Here’s how the story got started. Back in October, the FBI announced that it had broken up an international crime ring when it arrested six Estonians in what was then heralded as “the biggest cyber criminal takedown in history.” The Estonians had, over the course of four years, hijacked more than 4 million computers in 100 countries through the use of malware known as DNSChanger. By redirecting the infected browsers of unwitting users, DNSChanger was able to send high volumes of traffic to the criminal ring’s rogue websites and servers, collecting more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue and exposing their victims to information theft in the process.

“Operation Ghost Click” (as the FBI dubbed its sting operation) put an end to the Estonian scheme, but a problem remained. If the feds simply shut down the Estonian servers, the 4 million infected machines — nearly 1 million of which were in the United States — would be unable to reach the Internet. To give the cyber-crime victims time to clean up their machines, the FBI contracted the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to maintain valid servers in place of the criminal servers. The new servers would remain online until March 8, 2012.

And so it came to pass that the FBI tried to warn the people, but the people were not listening. The people were too busy swatting the pop-up ads that buzzed like flies around TMZ.

As things turned out, a cabal of Estonian thieves in an international crime ring wasn’t enough to get the public’s attention. By early February, nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies and half of all major federal agencies still had computers infected with the virus — along with 400,000 other computers around the world. If the government shut down its proxy servers on March 8, as was planned, all of these computers would be unable to access the Internet. (The FBI, frankly, hadn’t done the best job in getting the word out about DNSChanger: It slapped up a PDF on the Web and assumed people would find it.)

And then it happened. Somebody put two and two together. There was a larger, more familiar narrative at work here. The tale of Operation Ghost Click and DNSChanger held all the elements of a familiar story. A set date. The need for the wayward computer users to repent before the date came. The smug satisfaction that when the date finally came, the non-believers would be cast into a disconnected hell, with nary a Google Map to lead them out of it. Have you not accepted Norton AntiVirus as your savior? IT nerds across the nation waved their MacBooks in contemptuous indignation.

This wasn’t just any old computer virus. For those who did not repent — or at least scan their computers for the virus — March 8 would be INTERNET DOOMSDAY.

Let’s back up for a moment: “Doomsday?” one might ask. Really? Some accountant at Hormel might not be able to access the Internet one day because of slovenly security habits, and that becomes doomsday? Has the apocalyptic bar really been set that low?

In fact, it has — and there are three reasons for this.

Understanding the first reason requires a quick trip back to the last time apocalyptic rhetoric was as mainstream as it is today — the 1970s, when the country was buffeted by oil shocks, stagflation, Watergate, spiraling crime, inner-city decay, and defeat in Vietnam. A paranoid and pun-filled tome soon emerged to explain the chaos as signs of the end of the world — Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” the “No. 1 nonfiction seller of the decade” (as the New York Times put it), which found its way onto the bookshelves of more than 15 million Americans. And now the teens and 20-somethings who had clutched copies of “The Late Great Planet Earth” in the 1970s are editors, writers and producers, and they bring to the media landscape the narrative of their youth, in much the same way that indie music from the 1980s and ’90s, which never sold very well at the time, has reached a wider audience in the 2000s as Gen Xers find themselves program directors at radio stations or music supervisors at ad agencies and television networks.

The second reason came at the dawn of the next decade, with the launch of CNN in 1980. The rise of cable news (and, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the rise of the Internet) didn’t merely transform the media landscape; it exponentially expanded it. Prior to 1980, the “Big 3” networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — programmed little more than three hours of news per day. Nowadays, even the “24-hour news cycle” seems like an antiquated idea; Twitter has brought us the 24-minute news cycle, with reporters on their Tweetdecks chasing headlines like little kids playing soccer. In this new media landscape, where speed and hyperbole trump investigation and accuracy, apocalyptic headlines draw the all-important consumer eyeball, regardless of the story that runs beneath.

The third reason that we so readily embrace the apocalyptic story line — not merely as producers of news, but as consumers — can be found in the decade behind us. As we’ve written before, the first decade of the 21st century was a decade punctuated by historic events that seemed (or were treated as) nearly apocalyptic in scope. From preparations for Y2K to the attacks of Sept. 11, from rising evidence that climate change has arrived to the economic collapse of 2008 in which we still find ourselves entangled, the belief that the world is coming undone — that the final straw is just moments away from being lowered onto the camel’s back — has surged from the edges of conspiracy and into the center of our public discourse.

