MY aunt is 44 and lives alone in Manhattan in the same rent-controlled apartment she grew up in. For years I thought she’d never really been with a man, but it turns out she was once, in the ’80s. When you ask her about it, she says, “I’m glad I did it, but I wouldn’t do it again.” She pours much of her free time into maintaining her extensive VHS collection.

This aversion seems to run in our genes. My extended family consists almost entirely of fatherless, brotherless and husbandless women. We’re skinny and bright, with a capacity for imagination that lends itself to paranoia and social anxiety. We all possess an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema from the classic to the terrible. Acquiring this knowledge is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is possess a terror of actual male interaction.

My aunt’s VHS tapes are relics of my childhood. Most of them are rated “R” for violence, drugs, sex and other mistakes grown-ups make. Half are classics, and half are pulpy psychosexual dramas with the kind of morally questionable guys that fascinate and scare the elder generation of women in my family. When I was little, the inappropriate content was always fast-forwarded through at my mother’s request, leading me to believe that “Saturday Night Fever” was 20 minutes long.

One of my first memories (I was probably 7) is of sitting on the floor of my aunt’s apartment watching “Never Talk to Strangers.” This was right after she’d had a bad experience with an actual man, and my mother and I thought we should be there for her. She was talking quietly with my mother on the sofa.