by Kara Jesella
But the piece also included some points that were probably harder for a lot of parents to swallow, like when Laural says, “You can have feelings for a woman or even make love to a woman once and it won’t necessarily change your life; I mean, you won’t necessarily be a lesbian.” Or when Alex complains that in suburbia, he is taunted with cries of, “You homo, you fag, you AIDS victim.”
Despite advertisers’ concerns about Sassy’s sexual content, the magazine was an immediate business success. It scored ads from Benetton, ArtCarved class rings, Cover Girl, and even Trojan condoms, making Sassy the first American teen magazine to accept condom ads and proving that its commitment to sex education extended beyond its health features. But the loving, humanistic portraits of gay teens made the already skittish advertisers increasingly nervous. “Sandra and Jane spent a lot of time educating them about why it was important to talk to teens this way and do these stories,” says Elizabeth. “Advertisers would say, ‘Okay, we’ll try it out, take you at your word.’”
the boycott
As the first new teen magazine to come along in years, Sassy was getting its fair share of attention beyond the magazine industry. Sex stories made a particularly easy subject for the news media to grab onto. Jane was on a national media tour, going city to city and doing local TV, and was often asked whether the question “Are you ready for sex?” was promoting teen experimentation. In the article of the same title, Karen wrote about practicing rolling condoms on a banana. “Even that—which doesn’t seem like that big of a deal—people were already starting to watch us then,” says Jane.
And, naturally, not all of these people were pleased. Irate parents called Sassy’s office to complain; some canceled subscriptions. Perhaps even liberated, formerly free-loving, Cosmo-reading, baby boomer parents weren’t always as comfortable with the concept of teenagers and sex—or the idea that their daughters didn’t need to ask permission to lead their own erotic lives—as they thought they were.
In fact, the country was deeply divided about the place of the patriarchy in the lives of teenage girls: the death of Becky Bell in 1988—from the complications of an illegal abortion, which she underwent rather than tell her parents about her pregnancy and ask for consent for a legal procedure—was a lighting rod for abortion-rights groups, who blamed Indiana’s parental consent law, and anti-abortion groups, who blamed the country’s flimsy moral fiber. Jan Dawes—the mother of three sons, all grown—was in the latter camp. The woman from Wabash, Indiana, together with two of her Christian girlfriends, launched a petition campaign against the magazine. And she convinced her local Kmart and Hooks Drug Store to stop stocking Sassy.
Dawes was a member of a right-wing group called Women Aglow. The organization, which still exists today, is a proponent of laughably misogynistic beliefs. In an article on their Web site titled “10 Things Men Need to Know About Women,” item number six is “I need your logical, objective perception of things as much as you need my intuitive, subjective sensitivity. I get so emotionally involved in situations that I don’t see it clearly.” Item number eight is “I really do want you to be my spiritual leader.”
In the late 1980s, the religious right was just beginning to gather steam—The Silent Scream, a movie condemning abortion, was being screened to young pregnant women—and targeting teen-agers was a priority. Other like-minded organizations saw what Dawes was doing and decided to join her anti-Sassy crusade. In July, Focus on the Family, a California-based group headed by conservative activist James Dobson—who would later become known for having the ear of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, and loudly and successfully crusading against gay marriage—published an article in the Citizen, the group’s monthly newsletter, denouncing the magazine as “without question the most sexually provocative teen magazine ever published.”
In America, at least, this was probably true. While Seventeen had at least one article pertaining to sex every month, most of Sassy’s early issues contained more sexual content. The May issue may have been particularly interesting to hormone-addled adolescents. In addition to “She Was a Teenage Stripper” (hardly a how-to), there is “What Your Mom Doesn’t Know About You” (“Wow. Only 14 percent of mothers thought their daughters had lost their virginity … But c’mon, moms, this is 1988”) and “How to Kiss” (“Do put your fingers in his mouth. Okay, I was forced to put this one in. A few sickos—I mean people in this office—brought it up and I must admit there have been a couple of guys in my past who have gotten into it”). The “Help” section includes a letter from a girl who is having sex with her female friend and wants to stop, and one from a girl who has a teacher who “wants to jump on me.” There’s also a “What Now” piece bemoaning the fact that ten states are instating parental consent laws for girls under eighteen who want to have abortions.
