The Woman Cosmo Told Me I'd Be

As a teenager, I went on a quest to reinvent myself--from eyeliner to sex--inspired by Cosmo Magazine

In the 2000s, long before the days of Amazon grocery delivery, I used to accompany my mom while she went grocery shopping. While I love my mom, she has one fatal flaw (actually a combination of two) which is that she is a perfectionist but also waits until the last minute to do things. Christmas grocery shopping—which always took place way too close to Christmas—seemingly took eight hours, popping in to a variety of specialty stores because the garlic at the regular grocery store looked “too dry,” and driving across town to a specialty butcher for pheasant and venison. Typical non-Christmas grocery shopping wasn’t quite as hectic, but still took a while.

Because this process took so long, I would take advantage of a grocery store amenity that now seems antiquated: a free daycare. Unfortunately, it was intended for very young children. The only thing even remotely age-appropriate for me, an eleven-year-old, was an insipid Elmo computer game on a chunky kids’ computer with big yellow buttons, which I played repeatedly in hopes that I could unlock some secret level. Eventually, the daycare workers told my mother I couldn’t go there anymore because I was clearly too old for it (Fair.) So while I waited for my mom to select the perfect fresh herbs for the Martha Stewart duck recipe she was going to try that night, I would stand around at the checkout area and read women’s magazines. I graduated from Big Bird to Big Boobs.

As I became a teenage girl (and a girly-girl at that) I gravitated toward Cosmopolitan. I mean, every single issue had the word “SEX” emblazoned on the cover in hot pink letters. How could I not read it? Of course, I didn’t want to look like some kind of proto-gooner, so I made sure to spend most of my time reading about fashion and makeup, keeping a pinky finger wedged between the sex part so I could occasionally peek at the perverted pages when nobody was looking. Once, I opened and saw a passive-aggressive cutout pamphlet of sex tips that you were supposed to give to your boyfriend, including one tip that’s seared in my mind because it was so odd: when you’re about to go down on a woman, huff on her pussy a few times like you’re fogging up a car window.

My mom agreed to buy me a few of these magazines, but usually just Marie Claire or Glamour, which were considerably less raunchy than Cosmo. That was fine, because while the pussy-fogging sex was what initially drew me to the magazines, it wasn’t the main event. My favorite thing about these magazines—by far—was the endless, bountiful options for reinventing myself.

Recently, as a thirty-five-year-old, I visited my mom’s house for Thanksgiving, only to stumble upon the ultimate Cosmo Bible that I put together twenty years ago. I called it Amazing Guide:

Amazing Guide was completely comprised of clippings from women’s magazines. I was allowed to organize and curate them, but I set a rule for myself that I couldn’t personally write anything in Amazing Guide. It would all have to be vetted by trusted sources, such as the expert writers over at Cosmo who came up with the idea of situating a hotdog bun under your man’s member for “funky foreplay.” And Amazing Guide would—ideally—allow me to reinvent myself and become the woman that Cosmo told me I would become.

First of all, it goes without saying that almost every facet of self-reinvention boiled down to becoming hotter. I was a cute enough kid; I went through puberty at a completely unremarkable age, and by the time I was in high school I didn’t have any glaringly awkward features. But I still wanted to crawl out of my skin and balked at the handheld mirror that my excessively Jewish orthodontist handed me after every appointment—I didn’t like that I was pale, or brunette (I saw other people “pulling off” being pale and brunette in ways I couldn’t quite articulate.) I didn’t like that I was pear-shaped. I didn’t like that I had cellulite no matter how much I thought about working out. I didn’t like that my lips weren’t big, my nose wasn’t small, or that my hair wasn’t effortlessly waist-length (Despite loving my extremely long hair, I chopped it short after a bad breakup in ninth grade, with a 5’4” theater kid who was obsessed with Michael Moore.)

Of course, anyone close to me would parrot the same trite talking points about “loving myself” and “becoming confident.” But I didn’t see how I could magically make that switch. Surely, to become confident, I would have to become someone who inspired confidence. Enter Amazing Guide.