The problem with this arms race toward the ever more apocalyptic is that it depletes our reservoirs of concern. If everything is an apocalyptic threat, then nothing is. And when each overhyped threat passes with nothing happening — where are you now, Ebola virus? — we find ourselves more capable of dismissing real concerns like climate change as overhyped as well.

We called the FBI Press Office to ask them why they were trying to frighten people with their overheated rhetoric about “doomsday.” Didn’t they know that small children also used the Internet, and might be haunted by nightmares of never feeding their Moshi Monsters again? “I don’t think we’ve ever used that word,” the press officer who answered at FBI headquarters assured us. “We’ve never called it ‘Internet doomsday.’”

Ever since Y2K, the media has mastered the technique of combining any potential threat — no matter how remote the probability and no matter how localized or contained its likely impact — with the apocalyptic story line. The result has been an increasing hyperbole in the news, and an endless parade of stories that imagine the “end of the world” in the most unlikely of scenarios, from solar flares to polar shifts to … well, some get-rich-quick scheme cooked up by some hoodlums in Estonia.

Take, as another example, the headlines in March that warned us that an impending solar flare could knock out most of our satellite communications, GPS and utilities, plunging the world into unplugged chaos. Beneath the headlines, usually in the final paragraph, was a little-noticed caveat: Such flares occurred with regularity a decade ago, with virtually zero impact.

But it’s the headlines that matter, not the details or the subsequent paragraphs, and “Internet Doomsday” was a great headline. The blogs lit up with stories about the horrors that might befall us if we couldn’t access Gawker. And like all good apocalyptic narratives, the Internet Doomsday quickly took a turn toward the conspiratorial: The FBI itself was going to pull the plug on the Internet on March 8, it was said. Government efforts to protect computer users had become a government plot to unplug computer users. There was much logging on, and rumors of not logging on.

But this was not yet the end. A judge, apparently consulting with Harold Camping (who knew much about the flexibility of having a backup date for the apocalypse), ordered the FBI to keep its goodly proxy servers going for another 120 days, until July 9, to give the unrepentant more time to download Kaspersky. And the FBI became more Internet savvy: A few weeks ago, it unveiled a new website where computer users could check to see if their computers were infected with DNSChanger.

The press dutifully reported on the FBI’s valiant effort to help the remaining victims of the scam — perhaps 200,000 out of 2.3 billion Internet users in the world — repair their computers. The most common headline? You guessed it: “Internet Doomsday Coming July 9.”

The impetus is the surprise victory of Deb Fischer, a little-known state legislator, over two seasoned opponents in Tuesday’s Nebraska Republican Senate primary. Fischer’s candidacy seemed dead in the water until about a week ago, when she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. A last-second ad blitz from a super PAC controlled by the founder of Ameritrade added to her momentum, and Fischer ended up beating out state Attorney General Jon Bruning, who had been the favorite, by five points.

The outcome was greeted with immediate joy by Democrats, with the DSCC putting out a statement calling Fischer an “untested” and “accidental” nominee for the seat being vacated by Democrat Ben Nelson. The hope for Democrats is that the 61-year-old Fischer, who has represented a rural western Nebraska district in the state Senate since 2005, will melt under the spotlight of a high-stakes general election contest – much the way Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck and Joe Miller did in 2010.

This may prove to be wishful thinking. Fischer could end up being a perfectly competent candidate, one who isn’t prone to erratic behavior and pointlessly inflammatory rhetoric and who doesn’t have any serious skeletons in her closet. Certainly, she showed strong communication skills in her acceptance speech Tuesday night. And because of Nebraska’s deep red shading and its particular antipathy toward Democrats in the Obama-era, Fischer’s margin for error is probably substantial. The same mistakes that derailed Angle in Nevada may only be the difference between, say, a 20- and 10-point win in Nebraska.

That said, Fischer absolutely is an untested candidate. Bruning and the race’s other major candidate, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, spent months firing shots at each other and gobbling up all of the attention. The intensity of their battle probably helped create the opening that Fischer seized, but the late timing of her surge also spared her from facing much in the way of media scrutiny or attacks from her rivals. She raised and spent very little money, and not much is known about her.

