Though it may not seem like it, there will be a time, far from now. A time when, despite not having grown an inch in years, and despite maintaining a strong fascination with eighties pop music and its accompanying fashion statements, someone will want to have sex with you. Someone will want to be on the receiving end of all of the misinformation you gather from years of sex “education” classes, and the discovery of the internet.

Illustration by Skip Sterling

Right now, I know you know loss only as something severe and deeply fracturing. In summer, you went to sleep with a mother, and woke up to a cold and empty space, a funeral being planned in the living room. In coming years, you will know loss in much more trivial ways. You will lose keys, money, two cellphones in one weekend, and countless soccer games. You will grieve the loss of things that won’t return. You will lose things so celebrated that you won’t mourn them.

But you will always know there will be more to find and lose all over again. The latter is how boys are taught to become men and stay that way. To be the body that consumes and never the body that is consumed. Everything is for the taking until there is nothing left to take. When you eventually have sex with a girl, and then sneak out of her house while she sleeps one morning— embodying a teen film cliché — you won’t look back in grief or regret. You won’t feel shame because no one asks that of you. You have friends, eager to live through another story of another boy crossing over to the Promised Land, with no concern for what or who it takes to get there.

Everything you learn about purity is a myth. It is an unfair myth, told for a very specific purpose, for very specific reasons. When you spent all of a year telling the girls on the basketball team that they “weren’t really girls,” it is because of this. Years later, when a friend jokes that “girls shouldn’t use the bathroom,” and you laugh, it is because of this. You will need to unlearn the myth of the pure body as quickly as possible. You don’t get to push that myth. You don’t get to howl at every moon and then wake up in the morning and call yourself cleaner than everything you’ve ever touched.

You live in a time where there is no guilt for what you do at night. You live in that time now, and you always will. There will always be a group of men who pretend to not feel shame for what they do to anyone who is not a man. What it will take you far too long to see is how easy it is to project every bit of shame and anxiety you have about yourself, your body, and your inability to love onto anyone who tries to love you. Fragile boys grow up to become fragile men. What you won’t get taught in any class about sex is the violence that blooms from a man who doesn’t get something from a woman to which he feels entitled. Yes, it’s true that you may never be that man in a physical way, but you will always benefit from the systems and histories that those men put in place.

It all begins with the value that is placed on the bodies of girls and women, even now, when you are 14 and at school learning everything there is to know about sex. When a man teaches your sex education class, loss of virginity will be talked about as an inevitability; something that will surely happen sooner rather than later. There will be talk about sex, what to do or not to do, how to put on a condom. You will be shown a new and exciting world, almost as if you are being given a brochure about a thrilling vacation that is just on the horizon. It is almost like sex (with a woman, of course) is your birthright. Something that you are entitled to simply by existing as a boy or a man in America.

One day, you will remember how the buzz of excited young boys dimmed a bit when the girls re-entered the classroom after being taught a lesson on virginity, also by a man. You will remember their silence, how some of them were red, many looking down at their shoes. Many focused on anything but the eyes of boys who had just been promised the world, at their expense.

This is how it begins. Someone you like in college will sleep with someone on the soccer team and you will convince yourself that she’s “not worth it.”

At 21, a guy you know has sex with two people at the same party, and you laugh about it over breakfast the next morning.

At 23, a woman in your apartment complex walks from her door to her car and the men on the street yell about her legs, what they would do to her.

At 26, you will realize that you have never been given any unwanted attention on any street.

“Patriarchy” is a word that you don’t understand yet, but a system that you are already deeply immersed in. The problem with patriarchy, like all systems of oppression, is that it doesn’t just hurt the group of people it is oppressing. Of course, patriarchy impacts everyone more severely than it impacts straight, cis-gendered men. But it will also hurt you. It will also limit your imagination, the type of good that you allow yourself to be. It will limit your ability to love and be loved for far too many years.

At 30, you will look back on all of this and take inventory of every missed opportunity to dismantle and push back against a system that still tells you that you can only be one thing, a machine that loves women quietly and hurts women loudly. The past, in this way, will be a healthy burden. The thing you carry into every new relationship, the thing you are reminded of when you fight for people other than yourself, the thing that reminds you to sit, listen, and take up less and less of the space you are afforded.

The true damage all begins now, at 14 years old in sex ed class. It begins when you learn that the sex you have is a new trophy to be displayed, each time. And the sex women have is something to be hidden, silenced, and never spoken about. It begins when you ask for education and are given condoms. When you are taught as a boy that a girl’s body is a vessel, something that you rest inside of as it carries you to manhood.

It is a shame that they will never teach you how to be alone. How to love a woman for something other than sex. How to be honest about that love. How to just spend time with someone and not lie about it when your guy friends ask. But you are lucky. You learn enough of this on your own, eventually. At a time far too late, but still early enough to push back. To be something other than a boy who sneaks out of apartments and high-fives other boys who do the same.

At 30, it will be hard to remember that you deserve the love of all of the smart, encouraging, relentlessly powerful women in your life. The ones who will always demand you be better, more awake. It is impossible to not fuck up. It is entirely possible to be loved by women who cares about you enough to make sure that you’re held accountable for fucking up, and encourage you to do better.

What I want you to know now is that none of this will save you. You are never going to stop living in a society that caters to your needs and desires, and few things are more addicting than knowing that. But it is not enough to only know what is wrong. It is not enough to merely watch as a woman is called a “slut” on the internet, it’s not even enough to say “that’s not good.”

You have to dismantle everything that gives power to false purity. Take every system that places your desires over the humanity of others and start to take it apart. Make room for the voices who suffer from any system you find yourself complicit in.

You do not get to define anyone’s body louder than they do.

You do not get to watch while a body is defined for someone who is not given a voice.

Tearing that tower down also begins now, when a man teaches sex as if it is a gift. It begins with you, raising your hand. It begins with you, speaking up.

Yours,

Hanif

Click the response button below to write a letter to your younger self. Tag it with “LetsTalkAboutSexEd.” For more about why we think this is an important conversation and what Bright hopes will come out of it, read this.