The Little-Blue-Pill Problem

Illustration: Lia Kantrowitz

My mother and I talk a lot about sex on a near-daily basis, which hasn’t always been the case. Growing up, the only “sex talk” I can remember came the summer before I left for boarding school, when I was packing up, and my mother suddenly asked about the sex-education classes I’d endured as an eighth-grader.

“Did they teach abstinence or safe sex?”

Because I didn’t know what abstinence was, I chose the latter.

“Well then,” she said, “you know about sex.”

I didn’t know about sex...