who's the gURL
How We Learned to Stop
Hating Ourselves
&
Get Over the Girl Mags

by Esther Drill and Rebecca Odes,
editors of the online zine gURL



Reading fashion magazines has never been an option for me. It

has always been a compulsion, a need for what I first thought

was inspiration, and later discovered to be something equally

related to abuse. When I went away to college, my mother

celebrated by finally chucking the hundreds of Seventeen

magazines which were piled up like a guard wall around the

perimeter of my room. I had stopped reading them years before,

when I decided I was too mature to benefit from their prissy

insights and goofily diluted fashion, but I couldn't part with

them anyway. They were souvenirs of the moment I buried my

private neuroses in the sand and climbed on the hayride of

mass-directed "normal" insecurities.

bottle of fulfill me tube of happiness jar of la placebo


Many years and books later, I look at the grown-up versions of

those magazines through brain-bifocals. Understanding the sham

of beauty culture is somehow no deterrent to my obsession. I

don't buy fashion mags very often, but when I do, I can practically see

my twelve-year-old self digging into my wallet. Not

surprisingly, I usually buy them on the way home from the

shrink. The problem of finding a good, tenacious lipstick seems

comparatively easy to solve.

-- Rebecca
Reading fashion magazines together can be fun (not really)
I grew up uninterested in fashion magazines. I was for tennis

and math and reading and intellivision. Not fashion. Not girl

mags. Not girl "things". I would go over to Rebecca's house and

just roll my eyes at her Seventeens. They seemed so tedious to

me. So fakey. I dealt with not living up to the ridiculous

fashion ideal by completely ignoring it, by deciding that it

didn't relate to me at all. It was a boring dichotomy I lived

under and one that didn't leave me many options. Either you

cared about clothes or you cared about more important things.


eau d'excitement transformage lotion
I love to see those old movies where the tomboys miraculously

transform into beautiful, elegant women fabulously decked out

and desired. Till recently, that transformation eluded me.

But lately, I have taken to dyeing my hair, painting my toenails, and

refreshing my lipstick with surprising gusto. I see the fun in

fashion now. I've come to discover that fashion, from the right

point of view, is like, totally interesting.

-- Esther



gURL

gURL tries to encompass both of our angles, as well as the ones

in between. All the gURLs on the staff have their own ambivalent

relationships with girlmags - gURL is an attempt to take what we

want from them and chuck what we hate. It's about trying to

reconcile the kind of girls we were with the kind of women we

are. Where we can get just as excited about sex and clothes as

popping zits and climbing rocks.


blemish remover
take matters into
your own hands

i lost my virginity



Check out the sister story:

"Dear TeenGirl Spirit"