREAD go to the cops. Then there's charmer Psilly Cybin, who writes,

If I were the current boyfriend I'd probably react the same way...what, do you let anyone fuck you because they want to? So, anyone who you've ever slept with in the past can just claim you whenever they want? I suggest that the current Boyfriend move on and find someone who is faithful.

Commenter been there echoes Psilly, saying "She wasn't raped. [...] she made a choice - she DECIDED that the way she wanted to resolve the situation was to go along with him." And Can't Rape the Willing chimes in with "Just like DREAD, whenever I want to avoid causing a "confrontation" (esp with friends), I lie on my back, spread my legs, protest gently (optional), and let them do me..."

Of course, it's no surprise that assholes exist on the Internet, or that DREAD's situation generated some argument. But it's an instructive example of what advice columns have become in the age of commenting. They're no longer Dear-Abby-style exchanges between distraught people and agony aunts. They're public forums where anyone and everyone can engage in moral judgment, bickering, posturing — and victim-shaming.

That's Rape [The Stranger]

March 25 (10:35 am): "Hahahaha so true. Of course, our POST was about Dear Abby's advice, not that weird fucking letter."

March 25 (10:41 am): "It's also really weird that he's calling us for NOT spotting a fake when we spotted the fake who was plagiarizing all his (purportedly real) letters because they seemed so fake. Whatever, dude. Yeah, it was a super phone sex sounding scenario, but...um...nastier true shit happens every day on TV. Jesus fuck, there's a decent chance someone with this selfsame story winds up on Moment Of Truth by the end of this season."

March 26 (9:54 am): "Yeah, Dan Savage can suck it. He just hates blogs. Sure, the letter was a little porny and Penthouse Forum-y — but you know what happens sometimes? People ACT OUT THEIR PORNY FANTASIES. Weirder shit has happened. Seriously, Dan Savage, fuck you."

March 26 (10:28 am): "What annoys me is just that, hello, we are the ones who spotted his plagiarized letters in that NYPress lady's column. We spotted them because they sounded suspiciously fetishy. Because they had been sent into Savage Love, which is a repository of that sort of thing, okay. But then he went and defended the dumbass plagiarist, and I am assuming that's just because he hates blogs, which is annoying because we work fucking hard, and it's weird to imagine fetishists emailing Dear Abby, but she gets points for giving them exactly the sort of response the average incest orgy rape fetishist wants to hear!"

March 26 (10:29 am): "I bet he is one of those queens who is so sweet and fawning to your face and catty behind your back."

March 26 (10:04 pm): "Aaaack! Fuck fan [sic] savage! Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld."

Here's Lonow's column:

Yo, Lonow:
My girlfriend and I have been living together for two years, and we're beginning to talk about marriage and kids. I love her, but I'm beginning to be weirded out by her relationship with her brother. They're always touching in each other. Then, one day, I come home and my girlfriend is in her brother's arms on the couch. As soon as I walked in the door, they jumped up, and I saw a clear view of the outline of his boner. They both looked guilty. After he left I demanded to know what was going on. She confessed that they had been having incestuous relations since they were teenagers—and didn't think it was a big deal!

I asked her to move out. Of course everyone—family, friends, neighbors—is asking what happened. And I'm missing her. Am I forcing my morality on her, as she insists?

DUMP HER! Dump her and wash your body with that shit they washed Meryl Streep with in Silkwood! Oh, and, by the way... is there statutory rape involved? I bet Elliot Stabler would say, "yes" and punch a cement wall and Mariska Hargitay's eyes would well up and Ice-T would be all, "Damn! White people are crazy, yo."
Seriously people... there is a thing as too much tolerance of other people's perversions. Let's all make an agreement: we don't fuck our dogs, we don't fuck babies, (Africa, I'm talking to you), and we don't fuck our BROTHER! Is that really so difficult?

