How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  After reading Sassy for a while, Lew decided that he was going to make contact with the magazine. He randomly picked Christina Kelly’s name off the masthead of Sassy and mailed her an eclectic collection of his desk detritus. Charmed, she wrote him back, and the two started a mail correspondence. Finally, a series of hangouts between the Homeboy boys and the Sassy girls was arranged.

  Lew first met Jane and Christina, who were in Palm Springs for a Miss Teen USA competition (for what would become Christina’s article “Beauty Pageants Are a Lot Like the Army” in February 1990). A few months later, Lew, Andy, and Spike went to a bike event in New York and stopped by the Sassy offices. “It felt a little like meeting our East Coast counterparts,” Spike remembers. Even though the Sassy staff was for the most part only a few years older than the Homeboy boys, they seemed “like sophisticated New Yorkers,” he says. The guys were particularly impressed that they could spot rapper Special Ed and prank call Christina’s friends from the office. The three became fixtures in the office and minor celebrities in the magazine, with Lew penning several articles for Sassy. (In fact, Lew and Christina dated briefly.) Spike frequently appeared in “What Now,” sometimes to his chagrin. Christina and Lew decided it would be funny to have a “Win a Date with Spike Jonze” contest one month. “They didn’t tell me about it until I saw it in the magazine,” says Spike. “I was so embarrassed and humiliated and mad.”

  Meanwhile, Homeboy was on its last legs. It was one of the few publications out there that targeted adolescent to postadolescent guys. But with a circulation of just fifty thousand, it was basically a glorified zine.

  On the heels of Homeboy’s decline, Lew, Spike, and Andy had an idea for another kind of magazine for guys. The three created a mock table of contents and article layout, and Jane set up a meeting with Dale Lang, who listened to their pitch. But Lang thought he had too much on his own publishing agenda to do it. He suggested that they put out a first issue by themselves and see how it went. Dejected and lacking the funds to self-publish, they were about to consider other employment. Then they got a call from Lang, about two weeks later, asking if they still wanted to do a magazine. Lang had recently been asked by a journalist at The Wall Street Journal why there weren’t any male publications in the same vein as Sassy. (Details had just gone from a local New York publication to a national magazine, but it skewed affluent and effete. The only other general-interest magazine for boys was Boys’ Life, and you had to be a Boy Scout to receive it.) Lang claimed to already have a title in the works. He set the guys up in the Lang Communications West Coast ad-sales office, in a fancy suite on the twenty-fourth floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard.

  The first of issue of Dirt came out in September 1991 and was polybagged with Sassy. The cover featured a burning TV set (it was real, not Photoshopped) and the words “Youth Culture?” with smaller photos of such early nineties icons as MTV vixen Kari Wuhrer, rapper Ice T, and a snowboarder. Lew was the editor, Spike was the photographer, and Andy was the art director. “The magazine world has fallen short of producing anything for, ahem, young men, with a general interest in life itself,” Lew writes in his first editor’s letter. “And a whole lot of subjects fall into the category of daily living, so that’s basically what you can expect to find within Dirt. Sports, music, art, chicks, cars, celebrities, style, girls, motorcycles, females, global issues, current events, women, junk food, video games, and stone cold babes.” It was a mere fifty-two pages in length but was chock full of everything they promised: a column called “Junk Drawer” that served as Dirt’s answer to “What Now,” a story on the life of a gangster, Q&As with Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and the supercross racer Jeff Stanton, and the very Sassy-esque “Idiot’s Guide to First Dates.” There was a guys-only survey enclosed to test readers’ reactions. They got seventeen thousand responses in ten days.

  In a magazine world where demographics—not psychographics—still ruled, the fact that the magazine was so varied in terms of content made it hard to pinpoint. At Homeboy, the reader was clearly defined as someone who skated or rode BMX. “We couldn’t say that about the Dirt reader,” says Andy. “We liked to think our reader was a like-minded fellow who dug the content we filled the magazine with.” Being in the same publishing house as Sassy was an important connection, but all the other magazines at Lang were geared toward women, so Dirt’s articles on crazy bike messengers and rebel soapbox derbies were maybe, as Andy posits, packed with “a little too much testosterone” for the average Sassy reader.

