Innocence Lost
On coming of age in the time of Lana Del Rey and witnessing the birth of a new generation of coquette brain rot. (Sorry mom!)
Addison Rae, TikTok star turned burgeoning pop sensation who I can only associate with the disease with which she shares a first name, recently released her song Diet Pepsi. It’s interesting that in this song, he’s at the wheel in his own car; in this mutual sexual encounter, only Addison is losing her innocence in his backseat, functioning as a passive infantilized object of desire.
Before there was Addison Rae, there was Lana Del Rey. Lana touched on similar themes, but from the other side of girlhood, as a glamorous woman fast approaching her expiration date, mournfully looking back on a time where she was desirable for her youth and naïveté, when she still had something of value to be lost and consumed by another.
The easy and obvious comparisons have been drawn between Diet Pepsi and Lana Del Rey’s oeuvre. Listening to this cheap pastiche of Lana’s Pepsi Cola-flavored pussy for the first time, I reflected on my own coming-of-age loss of innocence more than a decade ago.
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Untouched, XO
(First Attempt)
It was graduation week of my senior year of high school, and much like an unpopular protagonist in a Judd Apatow movie, I had resolved that I would lose my virginity before I turned 18, lest I forever cement my status in my own mind as a loser.
I had had very little dating experience and was somewhat of a lone wolf, partly by choice of deliberate self-isolation; partly as a function of my feral, unsocialized nature and abrasive, offputting personality.
A dour scowl was permanently affixed to my face. I rarely spoke to anyone at school and spent my lunch breaks curled up in a cubicle at the back of the library reading and scrolling on my phone. Most of my nights were spent posting on Tumblr and listening to jazz radio on NPR, and the majority of my close personal relationships existed entirely online.
That’s not to say that I had no friends. One such friend, B., whom I had known since middle school, had unexpectedly become one of my closest confidantes.
We would go to the mall together, as part of a larger group or just the two of us. I had a makeover montage with him where I taught him the magic of V-neck shirts, cardigan sweaters, and skinny jeans (the height of metrosexual male fashion in the early 2010s).
I can recall an occasion where we wandered the furniture display showroom at Sears in ironic adolescent tableaus of adult domestic life—sitting side by side on a mattress edge, across from one another at a dining room table, in armchairs in a mock living room conversation nook—talking about our tumultuous home lives, family secrets, hopes, and dreams.
B. believed himself to be in love with my off-and-on best friend, Z. (off at this time); I believed myself to be in love with B.’s best friend C.; C. had just recently asked Z. to prom. My and B.’s unrequited pining for each other’s best friends was a hulking elephant in the room we dared not address.
Lacking for many options, I informed B. of my newfound goal and casually asked him if he would be interested in helping me make it happen, to which he agreed. A week or two after graduation, he picked me up and drove me to visit his wealthy friend J.’s parents’ house, nestled against a country club golf course high up in the mountains. The three of us watched V/H/S together, and after saying our goodbyes to J., B. and I trespassed on the golf course, lying in the freshly-watered grass, listening to the evening chorus of crickets and gazing up at the stars.
B. drove me to his mother’s house, which was far more cramped than J.’s family home, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood similar to my own. I said hello to his mother and brother and we ascended the stairs to B.’s room. He asked me if I wanted to see his Pokémon cards and furtively showed me the little weed bubbler pipe he kept hidden in their box. I dont think we even smoked any; I believe he was just engaging in show-and-tell like a ne’er-do-well 12-year-old boy.
Dear reader, I’ll spare you the explicit details, but I will note that in the course of my extensive preparatory pre-coital research, I had read on teen sex education website Scarleteen.com that one should always use condoms for both oral and PIV sex. Looking back on it, there were signs that I may not have been the only one seeking to lose my virginity that night, but I wasn’t about to take my chances with venereal disease.
My mouth was terribly dry and it was causing mechanical complications. B. offered to get me a glass of water. I sat on his bed, hands primly folded in my lap, waiting for him to come back from the kitchen. Upon his return, he handed me the glass and I downed the whole thing at once, never lifting my eyes from the floor to make eye contact. This experience was already proving to be more awkward than I had expected, and that was before the erectile dysfunction had come into the picture.