For Democrats, that’s reason to cheer. Had Bruning (or even Stenberg, a veteran of eight previous statewide campaigns) won the primary, the general election race would have been a snore. Polls showed both men comfortable ahead of the Democratic candidate, former Senator Bob Kerrey, who won elections in the state in 1982 (for governor), 1988 and 1994, back when he was something of a local hero. But Kerrey spent the last decade running the New School in New York and hasn’t been on a Nebraska ballot in 18 years. Partisan divisions have hardened since then, and Kerrey now faces cries of carpet-bagging.

There’s no meaningful Fischer/Kerrey poll numbers out yet. Presumably, the GOP nominee will begin with a solid lead, just because this is Nebraska (and because right now she embodies a neat underdog story). The question is how she’ll hold up, and on that score there’s some real doubt, which means that Nebraska is in play, at least provisionally.

Add in Indiana, where the Tea Party-aligned Richard Mourdock knocked off Dick Lugar last week, and two GOP primaries in one week have resulted in a surprise general election opportunities for Democrats. And primary season isn’t over yet. As Josh Kraushaar notes, the GOP’s grassroots seem poised to rise up against former Governor Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin; that race is already considered a toss-up, but a weak GOP nominee could tip the scales.

Other developments over the last year have also bolstered Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate, including the emergence of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (her recent troubles notwithstanding), Olympia Snowe’s unexpected retirement in Maine, and encouraging news from Arizona and maybe even North Dakota. What looked like an awful Senate map for Democrats at the start of this cycle has come to seem more manageable – even more so after Tuesday night’s shocker in Nebraska.

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 recovery act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.

According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”

There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.

Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”

As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member.  He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)

Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax-credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.

It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans half way, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.

What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.

But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.

Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the Whtie House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):

When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.

What a jokester! What a hypocrite.

I spoke with them both by phone about sex-positive parenting, where they draw the “TMI” line with each other, and their tips for making “the sex talk” less awkward.

Aretha, this might be an annoying question, because I’m sure you’ve gotten it for most of your life, but: What’s it like having a “sexpert” for a mom?

Aretha: I’ve been getting this question since second grade. Kids brought it up in the line at the cafeteria. I remember being way more defensive about it then, because just saying the word “sex,” it was like a four-letter word.

But now? It’s the same answer I always give, which is that it was pretty cool. I was the envy of all of my friends throughout puberty and high school. It’s interesting because now that I’m college-aged, I can see differences in how kids were brought up and, you know, I can see how my upbringing has affected me.

Did you have friends in high school who desperately wanted to come over and ask your mom for advice?

Aretha: I started community college when I was 13, so I had college friends who were in their 20s and late teens, and they felt really comfortable talking to my mom. Sometimes I got really jealous because they’d want to have alone time with her to talk about their relationship problems. With my high school friends, they felt too shy and inhibited. It was more that they’d come to me with a crisis and then I’d bring it to my mom.

Were you ever uncomfortable talking to your mom about sex when you were younger?

Aretha: No. Never. From age zero to now, I don’t think it’s ever been uncomfortable.

Susie: There’s an important distinction between “Do you feel comfortable talking about your personal sex life with your parents?” and “Do you feel comfortable talking about other people’s sex lives and sex in general, sex in the news and ‘what if’ sex, where you say, ‘I have a friend …’” All of that we’re very comfortable with. I think anybody would be shy when you feel like you need a little distance between you and your parents.

Sometimes I talk to kids and they tell me, “I have the opposite problem. My parents confide to me as if I was their little friend.” For me, that isn’t a healthy, sex-positive parental frame any more than being uptight and refusing to let a single word be said about it. Somehow, it’s the opposite but the same thing. A good parent says, “You can talk to me about anything and it can be in general terms. If you’ve got a physical problem and you’re uncomfortable talking, can I help get you to a clinic or a doctor that you would feel comfortable talking to?” Don’t get all hurt that they don’t want to tell you, just help them find someone that they can talk to instead of getting all sulky about it and saying, “You have to tell me everything or else I won’t help you!”

Aretha: I think we’ve always been sensitive about talking about each other’s sex lives. Except for when it comes to things that happened earlier in her life. I remember being really curious about how my mom lost her virginity. I could hear that story a million times.

