SHOUT!

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for use of ableist slurs.]

I just remembered - the first time I did it, and why.

I mean, as I've mentioned already, I'd been scratching since forever. But that was about the limit of it, until I was, oh, I guess eleven or twelve. I used to buy this magazine called SHOUT!. I think they still sell it today. A kind of teen magazine for pre-teens who wanted to feel older than they were; a smaller, cheaper and tackier version of Sugar, giving away free lipsticks or hair pins or sequinned purses with every issue. And they had this article, one fortnight, on looking after your complexion.

You should never squeeze out your spots, they will heal faster if you leave them alone, read the first sentence. Well, that wasn't news; I figured every idiot knew that much. And who'd want to squeeze a spot anyway? That's the kind of thing that gross, greasy teenage boys do when nobody is looking. Yuck.

And then the next sentence, and the real point of the article: But if you feel you really must squeeze them, then this is how best to do it.

It wasn't just curiosity. This was meant to be a magazine for cool, pretty girls. The implication was that cool, pretty girls just have to get rid of that spot. That a compulsion to squeeze them out is healthy and normal, and that only an ugly retarded freak would leave it sitting there for the whole world to see.

I was tired of being a retarded freak. I guess I had started buying SHOUT! in the hope that maybe, just maybe, it could teach me to be a cool, pretty, popular kid.

Fuck you, SHOUT! magazine.