LAUREN…Seventeen magazine, that infuriatingly addictive publication that, since 1944, has been bombarding teen girls with images of the teen girls they will never ever be….Lizzie has a subscription, and I had a subscription when I was Lizzie’s age.  I didn’t want to admit it back when I was 15, and it’s even more embarrassing to admit it now that I am…um, much older than 15.  What is harder to admit is that these many decades later, I grab Lizzie’s copy off her bedroom floor (in the mix of wet towels, crusty socks, old notebooks and Luna bar wrappers) and read it.

I read about how to get Your Best Body Ever (way harder now than before), have Shiny Hair, Perfect Makeup and Cute Clothes.   Boots.  Leggings.  Gell bras.  Mega-lashes.  Shimmery base coats.  Bronze blushes.  Who doesn’t want to be Bold and Trendy or Fresh and Playful?  Fun and Flirty or Cool and Confident?  Reading the magazine is like taking a trip to this foreign land, a bizarre, exotic place populated by a tribe of outlandish females who exist only in that particular environment.  It is riveting.

I have changed so much since I was teen, yet today I feel the same way about the magazine (which I don’t think has changed much at all) as I did those many years ago.  It makes me feel inferior, and it makes me feel superior.  At the same time.  I look at all these impossibly trendy, impossibly thin, professionally made up, skillfully airbrushed young models, and one part of me (still) thinks:  Okay, what can I do to look like that?  Tell me, please tell me.  And another part of me thinks:  How sad, how superficial, (how anti-female), how glad I am to be me.

Being glad to be me was a lot harder at 17 than it is now, but in truth, I never actually wanted to look like the girls in Seventeen.  I envied them, sure.  Who didn’t?  But I pitied them too.  What a burden to be those girls.  The hours it would take in front of the mirror, the shelves and shelves of products, the attention to detail, the keeping up.  I would rather – then as now – read a book.  But still…are there really Simple, Amazing Style Tricks to flatter my figure?  And what are the season’s Must-Haves?

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