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...y isn’t entirely unfounded, which I took as confirmation that my dad goes to kink spaces and I’m almost certain to run into him at an event. How the hell do I go about having a conversation like this when it’s guaranteed to be awkward? Does one simply stroll in and say, “Hey I’m making a FetLife account. Dad, could you please immediately block me, so I don’t have to worry?” I know this conversation will probably go fine I just have no idea how to start it. And there aren’t many people out there giving advice on how to talk to your dad about not going to kink events on the same nights.  Need To Know Basis There are other cities with big kink scenes, NTKB, and wanting to go to kink events without having to worry about running into family is a good enough reason to relocate. I grew up in Chicago, a city with a huge gay scene, but I wound up on the West Coast after college. One of the reasons I moved: I have an unreasonable number of uncles — Irish Catholic family — and I didn’t want to run into one of my uncles in a gay bar. (None of my uncles were gay, so far as I knew, but I didn’t want to risk it.) If I thought there was the slightest chance I might run into my father in a gay bar, I would’ve moved to Mars. Uprooting yourself so you can go to kink parties without having to worry about running into your dad is an extreme measure, I realize, and may be an unnecessary one in your case, NTKB, seeing as your parents are sex-positive empaths and not devout Irish Catholics. But you won’t be able to relax and enjoy kink events if you’re worried the guy in the leather hood hanging from meat hooks over the dance floor is your dad. Zooming out for a second: some will find it odd that you talked to one of your dad’s closest friends about whether he’s still going to kink parties but you’re hesitating to talk to your dad. But it makes perfect sense: Your dad is a constant in your life — dinners, birthdays, holidays — but his closest friends are not. If you have an awkward conversation with one of your dad’s friends, you don’t have to see that person again. One awkward conversation with your father, however, could ruin Juneteenth or Thanksgiving or Folsom. The best way to start a guaranteed-to-be-awkward convo is to highlight/foreground/emphasize the awkwardness by using the a-word: “This is awkward, Dad, but I was planning to go to [club name] on [date] for the [whatever] party, and I wanted to give you a heads up.” If you’re worried your dad is so sex-positive he might not realize you don’t want him to attend the event, you’ll have to add something like, “But I won’t go if you’re going.” Memory lane/cautionary tale: I got a letter a few years back (that I didn’t publish) from a gay dad whose son grew up to be gay. Dad was in his forties and into twinks… son was in his twenties and into daddies… and you can probably guess what happened: they matched on a hookup app. Which would’ve been mildly awkward if they’d realized it right away. But they didn’t realize until after they’d swapped face pics… which they didn’t do until after they’d swapped a bunch of other pics. After boiling their eyeballs, father and son had an extremely awkward brunch where they pulled out their phones, opened up the apps, and blocked each other on everything. If you don’t want the kink event equivalent of accidentally swapping hole pics with your dad to happen to you — and I’m not even going to speculate as to what that would look like — you’re gonna want to have that awkward conversation before the party, not at it or after. If your dad is as sex-positive and reasonable as you make him sound, I could see you agreeing to give each other a heads up — a little advance warning — about the events you’re planning to attend, NTKB, with whoever gives a heads up first having dibs on a particular event. If you don’t want texts about kink events mixed in with your regular father/daughter chats — or you don’t wanna risk sending a kink event text meant for your dad to your family’s group chat — you could create a top secret Google calendar that only you and your dad have access to, NTKB, but agree never to discuss. You often advise readers to move on all fronts: go places and meet people while also getting on the apps. It’s just that I have a terrible fear holding me back from the apps and I think it’s something only gay men have to worry about. To this day, I’m one of those faceless torsos that won’t share my mugshot (or nudes) because I’m petrified of it being screenshotted and posted online. It puts a pit in my stomach to see the way gay guys gossip about each other on forums like MaleGeneral, LPSG, and now Telegram. I’ve seen so many friends wind up on there for simply being horny. I can’t think of anything more dehumanizing, demoralizing, and