  But for all the boy energy in Dirt, they certainly weren’t chauvinists. “We didn’t want to do cheesecake photos of girls,” Lew explains, “but we never fully grasped how to deal with sexuality in there.” They had a chorus of girl voices in the form of the Sassy staff, who often wrote for Dirt (just as Lew wrote for Sassy). They offered relationship advice, as in the feminist-tinged article “Maybe This Is Why You Can’t Get a Girlfriend” or their column “Dear Girl,” in which Drew Barrymore, Kim Gordon, and Laura Ballance from Superchunk would dish out girl advice to readers.

  For Dirt’s small size and irregular publication (it came out more or less seasonally), it managed to get a lot of fans—both Sassy readers and celebrities. Kim Gordon jokingly told the editors that Sonic Youth’s album Dirty was named in honor of the magazine. Fugazi, a band notoriously elusive to the mainstream press, granted Dirt an interview. Director John Waters sent them a postcard saying how much he loved Dirt. They got writers like Hugh Gallagher and Douglas Coupland to contribute, and Sofia Coppola and the Beastie Boys were frequently spotted in their pages. Lew once sent a bunch of issues of Dirt to Cameron Crowe, who directed Say Anything, Singles, and Almost Famous, and who had been his favorite writer since high school, with a note saying, “I wish you were my friend.” Crowe sent him back a note that read, “Mark, I am your friend.” Lew remembers, “That got me so high.”

  Despite Dirt’s buzz, however, there was still pressure from New York to add fashion and grooming to the magazine to aid in getting ad dollars from big-money cosmetics companies. “In my eyes it just seemed to undermine the content,” Andy says. The three guys normally got their clothes from the Goodwill, or for free from skate companies. Having to use models dressed in mall clothes, they feared, would “pull away from any credibility we might have had. I think we made it work for a while, but it got harder as time went on—harder to be clever about it when we were being sent the goofiest shit to put people in. And the irony is that it didn’t pull in any advertising.”

  From an ad-sales standpoint, Dirt was a hard sell because there was no precedent, and no discernible competition for the magazine. Dale Lang came up with alternative ways to market it, making a deal with Marvel Comics to polybag various comic books with Dirt and sell them in comic shops. But since the average comic-book reader fell off at about fifteen years old, and the average Dirt reader began at about fifteen, it wasn’t the best fit. “I don’t feel anyone at Lang understood what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it,” Andy says (except for the Sassy staff, of course). Ultimately, the Dirt staff felt misunderstood, like they were three kids from L.A. in flannel shirts and jeans with funny ideas. Andy says, “The way we handled things was seen as unorthodox in the world of Lang, and so we never jived or meshed.”

  After about a year of producing Dirt, the three went on a creative retreat, which consisted of them driving around L.A., going to the Holiday Inn in Torrance, and staying up late trying to come up with a big-picture plan. They decided that they had been trying too hard to please the publisher and to make the magazine broadly general interest when their own interests were more niche. “We decided we should stop doing it,” Spike remembers, “or do it in a way that’s inspired.” So for issue six they took a more conceptual approach and did a tour issue, driving across the country for an entire month, hanging out with friends like the Breeders in Ohio, or meeting up with folksinger R. A. Williams.

  The deal with Marvel Comics was clearly not working, but ESPN w
as launching its younger-skewing brother network, ESPN2, and became an investor in the magazine. By that time Andy wanted out and Spike had already begun directing music videos (for the likes of the Beastie Boys, whom he had met through Dirt), so Lew was carrying the magazine on his own. But everything came together for their last issue, called “People, Places, and Things That Made Us Who We Are.” It included an essay by Hugh Gallagher about the deaths of River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. The guys thought it was the best issue yet, the realization of their initial intention. But, according to Spike, “Dale Lang was freaked out. He thought it was too dark and too weird.” It was never printed, and Dirt folded in 1995.

