The concept of a “Hot Girl summer” lives to see another June. We gave it a go! We gave it a good go, tried our hardest, sloughing dead skin in an attempt to free the hot girl beneath. “Save me!” came her voice, muffled as if from the bottom of a well. But try as we may, for most of us a Hot Girl summer was not realistic. Instead we are heading towards a Blobfish summer, floating very close to the ground with low-density flesh. A naked mole rat summer, dumbly burrowing into our own subconsciousness, pink, cold-blooded, unable (or unwilling) to feel pain. Our summer identities are sadly only an inch away from our winter ones, the main difference being sleeves. It’s at this time of year that I start to think about the lessons I learned from teen magazines, growing up. Every June, a new version of the ancient pursuit of a “bikini body” arrives. And with it, sense memories that are difficult to shake. My education at the hands of Just Seventeen, More!, Sugar and their sisters remains carved into the hardest part of my brain like initials on a tree. As age has caused it to scar and gnarl, the lessons – always change into a white T shirt before you get off a plane, blast your hair with cold water before getting out of the shower – have now become part of me. More than any petty maths or science I learned at school, these, I realise as summer comes, are my foundations. So it’s a pity, looking back, that so many of these lessons, swallowed hungrily by girls like me, desperate for a rulebook with which to navigate that cold and sticky world, were grounded in shame. Not only were diet tips standard, but they were the sort of tips that today would result in online scandal. Chew every mouthful 100 times, they said. If you’re hungry have a big glass of water, they said. The primary role of fashion (I learned at 12) was to help control and create the illusion of a compact body, rather than the morphing flesh sculpture that formed around us as we slept. They’d give us a problem (cellulite, muffin-tops) and then offer ways to fix it, a project intended to last a lifetime. Every month we were treated to a flow chart where we would discover which fruit our figure most resembled, and which jeans we should purchase to disguise it. The rules for neutralising our bodies and faces were complex and witchlike – . When I asked Twitter what lessons had stayed with them, one of the first women to reply said: “Dig a hole under your beach towel, so you look thinner tanning.” A shallow grave for your teenage shame, with room to dig deeper when the cancer hits. Despite sex being a distant fantasy for my friends and I, we all knew how to spice up our love lives by the age of 13. Rather than learning about, say, pleasure and consent, every British girl of my generation could describe how to alternate between a mouthful of tea and ice to give our “boyfriends” a blowjob to remember. A lot of time was spent adjusting our lives, posture and bodies for the boys in magazines. On Twitter, my friend Sophie remembered, “A boy in a ‘What do boys really want?’ quiz said girls in London had less shapely legs because they didn’t walk up as many hills. My friend and I became obsessed with getting ‘Sheffield legs’.” Flirting was an art. One woman learned to “coquettishly put things against your lips and into your mouth to imply being ‘up for it’,” but never wear bold lipstick because it scared boys. I loved: “Smile brightly the first two times he looks at you, then the third time look very sad, so he can come and ask you what’s wrong.” I think about it a lot now, the girls at discos doing a happy, happy, sad dance with their lipglossed mouths. No wonder so many boys found girls so confusing; no wonder that bafflement continues into adult relationships with similar rules drawn roughly in sand. Much of my magazine education was about international travel, which had little relevance to an audience more likely to go camping in Wales than long-haul flights on which we must spritz our faces with cool water every three hours. Similarly, their anti-ageing tips (apply moisturiser in upwards strokes!) were precisely as useful as More!’s “position of the fortnight”, yet on a summer’s day I can reel off every one to order. These flakes of knowledge rise to the surface as the weather turns: the smell of cut grass, a yearning for Orangina, the fact that you can make a boy fall in love with you by syncing your breath with his. And none more so than the importance of “getting sexy for summer”, using small wisdoms we internalised – prevent overeating by pouring salt over your food after half a plate, a “healthy nutritious shake” for lunch, suck your stomach in at all times. This year, rather than sink once more into that pit of inadequacy, I want to uproot those lessons, inspect their powers under the light, see how they’ve adapted over time, and work out how to unlearn them so as to avoid transferring their weird poisons to my children. Apart from the rinse your hair in cold water thing. That’s going nowhere.