And here's a Dan Savage column from 2006:

Here's one for you: My girlfriend and I have been living together for two years, and we've talked about marriage and kids. Like all relationships, ours wasn't perfect. But what really bothered me was my girlfriend's relationship with her brother. They were touchy-feely in a way that felt inappropriate. Two weeks ago I came home and found my girlfriend in her brother's arms on the couch. They freaked at my sudden arrival and jumped up, providing me with a clear view of the outline of the boner in his pants. Guilt was on their faces. After he left I demanded to know what was going on. At first my girlfriend insisted that I had a dirty mind. I told her that I recognized a boner when I see one, and she confessed that they had been having incestuous relations since they were teenagers - and didn't think it was a big deal! I told her it was a huge deal to me because (A) she's cheating on me, (B) she's cheating on me with her brother, and (C) EWWW.

I asked her to move out, which she took very badly. Of course everyone - family, friends, neighbors - is asking what happened. I'm also seriously missing the woman I thought would be my wife. Am I forcing my morality on her, as she insists? Or is ditching her a no-brainer? I can't even think clearly anymore. Is this a case of DTBFA - dump the brotherfucker already?

- Serious Incest Since Teens Appalled Him

What is with the incest letters lately? Was the incest taboo rescinded, and only SISTAH and I failed to get the memo? Motherfuckers, brotherfuckers, fatherfuckers - just reading the subject lines on my e-mails is giving me screaming nightmares. Eesh.

Listen, SISTAH: Dumping the brotherfucker was the right thing to do - a no-brainer, a definite case of DTBFA. Would you want the future mother of your children to regard incest as anything other than the taboo-to-the-tenth-power that it is and, if I have anything to say about it, always will be? And don't worry about your ex-girlfriend's future prospects - there's a guy besides her brother out there for her somewhere. Google can help her find a guy who has both a cuckold and an incest fetish, i.e., the kind of guy who is not only turned on by the thought of his mate being unfaithful, but would find it extra-special nifty if his wife was cheating on him with her own brother. That guy ain't you.

As for your family, friends, and neighbors, refrain from telling them the whole truth - your ex has enough problems without everyone knowing she's a brotherfucker. But when you're asked why the two of you broke up, SISTAH, you have every right to say that she was cheating on you with another man.

Kinda kills her credibility as to the origin of queries like this doesn't it?

Every time I watch ESPN or Spike TV I see these commercials for Enzyte "natural male enhancement." Does that shit actually work? Not that I'm small or anything, but I'm a divorced, middle-aged, chain-smoking, overweight single guy that lives in a trailer park. The only things I've got going are a steady job and a car that runs (most guys in this park don't have either). The only girls I can get are the crack whores that live here (of which there are tons). I'd love to land a normal woman but don't know what to do. I figure a few more inches downstairs wouldn't hurt, especially if all I have to do is take a pill every day.

This is pitiful and ridiculous and makes me wish I didn't even have to pay attention to this shit for a bunch of reasons, namely that when I emailed New York Press editor David Blum about this yesterday he got all up on his high horse, initially responding:

re your "ick" and "ew" comment: i'd say the q's are actually pretty standard for sex-advice columns these days.

i don't plan to be censoring questions just because i don't happen to like the question.

Ugh. You know what? You guys are idiots. I don't spend a lot of time critiquing the alternative newsweekly industry, which like the rest of the print industry is dying a slow death, namely because I grew up thinking alt-weeklies were some sort of salvation or anyway they got all the concert listings first but whatevs, and yet. And yet it is shit like this that is why they are so fucking irreversibly irrelevant. Editors who will spend fifteen minutes crafting a self-righteous response tailored to making a critic feel like a prudish Christian Coalition sex-negative asshole or whatever will fail to spend .23 seconds googling their fucking sex columns, or a minute and a half inquiring about the origin of their shocking, too taboo for the glossies! subject material. You know what, dude? I used to work at one of those phone sex call center whose pervy ads found a refuge in your pages/pay your bills. I would say I've heard it all, but on the basis of the wild spectrum of crazyass fantasies and batshit scenarios I know for a fact that I have not heard it all. There is always something weirder, sicker, more hilarious, more disturbing. But disturbing/sick/seamy/shocking/outrageous ≠ interesting. I encourage you to check out porneskimo to corroborate this fact.

At this point I'd rather read your answers to Ann Landers. That, at least, might be useful.

Earlier: How Common Is Incest, Piss-Drinking Anyway?