My mother was a feminist. My single mother, which means, God bless her, that I was raised as a feminist. It means my sex and relationship talks from her were about respecting women. About not taking advantage of women, not hurting them, not raping them. After my stepdad came into our lives I never discussed these things with him. It took a few conversations with my father to sort out the one thing that I really and truly needed to know about sex, which is: you’re not a bad looking dude, and don’t worry, you can get laid.

He’d had a very different life than me. I lost my virginity at seventeen; at that age he had been picked up for dealing heroin and given the choice of going to the clink or enlisting in the marines at the height of Vietnam. He told me stories like “one time I beat up this black guy so bad that I was checking the papers the next day to make sure I hadn’t killed him.” He had a tough, colorful life. I was on scholarship to a prep school where they had not one but two competing a capella groups that in any sensible community would have had the shit kicked out of them on a daily basis. I was going to a school where they flew in math geniuses from China and all the girls wore docksiders and no makeup and were second cousins with Winston Churchill and if they ever saw a penis they would explode. The occasional accidental erection of their horse was the only stiff penis they had ever seen, and they had absolutely no curiosity about expanding their knowledge. A rich new England WASP girl is basically born elderly, in terms of her sexuality. This is why she has time to focus on things like perfecting her application essay to intern at the U.N. When I started at this fancy school, it was immediately clear that none of these girls would ever show even the remotest interest in me; they barely showed interest in boys at all.

But still, I got talks about respecting women. I was assiduous about respecting them, when I couldn’t even get them to notice me or my fucking respect.

But my Dad– I had always assumed that, you know, the tradeoff to being the kind of person who might go to jail at seventeen is, you get to be the kind of person who’s around girls who will fuck you when you’re fourteen. But no, he told me- I used to worry about girls all the time, you know. It took a while before I got laid a little bit by accident and I started to realize: hey, I’m not a bad lookin dude. I could do all right. Same shit will happen with you.

This was precisely what I needed to hear. When you are in a desert of female interest you begin to think you are a hideous unfuckable mutant and will remain a virgin forever. You are not thinking about how to hurt, break the heart of, or rape a woman. You are thinking about the problem of even getting a woman to notice you. You can’t even get into a situation where you are alone in a room with a woman and rape or heartbreak might occur.

So instead of how to respect women and blah blah blah, what you should be telling your teenage son is how to get laid. Failing that: don’t worry, you eventually will get laid. Because every ounce of hate, disrespect, every piece of abuse that has come out of me toward women has sprung from the fact that I was either desperate to get laid, or frustrated that I had not been able to get laid.

Further, you should have two separate health classes, two separate sex eds. Right now sex ed is coed and is just a fancy way of saying “don’t fuck.” Most places can’t say “God will make you blind if you jack off” anymore; they can’t say that sexuality is wrong. But they can give you the impression that there’s a huge chance that you’ll get HIV through heterosexual sex, or that common infections like HPV are likely to have meaningful consequences. They can tell you: when to have sex is your choice, but remember that herpes HIV pregnancy etc., and so you better use a condom. You better use this awkward chemical-smelling medical torture device that that will make it impossible to feel where your dick is going, that will make it so you are not in fact touching the other person– we can make sex something scary, pleasureless and unnatural with this thing that you now have to wear because some gay guys in 1982 got a disease in a San Francisco bathhouse that you are never going to get.

When to have sex is your choice, but you should be aware of the dangers— see, go ahead and tell this to the girls’ class. Tell the girls not to fuck, that it’s scary, that guys will fuck you and not call you– tell them all these things; there are real consequences for them. It is their choice when to have sex and they should be aware of the dangers.

But for Christ’s fucking sake– it is certainly NOT a teenage boy’s choice when to have sex; if it were, they would have all done it with their very first boner. The dangers are meaningless and not particularly germane to them to begin with; pulling out works; you’re not going to get an STD; condoms are horrible, they completely ruin sex– if they didn’t do you think people would have to push them so hard? Every girl on the planet has an abortion and while it’s going to fuck with the money you were saving for an Xbox it does not ruin them as human beings; they get over it. Who you lose your virginity to is meaningless, it is not something special for you– it is a smear on you, visible to all, that needs to be purged as soon as possible. Fuck the fat chick. Fuck the school slut. Fuck your cousin. Do whatever it takes to get rid of your virginity as soon as possible. Because the struggle to get laid in the future very much hinges on it not being a big deal for you. The idea of being your first and providing you with a special life-changing experience and etc. is like a fucking horror movie for a girl. Girls want to get laid with guys who are already getting laid and don’t give a shit. Better to throw your virginity away, to not put any weight on the experience– to get it into your head that a fuck is just a fuck. That’s the only way you won’t scare girls away with your unmanly nebbishiness.

When I have a son, that is the talk I’m going to have. Better, I’m going to take him to a hooker when he’s thirteen. To show him that a fuck is just a fuck, so that the fucking obsession isn’t hanging destructively over his head for his whole life. It burns you, having these early formative years with no girls giving a shit about you. It makes you hate women for the rest of your life. It makes you pissed off every time you see a couple holding hands on the street– that fucking cunt, of course she’s dating a guy in a band. It fucking ruins you. You end up treating women terribly because of this burning hate you carry around, a hate that comes from self-hate, from unworthiness to women. Seeing them as just a piece of pussy, and what’s more a piece of pussy that is attainable, is, ironically, the only way you’re ever going to treat women like human beings.