But the article that so rankled Dawes, which was published in the second issue, was called “The Truth About Boys’ Bodies.” She told Dobson: “Let me just say that I’ve been married for thirty-one years. There was information in that particular article that I found offensive and shocking. And, having had a fulfilling relationship with my husband for thirty years, it was information I could well have done without.” But it’s hard to imagine that a woman who lived with four males wouldn’t already be familiar with the article’s contents. There wasn’t a particularly pornographic element to the high-school health-class basics that Sassy was presenting; it was mostly highly uncontroversial facts, like “at about age fourteen, a guy’s voice changes from something that sounds like Pee-Wee Herman to something that sounds more like John Wayne (he hopes).” In one section, titled “Below the Belt,” Karen writes, “You can’t fool me. I know you’re all reading this section first.” And while she goes on to use the words testicles, pubic hair, and penis, it’s still science-textbook chaste. The cheekiest part of the article is the cartoon illustration of a dorky-looking dude clad only in heart-covered boxers, accompanied by a few sentences debunking the old wives’ tale that the shape and size of a boy’s fingers are related to the shape and size of his penis—“So you can stop staring at that guy in chemistry with the huge hands.”
In the Citizen, Dobson enumerates a number of other articles he finds offensive, including “Swimsuits We Dare You to Wear,” a “Condom Update,” and the “What Now” about parental consent before obtaining abortions. Thumbing his nose at the ninth commandment, he also listed pieces that were blatant fictions: stories titled “Good Manners for Good-Mannered Sex,” “Seductive Nights: Daring Designs That Will Make Any Night a Night to Remember,” and “Snakes and Lovers” (what is that?) never ran in the magazine.
But Dobson’s piece wasn’t meant to be descriptive—it was a call to action accompanied by a “What You Can Do” sidebar, which directed angry acolytes to make their displeasure known. Dobson kindly included a list of who’s who to complain to, and their addresses. Besides Jane Pratt, it included Revlon, Noxell (owner of Noxzema and Cover Girl), Schering-Plough, Inc. (Maybelline), Carter-Wallace Inc. (Nair, Sea & Ski tanning lotion), and Tambrands, Inc. (Tampax, Maxithins). In other words, all of Sassy’s biggest advertisers.
Hundreds of letters poured into the 1 Times Square offices. In response, Jane dutifully published a letter in the Citizen that read “Sassy in no way intends to take the place of parents or to undermine their values. We only hope to be a source of entertainment, companionship, and information for teenagers at a time when such information is potentially a matter of life and death … In the end, our goals are probably not so different.”
But if Jane and her staff weren’t particularly concerned by Dobson, they soon had Reverend Donald Wildmon, the head of the American Family Association, to contend with. Wildmon had already launched a successful advertising campaign against the TV raunchfest Married with Children when he began publishing articles criticizing Sassy in his bulletin, which reached millions. And the Moral Majority launched their own campaign, claiming that Sassy promoted sex and homosexuality, and that
its stories threatened parent-child relationships.
With three right-wing groups on the attack, letters from parents and other concerned zealots flooded into the offices of Procter & Gamble, Tampax, and the like, threatening the companies that they would lose customers if they continued to advertise in Sassy. Within a matter of months, Sassy had lost nearly every ad account. To put it another way, the magazine’s debut issue was 129 pages; in April 1988, the magazine was 105 pages; and the following month it was 97 pages—a result of decreasing ads. According to the February 1989 issue of Adweek, twelve newsstand chains stopped carrying the magazine.
The staff jokingly referred to the magazine as the “Sassy pamphlet.” But the business repercussions were hardly laughable. “We basically had, like, Guess Jeans as our only advertiser. Maybelline pulled out. Cover Girl pulled out,” says Mary. “I have to appreciate Paul Marciano of Guess Jeans,” agrees Jane. “He came to Sassy because of the controversy.”