  Lew, Spike, and Andy’s work with Dirt and Sassy gave them a public forum where they could experiment with their burgeoning creative impulses. Andy went on to become the creative director for the hugely popular skate labels Girl and Chocolate, and Lew dabbled in advertising, wrote, and spent a few years in Costa Rica.

  As for Spike, Chloë, and countless other up-and-coming actors, future cultural creators, and underground legends: “I still remember all these people when they were teenagers, and have now become sort of larger-than-life and have managed to turn themselves into these kinds of iconic characters,” says Charles Aaron. “Sassy was the place where they entered the world. It seems like a welcoming way to come into the spotlight.”

  chapter 5

  Girl Culture

  girls, girls, girls

  Dolls. Dress-up. Slumber parties. Makeovers. First kisses. Saturdays spent at the mall. Gum-chewing. Boy bands. Teen magazines had always covered these aspects of female life with the utmost earnestness. The male mainstream had deemed all these things silly. Second Wave feminists, in their attempt to be seen as equals, had denigrated it all as fluff served up to distract an impressionable population from weightier issues.

  Sassy unapologetically celebrated the pop-cultural ephemera of girls’ lives. In the magazine’s philosophy, being a girl—and all the mass-market accoutrements that helped define girlhood—was good. This ethic was the original premise of what is now known as “girl culture,” the formation of which began with a feminist impulse to reclaim the undervalued artifacts of girlhood as a means of reminding girls of a time when they were powerful and strong.

  If it sounds counterintuitive—that an eleven-year-old sporting jelly bracelets up to her elbows and dancing around her room to “Like a Virgin” had any kind of larger import—consider “Why You Liked Yourself Better When You Were 11,” an article that appeared in Sassy’s July 1991 issue. In it, the magazine documents the findings of Dr. Carol Gilligan, a Harvard psychologist (and latter-day girl-culture icon) whose ideas on young women’s self-esteem are espoused in her seminal work, In a Different Voice. Sassy paraphrased: “When girls are little, they are true to their beliefs. They speak their minds. If they’re angry, they let you know. When someone asks them a question, they answer it with confidence. If they don’t agree with what they’re told to do, they disobey. Pre-teenage girls are proud of being different, and they know that resisting authority is okay.” But according to Gilligan, women go through a crisis of confidence at puberty, their self-esteem plummets, and they never truly recover. Gilligan posits that this is because America views boys as the norm: girls are different, and their way of being in the world isn’t validated. To validate them, to tell girls that who they are and what they are interested in is good, is an intrinsically feminist act.

  Sassy recognized the power of pop culture to create girls’ sense of self, but unlike the unsympathetic mass media and the disapproving Second Wave feminists, they didn’t denigrate it. Instead, the magazine assumed that girls were talking back to the TV, active participants in their cultural interactions, able to call pop culture on its flaws without having to write it off altogether. Thus, Christina could enjoy “Under the Bridge” while railing against Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sexist antics. “Girls like my friends and me, who were drawn to the TV shows and fashion aimed at our generation, were encouraged to look at it with a critical eye, but not discouraged from our interest in it,” says fan Anastasia Cole Plakias. When Sassy published its cast of 90210 paper dolls in September 1991, it was so girls could enjoy them on two levels: there was the sheer nostalgic joy in cutting out popular teen soap characters and dressing them up, and the simultaneous self-mocking that you would ever do such a thing. The glee in doing it was ironically cool. This meta-appreciation was simply nonexistent in the excruciatingly earnest world of teen magazines.

  Journalists like those on the Sassy staff, who were influenced by academia, were “all about the importance of popular culture,” says Ann Powers. “There was a sense that it could change your life, a sense of urgency about it. There was potential for popular culture to elevate your identity, especially for girls.” So Sassy used the word girl knowingly, liberally, and lovingly. Mary and Andrea got giddy over the idea of clipping plastic barrettes in their hair or wearing baby-doll dresses and tiaras to the prom. And unlike Seventeen, YM, and Teen, which gave readers advice on how to erase all traces of indelicate, ultrafeminine personality traits, Sassy ran articles like “Your Guide to the Perfect Crying Fit,” which dared to pose the question “Why shouldn’t girls cry as loud and often as they please?” and ran a back-page column called “Working Our Nerves,” which each month highlighted a new object of the staff’s derision, from the patriarchy (with an image of a presidential cabinet used to illustrate the concept), to misplaced quotation marks, to Jacinta’s public displays of affection with her boyfriend, Andy (whom she ended up marrying).

