Somewhere around grade 10, my friends and I started hanging around a particular group of guys. They were mostly apprentices who’d dropped out of school and they hung around our local shopping centre when they finished work in the afternoons. We caught the bus there after class and smoked cigarettes on the loading docks in our private school uniforms while these guys tried to source pot and mooch free pizza. They were the type of guys who considered taking a dump on somebody who was passed out at a party as “witty.”

When I stopped going to house parties and got drunk in bars instead, I fell out a little with these guys. I still saw them around, but when I did, I pretended not to know them. But after uni, our circles started overlapping again and I decided to give one of the boy’s house parties another go. Maybe they had grown up, toned down their behaviour and learned not to be so silly?

The party was going well. Nobody had spun a bottle or stuck their hands down my pants, the bathroom didn’t smell like vomit, and the police hadn’t visited. Then around midnight, the boys began passing around glow sticks.

“Are we going to a rave?” I asked.

“Not quite – wait and see,” somebody named Willo winked at me.

Each guy pulled down his jeans, cracked open his glow stick, and rubbed the contents onto his penis. Then they ran in a line down the dark street and shouted out to all the neighbours. Bleary eyed citizens shuffled to their bedroom windows and looked out to see a trail of bobbing wangs lit up and making their way past their rose bushes.

The boys then ran back to our yard and threw themselves one by one into the pool, screaming, “IT BURNS! FUCK, IT BURNS..”

A few moons ago, one of my friends was undertaking a massage course. One night she decided to practise some newly-learned techniques on her boyfriend.

“Now, just relax your diaphragm,” she instructed.

“Diaphragm!” he said, “Only girls have those!”

Somewhere around my ninth year of schooling, I found myself at the library during a free period and sitting in a study room full of boys not studying. As is wont to occur at Christian highschools, the conversation rapidly turned from the canteen’s new lunch menu to masturbation.

“It must be so awesome to be a chick,” a certain young man remarked.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Well don’t you all orgasm every time you put in a tampon?”

“Actually, a vagina is a little more complicated than that.”

“Whatever.”

I was recently driving some friends to a bar when I became aware of a fairly inane conversation taking place in my backseat.

Friend #1: Which do you think is worse – a pedophile, or a rapist?

Friend #2: I think they’re both pretty bad.

Friend #1: See, I think a pedophile is much worse.

Friend #2: How come?

Friend #1: Well a pedophile is, like, twisted and fucked in the head. Whereas a rapist is just Lebanese.

Copacabana, early 2003

boyfriend-at-the-time: Why are there bins in all the girls’ toilets?

me: So women can throw out their tampons and stuff.

boyfriend-at-the-time: But don’t they dissolve? Like inside you?