THE WORLD PORN MADE

In 1999, the year I turned 16, there were three cultural events that seemed to define what it meant to be a young womana girl-facing down the new millennium.

- SOPHIE GILBERT

In April, Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing polka-dot panties and a black push-up bra, clutching a Teletubby doll with one hand and a phone with the other. In September, DreamWorks released American Beauty, a movie in which a middle-aged man has florid sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter's best friend; the film later won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

In November, the teen-clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch released its holiday catalog, titled "Naughty or Nice," which featured nude photo spreads, sly references to oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actor Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts.

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.