B. informed me he had taken Xanax so that he wouldn’t be so nervous, which I hoped was the cause of his impotence. To imagine anything otherwise would be lethal to my already fragile self-esteem. After many valorous attempts at pushing rope, we admitted defeat. We stayed there for a while on his childhood bed, nude and in repose, talking about the series finale of the television show Little House on the Prairie and wasn’t it fucked up that it ended like that with everybody just exploding to death.
My attempt to defile myself had been dashed and my pesky innocence remained intact for now, but I considered myself half a virgin on a technicality.
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In the land of Gods and Monsters, I was an angel, looking to get fucked hard.
(Second Attempt)
My 18th birthday came and went. By this time, I was not just desperate to become a woman, but actually horny. Tinder was for normies and all I found myself doing on Bumble was antagonizing and insulting my matches. As an intellectual who possesses a rich interior life and loves personality quizzes, I felt more comfortable on OKCupid assessing my compatibility with others by nebulous percentage-based metrics.
Unfortunately, I grew up in a city known for having the ugliest men in the United States, a reputation which seemed to be well earned, and most people with any charisma, promising future, or value as a person ended up leaving town the second they got the chance. It sometimes felt like being left behind after the rapture. Among my many illustrious potential suitors were aggressively straight-laced Air Force pilots from the nearby base and an effete much older goth man on methadone who lived at his mother’s house, about an hour’s drive away in a rural town in a neighboring state.
One fateful evening, I matched and found myself messaging back and forth with A., a 30-year-old libertarian who was staying in town for the night on business. He worked in business development for hospitals, a job which was (and honestly still is for the most part) too abstract and fake-sounding for me to fully understand.
He was handsome enough, with beautiful curly hair and a kind face, and cooler and smarter than anyone I had spoken to thus far. I felt I had to seize this opportunity to be rid of my virginity once and for all. Based on media I had consumed and the liberal feminist sexual empowerment content I had been bombarded with online, I thought it was normal to have sex with strangers, so I asked him outright if he wanted to fuck me.
A. put on a show of being hesitant but it didn’t take very much convincing. I silently snuck out of my parents’ house in the dead of night and met him a block away at his white rented Mercedes sedan, so as not to rouse my parents from slumber with the sound and lights of his engine. I hopped in and he whisked me away to the Hilton Garden Inn.
We entered through the side door of the hotel, bypassing the front desk, and walked down a long hallway to his room. I remember we half-heartedly watched some older movie on cable TV for a few minutes as he gradually began to increase our level of physical contact, starting by putting his arm around me and progressing from there. When it came time to start making out, he threw away the gum he had been chewing, which I found to be somewhat repulsive, bovine and offensively odiferous (i believe the flavor was cinnamon).
He had obviously had a lot of practice; he certainly knew how to hit all of the right spots with precision, ease, and gusto, and had enough stamina to last multiple rounds over the course of several hours. In a purely physical sense, I experienced intense hedonistic pleasure. This seemed to me to be the best-case scenario outcome for a no-strings-attached one-night stand, and I thought this was what I had wanted, but in an emotional sense, I couldn’t help but feel empty.
Motel sprees, sprees and I'm singing
"Fuck yeah, give it to me"
"This is Heaven, what I truly want"
It's innocence lost
Innocence lost
When A. stopped to drop me off at home in the early morning hours, he turned and looked at me as I reached for the door handle. “You know I could have murdered you, right?” He didn’t say it in a threatening way; he sounded genuinely concerned that this was something I would do again with somebody else. I laughed, opened the car door, and disappeared into the night.
I came home to find my mother crying, sitting in the living room with the light on, waiting for me. She had woken up sometime ago and found me missing and was about to call the police when I arrived. It wasn’t so funny anymore and the potentially dire consequences of my impulsive decision now felt more real.
I don’t feel victimized by this encounter (though I’m sure many would justifiably see it in a different light). That being said, I never felt empowered or in control.
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We’re teaching young women that they have an increasingly shorter and shorter shelf life before they’re no longer desirable. There seems to be so much pressure to grow up, to look and act mature, but we spend the rest of our lives desperately grasping for any fragments of youth we can reach, longing to go back.
Much to the greedy delight of plastic surgeons and purveyors of anti-aging injectables, lotions, and potions, one can’t exist as a coquette forever. There has to be something more to life than being a sexy baby, and I hope popular culture comes to reflect this one day, but as long as there remains the potential for profit to be made from sowing insecurity, I don’t expect things to change.