degrading than having strangers comment on you and your body. Gay men can be so vicious to each other. I do alright in person, but never really meet someone who’s my type. Is my apprehension justified? If not, what precautions can I take to avoid winding up on those awful online forums? Posting Intimate Cock Shots It’s not just gay men who have to worry about time-wasting pic collectors and malicious assholes reposting screenshots. Straight women have to worry about that shit too, PICS, and some teenage boys have been tricked into sharing pics and then driven to suicide by blackmailers. But let’s not overstate the risk: millions of gay men swap pics online every day — torsos, faces, dicks — and the overwhelming majority don’t wind up being dissected on the sites you mentioned. And even if your pics wound up on one of those shitty forums, PICS, it doesn’t mean everyone you know is going to see them. And even if someone does recognize you? Most people won’t care. I recently had Colby Jaxxx on the Savage Lovecast. Colby is a professional gooner who just so happens to live in a small town in the Midwest, where he works a pretty normie day job. His normie boss and normie coworkers know about his side hustle, and it hasn’t been a problem. Because Jaxxx keeps his gooner life and his professional life in separate online silos. And that, increasingly, is the cultural consensus: so long as you don’t cross the streams — so long as you don’t post thirst-or-worst pics on your regular accounts — no one will see them except the people who go looking for them. And if someone is going out of their way to find your smut, that’s their problem, not yours. (This offer does not yet apply to people in teaching professions.) So, take reasonable precautions — blur your face pics, use messaging apps that only allow one view of a photo, don’t send out dick pics with your face in them or face pics with your dick in them, weed out guys who seem too good to be true (reverse image search is your friend), and be quick to block guys who make you feel uncomfortable — but don’t let the guys talking shit on online forums keep you from living your best life and/or getting the best dick. P.S. You won’t know what’s going on in those forums if you don’t look at them. I am the mom of an eleven-year-old boy. For the past year, he’s been using our sports massager privately in his room. When he first started doing it, he told me he was just putting it on his legs, and we talked about how it wouldn’t be a good idea to put it directly on his penis. Every few days, sometimes with weeks in between, he’ll announce, “I’m using the massager,” then head to his room for a couple of minutes with it, and that’s that. My only concern with this is that he might desensitize himself. Having this tool at his age makes me worry he’s going to develop unusual masturbation habits that might not be the best for him in the long term. I’ve thought about selling this massager, as he’s really the only one who “uses” it, and that would quickly solve the problem. But is it a problem? Should I just leave him be to explore himself? Misuse Of Massager Most boys begin masturbating around age thirteen, MOM, but some boys start sooner — thirteen is the average — so your son most likely isn’t using that sports massager on his legs. If he were using it on his legs, he would be doing it in front of the television and not in his room with the door closed. You worry he might become dependent on a particularly intense kind of stimulation in order to climax, MOM, and that’s a valid concern. Some adult men have a hard time climaxing during partnered PIV/PIB/PIT intercourse because they jacked off as boys doing or using things that vaginas, butts, and throats can’t replicate. (Google “death-grip syndrome” if you wanna read more about it.) That said, your son has a right to privacy, and bursting through his bedroom wall like the Kool-Aid mom to slap the sports massager out of his hands could do him more harm than the device itself. Instead, have an age-appropriate conversation with your son about self-pleasure — emphasizing privacy and online safety, the importance of consent, and the distortion field that is porn — and discuss the importance of being gentle with himself. You could also run interference by misplacing (read: hiding) the sports massager and/or arranging for it to break and not rushing to replace it. P.S. Speaking of consent: your son isn’t the only member of the family who uses that sports massager — presumably — which means his use of it as a sex toy could represent a low-key consent violation. Something to discuss with him. Got problems? Yes, you do! Email your question for the column to [email protected]! Or record your question for the Savage Lovecast at savage.love/askdan! Podcasts, columns, and more at Savage.Love