The discussion about COMA and weighing Covid risks misses the point: she doesn't want to go. That really is the end of that, and it doesn't need to be justified.

@109 fubar
I too am grateful for my embarrassing privilege.

It is monstrous that any need for the job market to provide Covid-hazzard pay is avoided by providing no societal Covid safety net. It is monstrous that employers have been simultaneously forced to stay open, and absolved of any responsibility for worker Covid-safety on the job.

Cleaning surfaces happens (and is good), but only because it's cheaper than virtually unmentioned more important measures such as ventilation systems creating vertical room airflow.

I'm hoping modified vaccines arrive in time for us to avoid following the Covid pandemic with the South African-Covid pandemic.

@111. I think it is more complicated than that for COMA. I am sure part of her does want to go -- desperately. But her pregnancy and her (legitimate) concerns about travel make it impossible. It is this conflict between her desire to be with her father in his last moments and the very real public health risks that makes the Aunt's pressuring so painful for COMA, and therefore all the more cruel on Auntie's part.

@65 BiDanFan (re LavaGirl and commentary from The Boyfriend Experience): I'm sorry that happened.

@69 nocutename: WA-HOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Congratulations, nocutename, on scoring this week's delectable Lucky @69 Award honors! Savor the envied riches and bask in the aura found only in Savage Love Land. :)

@100 Philophile: WA-HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Major congrats on scoring this week's Big Hunsky @100 Award honors! Glow in the limelight of being freshly awash in newfound good fortune. :)

@87 Ens. Pulver: I think Henry sent Radar to the latrine, if I remember correctly. The OR must have been overwhelmed by casualties. Ah, M*A*S*H. The one and only medically-related TV show I ever liked. 11 seasons (1972-1983) of the 4077th in wartime Korea. What a multi-Emmy winning classic.

Speaking truth is abusive, Fan? Ok for you to use mind games and put downs.. just called you out, honey. That’s all.
Sorry.. not banned. Or in a huff. Tennis has been on, and I hope the Russian Wins tonight. And it’s a five setter, Novak needs to go down. down. down.

Ens @114, I agree. No doubt COMA is already feeling guilty for missing this important moment with her father. She does not need a thoughtless aunt to pile on.

Griz @115, I was going to say I'm sorry she couldn't behave herself, but I see she's back, for now. No, Lava @117, you didn't "just call me out," you called me names. How old are you again? blocks

Ah dammit! We were just talking about vanishing asterisks. Pbbt.

Thanks Griz! I'm hoping for some more good fortune today. And to be freshly awash, we're having water problems.

And I forgot to say, thanks to ROPED for the story of how quarantining with someone really improved the relationship, and to Dan for throwing it in.

@117 BiDanFan and @118 LavaGirl: Sending cyber hugs, positrons, and VW beeps to both of you.

@120 Philophile: Water problems----are you in Texas or anywhere in the Midwest, Northeast, or Southeastern United States hit brutally hard by the recent cold snap and having to boil water just to stay warm? If so, I have read about your terrible extreme weather situation due to a lack of winter weather equipment upgrades for the state's failing power grid and express my deepest heartfelt condolences. Here's hoping you come upon good fortune soon, if you haven't already.

Has anyone heard from Musicbiker lately?

Er no, Grizelda. Did he give out his email? I didn’t notice. He’ll turn up when he’s got something to say.
/ Well that was a BiG bust./ Novak, congrats man/
My favourite, after Rafa, is Jim Courier, who comes every yr to do commentary. He’s a honey. Just wish they’d loose what’s his face, Hewitt, out of the box. That boy has some self image issues.
An Open during a Pandemic. Done and dusted, and thanks to all you champion athletes for dropping Down Under.
So what’s the go round here?

I noticed something in COMA's letter I skipped over the first time around: "this is not the first time she has used guilt to try and control others in moments of trauma."

