Having once been a teenage boy, I know that teenage males have sex on their minds for at least 15 hours and 59.99 minutes out of the average 16 hour day. So, the very notion that some hormonally-overdosed boy will try place his paws on even one sacred inch of my daughter’s anatomy will transform me from a good-natured father into a fire-breathing Visigoth.

It’s nice to have attractive daughters, but there are drawbacks, the worst of which is that more boys will be showing up. No doubt they will be polite, even obsequious, but good manners have no bearing on how they plan to conduct themselves once they’ve driven off with your daughter. There may even be an inverse proportion involved here, but I haven’t had time to conduct a scientific study.

I have two attractive daughters. When a young man expresses romantic interest in them, I wish they were genetically related to Quasimodo. A hunchback and some well-placed facial warts would do nicely.

Another disconcerting aspect of having daughters is that they grow breasts at 12. When I was a kid, girls weren’t allowed to have breasts until their senior year. Those that broke that law did their utmost to conceal the evidence, except for Angela Chuckerman, but that’s another story.

Before her first date, I  mentioned to my daughter that I had certain criteria regarding the basic appearances of the boys she was considering “hooking up with,” a phrase that unfortunately, has little to do with fishing or weaving.  First, his hair had to be in a fairly normal state -- no dyed hair, no  shaved heads. Second: his underpants could not be showing above the pant line. Third: no visible tattoos or piercings. Who knows what sort of electrical disaster could occur if his tongue stud ever connected with her braces.

My daughter’s first date was with a guy named Vince. I took Vince aside to show him my nonexistent collection of signed baseball bats, and outlined for him what his sorry fate would be should he dare to touch my little girl on one of the fifty-two areas I had painstakingly annotated on a small scale model of her body, drawn on a piece of graph paper.

Prior to the date, I also asked Vince for a detailed typewritten copy of their complete itinerary, which included a stop at Burger King for dinner and a movie at the mall. 

And so, they departed, my innocent little girl and this pockmarked Lothario, but only after I had spoken those annoying and pointless two words which I swore I would never say because my father had said them to me so often that I wanted to strangle him: “Drive safely.” 

“If you’re going to pace like this every time she has a date,” she said “we may want to consider replacing the living room carpeting with ceramic tile.”

Naturally, I stayed up late to make sure she was home safely before curfew, which I had originally set at a very reasonable 8:00 PM. But my daughter and my wife ganged up on me and talked me into midnight as the ETA. Short of a nuclear attack, I would accept no excuse for lateness.

         When they returned at exactly 11:59:12, give or take a nanosecond, I disabused Vince of any thoughts the sex-starved scoundrel may have had about a goodnight kiss or a cheap feel. I turned on the alarm system the second their feet hit the doorstep. The little bounder practically jumped out of his shoes.