The tail end of the ’90s was the era of Clinton sex scandals and Jerry Springer and the launch of a neat new drug called Viagra, a period when sex saturated mainstream culture. In the Spears profile, the interviewer, Steven Daly, alternates between lust—the logo on her Baby Phat T‐shirt, he notes, is “distended by her ample chest”—and detached observation that the sexuality of teen idols is just a “carefully baited” trap to sell records to suckers. Being a teen myself, I found it hard to discern the irony. What was obvious to my friends and to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature. There was no other kind, or none worth having. I attended an all-girls school run by stern second-wave feminists, who told us that we could succeed in any field or industry we chose. But that messaging was obliterated by the entertainment we absorbed all day long, which had been thoroughly shaped by the one defining art form of the late 20th century: porn.