I became a feminist after reading Cosmopolitan. And that’s why I’ll never write for women’s magazines as part of my freelance career.

One day in mid-college I flipped through my latest issue of Cosmo, fresh from the mail. I was just exiting my ill-advised sorority phase, when I thought I wanted to be someone, anyone different, and found instead who I least wanted to be. I left the sorority for a number of reasons, but realized that day over Cosmo the true reasons why.

Poring over the glossy photos and ads, along with the light-as-air pieces that passed for articles, I realized the magazine did nothing good for me. In fact, it peddled the same form of self-hatred I’d seen in all my mother’s magazines and in all those teen magazines I read as a younger girl. It highlighted every woman’s insecurities about appearance, sexuality, work, and l-i-v-i-n, drew them out and preyed on them. It told me I was nothing if I didn’t look like the women on the cover and inside, that I was a non-entity unless I learned how to please a man (with the sex), that my life’s ambition should be to get married, and that once I did, sure, I could go through the motions of a career and individual life, but I would really just need to quiet down, pop out some kids, and live out the rest of my days in irrelevance.

It all hit me that day. For some reason I got it, and I threw down the magazine and canceled my subscription. Over the next months I realized I truly left the sorority because female sisterhood there was a complete farce, made up of backstabbing politics and Mean Girls behavior. I left because they valued traditional gender roles above all, with cringe-worthy ceremonies for girls that got pinned and engaged at the tender age of 19 and 20. I left because I knew that life was not for me.

I was living with a boyfriend at the time, a boyfriend I had planned on marrying and reproducing with. But that all changed. I realized first I didn’t want to change my last name if I got married. Why should I? I reasoned. It’s my name, my identity. It belongs only to me. Then I realized I didn’t want to follow my man wherever his doctor career took him. My goals and wishes were just as important, if not more. Then I started questioning the whole marriage thing in its entirety. When we broke up, an inevitable result of my personality and beliefs changing while his stayed the same, I was sad and distraught and hurt. But I got over it. And I felt free.

How does this relate to my freelancing career? There are lines I draw when it comes to accepting and seeking out work. And women’s magazines are one of them. I know that many women and men find enormous rewards and paychecks by writing for these magazines, and understand that within some of the biggies (Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, etc.) there are meaty, significant articles you could conceivably find in “serious” newspapers and magazines. But I refuse to participate in markets that demean women, that encourage the traditional route of femininity and gender roles as the only worthy route to follow, that push women to stay insecure about their bodies and focused on the all-powerful marriage-as-means-to-meaning. No matter the lip service they give to “empowerment,” I ain’t buying it. And so I ain’t writing for it either.

What do you think? What markets or writing jobs do you refuse to consider, and why?