Ilana Slavit

Written by Ilana Slavit. Art by Cameron Tyme Edison. TW: sexual violence From age eleven to eighteen, I had a pathological fear of men over forty. Ever since I was a child, my brain processed potential threats vividly and somatically. When I learned about stranger danger, I had nightmares of being kidnapped for years. I’d lay in bed awake for hours, imagining every creak or thump was a villain out to get me. So when I first learned about sex, I assumed that all men wanted to violate my body.

SOPHIE. Dorian Electra. Shygirl. These are some of the new voices of hyper pop, a genre hinted at throughout pop music since the 2010s. PC Music, the label of London-based DJ A. G. Cook, recently introduced hyper pop into the mainstream with critically divisive singles. While the majority of hyper pop musicians don’t belong to the label, the label has influenced other musicians to take on some of PC music’s sonic and thematic elements.

This article references sexual assault and violence that may be uncomfortable for some readers. “Based on True Events No One Believed.” This is the tagline for “Unbelievable,” a recently released Netflix miniseries that tells the adjacent stories of a teenage girl assaulted in Washington and the detectives hunting her serial rapist in Colorado.