Whatever should I do?

FOR more than 1,000 years the Oracle at Delphi offered advice to all who asked for it. More than 500 snippets of oracular wisdom have survived. Some sound just like a modern agony aunt, if you ignore the animal sacrifice and the priestess’s mystic trance. The aphorisms inscribed outside the shrine were “know thyself” and “nothing in excess”.

Like most advice columnists today, the Delphic Oracle was female. But unlike modern agony aunts, she spoke in riddles. When the Persians were invading Greece, she told the Athenians to put their trust in “a wooden wall”. Themistocles, the Athenian leader, realised that this meant “build lots of ships”. He acted on the advice, and his navy routed the Persians at Salamis in 480BC. But her refusal to give a straight answer could lead to disaster. In the sixth century BC King Croesus of Lydia was told that if he made war on the Persians he would “destroy a mighty empire”. That empire turned out to be his own.

An agony aunt is “a purveyor of common sense”, writes Irma Kurtz, who did the job for Cosmopolitan for four decades, in “My Life in Agony”, a memoir. Since what counts as common sense varies from age to age and from place to place, the history of agony aunts reveals a lot about social change. The first regular problem page, open to questions from readers, was published in 1691 in the Athenian Gazette, a British periodical. Its creator, John Dunton, was feeling guilty for cheating on his wife. He thought that people like himself might appreciate confiding anonymously in a stranger, and that readers would be titillated by the exchange. It was an instant success. He was bombarded with queries on everything from marriage to the ethics of slave-trading to why sermons seem longer than they are.

The format caught on. Daniel Defoe, the author of “Robinson Crusoe”, penned an agony column for the Review, a magazine he founded in 1704. Alas, it wasn’t much good. “[H]e felt superior to his readership,” notes Robin Kent in “Aunt Agony Advises: Problem Pages through the Ages”. Defoe said his aim was “to enlighten the stupid understandings of the meaner and more thoughtless” members of the public. He railed against divorce, sex before marriage, sex after menopause and fiscal irresponsibility (which was a bit rich, coming from a serial bankrupt).

Readers expected a sympathetic ear; but not an infinitely indulgent one. One of the joys of reading the problem pages is to see people who deserve a ticking-off receive an amusingly brutal one. In 1765 a young man wrote to the Court Miscellany, a British periodical, to ask whether he should fight a duel against a rogue who had insulted his beloved. The reply urged him to accept the challenge: “[F]or if you run your antagonist through the body, or he you, ’tis three to one but the other comes to be hang’d; and then there’s good riddance of two ridiculous hot-headed coxcombs.”

The early British problem pages received far more queries about bigamy than divorce. Divorce was in effect illegal, but there was no central record of marriages, so an unhappy spouse could move and pose as single. One correspondent told Dunton that she had married a man who was already married. When she realised, she had him arrested. He was transported to Australia. She heard that he was dead, and remarried. Two years later he wrote to ask her to join him. She asked: “Which of the two…is my real husband?” Dunton told her to stick with the honest one.

The agony and the ecstasy

Advice columns often did more than reflect social change: they advocated it. In the 18th century advice columnists in papers such as the Spectator fulminated against arranged marriages. In the 19th century the problem pages of Cassell’s and the London Journal campaigned for women to retain control of their property after marriage—and may have hastened the day when such laws were passed. Agony aunts were also among the first to call for easier divorce laws, though they seldom pushed too far ahead of public opinion; papers cannot afford to alienate their readers.

Listening to so many hopes and desires may, perhaps, incline agony aunts to the idea that the world is happier if people make their own choices. But sympathy has often struggled against adesire to uphold moral values. A woman writing to the Family Star in 1935 complained that although everyone thought her marriage was happy, her husband believed in free love and was unfaithful. The agony aunt replied: “It is something that your husband has the decency to keep up appearances before outsiders. Continue to conduct yourself before the whole world as a faithful and happy wife and mother, and smile while your heart aches. That shows the stuff a brave woman is made of.”

The early agony aunts discussed sex only indirectly, and usually with pursed lips. When a young correspondent admitted to Defoe that she had been seduced, he called her a whore—though he spelled it “w---e” to spare his readers’ blushes. In the 1890s the advice column in the Boy’s Own Paper was almost entirely about how to refrain from masturbating (without ever spelling out the nature of the “school vice” that would make boys blind and prematurely senile). But in the 1930s agony aunts began to admit that even nice women might enjoy sex. They “gave lady-like hints on the joys of orgasm”, writes Ms Kent, and sent helpful booklets to frustrated couples—as long as they were married. In the 1960s readers began to pop the pill and agony aunts swung with them.

Today, advice columns do not merely explain how to have better sex; they show photos. A typical week for the mass-market Sun newspaper’s “Dear Deidre” column includes such conundrums as “I’ve got four girls on the go and none know[s]”, illustrated with half-nude models. The agony aunt Deidre Sanders is sober and constructive, however: she offers the serial philanderer an e-leaflet on how to be faithful.