Originally I was thinking of Miss Manners's advice to be especially forgiving and accommodating in times of grief. So while COMA has lost her father, her aunt has lost her brother. The aunt is lashing out saying mean things, and normally I'd advise COMA to take care of herself but then forgive her aunt who obviously isn't her best. However, this isn't the first time COMA has run into her aunt's unfortunate tendency. Under these circumstances, you don't go back to treating her normally and then be ready to duck and run when the aunt decides there's a trauma so she can say whatever she wants.

COMA, you have my permission to get through these next months any way you can and have as little as possible to do with your aunt for here on out.

Ms Lava - I sensed the tournament would be a Djoke when he got through the injury match with the assistance of the Lockdown Break when they had to clear the court and then in the next match had Hr Zverev with his dying suck of a second serve.

Kudos to those who predicted that the real final would be Osaka-Muguruza in the fourth round.

@77. Bi. I intended no imputations about the lw's numeracy. I do think that if you watched and were caught up in the news, you would overestimate the risk of dying of COVID, if you were of working age, and (say) underestimate the risk of your running into a pedestrian in your SUV and killing him or her (a death rate of 100% as against just above 50% for a car in speeds above 40mph, in an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study). This is probably as the makers of SUVs like it.

COMA, hugs to you. / I haven’t read thru comments, apologies if said before/ Cant your aunt set up FaceTime with your dad?
You start your letter with your most pressing concern, that there is a new life growing inside you, and that you are high risk as well.
Would your dad, want you to put so much at risk? I’d say a no, by the sound of the connection you had with him.
He’s gone, it’s you who has to say goodbye to him.. and that can be done safely, for your baby and you, by FaceTime. On some level, he’ll hear you. The mind is not just in the brain.
Stand up, gently, to your aunt and say No, that you’re not prepared to risk it. And by the sound of how much travel you’d have to do, it would be a big risk. Ask her, politely, to put your dad on FaceTime, and to please set it up to leave you alone with him, so you can say your goodbyes.
Good luck with the rest of your pregnancy.

Harriet @126: "you would overestimate the risk of dying of COVID".

Is there an alternate reality to which I'm not privy, wherein 2.47M dead worldwide (and 500,000 Americans, because everything has to be measured in Americans) in one year (and not done yet) is not the single highest death rate caused by anything, ever, in the history of history?

@128 fubar: I think I know the answer. The #1 killer worldwide is Trump-driven American MAGA / QANON stupidity. This is divided into any or all of the following subcategories:

1.) Those who willfully refuse to wear masks, claiming it's their "right"

2.) Those who still attend social gatherings of many people, and in close quarters, who mock those who practice social distancing or wearing masks

3.) Those in deep denial of the severity of the current COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, regarding the impact on public health, and the local, state, regional, national, and international economy

4.) Those who are crazy enough to believe that over 500,000 COVID deaths in the United States ALONE---and counting---is "God's Will", that this is "The Armageddon", and we're "supposed" to have global destruction over a peaceful, safe, healthy utopian democracy.

5.) Anyone who still travels by way of a highly COVID vulnerable means of transportation, such as in an airplane, and / or visits a foreign country that the CDC has rated a Category 4 COVID threat (such as Mexico; see recent news on Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz and family after a jaunt to Cancun, while millions of Texans lost power, electricity, heat, and clean water when the state's power grid failed, due to lack of winterization upgrades and protection)

6.) Those who stubbornly believe that they'll never get infected by COVID-19

7.) Those who think the pandemic (coronavirus) was named after a beer.

I myself am making a conscientious point of avoiding Trump-driven MAGA / QANONs as much as humanly possible to stay healthy, safe, and sane.
Aren't you glad you're Canadian----where there is socialized medicine? Lucky you.

Yeah BDF, I thought the collective opinion on that letter was problematic. It can be hard to tell boomers apart when everyone’s comments echo one another.

I dont kiss ass, if you haven’t noticed. Shitty opinions are equally opportunity for my criticism.

