“[Rivers Cuomo] was cute; he was vulnerable; he had glasses. Really cool glasses. His hair was unfortunate; his features were delicate; in his videos, he could never quite hold eye contact with the camera. He wore sweaters a lot, and he sang about wearing the sweaters; he was a sweater-wearing dude, that Rivers Cuomo. He sang at you on the radio. He loved you, more desperately than anyone ever had, or would. If you happened to be of a certain age when “The Blue Album” came out— let’s say, for the purposes of total non-specificity and universal relatability, “exactly twelve years old”-the highly sweater-centric single from that album, and the revelation that its singer was in fact good-looking, opened up a whole new landscape of sexual possibility. It made you think that sex might not, as you had previously supposed, be scary or harsh or done with any of the dudes at your school who smelled like pot and cheap beer and unwashed laundry and were sporting, with greater or lesser success, floppy Kurt Cobain haircuts. Instead, sex could be something you did with someone as soft-spoken and gentle and enthused about sweater-wearing as Mr. Rogers. Girls before you had learned about the power of male vulnerability-from Lloyd Dobler and his tear-stained boom box of rejection, or from Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, he with the body of a weightlifter and the soul of a tender wood nymph-but for you, it was Rivers. He made sex seem simultaneously safer and more intense. He gave you the power, the power to accept or reject him; he proclaimed, constantly, his own weakness before you.”

—Sady Doyle’s Awl piece on Rivers Cuomo

via dfvgkmng

Source: supcakes