Lots of detailed advice, all of it very well-meaning, and not a moment of questioning whether anybody needs this much advice about something human beings have been figuring out how to do on their own since before they were fully removed from apes. It includes a phone call to a guy known only as “uncle” who tells the kid how to masturbate as well as the dad’s suggestion that his son might enjoy it more if he fantasized about tomatoes. But what follows is an increasingly unhinged account of someone’s intense interest in the sex life of their child. And the piece starts off just fine: a nice liberal man had terrible sex ed as a kid, is conscious of how it messed him up, and doesn’t want his son to go through the same things he did. The instigator of our suffering was an essay published under the “Human Interest” banner at Slate titled “ What Happened When I Decided to Teach my Son to Masturbate.” Okay, sure, the title looked bad, but the algorithmic siren song of clickbait has entrapped us all at this point, so maybe it would turn out to be okay. Should I have been meditating on the crucifixion and death of Jesus instead of scrolling through Twitter? Probably, but feel confident that what I and so many others encountered online that day produced in us an intellectual and spiritual agony not entirely unlike being nailed to a cross for the sins of humanity. For my part, I was comfortably reclined at home keeping the Good Friday tradition of counting down the hours until midnight when I could go to town on a pepperoni pizza. The phrase “personal essay at Slate” has been steadily accumulating an aura of menace for several years now, but nobody was really prepared for what we witnessed on Friday.
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