Just days after Andy Cohen spoke to Paul Wesley about The Vampire Diaries, he spoke to Ian Somerhalder on Radio Andy.
Ian’s new show, V Wars, is out on Netflix, but the interview was dominated when Ian discussed losing his virginity.
As you can hear in this audio snippet, Andy Cohen asks Ian Somerhalder about his age when he first lost his virginity.
"[I was] 13," Ian reveals, to Andy’s astonishment.
He also confirms that this happened when he was modeling.
"It was fun," he says, stating the obvious.
Some people who first have sex at a younger age then go years before hooking up again, but Ian acknowledges that this is when his sex life started.
"When you’re 13 and you’re a boy, you know, or a girl, boys are pretty on it," Ian says.
He appears to be nodding to the fact that human sex drives may vary between individuals, but social forces work to repress female sexuality.
Ian also makes a stunning revelation: the girl with whom he slept at age 13 was 16 years old.
Ian also says that it is "scary" being a parent now. His daughter, Bodhi Soleil Reed Somerhalder, is two years old.
"You look, like, at these little dudes [angrily]," he says.
"It’s so vastly unfair," Ian laments. "All my friends who are guys who have sons are like, ‘Yeah, you’re going to get a date, you’re gonna do this.’"
He complains: "While all the dads with daughters are like, ‘I will kill these little bastards.’"
Ian also reveals that he used to be a peeping tom to spy on his brother, Thomas, who is seven years his senior.
"He taught me a lot. And he was quite a Casanova," Ian recalls. "He used to have girls in his bedroom all the time."
"And what I did was, I went into the bottom corner of his window and I pinched the Venetian blinds — I pinched the blinds down," he explains.
Ian did this "so I’d have a clear view — and then when he’d have girls over… I’d go outside and I would watch and I learned a lot."
He doesn’t seem to feel that this sexually invasive behavior was weird or problematic.
"We do what we have to do," Ian expresses.
He adds: "This was the live action organic version [of Internet porn].”
“Now kids are watching all this s–t on the Internet and it’s destroying society," Ian oddly claims without any explanation.
As you may have noticed, Ian seems to be letting a sexist worldview override his own life experiences.
In almost the same breath as he decries teenage boys as horny monsters from whom girls must be protected, he describes his own loss of virginity.
Ian would have been in 7th or 8th grade at age 13. The 16-year-old girl in question would have been old enough to drive in most places.
Had he been a year older, of if she’d been two years younger, we wouldn’t bat an eye. But that sounds like a sexually predatory situation.
We’re of course not accusing this unnamed woman of anything, and neither is Ian.
But it seems odd that he’s so leery of his daughter one day dating despite his own experiences being "fun" and having the dynamic that they did.
Also, virginity is a social construct, not a biological reality. Honestly, he’s sounding a little bit like T.I. here and that is not good.
It seems like Ian thinks that porn is turning today’s teens into sex monsters who will one day hunt his daughter for sport, or whatever.
We’re the first to admit that pornography is a terrible resource for learning about actual sexual practices.
But maybe creepy voyeurism of your family member and an innocent woman whose privacy you have no right to invade is not the answer, dude.
