Magazines I Hated But Bought Anyway

Hi, I’m Asten. I’m autistic, I grew up in the 00s, and I had a complicated relationship with teen girl magazines.

I bought them every week. I read them cover to cover. I hated most of them.

They were glossy, loud, full of ads, and always seemed to be yelling at me about what I should look like, what boys wanted, how to flirt, what my makeup said about my personality — and I just wanted to know if anyone else was obsessed with Basil Brush. Spoiler: they were not.

I don’t think I ever saw someone like me on the cover. Awkward, autistic, slightly weird-looking girls who weren’t interested in boys? Nope. Not even once.

It always felt like I was reading something for other girls — the “normal” kind. But back then, I thought that was my problem. I thought I was the one getting it wrong.

The worst offender? SUGAR. The amount of ✨ unsolicited ✨ advice in that thing was wild.

Second place? Probably Bliss — always going on about how to “get your crush to notice you” when all I wanted was to win the karaoke competition with a Britney song and maybe play some Neopets after school.

Now I look back and think… maybe a lot of autistic girls felt this way. Maybe we were all out there reading the same trashy mags, pretending to care about “kiss tips,” and quietly wondering why none of it made sense.

Also: you never saw Basil Brush in them. And that’s why I never fully trusted them. Boom boom.

If I’d Made My Own Magazine…

It would’ve been chaotic. And pink. And a little bit weird.

Every issue would’ve had:

A full-page poster of Basil Brush A feature called “What’s Actually Cool (By Asten)” — think Neopets, VHS tapes, and bringing back Tammy Girl A section for autistic girl problems (with solutions like “ditch the party and go home to reorganise your CD collection”) Real-life stories like: “I got obsessed with a cartoon fox for 20 years and I regret NOTHING” “I rewrote the entire plot of a movie in my head because the real ending made no sense” “I can tell what year it is in a photo based on the carpet pattern alone” An advice column run by Daisy Carter. No actual advice. Just chaos.

And the quizzes? They’d be things like:

Which nostalgic computer game are you? What part of the 00s fashion cycle lives rent-free in your wardrobe? Are you a Barbie.com girlie, a MyScene menace, or a Sims world-builder?

Also, every issue would come with a free gift: a pink sparkly CD case, a tamagotchi, or a sticker that says “NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR BOY DRAMA, THANKS.”

That’s the magazine I needed. That’s the one a lot of us needed.

Teen girl magazines didn’t get me. But that’s okay. I get me now.

Boom boom.