How not to be drawn

We all have our first crushes. I have lots of them. Babysitters, sister's friends, classmates, comic book characters. I can't really say there was any one moment in my life when I "discovered" girls, when I had that oft-romanticized conversion from thinking girls were icky and had cooties to suddenly liking one (according to movies and TV, this happens somewhere between 3rd and 5th grades), because from the moment I can remember, I've been amazed by pretty girls.

But hot girls? That's another story. I remember (but won't detail) the revelation of just about every female body part: as it happened and who it was. I always appreciated pretty over anything else, but there were a number of lines in the sand that separated crushes from lusting.

And like many of (I would guess) other guys my age, Betty and Veronica were there to see me walk across those lines. I was in Greece in elementary school and my parents allowed me to get my weekly allowance in either drachmas or dollars. If I got it in drachmas, it went to the kiosks for Bubble Yum and Mad magazine. But if I got it in dollars, I went straight to the American military book store, the Stars and Stripes, and spent it on Archie comics. At the time, I bought them because we all thought they were funny. But at some point, the following things occurred to me:

1. Woah. Betty and Veronica are more than just pretty.
2. I never noticed those before.

Even twenty-five years on from these revelations, I still could find a slight excitement at the covers of the Double Digests in the neighborhood Safeway. So it was with heartbreak today that I read about Betty and Veronica's makeover from signposts pointing to the appreciation of female sexiness to freakish Hollywood appropriations of...I don't know what. They didn't look human before, but they weren't trying to. They were attractive in a comic way; in a way that pointed out to those of us growing up to look out in real life what we were getting a nudge-nudge for in drawings.

And now? Well, with the *ahem* wealth of the internet, I can't imagine that there's any 10-to-13 year olds who rely on lines and watercolors to show them the way, but even if there were, I can't imagine that these new versions of 1980 adolescent sexiness will show them anything they don't already know. And for that, I pity them.