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[Image description: Text ‘Considering My Crushes Guest Post’ on a lilac background]

This guest post series is a space where other writers in my community think about their own fruity memories and fantasies from back in the day.

Check out ‘#50: Guest Post – Considering My Crushes’ for Karla Marie Sweet’s essay on her crushes on Aladdin, footballer Paul Ince, Spice Girl Mel C and lots of sexy actresses from film and TV. And earlier on in this season of ‘She Dares To Say’ I wrote ‘#46: Considering My Crushes – No. 02’, where I describe early 00s crushes on Sirius Black and Kingsley Shacklebolt from Harry Potter; Harvey, Romeo and Asher D from So Solid Crew. And in ‘#40: Considering My Crushes – No. 01’ I went back to the mid/late 90s, to my first crushes who were Peter Pan, Damon Albarn, Billy Kennedy, Ernst Robinson and US President Bill Clinton.

‘Considering My Crushes’ by Peter Apps, author of the award-winning Show Me The Bodies and who also runs email newsletter Peter’s Substack

For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, I was a shy, repressed and geeky kid with crap clothes, a bowl haircut and permanently bent glasses frames, who also happened to be straight at an all boys Catholic school. For all the above reasons, my early adolescence was not awash with real-world romance and most of my early sexual awakening happened as a result of the strange mash of popular culture I absorbed as a child 

I say strange because I grew up in a pre-internet world with parents who didn’t get a TV license until I was nearly eight – a consequence of some middle-class beliefs about the perils of screentime (yes, even in the era of five TV channels) and a genuinely squeezed family budget.

So I read a lot, played imaginative games and watched our small video collection over and over again. 

This collection consisted mostly of English west country regional variations from the 1980s, which my grandparents (who lived in Somerset) had recorded off the TV. I grew up in London, so absolutely no-one I know remembers the TV I loved as a kid: Greenclaws, Charlie Chalk, Pie in the Sky and Mr Ben over and over again. And the original Disney Mary Poppins movie, which we watched almost every Saturday. 

None of these really offered much to introduce me to admiration of the human form, although things did step up a bit when Aladdin was released on home video in 1994 and became our favourite film. Princess Jasmine, with her turquoise crop top, Disney doe eyes, and flowing hair certainly awakened something in me, although thinking back I don’t think I would have identified it as sexual attraction. 

I guess I felt it most in my tummy, a sort of swooping sensation, certainly identifiable as a desire, but non-specific. I suppose I knew I would have wanted to be Aladdin on the magic carpet ride, and certainly that I would have wanted to be the one who rescued her from that giant sand timer thing, and that I got some degree of goose bumps when her hand slips under the surface, but I would not have been able to tell you what I was feeling or why. 

[Image description: Jasmine from the Disney animation ‘Aladdin’ wearing her iconic turquoise two piece]

In the late 1990s, my parents finally succumbed to the rising tide of screen-based entertainment and purchased a TV license and a small TV for the living room. Suddenly, my world expanded into a blissful two hours per week (imagine that limit today), when I could soak up CBBC on BBC One and CITV on ITV after a hard day of learning to add three-figure sums or name the planets or whatever it is you learned aged nine in 1997. 

A lot of people my age probably have fond recollections of Konnie Huq on Blue Peter, but for me it was one of the show’s other presenters, Katy Hill, who caught my eye, and this time I was a bit clearer about what I felt. The sparkly rush of endorphins when she was wearing her see-through top and vest showing her belly button was called fancying someone. 

[Image description: ‘Blue Peter’ presenters Katy Hill, Konnie Huq and Simon Thomas in the studio with a golden retriever dog]

These feelings were taken on to a further stage by the Jennifer Lopez video for Ain’t It Funny, which aired on Top of the Pops in 2001, when I was 12. This one stands out for me as a very clear moment when I was caught by an overtly sexual desire for what must have been the first time. The video is, honestly, fairly forgettable and relatively tame compared to the regular output of MTV Bass around that time. J-Lo is in a dance-off on a Romany Gypsy site with a man, and there is a lot of smouldering eye contact, hip thrusting and torso on display. I don’t know why this video in particular caught my eye and my imagination, but it did, and would be my first real memory of the kind of overt male sexual desire which becomes such a regular feeling as adolescence progresses. 

[Image description: J-Lo wearing an off the shoulder top and lots of necklaces, her curly hair is swept off her face in a messy ponytail]

Realising that I was 12 when I felt this for the first time makes me feel I came to it all a little late compared to some of the boys of my age. But for me as a younger boy, sex and sexual desire was something quite scary – something which I felt I ought not to be feeling or doing and should repress or not admit to. I think some of this was linked to my religious upbringing – I grew up in a Pentecostal church which left me mortally afraid of hell and my own sinful nature being found out. It also made it pretty clear that fornication and masturbation did not please God, and these messages settled inside me and took some time to unpick. 