Harriet @126, regarding your first sentence, let me replicate your comment:
"I just thought that TFR was of the social class, educational background and degree of personal sophistication that knows how to conduct a relationship essentially respectfully and negotiate good sex, and MATH (though more to the point, her boyfriend) wasn't. Sure she does arithmetic in her head...."
If that wasn't snarkily implying that MATH reads as uneducated and therefore incapable of doing math in her head, what did you mean by that paragraph?

I've already discussed that "risk of personally dying of Covid" is not the driving force you see behind all behaviour in this pandemic, nor should it be. I don't come here to debate Covid so I will leave it there.

Kiss @130, fair criticism is one thing (indeed, it's my thing), insults entirely another, the main difference being who looks like the asshole. One's opinion may be gold plated but if one insults other people to get it across, its value magically vanishes.

And the opinion that those of us who were criticising a possibly alcoholic, possibly socipathic, gold digging CPOS did so because we envied her was plated in, well, it sure wasn't gold.

@110 Fubar, tales of the Thalidomide generation in no small part fueled my suspicion of medications during pregnancy.

@131 Bi, I had assumed that particular comment of Harriet's was a criticism of my statement that LWs belie a lot about themselves (and lose or gain the sympathy of Dan and the commentariat) by their writing styles, tone, information they choose to share or not. I never said I thought MATH was uneducated, nor did I say I wish LWs had the prose styling of a novelist. I chose to compare the two letters this week that effectively had the same problem, and the very different ways those two LWs described their partners and relationships (or didn't). I assumed Harriet's comment about TFR being more mature/sophisticated/sufficiently educated to conduct himself in a relationship was a sarcastic comment based on interpreting my comments about MATH as classist. Choosing to not share pertinent information about your partner and relationship when writing in to a sex/relationship advice columnist is telling to me, and has absolutely nothing to do with someone's level of education.

Also, in regards to masturbating in bed next to your partner: * puts on Ebenezer Scrooge voice * "Are there no showers? Are there no bathrooms?"

Mrs Fox @133: "I never said I thought MATH was uneducated, nor did I say I wish LWs had the prose styling of a novelist." And I didn't interpret your comments that way. In fact, I said you made a lot of good points in that post. I agree that TFR comes across as a lot more emotionally literate than MATH, despite their being similar ages. Harriet was the one who tied this difference in emotional literacy to social class and snarked, "Sure she does arithmetic in her head..."
Harriet is quite often inscrutable to me, so let's wait to see what their explanation is for what they meant by that. Hopefully something a bit more useful than charging -me- with being the classist one.

Mrs Fox, upon re-reading the thread it seems that Harriet may have confused your words for mine. Imagining that their reply to me @75 was written with the inaccurate assumption that I had written the post @51 makes more sense. And they conflated your remarks about MATH not expressing herself well with an imagined regional bias on my part to draw a conclusion that I was guilty of the classism I was pointing out in Harriet's own post.

Honestly, it does not take even a high school diploma to write a letter to an advice column, and there are PhDs in the sciences who are heavily dyslexic, not to mention the international nature of this column, so I draw no presumptions about a letter writer's education or social class based on how it's written. If Harriet is presuming that you (Mrs Fox) or I do that, they are projecting.

@135, 136 Bi - I think Harriet did indeed confuse my comments with yours. I ruffled a bit at Harriet leaping to the conclusion that my remarks were classist in nature, as that was lightyears away from the intent of what I wrote. I have seen in my approx 2.5 years of lurking on the SL comments board that Harriet sometimes has a knack for taking an idea and running wildly off course with it, or making obtuse remarks seemingly for the sake of exasperating other commentators and goading them into engaging in circular arguments that have a way of bogarting the rest of the thread. I had zero interest in biting what struck me as argument bait.

