DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I know you’re not an actual medical doctor but I’ve been wondering do I have a crippling porn addiction. I was introduced to porn when my middle school friends around 7th or 8th grade were talking about it and I proceeded to look it up when I was home alone.

Keep in mind it was pretty much the way I was introduced to sex (which isn’t good) because the sex education was a joke more pathetic than funny and my parents weren’t the best at explaining it because one was religious and the other was autistic. And let’s just say it let me down a rabbit hole that pretty much scrambled and twisted my brain about sex and women in general that even to this day they’re difficult to shake off.

Like believing women are inherently vain, shallow and vapid only want one kind of guy based on his sex drive, body type and “size” which fueled me with a s--t ton of insecurity and body image issues (I’m a literal fatass; not thick, not husky, not curvy. I’m a poster child of the modern American slob, sorry. When it comes to my body image I’m brutally honest and not pc) and you won’t see my body types in porn unless its a creepy and degrading fetish or he’s the cuck in the corner where he belongs.

I wasn’t till much later I realized it wasn’t women who weren’t the shallow and vapid ones but rather me because once again porn made me think to only go after porn star gorgeous women who will give me the most exciting and satisfying sex. Compared to average who have average faces and body types because in my mind average = dull and boring the human equivalent of flavorless oatmeal. Which once again is hard as s--t to shake off and even then turns out real world sex is nothing like porn and after I’ve learned that lesson after my fist sexual encounter (at the ripe old age of 23 too late to lose my virginity) felt like I got fooled, I got duped and quite possibly bamboozled.

Even after my sexual encounter I’m still infected with the “c-m brain” brain rot where I’m constantly horny for a particular kind of porn and once I’m done masturbation I feel nothing but shame, disgust and self hatred for myself. Like there is reason when women masturbate its fearless and empowering but when men do it’s sad and pathetic, like owning male sex toys is a sign of loneliness, sadness and patheticness. I’ve all the “health benefits” of masturbation but it’s hard believe em when you constantly feel like s--t after doing it or the people espousing might are just addicted as me just justifying it like a smoker or an alcoholic telling me destroying their lungs and liver is actually a good thing because dopamine.

I was given suggestions how to help combat these negative feelings around porn and masturbation: Try looking at feminist porn which at first just lead me to literal c&b torture vids where a woman in high heels steps on a man’s genitals calling him a worthless little f--k pig frankly did not turn me on. The second time I tried I’m not gonna lie it didn’t arouse me it bored me f--king tears like holy s--t there was nothing exciting or sexually appealing about it, just boring sets, with boring looking people, doing the most boring and vanilla sex it legit nearly put me to sleep. And another suggestion was maybe subscribe an OnlyFans girl but that opens up another can of worms because frankly the men who unironically subscribe to only fans well there is reason it they’re called simps and the lonely fans of Only Fans. Cause all those “men” are sad pathetic losers who know they have zero chances with these girls irl and yet continue to pay them for a crumb of attention, even the girls know their subscribers are sad pathetic losers. So yeah don’t wanna join the crowd of bottom feeding losers.

So what I do? How do I shake these feelings towards sex and porn? How do I stop from being a c--brain loser? How do I overcome my crippling porn addiction and actually have a healthy relationship with my own sexuality?

Sincerely

A Loser Porn Addict

DEAR A LOSER PORN ADDICT: Right, this is going to be a long one, because we’re going to be covering a LOT of topics.

This, LPA, is what we in the advice biz call “a self-inflicted injury”. Most of the problems you’re running into have less to do with porn or “c-m brain” and far more to do with your own sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

We hear a lot about porn addiction, especially from religious organizations and fascist groups like the Proud Boys, but the fact of the matter is that porn addiction as most laypeople describe it doesn’t exist. I will refer you to the statement from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists on the subject:

“ AASECT 1) does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder, and 2) does not find the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge. Therefore, it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”

(https://www.aasect.org/position-sex-addiction)

Now this isn’t to say that people don’t or can’t have problematic relationships to masturbation or their use of porn. But more often than not, the issue with problematic uses of porn come down to a) spiritual beliefs, especially within conservative religious groups and b) a form of self-medication that leads to excessive use. Which is to say: porn and sex “addiction” are the often due to either other issues that the person is attempting to alleviate, or because they’ve been taught to see sex and sexuality in a negative light.

You are very much in the latter. And quite frankly, it’s not hard to see where a lot of this is coming from. So if you want to deal with your negative feelings about your porn usage and have a healthier relationship with your own sexuality, the first thing you should do is get the f--k off the nofap, porn addiction and other subreddits and communities you’re part of. Literally none of them have therapeutic benefits, and only serve to create a sense of co-dependency within the community and constant feelings of shame in the members.

