LIZZIE…Ah yes, nothing like looking at girls prettier and skinnier than me with flawless smiles and an actual sense of fashion!  Wow…doesn’t that sound depressing?  To be completely honest, I can’t look through Seventeen magazine without feeling terrible.  Yet I look through every issue.

There are four sections in the magazine:  ads (lots and lots and lots), clothes and make-up features, love advice and then always one serious story about suicide or rape.  It’s everything a teen girl wants to know!  Well, not this teen girl.

Besides feeling inferior and self-conscious while looking through the endless pages of clothes and make-up and photos of girls who look so different than me that we’re like not even the same species, I always find myself criticizing the advice the magazine gives out.  Seventeen magazine tells you to be innocent, play footsie, share dessert, text cute messages!  Yuck!  Gee, nothing like acting like a helpless charmer, huh?  Like we’re just arm candy?  I don’t know,  I just find it all so fake.  Why not just go out into the world and figure out how to be yourself…and get the guy that way?  But Seventeen magazine can’t say that because then they couldn’t sell all those products that ate supposed to make you look like the girls in Seventeen magazine.

But I have to say (and I’m sorry to say) that even though I know how unrealistic the models are in Seventeen magazine – or any model in the world – there’s part of me that still longs to look like that.

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