The same thing that got Guess on board with Sassy—it made good business sense for a brand with a risqué reputation—kept advertisers with more wholesome images away. It was hardly a moral decision. Though advertisers’ unwillingness to support Sassy was blamed on the magazine’s sexual content, Elizabeth wrote in Utne, their concerns were really about sales. “I realized that many of the same companies that objected to ‘Sex for Absolute Beginners’ in Sassy nevertheless advertised without complaint in Dolly—the most widely read teen magazine in the world in terms of circulation per capita.” (In fact, Dolly’s sex education stories could make Dr. Ruth blush: “An old man wanking in public is a dirty thing,” advised one on the do’s and don’ts of masturbation.) But mass-market companies are intrinsically skittish. They didn’t necessarily think that what Sassy was saying about sex was wrong; they simply didn’t want to rock the boat and anger any of their potential consumers. It was safer for them to place their ads in less controversial magazines that wouldn’t upset an increasingly vocal constituency.
“There was a kind of sexism back then. Advertisers didn’t really believe girls had money and, if they did have money, they really felt like they only understood makeup,” says Sarah Crichton, who was executive editor of Seventeen at the time. In the late 1990s, companies started to see that girls had lots of disposable income, and they were spending it on all kinds of things—fashion, cars, gadgets. But in the eighties, it was a struggle “to convince advertisers that teenage girls had any impact financially at all,” Crichton says. Clearly, keeping girls’ parents happy was more important than impressing young consumers.
Something was going to have to give. And that meant editorial compromise. The September issue was already being printed when a story debunking the myths of masturbation (“maybe you call it jerking off, a hand job, beating off”) was deemed too risky and was pulled. “A big advertiser said, ‘If you run that story, we will pull all of our ads.’ And we literally stopped the presses and replaced the story with something else,” says Karen, who authored the story. She adds that in her rage, she “was throwing things.” (She later gave the story to riot grrrl zine Girl Germs to publish.) So many companies were pulling ads out of the magazine that no one staff member can remember exactly which one delivered the final ultimatum on the piece.
There was also one other matter. A reader had sent in a question to the “Help” column asking if she could get AIDS from giving her boyfriend a blow job. It was one thing to say “oral sex”—Seventeen certainly did—but Sandra Yates thought the colloquial phrasing would add more fuel to the fire, endangering the magazine’s existence.
“The language just bothered people, because it was that thing that Time magazine called ‘Pajama-party journalism,’” says Jane, referring to the informal way Sassy spoke to its readers. “To use that language when you’re talking about sex made these old men at the ad agencies feel like we were encouraging it somehow. But we weren’t; we were just talking about it the way kids talk about it. They didn’t understand half the words we used, and that made it hard. ‘So you’re promoting blow jobs.’ No, we’re not promoting them, we’re saying you could get AIDS from them.”
The “Help” page of that issue had to be shredded.
“If they had produced the issue as it was, they would have been on their way out of business,” Michael Drexler, the national media director of the Bozell ad agency, told Jonathan van Meter in an article he wrote about the boycott for 7 Days, a New York City weekly. “No question. The end.”
underestimating the enemy
Before the boycott, “I don’t remember her stopping us from doing anything,” says Jane of Sandra. And though she occasionally vetoed ideas because they were too expensive, “She never vetoed anything on the basis of it being too crazy or wild, ever.”
A quintessentially Australian publisher, Sandra really believed in letting her young staff make the editorial decisions. And why not? In less than six months from its launch, Sassy’s circulation climbed from 250,000 to 500,000, making it one of the most successful women’s magazine launches in history. And though Sandra was business-savvy enough to pull the masturbation and blow-job stories at the crucial eleventh hour, in some ways, it was too little, too late. In fact, she had never really understood the dire threat the right wing posed. No one from Australia did. “I couldn’t believe it. Neill was the same,” says Cheryl. “The things we were writing about—relationships, suicide, masturbation—we had run in Australia without a problem.”
