Earlier this year, as Brand New was on the cusp of releasing a new record, I asked my male coworkers to Google the words “Brand New date rape song.” We were considering awarding Brand New’s fifth album Science Fiction the distinction of Best New Music, and I wanted my peers to be clear about this unsettling aspect of the band’s history. At this point, in August, the disturbing allegations against frontman Jesse Lacey—years spent preying on at least two underage Brand New fans, soliciting them online for nude photos and more—had not been made. And yet the music said a lot. Third-wave emo—the 2000s mutation of the sound as sold at Hot Topic, as dialogued on Myspace and LiveJournal, and as broadcast on MTV—was a notoriously sexist commodity. Here was a concrete example.

The song that appears when you Google “Brand New date rape song” is “Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis,” from 2003’s Deja Entendu. It goes, “I got desperate desires and unadmirable plans/My tongue will taste of gin and malicious intent/Bring you back to the bar/Get you out of the cold/My sober straight face gets you out of your clothes.” Lacey later sings such biting lines as “I almost feel sorry for what I’m gonna do” and “If you let me have my way I swear I’ll tear you apart.” Of course, Lacey has denied that these lyrics are autobiographical, claiming that he was describing a nightmare he feared; only a monster would accept these thoughts as his own. Lacey still found them suitable to sing on Brand New’s breakout record, attaching his name to them forever.

Every lyric from Deja Entendu and its predecessor, 2001’s Your Favorite Weapon, is encoded into the neurons inside my skull, a reality that is at once disquieting and comforting. When I switch on the part of my brain that can rattle off those lines with the unneeded ease of a clap-on lamp, it is a surreal reminder of who I was and who I have become.

My relationship with Brand New is complex. I was 13 and living on the south shore of Long Island at the start of 2003, the exact moment when bands like Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, and Glassjaw were catapulting to national profiles and putting my own suburban scene on the alt-rock map. I spent my formative years as a music fan watching all-ages bills full of all-male bands that existed in the wake and under the emotionally tormented spell of our local heroes. They adapted the same tricks: overdriven melodies, gang vocals, roiling angst, Max Martin-levels of uncomplicated catchiness.

The Long Island scene had a rich history before this. In the 1990s, bands like Silent Majority and Mind Over Matter architected the melodic hardcore sound that Brand New and Taking Back Sunday would sugarcoat and blow up. Silent Majority were at least trying to be post-Fugazi male feminists, with songs like “Polar Bear Club” (from 1997’s Life of a Spectator), which included a line hypothesizing about the year 2016: “I just bought a microphone for my kid,” singer Tommy Corrigan daydreams, “’Cause she’s trying out for a band.” But things changed on Long Island.

It strikes me now as no coincidence at all that my favorite Long Island band of the early-2000s, the one I obsessed over hardest, was also the only group I ever saw with a female member: Michelle Nolan, multi-instrumentalist of emotional piano-rockers Straylight Run (which included former members of Taking Back Sunday). But Straylight Run was the exception to the rule in a scene that hardly represented young women. Participating in the Long Island music scene of the mid-2000s changed my life—because it introduced me to the concept of an underground, to shows in practice spaces and temples and VFW halls, but more to the point because it ultimately repulsed me.

Reading the graphic testimonies of the women who have come forward, I recalled the male arrogance, condescension, and entitlement that always seemed to hang in the air at third-wave emo shows on Long Island. I experienced this subtly and unsubtly, verbally and physically. Men constantly treated me like I was there primarily to meet them. In fact I did not care much about boys at this point in my life. (My normier eighth grade boyfriend broke up with me for, to quote his text-message that I read on my flip-phone, “[caring] about music more than you care about me,” and I have spent the rest of my life proving him right.) For a time, the subtle cruelties were something that I accepted, a mere consequence of the life-changing experience of having adventures. Third-wave emo—bubblegum emo—needed its female fans, as evidenced by the swaths of girls who screamed this music back, who took photos, who muscled against stages to get as close as possible without being crushed. But the scene did not really want us.

I am suggesting here that there is a correlation between misogynist art, the young people who make it, and the younger people who consume it. That is not a radical idea, and it strikes me now as dubious that any longtime Brand New fan would be completely shocked by these allegations. Women have long been shouting about the fucked-up power dynamics of pop-punk and third-wave emo, which have continued into the present—the allegations against Front Step Porch’s predatory singer Jake McElfresh in 2015 almost mirror the ones against Lacey. People are now listening because they have been cornered. The walls are closing in. “I’m hoping that with this coming out, it opens the door for people really looking out for women in our scene,“ Emily Driskill, one of Lacey’s alleged victims, told Pitchfork. “It’s been talked about for a while but it hasn’t actually been happening.”

In her groundbreaking 2003 essay “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” originally published in Punk Planet, Jessica Hopper was watching. Her “deepest concerns,” she said, were for the girls clinging to the lip of the stage, front and center, “who are wanting to stake some claim to punk rock, or an underground avenue, for a way out.” The first time I read this, some years later, I cried at the reality of being seen in a space where I had believed no one was looking out for women. “And so I watch these girls at emo shows more than I ever do the band,” Hopper wrote. “I watch them sing along, see what parts they freak out over… I wonder if they are being thwarted by the FACT that there is no presentation of girls as participants, but rather, only as consumers, or if we reference the songs directly, the consumed. I wonder if this is where music will begin and end for them. If they can be radicalized in spite of this. If being denied keys to the clubhouse is enough to spur them into action.”