Susie: There’s so many different levels of what it’s like to have conversations about sex, and because so many families don’t discuss it at all, they think that once you open the door it’s somehow like there’s no privacy, there’s no boundaries, there’s no self-respecting way to talk about anything. But I knew that wasn’t the case, even from my own growing up. My mom told me about getting her period, which I thought was fascinating, because she told me about the nuns stuffing a rag down her pants and they wouldn’t tell her what was happening. Her moral was, “I’m telling you this because you’ll never have to go through that, because I’m going to tell you the scientific reason for menstruating.”

My dad was the same. He would say, “I was so shy, I never kissed anyone until I kissed your mom, and I was in college,” but there were other things he wouldn’t have expressed to me — and of course not. It just starts to feel creepy, and I guess not everyone’s creep line is in the same place.

It’s just knowing that you can hold your privacy and yet you can share things that are part of a valuable conversation. Part of what I liked so much about writing the Jezebel column, and writing this book, was that I could hear Aretha’s reactions to things and it made me realize how strongly she felt about certain topics. I wasn’t going to just say to her, “So, Aretha, what do you feel about oral sex personally?” No way, I would have been too embarrassed and she would have been like, “Are you out of your mind?” When I heard her sticking up for other girls getting satisfied in bed and not just lying there and crying afterward …

Aretha: Why would I want them to do that? That makes no sense!

Susie: Well, you say that, but I know plenty of women who would say, “What do you expect, you shouldn’t be so romantic or you should try harder.” There are some really negative, shaming answers. The fact that you were such a good advocate, it just made me so happy inside. It wasn’t like I had dragged you over to a desk every day and said, “Now, Aretha, how do you spell ‘orgasm’?”

Susie, what sort of parental anxieties did you have about sex?

Susie: Well, I still have them in the sense — this is more dating and relationships — when she meets someone new, I wonder if I’ll like her boyfriend. If I don’t think they did something right or they hurt her feelings, there’s part of me that wants to run over and slap them — even though I’m supposed to just listen and be cool because they’re probably going to make up in 10 minutes and then I’ll look ridiculous.

Aretha: From my side, I see my mom worrying, like, “I want Aretha to feel like she can ask for what she wants with anyone, because not everyone’s had the same upbringing she’s had, so they might not know that everything’s supposed to be egalitarian.”

Susie: Yeah, but you haven’t had any really terrible sweethearts. You’ve had pretty open-minded people in your life so far.

Aretha: Well, there might be ones that maybe you don’t know about …

Susie: OK, now it all comes out! [Laughs] When you first asked that question, Tracy, I wondered what you meant, if it was, “Were you worried that Aretha would get pregnant too young?”

Well, here’s another question: What do you think most parents are afraid of when it comes to sex and their kids — is it the fear of them getting pregnant, of them having sex too soon?

Susie: I think the fear of having sex too soon is this big, tender topic that covers a lot of things. On the surface, they would say, “An early pregnancy or some sort of STD could be tragic and wipe my kid’s life out.” But if you scratch at that a little bit, lots of times it’s because the parent identifies with the kids and is having memories about regrets, about things they did or didn’t do when they were teenagers. So their child’s coming of age is like their chance of doing it over again.

As much as it’s true that I could just jump in there and completely micromanage every detail for Aretha, it is so important not to do that, to be a good listener and let them know that you hear them, to respond if they want your help but to mostly just be really solid and say, “I’m there for you.” You have to take every lesson you ever learned from a good therapist and bring it to bear and give them the space to figure it out on their own — not to be neglectful but not to be a busybody either. It’s such a hard line to walk, I’m not trying to make it sound easy.

Why is it so hard for most parents and kids to talk about sex with each other? We make such a big deal about the Sex Talk, as though it’s one talk that happens, ever, between parents and their kids. Why is that?

Aretha: Where to even start?

Susie: There’s so many fingers you want to point. For me, it had a lot to do with being raised in a religion that was very condemning of sexuality outside of procreation and women’s subjugation.

That sure covers a lot territory. So how can you make talking about sex with your kids, or with your parents, less awkward?

