The Video That Made Me Who I Am

Five minutes and six seconds. I know that runtime the way I know my own birthday, because I watched Geri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men video approximately ten thousand times as a frustrated teenage boy, and yes, I jerked off to it. Successfully. Multiple times. I’m not especially proud of that, but it happened, and somewhere in that transaction I understood exactly the kind of hold certain women could have over me—the kind you recognize instantly and can do absolutely nothing about. I loved Ginger Spice the way you love a one-night stand you keep running into on the street afterwards: no conversation, just this shared understanding that something real happened once.

Now she’s 41 and back with a new track called Half of Me, and it is so comprehensively terrible—the song, the video, the whole enterprise—that I would rip the radio out of my dashboard if it came on while I was driving. Which I’m not, because I don’t have a car. Or a radio. The point stands. Some doors, once closed, should stay that way.