In regards to MATH and my criticism of the way she wrote her letter: I have read dozens, if not hundreds, of letters written to Dan wherein the situation is such a painfully obvious DTMFA, yet the LW still manages to squeeze in "but I love my partner" or "we have a lot of fun together" or some version of "X, Y, and Z are amazing aspects of our relationship." Even when the partner is clearly awful and abusive, the LW still usually manages a good word or two about the partner or relationship. MATH never did any of the above. Given that she's young and wrote in to Dan in the first place, I'm assuming a certain level of sex positivity and familiarity with the kind of advice Dan gives. Hell, MATH and Mr. MATH may read SL together every week. Given that the only question asked was this weird hand-wringing "did I do something wrong, Mr. Dan Savage, by taking care of my sexual needs when my BF rebuffed me? Should I feel guilty that my terrible, terrible unsatisfying-in-bed BF gave me a sad one time?" the whole letter just ultimately rubbed me the wrong way. No word about what works in your relationship? No insight into why you're putting up with this? No expression of concern as to what may be going on in your partner's head that has lead to a decreased interest in sex? Not actually asking Dan for any advice? Again, I'm left wondering what MATH was really after.

@138: I took MATH's question to be: "Should I feel guilty about masturbating when he turns me down?" Now, this should be a no-brainer, and perhaps she was really trying to get Dan to offer up the obligatory DTMFA and thus get permission to dump the motherfucker already. But given everything else in this letter, I am inclined to think that she is seriously asking whether she ought to feel guilty for masturbating when her boyfriend turns down her attempts to initiate sex. He (the boyfriend) apparently thinks she should; he got "upset" and took "offense" at her masturbating.

Not only does MATH not say a single positive thing about her boyfriend or the relationship--not even the usual disclaimer, "other than the fact that he stole money from my disabled mother, wrecked my car, calls me names, had sex with my sister, kicks the dog and thinks Ted Cruz is awesome, he's great"--she describes what looks like a nightmare.

Here's the letter in full, just so we can all see it in all its awfulness:

"I am a 26-year-old heterosexual girl. After four years with my boyfriend (and with the pandemic on top of it), we started to experience sex issues. It is mainly from my side, I (almost) never get satisfaction out of sex. I’m always enthusiastic about having sex but I don’t feel “involved” and I could literally be solving math problems in my head while we have sex. As the situation is frustrating, I talked to him and suggested that more foreplay could help me stay engaged and enjoy the sex. He was puzzled by my “need for foreplay” to reach orgasm but committed to trying. However, after minimal initial effort, he stopped trying and the limited foreplay ceased. He probably got frustrated by the amount of time I require to “warm up” and his efforts dried up and he began rebuffing me whenever I attempted to initiate sex. Recently after he turned my sexual advances down yet again, I decided to masturbate. The result was him being upset and taking offense at my “unpleasant behavior.” Should I feel guilty about masturbating when he turns me down? I am hurt and I very frustrated by this situation."

My take is that no, she's not doing math--that's a common way to indicate that she's not mentally present during sex, and the fact that she says she could "literally be solving math problems" suggest to me that she really means "figuratively," i.e. she's checked out. Most of the time when people say they're "literally" anything, they don't mean it literally.

They seem to have non-existent communication skills: she says that her boyfriend began rebuffing her attempts to initiate sex after she wasn't orgasming after some perfunctory "foreplay" (more on "foreplay" below), and she says he "probably got frustrated" by her inability to get off on his timetable. The fact that she is trying to guess what's going on with him suggests to me that they don't talk about this--or not effectively.

Then there's the issue of the lack of "foreplay," which I take to mean anything beyond sticking his penis in her vagina. I bloody hate the word "foreplay," which implies it's a warmup for the main event--the main event being the man's sticking his penis in the woman's vagina and being over when the man comes--even if the only way the woman can come is from digital or oral sex. It's all sex, dammit.

But the part that really jumped out at me was that she describes their sexual incompatibility as HER problem ("we started to experience sex issues. It is mainly from my side, I (almost) never get satisfaction out of sex."). The issues that they are having are their mutual problem. He is "puzzled" that she doesn't come from PIV alone, and doesn't appear to want to put in time or effort to satisfy her. I would characterize this as their problem and I see them both as having poor communication skills, but the fact that he seems to resent having to do anything at all for any amount of time, that he considers it "unpleasant" that she masturbates, that she initiates and he rebuffs sex, suggests to me that she lacks self confidence and is being controlled by him--after all, she's writing to a sex advice columnist seemingly to get permission to masturbate when her boyfriend rejects her sexual advances.