Susie: I got some of my first lessons of how to handle this when I worked in a vibrator store and someone would say, “How do I raise this with my husband?” or “How do I raise this with my wife?” I got really good at answering this: First of all, if talking is the part that freaks you out, buy a book and leave it in the bathroom or on the coffee table.

Aretha: I think you have to be careful with that, though! So many people complain, “My parents left a book under my bed about our changing bodies and they never said word one, they just expected me to find the book and come to them with questions later.” And guess what, they never came to them with any questions because they figured, “My parents are too shy to talk to me about it so I shouldn’t talk to them.” Not to, like, totally slam your suggestion, mom.

Susie: But they did something! People are always asking me, “Are there any particular books I should have in my house for sex education?” and I say, “You know what? If you have books at all, that’s great.” Books! Newspapers! Talk about what you’re reading on the Web! Sex will inevitably come up if you’re talking about it like you’d talk about anything else — in politics, in science, in arts. It’s not a ghettoized topic.

Here’s another thing: I call it “the cool aunt theory.” You realize that you, the parent, are too upset and uptight about sex to say anything, but your sister or friend or ex or someone you know very well has a sense of humor and has a good head on their shoulders and you go to them and ask, “Could you do this?” Or here’s another thing, when your kid raises an uncomfortable question, to just say, “You know, that is a really good question and I’m not sure I know the answer.” You’ve given yourself some time, but you’ve been friendly about it and then you can decide if you bring in somebody in the family or you get a book or find a documentary on PBS. The point is you don’t just freeze like a deer in the headlights and go, “Ahh!”

You can use that for a million things. People act like this is the only difficult topic — try talking about death in the family or money issues. There are so many things where people feel tense and if you can find some calming, loving ways to handle touchy questions in one area, you can pretty much apply it to everything.

Aretha: And definitely you can never start too early. Kids are talking about sex in one way or another starting in kindergarten.

Generationally, how were your youthful sexual experiences different?

Aretha: My mom was in high school in the ’70s — you know, a lot of free love everywhere. Seriously, when I was in high school and I liked two boys at the same time, my mom would suggest that we have an open relationship, like it was the most normal thing in the world! And she was like, “Why are you so possessive of each other? You’re so young, you don’t know who you are yet, so just experiment! They can’t even say they’re straight yet.” I just remember feeling like, “She does not understand. It is so different now.”

There’s also way, way more virgins and people who are waiting to have any sexual experiences. In some ways, I think kids know more, but they also know less, practically speaking.

Susie: I knew I was being kind of snotty when I was saying, “Why not have an open relationship?” but I just had to make my little feminist point.

Aretha: Well, you said it a lot.

Susie: I have a lot of feminist points to make, I guess. You know, all these people that are trying to live out the romance bible are going to grow up and realize that life is more complicated, and why not be exposed to reality? People either are having open relationships or they’re cheating, and here are these people in ninth grade acting like they’ve got to take their vows and it’s just so silly!

I not only came of age in the ’70s, I was also in a major urban high school and I was in a feminist consciousness-raising group, I was involved in an underground commie anarchist newspaper. So it’s like, yes, I was in an extremely different scene, but the tenderness, the inexperience, the shyness and all the drama that happened every day, that was the same.

Did you notice any themes in the questions that you got for the column?

Aretha: Um, that they have horrible boyfriends and that they should dump them?

Susie: The funniest line was people would always say, “Our sex life is awesome, but …” and then they would tell me this problem that would negate it being “awesome.” This is from my crabby old feminist dyke warrior lady position, but I was constantly saying, “Why would you give a fuck what he thinks?” Or I’d think, “What you need is a nice, big lesbian experience.” I would think that the lesbian cure, if you were in a lesbian milieu, you wouldn’t be so second-guessing yourself and your femaleness all the time, but I realized that’s a generation gap too. I get some questions from young lesbians and some of them are just as fragile as any straight girl. I realized it’s more my feminist point of view rather than gay or straight.

What was your favorite question that you got for the column?

Aretha: This wasn’t my favorite question, it was what happened afterward: Someone sent us a picture of her hand and an engagement ring on it and I was like, “Yes! It worked out!” I liked the throw-up column, the girl who throws up every time her boyfriend comes in her mouth. I liked the boyfriend who asked how he could ask his girlfriend to shave her pubic hair, politely.

Susie: Aretha’s answer to that is, “There is no polite way!”