  It made sense in an era defined by identity politics—in which groups of people used their status as members of marginalized groups to push for change—to rally around girlhood. Over the years, Sassy ran disparate articles about boys, fashion, beauty, food, and culture that, taken separately, aren’t easily distinguishable from what Seventeen, YM, and Teen were covering. But collectively, they were part of a larger mandate to celebrate girls and their culture, proving to a population as diverse as American teenage girls that they share experiences all their own.

  The magazine was “really good at capturing a real girl culture, meaning that it wasn’t all about dieting and three-hundred-dollar moisturizers and model stuff that only one percent of the population knew about or could identify with,” says fan Millie di Chirico.

  Since the beginning, the magazine had told real girls’ first-person tales in its “It Happened to Me” column (Seventeen had long run a similar column), but the magazine also made a point of showing real girls—not models—in regular sections like “On the Road.” Part of the reason for the magazine’s yearly Sassiest Girl in America contest was, according to Karen, to tell readers that “we don’t want to do a model search. We want to do something deeper and richer than that, that acknowledges that we’re not just looking for the skinny girl from L.A.” Girls won points for being cool, offbeat, socially active, and politically conscious.

  When Caroline Miller came to Seventeen in 1994, she used her signature column, “School Zone,” to showcase tribes of real teens in high schools across the country—but they were well-lit, poreless, and glamorized.

  the beauty myth demystified

  By the late eighties, when Sassy launched, women and teenage girls had already endured half a decade of fitness fanaticism, an anti-feminist backlash that insisted that only through endless workouts and restrictive eating habits could a girl simultaneously prove that she was like a man (rigorous, disciplined, deserving of a climb up the corporate ladder instead of being waylaid on the mommy track) and worthy of male attention. From Jane Fonda’s workout tapes to Linda Hamilton’s supertoned physique in 1991’s Terminator 2, the cult of the body reached its apotheosis. Though a new emphasis on exercise may have been good for certain sports-inclined women, an athletic body felt like yet another ideal that many women couldn’t live up to. Talk about an effective way of making sure women wouldn’t become too smart, too academic, too big for their britches! After all,
who had time to concentrate on schoolwork when it took nearly every ounce of a girl’s mental and physical energy to stick with this dogmatic regimen? Diet stories were a Seventeen staple; often a reader would find more than one in an issue, with subtitles like “How Not to Eat Your Way Through College” or warnings that “extra pounds can keep a girl from joining in, speaking up, reaching out.”

  But Sassy didn’t fall prey to idealizing appearance obsession. From the beginning, Jane refused to run the ubiquitous dieting stories that littered other teen magazines and fed into the ongoing epidemic of eating disorders and unhealthy body preoccupations. Instead, Sassy ran articles like “13 Reasons Not to Diet” (one of the reasons, of course, was that it would impair your cognitive abilities). And though it ran the de rigueur workout article, Sassy gave it a decidedly feminist spin by stating, “It’s not about exercising to get smaller, it’s about exercising to get stronger.” Remember: this was a decade before Buffy.

  Of course, the ads that accompanied the magazine editorial often undermined the editors’ mission to downplay the importance of popularity and conventional beauty. Sassy could only compete by taking whatever ads came its way, and that included such female-unfriendly plugs as the Clairol shampoo ad that showed a smug supermodel-type alongside copy reading, “The body? Maybe. But the hair can be yours.” And while Sassy had to provide complementary copy for its biggest advertisers, it also rebelled whenever possible. For example, like the other magazines in its category, Sassy often ran ads for products that promised to give insecure teenage girls bigger breasts and thinner thighs; but it also ran an article titled “Karen Tries to Get Thinner Thighs … Through the Mail” that debunked the utility of any of said products—not to mention the anti-feminist, female-body-hating impetus behind them.