Here’s an easy rule of thumb to help you gauge how helpful and healthy a “support community” is: if the primary purpose and motivator of a community is shame and derision, then it’s not actually providing support. All it provides is misogyny, homophobia and makes the problem worse. That’s not just “woo, sex is great!” pseudo sex-positivity; there’s actual science behind this. A study from the journal Sexualities found that not only does increased participation in NoFap make people feel worse about themselves – especially by framing relapses or setbacks as personal or moral failings – but that engagement with NoFap and “reboot” communities is directly correlated to increased feelings of anxiety, shame, suicidal ideation and sex negativity. And that’s before we get into the antisemitism, white supremacy, the homophobia and transphobia, bullying and calls for participants to harm themselves.

The fact that you’re talking about “c-m brain” is a pretty good example of this, as does framing things like male masturbation as being “sad” and “pathetic” or that people who subscribe to a person’s “OnlyFans” are hapless losers.

So to quote the old joke: “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “So stop doing that.” Much as with people who join incel communities, the first step to better mental health and self-image is to quit going to the places that tell you you’re a porn-addicted loser. All this does is serve to reinforce your own sense of worthlessness. It doesn’t help, it only hurts.

This mindset that you have right now is the Rosetta Stone to just about everything you talk about in your letter. The difference between alcohol and jerking off is that alcohol is literally a toxin. Intoxication – where “toxic” is literally embedded in the word – is a form of mild poisoning. A hangover comes about because your body is recuperating after you poisoned yourself. That doesn’t happen with masturbation. You don’t damage your liver by jerking off, nor do you “drain your dopamine”. You don’t feel like s--t after masturbating because masturbation is bad for you. You feel like s--t after masturbating because you believe masturbation is pathetic and doing it makes you a loser. That’s not an issue with the act, that’s an issue with how you feel about yourself.

This is why the problem isn’t porn or masturbation, the problem you’re dealing with is the constant reinforcement that what you’re doing is sad and pathetic and that you are sad and pathetic for doing so. You filter everything through the belief that porn = bad, porn users = losers and thus since you use porn, you’re bad and also a loser. It also means that you not only miss the point of people’s advice, but you apply it haphazardly, incorrectly and take the wrong lessons from it.

Take the idea that female masturbation is “empowering” but male masturbation is “pathetic”. The reason why female masturbation is framed as “empowering” is because it’s a direct response to decades of women being taught that they weren’t sexual, that women don’t like sex and that a woman with a vibrator is broken or can’t get a man. Much of the post-second-wave feminist movement was about getting away from the sex-negativity that society demanded of women.

Male masturbation has been stigmatized and medicalized for about as long. The most infamous example would be John Harvey Kellogg. Yes, that Kellogg. A popular figure in the health and wellness community of the early 20th century proclaimed that all sex was bad, masturbation in particular, and used literal torture to prevent and discourage orgasms, masturbation and even spontaneous erections. The stigmatization of male masturbation as “pathetic” and for men who “can’t it otherwise” is a continuation of this belief, a form of toxic and restrictive masculinity that only serves to make people feel ashamed of a normal, natural and pleasurable activity.

What, for example, makes masturbation sleeves “pathetic”, when all they do is provide pleasurable sensation? Pathetic-ness is very much in the eye of the beholder. To be sure, the ones that are designed to look like disembodied vulvas can be disturbing – much in the same way that penetrative sex toys often only looked like penises – but you can find plenty that aren’t modeled after body parts. In fact, part of the movement to destigmatize female masturbation and reframe it as a means of reclaiming female sexuality was to move away from sex toys designed like body parts. Now sex toys meant for insertion or clitoral stimulation look far less like phalluses and allow function to define form.

That “pathetic” aspect applies to things like people who subscribe to OnlyFans accounts. The insistence that the only people who subscribe to somebody’s OnlyFans are simps and losers depends on toxic ideas about men and women. There’re three things to consider here.

The first is that subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans is about paying for the “crumbs” of attention from someone “you couldn’t get with IRL” rather than, say, directly supporting someone who’s work you enjoy. If I’m a fan of, say, a particular author and I decide to join her Patreon for $5 a month, is that because I’m “paying for crumbs of attention” from her, or because I enjoy her work and want to support her directly? What about if I pay the same amount per month to a male artist? Am I still just trying to get his attention, or is that different? Think carefully here, especially if your knee-jerk reaction is to say it’s different. If it’s different, how, precisely is it different? Don’t just say “nudity” or “sex”, give me actual reasons.