When the boycott started, “Sandra was amazing,” says Elizabeth. “She said, ‘Let’s stay the course. We will educate the public about this.’” In many ways, her cultural naïveté was what helped make the magazine so special.
Jane and Sandra embarked on a cross-country tour to try to pacify advertisers and wholesalers, to tell them why Sassy should be back on newsstands. They certainly had the blessing of the industry. “Both the Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors were very supportive of Sassy when the boycott began,” says Sandra. Support came from a few other unusual sources as well: Kevyn Aucoin, the late celebrity makeup artist, was working with Cover Girl at the time, and told the company he would stop unless they reinstated their ads. “I didn’t find this out until later,” says Jane. “He called them and said, ‘I’m not going to work with you guys anymore unless you put your ads back in Sassy,’” He knew that their pulling out was related to the articles the magazine had run on homosexuality, and “he thought that it was amazing, what we had done.”
For the most part, Sandra and Jane’s plan worked. Though Sassy’s first publisher, Helen Barr, quit—aghast at the magazine’s continued pushing of the proverbial envelope—a new publisher was hired, and advertisers slowly came back. Sassy even tried to make peace with Women Aglow, doing an “On the Road” on Jan Dawes’s hometown of Wabash, Indiana. (“It did nothing to mollify them,” says Elizabeth.)
In November 1988, Sassy ran yet another sex article. But this one was just as appealing to the magazine’s critics as it was to its young, sometimes inexperienced fans. It was titled “Virgins Are Cool.”
sex and your body
Sassy’s competition lambasted the magazine for its sex coverage. “I don’t think that feature is responsible,” Robert Brown, associate publisher of Teen, has said about the article “Losing Your Virginity.” “I think it’s offensive.”
That depends, of course, on your definition of responsibility. To the Sassy staff, it was irresponsible, in light of the threat of AIDS and the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, to pretend that teens weren’t having sex; it was irresponsible to talk to teenagers about sex in a way that wouldn’t connect with them; it was irresponsible to shy away from subjects that were important to teenagers simply because writing about them might piss off advertisers. Not to mention that it was more irresponsible to pretend that all of its readers were the consummate good girls, that their parents were always right, that sex wasn’t the issue that loomed largest in their minds.
I
n other words, Sassy’s definition of responsibility was radically different from Seventeen’s. “You weren’t like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to give those girls the truth,’” says Crichton, who was in charge of all the articles, of the magazine’s traditional role as an extension of the patriarchy. “You were like, ‘We’ve just got to give those girls what’s good for them.’”
It’s an attitude she probably learned from her boss, Midge Richardson, the editor in chief of Seventeen and an ex-nun. Midge grew up in a Catholic family in Los Angeles, a former child star who had appeared in a movie called The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer with Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple. But she put aside her Hollywood life when she found God, joined a convent, and became Sister Agnes, then a Mother Superior. She was heading a high school in her home city when she was stricken with psychosomatic blindness. The doctors told her that she would never regain her sight if she didn’t make some major life changes. So she left the convent—and apparently that’s all it took—and wrote a memoir about her experience called The Buried Life. While she was doing press for the book, an editor at Glamour magazine called her up and offered her a job. She accepted.
One day, Alexander Liberman, the legendary Condé Nast editorial director, spotted her in the elevator and asked around about the cute girl who looked like a nun. “She was a nun, until recently,” he was told. But she was quite fetching without her habit on. In fact, she caught the eye of Vogue photographer Gordon Parks, who sent her to France for a $10,000 makeover, including a chic new haircut from Vidal Sassoon. All of which is to say, by the time Jane Pratt appeared on the magazine scene, Midge wasn’t totally uncool: she wore Ungaro and Chanel; she dated Burt Reynolds—no rock star, true, but a furry-chested Cosmo centerfold all the same; and she later married Hamilton Richardson, a tennis star who had an apartment on Park Avenue, rented a huge house in Southampton, and owned a condo on Palm Beach.