It was, but it took awhile. Part of the premise of emo then was, “I hate myself, I hate the world.” When that is square one, it can be hard to parse how the music is making you internalize even more gendered self-loathing. In the internet days before Tumblr, our intellectualization was less instant; as teenagers, we didn’t have a vocabulary to articulate all of our contradictory instincts. For that reason, when I heard about the Lacey allegations, I wanted to talk to other women like me: girls I met on LiveJournal and Myspace back when we lived and breathed the Long Island scene, the type Hopper was watching. I found that these women were similarly disturbed but unsurprised.

“So many songs celebrate the objectification of women in one way or another, so we normalize it,” says Jackee Sadicario, whom I met on a Straylight Run Yahoo! group in 2003. “We say the content is fiction, the production of someone toiling with their deep-rooted emotions. But it turns out it isn’t fiction. We can’t turn the truth off, and just a few weeks after I sang along with the new songs from Science Fiction live, I can’t listen to the album.”

We begin staring down the question of how to untangle our memories—the faces and scenes and processes of our lives—from the lyrics and riffs and beats they inhabit, from the grim realities that are only now being pried out of hiding. When Ellisa Keller, who I met on Livejournal, experienced the death of one of her childhood best friends earlier this year, she listened to Brand New “religiously” to feel close to her. “I can’t help but think of her when I see the overpass in my hometown where we used to sit and sing ‘Soco Amaretto Lime.’ I always will,” Keller says. “But now I’ll have the association that someone we both looked up to so dearly took advantage of women that were our age. That the person who strengthened our friendship and so many other female friendships was actually a predator. We trusted his words and treated him almost like an emo god.”

Where did we lose the plot? When I think about the decades that immediately preceded third-wave emo—about D.C. punk, riot grrrl, Kurt Cobain proclaiming women the future of rock—I’m astonished that it happened at all. What caused the vindictive mall-punk 180? Most of all, I wonder why us girls couldn’t detect the harm in these lyrics as we shouted them back, plastered them on our profiles, carved them on our Converse with ballpoint pens. Maybe we internalized our own misogyny, saw those girls in the songs as Them, not Us. Maybe we were too young to see the devil in the details. Maybe the internet—the accelerated pace of the first music subculture fully bred online, the frenzy of file-sharing and Myspace bulletins, the brand new thrill of reaching other young fans—just erased nuance, made everything easy.

“When I think about lyrics that I pasted all over my AIM away messages, a lot of the music then—not just Brand New—was misogynistic and violent against ‘the girl’ of the songs,” says Michelle Strom, another Long Island scene fan. “Talking about relationships that way was so normal, though. I never thought about the sexism in the scene back then because it wasn’t in my schema. I was naive—I think a lot of us were. But I think about it a lot now.”

“It makes me rethink the boys I dated during that time,” Strom continues, “the actions and words I let slide because my favorite bands sang about the same things I was experiencing. Like, ‘oooh my boyfriend is just such a moody musician!’ No, my boyfriend was a misogynist dick who happened to admire Senses Fail too much.” (A sample anti-girl lyric from that New Jersey band’s 2004 LP: “So love me gently with a chainsaw/And take the glass against your wrists… You’re worth more dead.”) Despite the supposed vulnerability of this music, actual sensitivity was often met with reproach. “Some men really honed this skill of ‘negging,’ though I didn’t have that word for it then,” Sadicario says. “I didn’t have a word for any of it then.”

I am grateful to have the words now. In 2015 I interviewed Glassjaw, another Long Island band whose early-2000s lyrics could pivot from embarrassingly spiteful to bluntly-stated violence against women: “You can lead a whore to water,” goes 2000’s “Pretty Lush,” “And you can bet she’ll drink and follow orders”—from there it gets worse. I spoke to them because I wanted to negotiate my own uncertain connection to the music I grew up with, to navigate a complicated relationship to home. I asked them about the misogyny that accompanied their Jeff Buckley-in-hell post-hardcore. Vocalist Daryl Palumbo apologized to me without deflecting responsibility; he said he would never write those lyrics now. At the time it felt like a kind of progress.

The women Lacey preyed on deserve, at the very least, clearer and more direct apologies than the one they received last week, before details emerged. These allegations should begin the overdue unraveling of how we think about an entire subculture that has rarely taken women seriously. It’s time for the bands that shaped third-wave emo to acknowledge women as whole human beings, something they’ve hardly done in their songs. If these bands are to continue into the future, they should be grappling with the past right now.

“Youth culture today is cynical about love,” bell hooks wrote in 2000’s All About Love. I wonder what she’d have made of my Kazaa library back then. My favorite band in 2001 was the Ataris. I still love so much of their catalog, but they have this one track called “The Last Song I Will Ever Write About a Girl.” It contains the lines, “Love is wrong/And girls are fucking evil/I guess I’ll never figure out/What womankind is all about.” Well, with all the fibers of my being, I hope this is the last essay I ever write about careless male artists abusing power. I know it won’t be.