I can still remember being in my best friends room after school in early 1999 blasting Britney Spears ...Baby One More Time. My loneliness is killing me (and I)/ I must confess I still believe (still believe)/ When Im not with you I lose my mind/ Give me a sign/ Hit me, baby, one more time.

We danced around with the door closed, our shirts tied up into crop tops like the ones that Spears and her dancers wear in the music video , performing some adorably chaste sexy dance moves and collapsing into hysterical laughter.

We were a few months away from turning 12, and newly minted teen pop icon Spears seemed like a reflection of what girls my age were supposed to naturally become beautiful, feminine, desirable but not slutty, successful but unthreatening, in control of her sexuality while also being ignorant to its power.

To attempt to ape these teen queens felt like it would only result in an inevitable failure to measure up. So I was left with only one option: to reject them; to dance raucously to ...Baby One More Time, while declaring that Spears and her contemporaries were probably shallow and lacking in other ways. I was smart. I was substantial. I was no Britney Spears .

I never took the time to consider whether these young pop stars felt constrained by the archetypes they had been pushed to embody; whether their own development as agents rather than objects had been stunted against their will; whether their traditional femininity was truly in opposition to substance. Looking back two decades later, I see something more complex than teen icons to alternately revere and resent.

1999 was a year filled with teen queen pop stars like Spears: Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson. They sang about craving sweet boys (Mandy Moores Candy ), being rubbed the right way by the right man (Christina Aguileras Genie In A Bottle), being driven crazy by a guy (Britney Spears Drive Me Crazy) and spending 10,000 lifetimes with a man (Jessica Simpsons I Wanna Love You Forever). (Beyonc, by way of Destinys Child, remains a notable outlier. The Writings On The Wall is an album that holds up.)

That year, teen queens dominated the Billboard charts. Spears ...Baby One More Time was the fifth-most-popular song of the year, according to Billboard, while Aguileras Genie In A Bottle followed in seventh place. They graced magazine covers; not just tween and teen publications, like J-14, Teen Beat, CosmoGirl and Seventeen, but also more adult media properties, like Rolling Stone. They were hypersexualized by the male-dominated music media, for the benefit of straight, adult male readers.

Take Spears famous Rolling Stone cover : Shes photographed in lingerie under the headline Inside the Heart, Mind and Bedroom of a Teen Dream, and an older male writer describes her honeyed thigh and ample chest in the article. A few months later, in the same magazine , a different male writer referred to Aguilera as a kind of legal Lolita, with swimming-pool-blue eyes and a waist as big around as a football.

Meanwhile, their music was explicitly marketed to (and made popular by ) tweens and teens. In 99, 10- to 14-year-olds accounted for nearly 10% of all CD sales , and it was their allowance money that was fueling the success of these teen pop stars. As Jon Pareles put it in July 1999 for The New York Times , kiddie-pop has always been available to those who wanted it, but in the late 1990s, its turning into the only game in town The entertainment business has clearly decided that youngsters now have decisive buying power.

Twenty years ago, I was one of those tweens eagerly spending her limited funds at Tower Records, and I both revered and resented Spears and her pretty, famous contemporaries. I resented their flat stomachs, their carefully calibrated public images, meant to bask in the male gaze while simultaneously telegraphing that they were still good girls.

After all, this was the age of Spears widely discussed sexy schoolgirl music video get-up and Simpsons virginity . The message seemed to be that successfully entering womanhood required walking an invisible tightrope, appearing sexually desirable to the general culture while withholding actual sex.

After a yearlong national sex scandal between the president and a young former intern, it felt obvious that to be a titillating virgin was held in higher regard than being a smart (but plain) giver of blowjobs.