When I was a kid, every boy had cooties. Didn’t matter who he was or if we were friends. If a kid had a pee-pee, that kid had cooties. You couldn’t see cooties, and there was no cootie-indicator — it was just that boys had cooties, and girls didn’t, or vice versa. Cooties were a family of germs: microscopic, contagious and dangerous. Worse yet, you only had to touch someone to get them. (Thankfully cooties, at least in my neighborhood, were not airborne pathogens.)

Then, sometime around the fifth grade or so — give or take a few years, depending on your entrance into puberty — you abandoned the notion of cooties in favor of holding hands and your first game of spin the bottle. But when you discovered sex sometime after that, everyone, particularly your parents and teachers, made damn sure you remembered them. Kissing? There’s a cooties for that. Handjob? There’s a cooties for that. Penetrative sex comes with so much potential cooties, even “Circle, circle, knife, knife” won’t protect you, and that’s supposed to be a lifelong insurance.

Still, even as we age we trundle onward in the face of such adversity, bravely screwing like every thrust will be our last. Now I said bravely, not recklessly, although there is a fine line between the two. We take the proper precautions if we’re smart, deal with the consequences if we’re not. But in the battles waged between our desire to do it and our bodies’ silly need to remain healthy, there is an insidious foe: human papillomavirus, the true cootie of our adult lives.

Take a look around you. Assume that some, if not most of the people you see are sexually active. Now consider that most (as in, well over half) of those people have HPV. They likely don’t even know it, not any more than you do. But they’re still off diddling their friends and partners, spreading this terrible cootie like wildfire.

You’ve probably heard the statistics: 80 percent of sexually active people have HPV. 60 percent of college women will get it during their college career. It sounds horrifying, but what does it mean?

HPV is a bitch of a cootie. It can cause warts on your junk — certain types of HPV do; did I mention there are multiple types of this fucker? — that can come right back even after you treat them. Of course that assumes you get any symptoms at all, which is pretty unlikely. You can get HPV without knowing it, since your partner probably doesn’t know he or she is spreading it all over your body like a human sundae made of icky.

And the kicker? You can get it without even having penetrative sex. You can get it even if you regularly use condoms. A nurse told me, “If you have sex six times without a condom, you’ll probably get it. If you have sex 12 times with a condom, you’ll probably get it.” It doesn’t only affect your junk but the whole area around it. But try bumpin’ uglies without actually bumping your ugly into your partner’s ugly. Can’t be done! Seems to me like HPV is just about unavoidable, unless you’re lucky or abstinent.

What sucks the most about this is that, like lots of other things in life, chicks get the short end of the stick. Out of the thirty or so strains of HPV that can invade your genital area, four of them can cause mad problems for women. An HPV infection gone long undetected in a woman’s body can cause cervical cancer. Infections in the anus and penis can have the same effect, but it’s less common. Cancer?! Ain’t that some shit?

Not to worry, ladies — as long as you kick back into some steel stirrups on the regular, you should be fine. Bodies are resilient things, and plenty of cases of HPV clear up on their own, just like a cold. But don’t count on it. The sooner you catch something abnormal, the closer you can keep an eye on it. Make an appointment for an annual exam right now. I’ll wait.

So if I’ve got HPV, and you’ve got HPV, and pretty much all of us have HPV, why are we still freaking out about STIs like it’s the first grade and Edgar Montaine just got dared by his friends to plant a big wet one on your cheek? What’s the deal with the stigma? Why can’t we talk about these things without feeling like we just crawled out from under some dirty, funky-ass rock?

Having an STI is no more shameful or dirty than having a cold. Sure, people might not be rearing to jump your bones for a little while, but then, we keep our distance from folks with a cough without making them feel like shit about it. Was it irresponsible of them to bareback a handshake without a glove? Maybe. They could have washed their hands. But they didn’t, and what’s done is done. No one loses respect for a person with a cold, even if they could have avoided it but didn’t.

How we feel about sexually transmitted infections is a result of how we feel about sex, even now, even as we consider ourselves liberated and tolerant. We’re still scared of it and ashamed of it. We still think it’s dirty and gross. But do you know what’s really dirty and gross? Smoking.

People get sympathy when they get lung cancer caused by smoking. But, when somebody gets, say, Chlamydia — which can be cured with one pill, by the way — they get shame that lasts a lifetime. But what’s weird about all of this is that sex is awesome and smoking is bad.

Why are the downsides of sex given so much more shameful weight than the downsides of smoking?

Most of us have HPV in common, brewing inside our bodies, hunkered down for a long stay. It could be a non-issue, or it could be a big downer. But if that many people never left the house because they were afraid of someone knowing they had cooties, the world would be a much emptier place.

Unfortunately, “Circle, circle, dot, dot” is not the HPV shot. Guardasil is, and it’ll protect you from the strains of cancer-causing HPV.

Fortunately, the cootie shot does look like boobs: (•) (•). Ain’t no shame in that.