Middle school started early in my district (fifth grade) and though it wouldn’t be accurate to say that was the year R&B recordings became more explicit (“Let’s Talk about Sex” was two years prior), it was the year I started to be aware of it. “Knockin the Boots” was a big deal coming into that school year.  I couldn’t have, or wouldn’t have wanted to read explicitly into that inference, but I knew it was “dirty,” in the guilty, Catholic sense, and sex in general—in that period, where when you heard about sex, it was always about condoms in school and AIDS, and how Oprah got molested when she was 9—was “dirty” in the guilty, Catholic sense.  Sex wasn’t making love; it was politicized, blunt, urban, and you had no idea what AIDS was, really, but there was Tom Hanks, bald, in that movie, and it smelled of tragedy.

In my middle school in the mid-nineties, thirteen year olds really were getting pregnant.  Pregnancy had a certain cache, even, because—and I’m sure this is often the way it goes—it was the hot, well-developed girls who lined their lips in black eyeliner who got pregnant, so the competitive arc among girls naturally leaned in that direction.  I was so utterly far from sex.  I was still on cute-boyfriend-in-the-Zack-Morris-sense, not even the Jordan Catalano sense.  Everyone else seemed at ease with “Knockin the Boots,” though.  It slunk in so naturally with the transition from segregated, whitey white elementary school and its rhinestone Keds to our suburban pseudo-Bronx middle school with its Gin & Juice by way of K-Mart aesthetic.

I question what sex-in-music-via, e.g. “Birthday Sex” is like now for a fifth grader.  It’s a different bluntness altogether, as much wrapped in with a culture of abstinence education and Teen Mom as the old shit was the after-school-specialization of STDs and “protection.”  It’s a Midwest inspired Victoria’s Secret vajazzlement of magical thinking.  Disney stars “sexting” merged nonsensically with Robert Pattinson’s nouveau-Victorian vampire blueballs.  Rihanna’s body and beating, and it’s pretty, clubby sex, whether it’s rapped or popped about.

What’s sad about both this version of sex (Vanessa Hudgens sex) and the prior (TBoz sex) is that 10, 11 are the last years of your capacity to imagine as a child, and since they’re the last, they’re the most literate/intelligent years you have while still a child.  You don’t realize how traumatized you are by sex’s entrance, like the Kool-Aid man, into your mind’s quiet garden until years after.  How scary to awake from your copy of Anne of Green Gables and be born into this:

Coming out your mouth with your blah blah blah
Just zip your lips like a padlock
And meet me at the back with the jack and the jukebox
I don’t really care where you live at
Just turn around boy and let me hit that
Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat
Just show me where your dick’s at

I remember in fifth grade listening to these two girls talking in gym class.  The one asks the other, “Yo, you did sex yet?” and the other one goes, smirking, “Nuh uh!” Then the first girl sucks her teeth and says, “You walk like you did sex.”  The truth was she did walk like she did sex, pants low down, cocky like a boy.

What probably doesn’t come across there is that it wasn’t so much a put down as a stated observation of an accomplishment, i.e. “Have you been on a diet?” “No.”  “Well, it looks like you’ve been on a diet.”  Whatever it was, its utterance hit me as a cold, indivisible block of terror, and contained at once both the deep sadness of falling behind, and a desire to run away, recede from the race.

Among the many things that alternative music was as an option, it was an option to the contrary of sex.  I fled to it for a lot of reasons, not least which was that the boys I wanted to go to the dance with (to slow dance, not grind with) were headed in that direction.  In part I wonder what that option is for today’s fifth graders.  I’m sure, probably, there’s at least one, in a kind of subdivided way, but I can’t exactly imagine fifth graders not having developed an entire working lingua franca around sex (texting, Facebooking and shopping like they did sex) before being consumeristically savvy enough to choose it.

Whatever mid-nineties sex was, it was presented as bluntly distinct: a world by and for adults, and with a constant almost municipal inelegance around the reminders of its consequences.  Not like the catnippy, pied piper trail from Bratz to Ke$ha, where a kind of primal scene trauma is woven into your surrealistic glitter consciousness, and you’ve not been given so much as a roadmap or glossary to be able to sift through or recognize any of it.