I remember the first time I saw someone with underpants that said "love, Pink" and I asked "What's that?" They said it was Victoria's Secret.

Later I saw the catalog, and it was like teenage girls in underwear, playing sexy. It unplugged something in me. I knew it was evil and sneaky and wrong in a way I could not even imagine. I spent years trying to put words on it.

There used to be these Calvin Klein ads of mostly naked teenagers in black and white. They had a weird look to them, the girls and the boys: Their mouths were hanging open and they looked really not normal, in an intense way.

I asked one of my friends about it, and she was one of those people who knew how things worked. She said the kids were on heroin or were having sexual things done to them to make them look like that. If you ever went to a photo shoot, you would see it.

That was the yuck I knew was there. That was part of it. Giving kids really hard drugs or sex to make them look weird and make them stars in magazines so other kids would want to be like them. You didn't tell the kids what to do, you showed them how to be, and made being bad seem cool.

I eventually had friends who did modeling, who told me about it, and I put the pieces together: Models had to walk around almost naked in front of all these adults, and if you wanted to win the contest or a contract or a job doing commercials or in a TV show you had to do more. Everyone knew it, that was just how it worked.

I eventually realized that girls who didn't get enough attention as children try to make up for it by getting sexual attention. There is this huge missing piece of not getting love or care or interest or understanding that we try to cram into and make up for with sexuality and being desired. It is like a hole that can never get filled enough.

When I look at girls in Victoria's Secret, that's what I see.

And after a while they begin to catch on:

And then it becomes a kind of sick going along, of knowing and doing it anyway, because it is better to be "wanted" than not-wanted.

And that's what we deal with in general, knowing we're in something broken and going along with it, making the best of it. We want to feel wanted. We want to be part of the cool crew. We want to be included. Even though no one is really enjoying anything and we are all mean to each other. It is better than being left out.