The spread of agony aunts around the world reveals a lot about varying cultures—and political systems. Consider China. Perhaps its first modern agony aunt was Xinran, who hosted “Words on the Night Breeze”, a radio show, from 1989 to 1997. One of her first letters was from a boy who said that an old man in his village had bought a young girl as his wife. She was kept chained up, and had obviously been kidnapped. The boy asked Xinran to save her, adding: “Whatever you do, don’t mention this on the radio. If the villagers find out, they’ll drive my family away.”

Xinran called the police, who told her that this sort of thing happened all the time and she should mind her own business. But she persisted, and finally managed to rescue the girl, who turned out to be 12 years old, and reunite her with her parents. In most countries, Xinran’s bosses would have congratulated her. Not in China: the state-run radio station was furious that she had caused so much trouble and wasted so much time and money.

Censorship made Xinran’s job hard. She moved to Britain; others soldier on. Gloria Ai, the host and founder of Ask Media, produces programmes for Chinese state television in which viewers send in questions and experts try to answer them. The topics range from starting a business to coping with throat cancer. The shows are recorded; there is no question of allowing a live phone-in. A member of the public with a live microphone might veer off topic and start criticising the Communist Party.

Social media allow Chinese people to seek advice without attracting the censors’ ire. Tony Tong and Kristin Wu run New Kinsey, an organisation that offers sex advice in person or via social media. More than 160,000 people follow Mr Tong on Weibo, a microblog a bit like Twitter. Since there is no good sex education in Chinese schools and embarrassed parents rarely broach the topic, Chinese youngsters are desperate for information. “Almost none” of those Mr Tong deals with knows how to use a condom properly. Many young Chinese men have learned about sex from Japanese porn, he says, and expect their partners to be submissive. Many young women find this disagreeable. “We try to show them what’s real and what’s not,” he says.

South African agony aunts cast light on a culture that mixes rich, poor, modern and traditional. In the Daily Sun, a feisty tabloid aimed at the black working class, Khanyi Mbau, a well-known actress, offers cheerful tips about such matters as what to do when your boyfriend worries too much about what the ancestors might think. “Mizz B”, a column provided by LoveLife, an anti-AIDS charity, offers sensible advice about sex, while being careful not to contradict readers’ prejudices too directly. When a man writes to say he needs help because he is attracted to other men, Mizz B does not tell him, in print, that it is OK to be gay. Instead, she gives him the number of a sympathetic counsellor.

For the pious, Pastor Daniel offers “Spiritual Guidance”. A woman complains that her husband is unfaithful, has given her sexually transmitted diseases, is physically abusive and has “raped me twice already”. On the plus side, he has not yet given her AIDS. A Western agony aunt might suggest dumping the bastard and calling the police. But for Pastor Daniel, divorce is a sin. “Look for a pastor who can assist with counselling for you as a couple,” he says; and “in the meantime, encourage your partner to condomise [so that you don’t get HIV].”

The internet has allowed agony aunts to specialise: there are advice columns for gay men, for trainspotters and for Jews who live in Philadelphia. There are aunts for every worldview, from libertine to puritan and from reactionary to radical. In November the Nation, a left-wing American magazine, launched an advice column. The first reader’s question was: “Is my depression individual or political?” The reply: “Dear Depressed, Let’s not draw too sharp a distinction. Life under capitalism can be a profound bummer!”

You are not alone

The internet and social media have enabled crowdsourcing, where one reader posts a problem and others suggest solutions. Bella Naija, a popular Nigerian website, has an “Aunty Bella” column in which readers argue passionately about how to cope with an interfering mother or a duff husband. They also help people to realise that they are not alone. “Everyone who wrote to us in [the pre-internet days] thought they were the only person in the world who made themselves sick after eating or cut themselves with razors,” says Virginia Ironside, a veteran agony aunt for the Independent, a British newspaper. Now they are only a mouseclick away from a self-help group.

But this does not make professional agony aunts redundant. The best ones are more entertaining than any crowdsourced comment stream, and offer snappier advice. Many publish their own suggestions alongside those from readers. This is “immensely freeing”, says Ms Ironside. “It allows me to go out on a limb.”

She often does. “Is there anything worse than being abandoned like this? Quite frankly, it would be better if your husband had died,” she told a jilted wife. “[Y]ou would [receive] a great deal more sympathy from friends, you would know that there was absolutely no hope of his ever returning, and you wouldn’t be tormented by thoughts of him living in a love nest with his new woman.”

The world is richer and in many ways gentler than in the early days of agony aunting. Readers no longer wonder if it is all right to throw witches in ponds, as John Dunton was asked in 1692. But people are probably no happier, thinks Ms Ironside: “Everyone still worries about children, marriage and being alone.” Still, agony aunts have it easier than their forebears. If they give controversial advice, they may be subjected to a flame war. When the Delphic Oracle scolded the emperor Nero for having murdered his mother, he had her burned alive.