When I was a teenager there was virginity. I mean: the virginity of the girls was a value and not a stumbling block; it was something to save for marriage and the white dress.

I had to be a teenager under the dictatorship: sexual repression had returned to the average discourse and daily life after the very brief hippie spring. In those years, when we reached the age of debuting, for us men high in hormones, the dilemma was brutal: with a whore or nothing. With a whore or who knows when. The girls kept their virginity.

We knew that debuting with a whore was a traumatic situation and many of us (more than half of my friends, I remember) refused. There was no shortage of the father, brother, canchero uncle -cross out what does not correspond- who as a deformed initiation ritual offered to take you to debut with some whore friend and then one felt even smaller and castrated.

In our proto-men talks and without still knowing exactly what we were talking about, we blamed Sexual Repression, as if it were an institution, a world conspiracy: pettiness, pressure on the body and the desire of women was what forced us, cornered us with the horrible whores at the door of some telo outside the walls.

With the end of the dictatorship, the arrival at the university, with pop, pogo and democracy, the local version of sexual liberation arrived late but arrived: the Destape that we had read about in the magazines. Women were no longer afraid to manifest desire; they could buy you a coffee or face you without shame and with pride. Virginity, who would say, in just a couple of decades, became a test to overcome, an unexpected treasure trove of stragglers.

Logic indicated that with sexual liberation, with the desire for real women, prostitution would recede. Who would go with a whore if there were women on hand now? Brides without modesty past, friends with the right to touch, lovers for the committed but dissatisfied, chance encounters, flashes of a night, curious bodies on equal terms. Who was going to look for a whore?

However, it was not. Prostitution was reborn strengthened in times of sexual freedom. Even with a new name. Whores were now cats and when words spread it is because they denote a phenomenon. It happened with the adjective “trout”. In a matter of months, in this country riddled with lies and corruption, everyone knew what we were talking about when we said “trucho”. The same thing happened with “cat”: the word spread because it gave an account of something that was multiplying, sex for money, now with fewer moral questions, a naturalized neo-prostitution.

I have known Juan Carlos Volnovich for 25 years. I must be one of the few people in this town who was never his patient. Thanks to that I am his friend and, in private (we are very modest) I count him as my older brother.

25 years ago, when I was a schematic student of letters, Juan Carlos showed me that Marxism and psychoanalysis were not contradictory discourses. That there were fruitful crosses between the two and to prove it he introduced me to the immense Marie Langer, to whom I had the privilege of recording his last journalistic interview.

At the end of the 1980s, we all thought that the children of the disappeared should be returned to their biological families, but it was Juan Carlos who explained to me the theoretical contribution that the return of these kids to their origins meant. The value of identity as a masterpiece, as an operating system of subjectivity, as a deep reparation for those children torn from their history, with parents without a grave.

Years later, in the early 1990s, Juan Carlos revealed to me the silent horror, behind the doors of homes, of the abuses against women and children. That Revelation, that astonishment, that certainty that these were not isolated episodes of private life, horrors of dispersed people, encouraged me -and I have received several criticisms regarding the "crudeness" of the stories- to take these themes to my open television programs.

The beatings of the couple, the intramarital rape, were not then intimate exceptions, at most approachable from criminal law. They were true social phenomena of unprecedented massiveness. Just like child abuse: it wasn't an aberration committed by outsiders coming from a hostile and marginal outside.

The rape of boys and girls, with the timeless havoc it left in each one of those kids, was with us more than we wanted to admit; I was in the house of the enlightened middle class neighbor and in the house of the poor of all poverty. And, to top it off, most of the abuse and rape of children came from familiar adults: relatives, parents, stepfathers, uncles, cousins, neighbors. Sexual predators, double life vampires.

It was also Juan Carlos (the first and only male feminist I know) who forced me to put aside my reservations about gender studies and review defensive behaviors.