This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Shannon Keating, writing for Buzzfeed: As a 15-year-old, if I had been approached by the lead singer of a band I believed had saved my life, there’s no telling what I would have done for him, had he asked. He and other punk-rock icons stared out at me from my bedroom walls every day, where I’d obscured my pathetically girly cloud-swirled blue wallpaper with posters and photo spreads from the Alternative Press. Lacey was my hero. I have a feeling I would have given him anything he wanted. Like Garey, like every teenager, I was a know-it-all who thought I was a grown-up, so I wouldn’t have recognized that kind of behavior for what it was. But I also believed, at 15, that emo boys — and men — were different from “regular” guys. Emo guys were, yes, “emotional,” and introspective, and artistic, and they imbued everything with the kind of emotional weight I did as a shitty-poetry-writing teen Expand - View Original
"What I’m trying to figure out now is whether we’re supposed to let him take away our memories of what his music meant to us, at a time when we were trying to figure out who we were and who we should be. Because it would have been nice to return to that music now and then, if only to remember what it’s like to blindly love a song with a wild, wholehearted fierceness. The kind you can only really manage when you’re young." Exactly how I feel right now.
The feeling of shame I keep trying to suppress for ever having listened to or loved some of these bands is making me feel sick. And then it makes me angry. I should not feel shame that even just as a young, female, casual fan (as opposed to an actual victim) I have been manipulated to feel that there was nothing off about the power dynamic, that the lyrics were metaphorical, that I as a woman could and should connect to these songs. But I do. I feel ashamed that I could not see it. All I can think is that our young girls now and in the future deserve so much better than this.