It all started when I was trying to find out where to send my Rupert Grint fan mail.

I was 11, and a Yahoo search led me to the official Warner Bros Harry Potter forum, and that’s where I found my very first sex mentor, let’s call her xxSlytherinXXXSweetie<3xxx. Her avatar was a svelte blonde doll, she typed in yellow Arial against the edgy-for-the-noughties black site background, and when she talked about Draco Malfoy’s 6-inch-long cock (lol OK), she had to spell it “co.ck” to trick the website’s decency filters. She probably didn’t know that her slightly naughty (but mostly just bad) fan fiction would make me blush, or that that garish yellow "co.ck" would live in infamy as my initiation into a culture that defined my teenage years. As they say, you never forget your first.

Offline, I was a sheltered military brat; I spent most of my time with my church youth group, or watching the Disney Channel and reading children’s fantasy books, so I had never really come in contact with much sex slang. Even now I can’t read the word “cock” without visualising that little dissecting full stop. Even when we’re talking about chickens. Or raised eyebrows.

Being scandalised by a mediocre sex scene was not something Hermione, the ultimate heroine of my rich teen fantasy life, would do. (Especially not the Hermione of this fic, who was too busy getting drilled by Draco in a magical soundproof bubble in the Prefects’ Toilet to be worried about the shock value, or worse, grammatical sin, of a pretty arbitrary epithet for junk.) But the idea that a character I knew, loved, and admired, could be doing something that felt so far beyond my maturity level is something I thought I should be worried about. Something I was ill-equipped to deal with. This was grown-up stuff, and grown-up stuff is scary. At 11, I was only about 10% curious about it; the remaining 90% cringed from sex in every other aspect of life. Too busy organising Beanie Babies and lip-syncing to Mandy Moore, thank you very much.