The second is that OnlyFans is a form of sex work, and sex work is work – as in, you’re exchanging money for a service. If someone on OnlyFans – or ManyVids, Fansly, or CamSoda or any other similar site – offers things like private chats, custom videos or things like penis ratings, that’s a service they’re offering. You aren’t being “pathetic” by taking someone up on a compensated service that people offer any more than you’re being pathetic for buying lunch at a restaurant instead of making it yourself or someone making it for you. That’s a choice that the service provider made, something they have chosen to offer to anyone who would be interested. And – importantly – they’re under no obligation to actually accept somebody’s money or grant that person the service any more than a restaurant is obligated to serve everyone. There’s a reason why places have a right to refuse service or ask people to leave if they’re being disruptive.

The third thing to realize is that OnlyFans models – like all sex workers – don’t inherently look down on their customers or fans… at least not when it’s not part of their whole gimmick. A FinDom will make a performance of looking down on their “piggies” but that’s literally part of the whole package. It’s what the “piggies” are paying for; they are asking to be condescended to and humiliated. If you actually ask sex workers how they feel about their clients, you’re going to get the same range of attitudes that you’d get from anyone in a service industry job – some have deep affection for many of their clients, others can be annoyed by them and still others see it as just part of the job.

And consider, for that matter, that sex work isn’t just “easy money”. Most payment processors don’t allow online services that feature explicit sexuality – PayPal is notorious for shutting down accounts of anyone who has even a whiff of sex – nor do most platforms allow porn or nudity and regularly shut down sex workers’ accounts without warning or appeal. If OnlyFans models really disdained their fans and customers, they’d be incentivized to find other income streams that aren’t nearly as precarious and that don’t require interacting with people they despise.

While yes, part of the appeal of subscribing to someone’s OnlyFans is the feeling of greater access to that person, the same could be said of joining the Discord for your favorite podcast or YouTuber. So if I’m a fan of Junkfood Cinema or and join their Discord because it means I can interact with Brian and Cargill, does that make me a simp who could never talk to them otherwise? Again, think carefully before you answer.

Another example of taking the wrong message from people’s advice would be the “feminist” porn you looked up. What you found wasn’t what folks meant by feminist porn; what you found were examples of BDSM. Cock and ball torture, degradation, forced-feminization porn… those aren’t examples of feminist porn, those are humiliation-play, and they’re filmed, produced and directed primarily by men. When people tell you to watch feminist porn, they mean porn produced and filmed by feminists – porn that isn’t based entirely around penetration, male domination or male pleasure. Sites like Make Love, Not Porn, Good Vibrations After Dark, Beautiful Agony, Dane Jones or CrashPad are far more about what people are advising for you – porn where the sex is about mutual pleasure, not the sexual equivalent of the Fast and Furious movies.

That, incidentally is where you’re also likely to find porn that features far more diverse body types, including fat people, where non-sculpted physiques aren’t just objects of scorn.

You say that what you did see bored you to tears. OK… why? It’s too “vanilla” – or, as I prefer to call it, “standard issue”? OK… what about it being standard-issue bores you? Think on this carefully before you answer, especially if your knee-jerk response is to say that porn “made” you incapable of responding to more tame videos – something that is widely claimed but regularly disproven in studies. I’m not asking because I want you to reprogram your brain to react more strongly to standard-issue sex, I’m asking because part of having a better relationship with your sexuality is understanding why something arouses you and gets you off. If you’re into porn that is more about dominating another person, that’s cool… but ask what, precisely, is it that turns your crank? Is it because power-exchange turns you on, especially if you feel powerless in your daily life? What kind of domination does it for you? Can you get as excited when the domination is in the form of giving pleasure – arousing another person until they “lose” control – rather than forcing them to give into something they don’t want?

The more you understand what you like and the why of it, the more you’re able to actually work with it and, importantly, stop feeling ashamed about it.

This isn’t to say that porn in general doesn’t have a metric f--kton of problematic issues. Mainstream professional porn trades in s--tloads of racist, queerphobic, fatphobic and misogynist tropes, and there’re plenty of people who mistake porn sex for real sex – often in ways that they wouldn’t mistake Bullitt for driving lessons. But that doesn’t make watching people have sex as a performance inherently bad or degrading. The problem isn’t in the subject matter, the problem is in the people who are making it and marketing it. As I said earlier: there’s a lot of porn out there being made that deliberately avoids those issues. If it’s not in the mainstream yet… well, that’s as much an issue with the marketplace and the first-adopter advantage, as well as the overall issues with companies restricting sexual content.