This is a DTMFY (yesterday), if I've ever read one, but I don't know that she even realizes she has that option.

@139 Nocute, eloquently stated as always (and I'm dying at your second paragraph example of an SL disclaimer, so sad and true). I guess I'm hoping that a generation of young adults who may have effectively grown up reading SL would be more empowered sexually than MATH comes across. But old habits (and societal attitudes) die hard it would seem.

nocute @139: MATH opened by referring to herself as a "girl", and then asked if she should feel guilty. It doesn't sound like the 'grown-ass woman with agency' penny has dropped yet.

@141: fubar, while I don't read too much into "girl," as lots of people use it for lack of a better-seeming-to-them option, I agree with you about the penny not having dropped yet. MATH doesn't see herself as having agency, nor even having the right to sexual satisfaction.

I can't tell how much of this is society at large's fault and how much is her personal background/family's fault.

I mean, I'm a grown-ass woman in my 50s who refers to herself as a "girl." I understand that I'm a woman, but I tend to use those words interchangeably.

nocute @143: I think it was the combination of "girl" and essentially asking for permission that caught my attention. The word "girl" has lots of connotations, and many of them are lots of fun.

I'm not sure when I decided I was no longer a boy, but I do remember being 25 and realizing I'd passed the final hurdle into adulthood (allowed to rent a car). Back in the 1990s, there was lots of talk in the men's awareness movement of reintroducing rites of passage, but I don't think much came of it.

Now I'm on the verge of becoming a crusty old geezer. I should at least get a ribbon or something.

The best thing about my early twenties was being able to get away with things. Like smoking pot pretty much everywhere.

@144: Your ribbon is in the mail.

Ms Cute - Quite correct of you. You want to be a woman except when you want to be a girl, or vice versa.

@143 nocutename: For the WIN! Agreed and seconded. :)
and
@143 nocutename and @144 fubar : You BOTH deserve a ribbon! :)

Mrs Fox @138 / Nocute @139, either of these readings is possible. I read it literally (as in literally, not figuratively), the way Nocute did. Everything she wrote is plausible and the obvious explanations and answers are right there. However, I agree with Mrs Fox that the answers are SO obvious it's possible MATH has an agenda and is manipulating Dan and us readers to conclude, "You did nothing wrong! He's the bad guy! DTMFA!" As I've said before, probably to Harriet, it's always possible an LW is lying, and if that's the case it makes advising that person impossible. Is MATH a naive, innocent victim of a selfish straight-male stereotype? Or has she got by in life by "playing dumb" and gaining sympathy? We may never know. Either way, at 26 she is no longer a girl and she needs to grow up -- either by learning to communicate or by taking responsibility for her own choices. Or both.

Fubar @141/@144, word. She calls herself a girl and she is not acting like an adult. The word is a tell.

Nocute @143, would you really write to Dan and say "I'm a girl in my 50s"?
I might invite a few friends around for girls' night, or refer to myself as somebody's girlfriend, but aside from those narrow socially acceptable exceptions for calling grown women girls, I personally would not, either.

Nocute, I'm with you on the concept of "foreplay" as implying everything that is not PIV is simply a precursor to PIV. I agree that any activity involving the genitals would be better termed "sex." However, particularly as I sail through perimenopause, I've grown to think of foreplay as a precursor to genital contact. Foreplay is not sticking your fingers into my underwear. Foreplay is what I need -before- fingers can be stuck pleasurably into my underwear, to get me turned on and wet enough. (This is an ongoing discussion with my straight boy, whose dial still goes from zero to horny in seconds.) So what MATH means by foreplay is an important question. Does he, too, think he IS giving her foreplay by fingering her immediately, and is she trying to tell him she needs to make out and have her breasts fondled for 5-10 minutes first? She wasn't specific with us; she needs to be specific with him.