Seventeen

In her blog (http://www.girlinthisroom.blogspot.com/) entitled “Guys Should Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses”, Cait says:

When I was thirteen I was, like so many other angsty teen girls, a wannabe poet and a wannabe suicide risk. I also had a borderline unnatural obsession with being published in Seventeen magazine. Everybody knows that no self-respecting seventeen year old actually reads Seventeen--this periodical (if you can use such an esteemed word to describe it) is meant for the twelve to fifteen year old set. Before you learn to drive, before you start sneaking out to go to peach schnapps-fueled house parties, you read Seventeen and dream of one day having a boyfriend and maybe buying a Hypercolor t-shirt.

My feelings have always been that there were no girls anywhere, no matter where you looked, who ever looked anything like any of the girls in Seventeen Magazine. I was told this by a friend who made me go and look at the magazine in the drugstore, when no one was looking.

We were seventeen at the time, and were really bummed out by the reality of this statement. I’ve worried about this for years, but until Cait wrote this down, I never considered the actual age of the audience. Cait never figured that there were guys, hiding in drug store corners, looking at the magazine as well. We were the hidden audience, pining away for those unobtainable girls!