Aretha: I stand by that.

Susie: My favorite was we answered a question from a girl who was given a Paxil prescription after a five-minute intake and it had a terrible impact on her libido. We wrote her a super-sympathetic, supportive thing that basically said, “Go see someone who will pay attention to you.” We thought it was a great answer, but it got a lot of pushback from people who are using and approve of the SSRI’s in their life. The Paxil cheerleaders were enraged!

But the girl who wrote the question really, really liked our answer and felt encouraged. It felt good, it makes you feel great when you’re a total stranger and you’re able to make a positive difference in someone’s life or their health. That’s what I like about my job in general, and it was even more poignant to do it with Aretha. It was like suddenly having a million daughters instead of just one.

Unsure

Dear Unsure,

You may have thought and read about conflicts of interest and imbalances of power but are you ready to find, in the agonizing grip of an affair, a visceral unhappiness unlike anything you have ever known? Can you handle wanting to scream or grab a crowbar while also wanting to weep and beg forgiveness?

Are you ready to find yourself, as if living in a pre-feminist era, driven to a gradual, crippling compromise by your desire for some man who for all his fine words still seems to secretly enjoy unassailable privilege? Are you ready to be emptying ashtrays and making tea and realize, holy shit! You secretly expected his prestige and power to rub off on you but nothing has really changed! Are you ready to realize you allowed yourself to indulge in some 19th-century claptrap and did it with your eyes open and your finger on the page in this book right here where it says women are powerful and things have changed and you control your own destiny, which is sort of true in lots of ways except for the ones that really matter?

Except where actual privilege lives its actual life?

Actual privilege is nice and attractive. It just doesn’t have much of a heart.

I’m not saying be a good girl and never act on your impulses. And I’m not setting it up for I Told You So And Now Don’t Come Crying to Me or some such. I’m saying, do some research on him. Does he have a girlfriend? Is he married? Does he spend time with lots of students, or mainly with his peers? Watch him. Study him.

You are vulnerable here. Maybe you are capable of handling this. But maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time someone thought she knew what she was doing.

So do some courageous self-assessment. Share your dilemma with your women friends. Don’t just walk in there with your eyes shut and open up for him. Power and privilege still break women’s hearts and psychotherapy is expensive especially if you didn’t get that tenure-track job even though he promised to go to bat for you in the committee and now that you think about it, weirdly enough, he didn’t really support you as energetically as you thought he would.

I mean, Are you ready to want what you didn’t think you wanted, and want it more strongly than you thought you could want anything, and then find out that no matter how much you want it you’re never going to get it because somebody else already took it and she wears weird eye shadow?

That is what happens when your lust is only a thin covering over a deeper, global longing that you don’t even know you have until after it’s driven you crazy.

Are you ready to realize that you’re the one who said all these empowered, knowing, independent-sounding words and now all you want is for this man to just stay right here and not go teach his next class while you embody your desire in the form of another cup of green tea and an omelet, which he consumes but does not appear to taste, and when you ask him a question about his work he waves it away as if it were not phrased properly and when you see him with other students, you notice a pretty young woman student who has this adoring look on her face that seems eerily familiar …

And if it comes to that will you be able to accept that he has another young student who finds him as irresistible as you do and he may be seeing her tonight, and he may lie to you about it or not tell you anything, or disappear for weeks at a time with no notice, or break a date with you without warning or explanation, or suddenly seem distant and petty and not at all interested in you and what you have to say, or become critical of you and your life choices or not want to meet your friends and family or find fault with your apartment, which is too small, or the color of your toenails, which is too bright, all of which makes you scream at him but you don’t because you don’t want him to see your juvenile, screamer-bitch side, which you only so recently thought you’d completely left behind.

Because you are a graduate student at a distinguished university and it wouldn’t be right …  after he fails to show up yet again and you are left sitting at the bar wondering why you didn’t heed the warning signs.

You could have read about this in a book. You don’t have to actually fall off a cliff to know why it’s good to stand back from the edge.

Maybe you are very tough and self-reliant and just want an adventure. I don’t know you. But if you are so tough and self-reliant, why are you sharing this with me?

I think you know there is something dangerous about this and what you really need is for someone to say, Slow down. Examine your motives. Examine your hungers. What are you really looking for?