For many people, the sign that they are crossing into adulthood is something arbitrary, like getting their first chest hair or period. I had something a little more concrete. I had J-14 magazine.
I still remember being slightly bemused when, on my fourteenth birthday, I unwrapped a small package that contained a thank-you-for-ordering slip for the magazine. I considered the present my mother had oh-so-expectantly placed in my hands. Learning about celebrities felt like almost a right of passage. My mother denounced the practice of following them like they were gods, yet always had TMZ on. It felt like an adult passion—something reserved for women, not girls.
And here I was, staring at a grainy image of Taylor Lautner’s grinning face as the magazine thanked me for my patronage. I was being given a ticket in.
If you didn’t grow up with a subscription to J-14 magazine, you frankly weren’t missing out on a lot. Nothing particularly differentiated it from other teen magazines of the time, like Tiger Beats or Teen Vogue before it became woke. But for a lot of people, J-14 was their first brush with the concept of being a teenager. Eleven to twelve, you were still considered a tweenager. Thirteen, you didn’t really feel as if you had shaken that reputation. But fourteen? Fourteen was the golden year where you finally could join the ranks of teenagehood.
The articles themselves ranged from flat to asinine. In an attempt to present celebrities in a way that made them “accessible” (they’re just like us, after all), J-14, as well as pretty much any celebrity magazine of the past, present, and future, created very strange articles that were somehow so normal, so unremarkable, that they ended up being almost alien. Articles detailing celebrities’ favorite foods, what they were looking for in a partner (hint—the qualities were always so vague that it could totally be you), and a shocking amount that detailed their near-death experiences were par for the course. Almost all of the celebrities had some sort of sob story to offer to the magazine each month about a haunting past, a score unsettled, a fear of failure—but nothing too serious, because this was a children’s magazine, after all, and the kids were just there to cut out pictures of Joe Jonas to paste onto their school binders.
And pictures there were!
Each issue of J-14 magazine came absolutely loaded with posters that, try as you might, you could never take out of the magazine without ripping to shreds (who needs perforated edges?). But it didn’t matter if you had ripped through that poster of Justin Bieber, so long as you had some scraps of him left to scotch-tape to your wall. I remember feeling an incredible sense of autonomy when I removed my first batch of posters from the magazine and taped over the train wallpaper that my room had since infancy. It was the first real augmentation that I had made to my room of my own volition—not my parents putting up a painting that they thought would look nice, or moving in some furniture, or arranging my toys in a way that would be pleasing to them. For the first time, I was given a choice in how my living space looked. It made my room feel like a sanctuary. Which is a lot of power for one Tokio Hotel poster to give you.
And really, that was the true impact of J-14. It wasn’t a good magazine by any means. But it made its readers feel important. It made them feel like they were the only person in the world who had access to top secret information on the stars we knew and loved, even if that “top secret information” was just that they hated pickles. It gave us a real sense of moving forward in our lives, that we were finally the teens in the movies that we had watched growing up. It made us feel welcome.
And what great piece of media doesn’t do that?
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