So. Now that we’ve dismantled and debunked some of the areas where your beliefs were incorrect or misleading, let’s talk a bit more about what you can do about all of this. As I said, the first and most important step is going to be getting the f--k off Reddit, TikTok, 4chan and every other forum, subreddit or Discord you’re going to for “support”. That is something you should go cold-turkey on – delete your account, delete the apps from your phone, use browser plugins to restrict your access and give the password to a trusted friend so you can’t just turn it off. The sooner you stop constantly reinforcing the sense of shame and misery that these communities want to foist onto you, the quicker you’ll recover.

The next thing you need to do is start treating yourself better. And I don’t mean “Eat a salad and get in shape, loser”, I mean stop treating yourself so cruelly. Jesus f--knuts Christ my dude, look at the way you talk about yourself. “Fat ass.” “Poster child for the American slob”. “stand in the corner where he belongs.” That’s not “being brutally honest” and framing that way is lying to yourself. You’re not being honest, you’re being brutal. If you were actually dedicated to being honest, then some of that honesty would be about positive things about yourself. All you’re doing is using “brutally honest” as an excuse to kick yourself in the nuts. You’re hurting your own feelings for no better reason than other people told you that you should and you’ve sold yourself on the idea that it’s some twisted form of virtue. It’s not. It’s just psychic self-harm, no different from the same sort of masochistic epistemology that incels try to pass off as enlightenment.

If you want a healthier sense of your sexuality and your own general self-worth you need to treat yourself far more kindly than you do now. You can’t “shame” your way to self-improvement; if that were the case, you wouldn’t have written into me about your issues with porn. Shame doesn’t motivate change, it demotivates it. You’re already starting from a place where you believe change is difficult if not impossible, so you’re starting from a place where you don’t give it your full effort. After all, you’re just a shameful c-m brain loser who thinks he could be better, yeah? But to make matters worse, trying to shame yourself into improvement means that when you backslide – as everyone does, because change can be hard and your brain fights against it – you won’t be able to recover from it as quickly or as completely as someone who is coming to self-improvement from a more positive attitude.

You know what does make it easier to improve, to make positive changes and to stick to them? An attitude of “I’m going to do better because I deserve better and I deserve good things.” If you decide to adjust how you eat, you don’t say “no more slop for this fat piggy oink oink”, you say “I’m going to eat a more nutritious meal because it makes me feel good, but I don’t need to be a fanatic about it, nor do I need to feel bad about what I eat.” After all, carbs, fat and sugar are not just delicious but also necessary. Nor for that matter, do you declare being fat as being shameful, slovenly or a mark of low moral character. Being fat is a neutral fact about yourself; it doesn’t make you a good or bad person, nor is it a mistake to be “corrected”.

More exercise is generally a good thing. Our bodies are designed to move, so going and being more active in general is good. Go for walks, not because you’re a fatty fat fat and you’re trying to change that but because walks are good for your cardiovascular system and your mental health and mood. Treating exercise as punishment or using shame about your weight as motivation doesn’t work and will only make you feel worse.

What if you slip up? What if you have a meal that’s more empty calories than nutritional value? Well… what about it? You had a meal that wasn’t as healthy as it could have been. I hope it was delicious and that you enjoyed it. Shrug your shoulders about it and say “yup, that happened, and that’s ok” and go on doing your best. Same with exercise; if you don’t work out as “hard” as you could or you take a day off, that’s fine. Same applies to anything else – cutting back on screen time, trying to talk to more people or any other area that you’re trying to improve. Any sort of backslide or relapse isn’t the end of the world; it’s just that moment.

Having some self-compassion is going to be much more productive for achieving your goals than self-recrimination. Punishing yourself or having an attitude of “I f--ked up, I’m so s--tty” just means you’re more likely to give up entirely instead of just saying “enh, I don’t need to be perfect” and resolving to do better next time.

You’re a “slob”? Ok well that’s an easy enough fix – stop defining yourself as a slob and put some effort into keeping your place relatively clean and organized. You don’t need to live in an environment so sterile you could conduct surgery in it, but making a point of picking up and cleaning once a week will do wonders for you. Make it a habit: on Sundays, you clean, you do laundry and you treat your living space like you give a damn.

Similarly, dress in ways that make you feel like you look good, regardless of your size. Yeah, finding clothes for fat people can be difficult, but you can and should dress like you give a damn, not just wearing something you call your “shame tarp” or whatever. Dressing in ways that make you feel like you’re looking sharp is an important part of feeling better about yourself. You’re giving yourself permission to like yourself and treat yourself better – like a friend who cares about you, not a drill sergeant who’s trying to break you down. Basic improvements to your grooming are part of this; a simple change in skin care and a different hair cut can be transformative.