I remember being 11 on a week away for a school trip, sharing a bunk bed with three other boys, two of whom were several degrees more experienced in these matters than I was. They were talking about their girlfriends, who had allowed them to play ‘nervous’, a game where they ran a hand up their legs and told them to stop when they said ‘nervous’. Again, looking back, this feels very innocent and actually a fairly touching introduction to ideas about consent and mutually exploring desires with a partner, but to me it set off a rage of both desire (to do it myself) and fear (that I was desiring something sinful). I remember my heart racing, and shoving my head in my pillow and pretending to be asleep while also mentally saying a prayer.  

Another young crush worth mentioning is one which sprung from the world of reading. As a child, I was blessed with a vivid, visual imagination which meant I really saw and lived in the story books I read. 

As a child I loved the ‘Animorphs’ book series to the point of obsession – a regular feature of school libraries at the time, which you may remember had fairly naff covers of children transforming into animals and covered the adventures of a group of teenagers who are given the power to become any creature they touch, in order to fight off an alien invasion which involves slugs (Yerks) wrapping themsleves around human brains and taking control of them. I will still argue that these books are criminally underrated.

These books left me with quite a deep emotional attachment to Cassie – the girl whose parents conveniently run a zoo and a veterinary clinic for injured animals, providing a plentiful supply of animals for our heroes to transform into. 

[Image description: front cover of Animorphs series for The Departure showing character Cassie morphing from human form into a butterfly]

I had enough of an attachment to her character that I felt genuine pangs of envy when she finally kisses her long-time on-off crush Jake. My attraction, I think, was mostly driven by her character as the sometimes flawed conscience of the group. She was the one who would obsess over right and wrong, struggle with ruthless decisions and try to show some compassion for the group’s enemies and even the animals they had transformed into. There was a pull there for me, a desire to be with someone who had that sort of conscience. 

Reflecting on these early crushes leaves me feeling wistful. I grew up at an odd moment – on the cusp of childhood being transformed forever by the internet. The web arrived in my house for the first time when I was about 11 – a blue/green Apple Mac which could plug into dial-up internet with the whoosing, hissing and beeping noises that my generation will remember well. As a teenager, I was allowed 30-minutes browsing time a day, and the computer was in the family living room. Loading time speeds and the potential for being caught meant porn stayed strictly off the menu.

But the arrival of this new technology changed everything rapidly. When I started secondary school, I got hold of pop songs by recording them onto a cassette off the radio and playing them on a Walkman. I still remember the rush to hit record when ‘Family Affair’ by Missy Elliott played during the charts, and the fact that the last 30 seconds were ruined by radio host ‘Dr Fox’ talking over it. 

But by the time I finished secondary school, I was downloading songs from Limewire and playing them on an MP3 player. 

At the start of secondary school, I’d phone my friends on their parent’s landline. By the end of my GCSE year, 15 of us were talking at once on MSN Messenger. And then the iPhone arrived in my first year of sixth form and very rapidly, the world was different again. 

All of this means I’m probably among the very last cohort of kids to grow up free from the tentacles of mainstream porn and the lurid, explicit videos and images which zip around WhatsApp groups, TikToks and Snapchats. The gentle, eccentric crushes seem almost achingly innocent and archaic, like steam railways or the welfare state. 

It scares me that children whose brains are so malleable are now able to access and view hardcore images of pornography. How does the chemistry of a developing brain deal with that level of overload? Mine would probably have melted like wax if it was presented with even a flash of Pornhub.  

Writing this, I can see how myself today has been shaped by my early exposure to sexual content – the lines from these times that have spread through adulthood and into the feelings I have carried into my real-world relationships, and also the backwards echo of what would become more defined feelings, desires and fears starting to emerge. This is a fragile, formative and precious period for a child and – odd as mine may have been by some measures – I’m glad I had it then rather than now. 

About the Author
Pete Apps is an award-winning housing journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the New Statesman, Private Eye, The Sunday Times, The I, The Spectator and a range of professional publications. His book, Show Me The Bodies, which covers the events which led to the Grenfell Tower fire won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2023. He writes on his personal substack here: 

Peter’s Substack My personal Substack By Peter Apps

[Image description: Text ‘PRODUCED BY’]

I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.

This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber of ‘She Dares to Say’ to support this project. Paid subscribers get additional subscriber-only posts each month and continuous access to the full archive. Paid subscriptions are either billed monthly at £3.79 or annually at £34.99.

Upgrade to paid

If you would prefer to make a one-off donation, feel free to send a contribution via PayPal.

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You can also show your enjoyment without spending £££, by liking, commenting, restacking via Notes or just generally sharing 😃