There are children growing up in this toxic cloud. What do you tell them? That if you want beauty, the best place to look is the sky, time of day not important? How does this stick in the juvenile mind, exactly? Especially if you can't get it to stick in the adult mind? [...] Explaining to a girl the problems inherent in seeing men primarily as a source of money is easy because the dangers of marrying for anything other than some kind of mutual respect and affection are clear and even physical. I also think--and I'm aware that this is probably going to be taken wrong by many Broadsheet regulars--that women do better alone. Our extended social webs are much larger as a rule, and our sex drive is different. Economic and social independence make this one a no-brainer.

I suppose I could argue at length against your idea that we can't do anything -- I tend to be an optimist now, I believe people are so complex that no development, good or bad, is "unavoidable" and can't be changed -- but perhaps the best way is to give you some of my own life story. I know it will sound exaggerated; some people will not believe it. It's so easy to lie on the internet, and so many people are dying for attention... But since I have nothing to gain by lying (I am most definitely not trying to get into your pants :-), maybe you, and some other people will believe me.

Like you, I am also quite an introvert -- a lot more in my childhood than I am now. I had absolutely no social skills, which may actually result from a slight disability (at least if my therapist is right; she wants to convince me I have Asperger's syndrome -- I'm still fighting her diagnosis, but I admit it would fit my childhood). I was the skinny little guy with the big thick glasses sitting on a bench and having his copy of Paradise Lost (actually, the Portuguese equivalent, Os Lusíadas) taken from his hand and torn to pieces by school bullies. The little weirdo who was so afraid of everybody else (the whole "real" world, in my imagination, seemed to contain only bullies), he often preferred to stay in a bathroom stall during recess so as not to be disturbed. When I was safe, there or at home, I could study Italian, read about Quantum Mechanics and Astronomy and or Science Fiction, solve math problems, write poetry, and... when I hit puberty... of course, look at porn. Lots of it.

In an Allie-McBeal-esque way, I also ended up developing a big fantasy world, peopled by mathematical theorems, wondrous flights to other planets, beautiful women with their legs spread open, the mysteries of limits and first-order derivatives, the differences between Saurischian and Ornithischian dinosaurs, fellatio, Escher, Salvador Dalí, Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, the Russian alphabet, and Z80 Assembly Language programming. (Yes, I'm that old. Or maybe it's because Brazilian computers evolved more slowly than American ones. Does anyone remember the TRS-80? Or 80 Micro magazine?) I invented people and gave them lives, I saw myself as Superman flying all over the world in my dreams... while sitting at a corner and doing everything I could to push people away from me. I think I saw everybody as a potential threat, even kids who, all in all, might have been pretty OK friends. Indeed, I was a very weird teenager, Anonymous_Too. I'm sure that, if you had met me then, you'd have run away from me as if I were a serial killer.