This also applies to self-recriminating bulls--t like saying “23 is too late to lose my virginity”. Not only is this bulls--t – there is literally no age where it’s “too late” – but it’s just yet another way of punishing yourself, even for doing things that you’re “supposed” to do. All this is is your saying “Oh, you had sex? CONGRATULATIONS LOSER, YOU DID IT THE WRONG WAY THAT DOESN’T COUNT”. Much like being fat, being a virgin or not is neither good nor bad; it’s just data, a singular fact about you that is inherently neutral. And, incidentally, 23 ain’t that old for your first sexual experience. It’s a bit on the right side of the bell curve, but the bell curve is just about median age, not “this is when you’re supposed to have sex for the first time”.

Now I will say that you should cut out online porn for a while. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because right now, you’re using it in an unhealthy way. You’re harming yourself; porn and the way you feel afterwards are just the tool you’re using to do it.

Notice that I don’t say “stop masturbating”. Right now is a good time to start using your imagination to spur things, not just relying on pre-digested material and other people’s ideas about sex. Use a break from online porn as a way of exploring more about what you’re actually into and realizing that your erotic response is actually broader than you give yourself credit for. You may have a type, sure; pretty much everybody does. But having a type isn’t the same thing as only being attracted to them.

Masturbation is also a good way to figure out what brings you pleasure and – importantly – how to communicate that to your partner. Because you know one thing you don’t see in porn that you do see in actual partnered sex? Talking. Discussion. Communication. The more you understand what you like, what feels good and why, the easier it is to communicate that to your partner so that they know what you like and what gets you off. Don’t just jerk it like you’re trying to reach the finish line before time runs out, explore things a bit. What level of friction do you prefer? Do you like more attention to the glans or the shaft and what type? Do you enjoy external pressure on your prostate? What about touching your neck, your nipples, your wrists? Don’t let weirdos online tell you that any of this is weak, weird, sick or “gay”; they don’t respect you, don’t like you and aren’t trying to help you. All they’re doing is trying to control you and define things for you.

I would also recommend that you talk to a qualified and certified mental health professional. You sound like you’re carrying around a lot of pain and shame, and it’s difficult to offload those unnecessary burdens on your own. It’s important that you do so, because the healing really can’t start until you let go of the hurt first. So I’d highly recommend you talk to a counselor or therapist, especially a sex-positive counselor who understands issues surrounding sexual trauma and self-esteem. If you look for help, I would recommend going to AASECT’s referral directory; this will help you find a sex-positive, trauma-informed therapist in your area, someone who will help you work on these issues of shame instead of just reinforcing them.

Oh, and one more thing: always, always check the sources. You’re going to find a lot of sites and organizations like “Fight the New Drug” or “Your Brain on Porn” or “Covenant Eyes” that will be thrilled to reinforce your pre-existing negative feelings about yourself. You’ll also find plenty of “masculinity” influencers that will do the same and neg you for all of your other self-perceived flaws. They’re frequently right-wing (often fascist-adjacent) organizations, often with extreme religious affiliation. They rely on pseudoscience, “everybody knows” and your pre-existing negative beliefs in order to try to convince you that you’re shameful and disgusting. You need to recognize these for what they are – people who aren’t interested in helping you, they’re interested in controlling you and recruiting you.

It rarely takes much to see these organizations and communities for who and what they really are. But at the very least, pay attention to the message and the way they make you feel. When their primary message is one about shame and weakness, when they frame a nebulous “other” as the mastermind behind “what’s wrong with men today” or other bulls--t, rely on a return to some never-extant “golden age” or generally rely on your feeling like s--t about yourself or denigrating others? That’s a giant goddamn red flag.

I hope you start feeling better about yourself, man. It’s time to ditch that “loser” appellation and start actually treating yourself like you deserve – like a good and valued friend. But the only person who can make any of this happen is you.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I am a 27 year old male, I am writing this because I feel my particular issue has not been discussed and that is having Christian parents while living at home trying to date.

For some context, after high school I began community college, but stopped after the first year to try electrical work. My parents decided to move from the area I went to high school so I moved as well since I did not make enough move out yet and then decided to go back to community college and finished my associates degree in IT.

Still living with my parents at this point, I have gone between several IT support jobs but still don’t make enough to afford to move out without getting a roommate.

I feel my situation is different then what’s been addressed because my parents are Christian and don’t believe in letting me have girls sleep over before were married. My parents do not even want me closing the door to the room I’m in if I have a girl over. They will not give me a hard time if I sleep over at a girls house they simply state that those are the rules under their roof.

I have felt reluctant to even try to date for many years because it will look like my parents are treating us like were 15. I have brought this up with them, they are not forceful about it they simply state that’s what they believe in and it will not change, and I have been respectful of that.

