I didn’t date as a teenager, missed the boat due in part to an excess of panic. At the age of thirteen I became obsessed with venereal diseases, misunderstood my way into a locked box from which I then spent the rest of my teens attempting to extract myself. At some point, I had come to understand that somewhere at the core of sex as an activity lay the possibility not only of illness but specifically of bodily harm, and this conviction, once formed, proved difficult to shake.