I have not been on a date since I was 21 and I had not even tried to find someone until about a year ago due to still living at home. I don’t like dating sites so I have been going old school going to bars trying to meet someone. This has not been successful so far and I have been considering trying dating sites but I have been to worried about being 27 and having to tell girls I live with my parents and it being compounded by the fact that they can’t stay over or even been in a room with the door shut with me.

I am not looking for hook ups either, which has made me feel like girls my age who also want a serious relationship would not want to deal with my situation.

Sorry for the long winded comment, I hope you can provide some advice on how I should approach this situation.

Thanks

No Place To Go

DEAR NO PLACE TO GO: I think the fact that you live with your parents isn’t as much of an issue for dating as you might assume, NPTG. As I’ve said many times before, a majority of Millennials and Gen-Z live in multi-generational households; it’s hardly unusual and the self-imposed stigma about it is out of proportion to the people who are in that situation.

The bigger issue here is that your parents seem to have not accepted that you’re a grown-ass adult. That, to my mind, is the bigger problem here. But that’s a them problem, not a you problem, in as much as that their attitude towards you reflects on them. You don’t need your parents’ sign-off to be a grown-ass man. The fact that they treat you like a tween is much more shameful to them than it is to you; it suggests that they’re living in a cloud of denial and refuse to believe that you’re an autonomous and independent individual. That shames them.

The first question I usually have for people dealing with issues surrounding parental disapproval or attitudes towards their love life is “are you materially dependent on them?” In this case, yeah, you are, which means that they actually do have the leverage with which to say “my house, my rules”. The rules in question, again, are pretty f--king absurd to be imposing on a grown-ass man, but they do have the authority to issue them and to enforce them.

This is why the first thing I would suggest is to start saving up as much as you can in order to move out as soon as is feasible. It would go a lot faster if you found a place and moved in with a friend – or at least someone you can get along with well enough to share living space. I’m not entirely sure why you would hesitate to get a roommate; it’s pretty widely acknowledged that there’s an absolute crisis in affordable housing, so splitting the rent with someone isn’t exactly going to be a mark of shame, no matter how old you are. But if that’s not an option for you right now, it’s not an option, so let’s talk about alternative possibilities.

The fact that you may not be able to sleep with a hypothetical date at your place doesn’t mean you can’t date. Your parents may have a “no women past 8 PM” rule like a boarding house from the 20s, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have options. The most obvious option is “sleep at her place”; your parents have made it clear that this is permissible for them. It smacks me as being stupidly hypocritical – if it’s sinful to do it at your place, it’s sinful everywhere – but whatever. People will twist themselves into knots over the dumbest s--t.

The other option is “get a hotel room” or rent an AirB&B. As they said: it’s their house, their rules, so get your kicks outside of their house. There’re even apps like HotelTonight that help you find rooms at the last minute, usually at a discount. Renting a room somewhere would even give you the option of long weekends together, so you don’t feel like you’re having to sneak around at some No-Tell Motel like a Republican politician cheating on his wife.

But the bigger issue here – for you, anyway – is how you let this affect you. You and your parents are having a conflict over boundaries. They’ve made it clear: this is a hard limit for them. You can either accept that this is a limit for you, too, or you can establish your own boundaries – including “I’m not going to be treated like a child”. The core part of enforcing boundaries, however, ultimately comes down to what’s actually in your control. If you break their rules, they have the authority – both literally and effectively – to kick you out. If they violate your boundary – not treating you like an adult – then that should be contingent on your presence in their life. If they want you around, they can acknowledge that you’re 27 goddamn years old. If they’re going to act like you’re a kid, you can and should take off – especially since their issue here is apparently “sinning” is ok as long as they don’t get splashback from God over it. So I would make it clear: this isn’t cool, you’re not going to tolerate it and minimize your time with them as much as is possible until you can actually pack you s--t and get out.

I would also suggest that you take that attitude of “this is only temporary and I’m getting my own place as soon as possible,” and hold onto it as you date. Reminding yourself that this is a temporary situation that you’ve been forced into by circumstance is important. Everyone understands the realities of life, especially with the economy the way it currently is. If you see your living situation as shameful, then that’s going to hinder you in dating – not because of what other people think, but because you are letting it hold you back from even making the attempt. Reminding yourself that this is temporary, imposed from the economic realities of life in 21st century America and not something you’re “stuck” with will be important.

It’s worth remembering: anyone who you would actually want to date is going to be dating the holistic “you” – everything about you, not just where you live or who you live with. That means that someone worth dating will be understanding, even sympathetic with your circumstances. The people who are going to have serious issues with your living with your parents – outside of their absurd restrictions – are people who will assume that this is a “failure to launch” situation, not “it’s next to impossible to get a place to live on the average salary”.

If they think that, then clearly they don’t know you, don’t care to know or understand your situation and have thus proven that they’re not right for you in the first place.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com

DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’ve been trying to find an answer to my situation and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone answer a question like mine before, so I hope you can help me. I have a problem that isn’t like most people’s. I need to tell my girlfriend that I’m not actually a virgin like she thinks I am.

I guess I should explain. I (20, M) have been dating my girlfriend “Samantha” (20, F) for about three months now. When we met, I’d told her that I hadn’t had a real relationship before and she was excited to be my first. In fact, she’s been incredibly excited to be my first for everything, including my first time.

Samantha’s been incredibly loving and supportive and doesn’t think that my having never dated before is a bad thing, which I really appreciate. I was afraid that she was going to see my having never had a girlfriend as some sort of red flag. But that’s what makes things awkward. You see, she’s looking forward to my losing my virginity to her, but I’m not actually a virgin.

I was never one of the cool kids in high-school but I had friends who were friends with them, so when they would get invited to parties, I’d get to go along. The summer of my junior year, I went to a party at someone’s house and got drunk for the first time. Apparently I ended up dancing with a girl I knew, then we were making out on the dance floor and then later on she and I hooked up. I honestly don’t remember much about things, just a lot of unclear memories and waking up with both of us trying to get back into our clothes and trying not to be sick at the same time. The only thing we know for sure is that there was a used condom in the trash. She and I never really talked about it after, but she was always friendly to me afterwards so I guess we had a good time?

Anyway, I haven’t brought this up to Samantha and I don’t really know how to say “hey, I know we talked about your being my first but I’m not really a virgin”. I’m worried that she’s going to be hurt that I lied and I’m going to get dumped because I wasn’t honest with her. My friends tell me I shouldn’t say anything and that my first time didn’t really count since I was drunk. My conscience tells me I should tell her everything. I don’t know what I should do.

Please help?

Feels Like The First Time

DEAR FEELS LIKE THE FIRST TIME: Alright before we get to your answer, FLTFT, I’m going to be honest: your question sounds an awful lot like the plot to a book I read a few years ago, so I’m going to reiterate the DNL policy on potentially fake letters: if the question may be helpful to other folks in similar situations, I don’t worry about whether a letter is 100% authentic. Every letter is ultimately hypothetical to everyone who reads it – besides the original writer, anyway – so the idea that someone’s trying to sneak one by me doesn’t bother me that much.

And to be blunt, I don’t run the ones that’re obviously in bad faith or obviously trying to pull a fast one on me to shit on someone else.

Since your question deals with some topics, especially regarding virginity, what “counts” as losing your virginity and honesty in relationships, we’re just gonna roll with it.

So with all that in mind, FLTFT… this is an interesting one. I get a fairly sizable number of questions about whether people – usually, but not exclusively men – should conceal the fact that they’re a virgin from potential partners. Most of the time, if I’ve gotten questions about people who want to hide that they’re not a virgin, it’s usually from women who come from incredibly conservative religious or cultural backgrounds. So a guy hiding his having HAD sex is, admittedly, a novel one here at NerdLove Industries.

However, this is one of those times when I think you actually have two questions running in parallel. The first question would be “is it ethical or permissible to lie about being a virgin (or not)”. The second would be “what counts as losing your virginity?”

I want to tackle that second question first, in no small part because, frankly, I think it’s the more important one. For all that people make a fuss about the significance of (or problem with) being a virgin, virginity isn’t really a thing. It’s a social construct, not an actual state of being, and there really isn’t any meaningful definition that isn’t full of more holes than a ten pound block of Swiss cheese. What, precisely, defines virginity and how do you define losing it? If it’s strictly about penetration, then that opens up a lot of questions. Do gold-star lesbians count as virgins since they’d never had sex with men? Do gay men who only do oral sex or don’t have anal sex count as virgins or non-virgins? What about a gay man who’s strictly a bottom? Does it count if it’s anal penetration and if that’s the case, does that mean that the Christian kids who tried to exploit God’s Little Loophole aren’t virgins?

If someone penetrates their partner with a strap-on, does that count as losing one’s virginity, and if so, who’s the one losing it, the person doing the penetrating or the receiving? And for that matter, if a sex toy like a dildo or vibrator would count in that instance, does that mean that someone could theoretically lose their virginity to themselves?

Similarly, if we accept PIV penetration as the defining standard for virginity, then what precisely counts? If someone doesn’t fully penetrate – they go soft, they play “just the tip” – does that count? How many thrusts are needed for it to technically be sex? Do the Mormons who practice “soaking” (don’t Google that at work) count? What if they have someone jumping on the bed for them? For that matter, what about if penetration may or may not have happened? Does it really count – or count for less – if someone loses their virginity to a sex worker? If a guy loses his virginity in the woods and nobody’s there to witness it, does it really count?

If you ask me – and, well, you did – I’d say that intent matters far more than the actual act. Oral sex is sex; it’s right there in the name. So is anal sex. So are other forms of getting people off. I think if you and your partner decide to interact with each other’s genitals for the purpose of intimacy and/or orgasm, I think it’s fair to define that as “sex” for one’s purposes, in no small part because it doesn’t f--king matter except to the people doing the deed. A person who’s got a hymen isn’t meaningfully different from someone who doesn’t and a person who’s put their junk in someone else’s – or had someone else in theirs – isn’t magically different from someone who’s never had anything of the sort. It’s just an experience that someone has or hasn’t had yet, no more or less significant or important than someone who’s been downhill skiing or bungee jumping.

Not having been skiing only means as much as any one person decides it does. Same with having sex.

In your case, FLTFT, you had a sexual experience of some sort. You and your partner were apparently hammered, so there’s an open question as to what happened. You might’ve had sex, you might have orgasmed as soon as the condom was on, you and your partner may have used a condom for oral sex… there are enough unknowns here that this almost serves as Schrodinger’s First Time. In the absence of evidence otherwise – and really, I’d say this even if there were video proof of the two of you going at it like Jorge El Niño and an obliging MILF – I think you’re in a position to decide for yourself whether this “counts” or not. So if you want to either say it doesn’t “count” or assume that you didn’t complete the deed, you’re well within your rights to do so. Or you can decide that it did “count” and you are now in the Fraternal Order of Sex Havers. Up to you, really.

The question of “is it ethical to not tell your girlfriend” is… well, that’s where it gets thornier, mostly because now it involves someone else’s informed consent to a degree. A lot depends on how your girlfriend feels about this. Most of the time, the guys who are worried about lying about their status as virgins are worried that their partners are going to see that as a red flag – mostly under the assumption that their partners would assume this means there’s something wrong with them or that they’re just going to be shit in bed. Your circumstances are a bit different, and a lot depends on your girlfriend’s feelings on the subject.

Would she, for example, not have started dating you if she knew that you weren’t one of the Great Untouched? Is her interest in sleeping with you contingent on your status as a virgin? If she would have decided otherwise, then yeah, it’s not cool to lie about it. But what if it’s not a lie? What if you decided that no, that experience didn’t count? Well… on the one hand, I could see an argument for saying that you’re telling the truth and that this isn’t a lie, at least to you. But on the other, if she has strong feelings about what virginity means, then “it’s true… from a certain point of view” has never really mollified anyone.

(Ask some OG Star Wars fans about how that worked out.)

At the same time, however, I think that how you genuinely feel about it – and I emphasize “genuinely”, not just claiming it so that you can bang someone – matters more. If someone’s going to lose their shit because they think X counts and you don’t, then that’s more of a “them” problem and a matter of compatibility than ethics. Think of it this way: if a guy will refuse to sleep with another person because that person doesn’t have an intact hymen, that’s the guy’s issue. Hymens aren’t signs of virginity and the lack of one doesn’t mean that someone’s had sex.

Now with all that having been said: I’d err on the side of honesty with your girlfriend. Not because I think your not telling her would be bad – especially since the odds of her ever finding out are low – but because you seem to want an emotionally intimate and lasting relationship with her. Sharing this aspect of your history with her in all it’s confusion and complicated feelings is a sign of trust and vulnerability – things that help make a strong and successful relationship. It’s not as much about informed consent so much as “this is part of who I am and what makes me me”, information that she would likely appreciate. I don’t think that this knowledge would influence her decision, but I think it would give her a more complete and rounded picture of you as a person and influence how the two of you go about having sex for the first time.

My advice is to have an Awkward Conversation about this. Explain that you haven’t told her about this because you feel conflicted and a bit embarrassed about it, how you have some complex feelings about whether that encounter “counts” or not and how what you ultimately want is for your “real” first time to be one that you deliberately chose, with someone who’s important to you, not an event that you can barely remember and one that you aren’t even entirely sure what you did. I would emphasize that you still think of yourself as being a virgin, even if this would slide under a technicality and that you see the intimacy and connection with her as being more significant and important to you than a random hook up. The odds are good that she’ll understand and that she’ll appreciate your being open and vulnerable with her about this.

And for the record, I think you can claim having sex with her as being you official first time. The fact that it’s likely going to be much more significant and meaningful to the two of you is more important than any technicalities from a night you can barely remember.

Good luck.

Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com