How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  Sassy was masterful at finding the kernel of feminism in places where others didn’t bother to look, even though it was right in front of them, and that includes the twin nadirs of Ms. magazine: fashion and beauty. Ms., once it went ad-free, had the luxury of refusing to push product, but a consumer magazine like Sassy was the perfect place to merge fashion and feminism. The women’s movement was one of the most anti-capitalist movements in American history, and though the Sassy staffers were staunchly feminist, a teen magazine could stay alive only by running fashion and beauty ads and, hence, fashion and beauty stories. But Sassy made the situation work in tandem with their engaging new brand of feminism. (And sometimes the stories were slyly political: one thumbed its nose at its beauty advertisers, with their high-priced products, by telling girls how to make their own. How ’bout dying your hair with Jell-O instead of spending eight dollars on a box of Clairol?)

  Sassy was deconstructing images of beauty even before the 1991 publication of Naomi Wolf’s groundbreaking book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that women could never be equal to men so long as they were tyrannized by unnatural, unachievable images. “How We Make This Girl Gorgeous (and other tricks magazines use to get teeth whiter, hips slimmer and breasts bigger)” was a lesson in media literacy, showing girls the way companies tricked them into wanting to look like women who didn’t exist in nature. Similarly, “Why Your Breasts Aren’t as Weird as You Think” called beauty standards themselves into question.

  “We were very aware—with fashion and beauty texts in particular—of never, ever making the person who is reading them hate themselves,” says Karen, who, in the beginning, wrote most of them. So a bathing suit story features a bikini for girls with a “cute little round tummy” and a one-piece for a “bodacious butt.” The story didn’t presume girls felt like they had figure flaws—they just recast the flaws and told girls how to deal with them. Karen says, “We also didn’t want to do ‘Oh, you’re perfect, you’re fine.’ Nobody believes that bullshit. But there had to be a middle ground between ‘Go shoot yourself’ and platitudes.”

  When Amber Drea discovered Sassy she was “happy to make it my number one magazine and get rid of all my YMs, which just made me feel gross—like I didn’t stand a chance at being pretty, ever.”

  Instead of humiliating girls into eating their broccoli, Sassy celebrated the way real teenagers eat. Hence, one of the most remembered stories of all time: “Our First Annual Junk Food Taste Off.” “We convened a panel of convenience-store connoisseurs: Margie Ingall, Mike, Mary Ann, Kim France, and Andrea T. For four diarrhea-inducing days we tasted sixty-four junky treats,” the article opens. After an explanation of the categories and how each junk food will be rated, the staff tries the pork rinds:

  MARGIE: As a Jew, I am flatly refusing to taste the pork rinds.

  KIM: As a Jew, I am pleased to sample the pork rinds.

  MARY ANN: As a human being, I am not going to sample them.

  MARGIE: You must. You have no religious grounds.

  KIM: They are quite delightful. Big and light like popcorn, then they crunch down to something small and nice.

  ANDREA: The texture of sunburned skin.

  MARY ANN: These are repulsive beyond explanation. Words fail me.

  MIKE: I like the idea of, like, meat being integrated into a salty, fried, crispy thing … It’s good.

  On plantain chips:

  MARGIE: Look, there’s a little lesson about “What is a plantain” on the back.

  ANDREA: The PBS of junk food.

  On plain M & M’s:

  ANDREA: What does green mean again?

  KIM: It doesn’t mean that unless it’s peanut.

  MARGIE: I heard it meant that.

  “That junk-food survey ought to go down in journalistic history,” says Elisa Ung. “I remember sitting outside and reading that and laughing so hard my stomach hurt. Constance Hwong agrees. “I remember laughing out loud when reading it. It sounds like something me and my friends would do.”

  But despite their progressive stance, the Sassy staff was certainly not unanimous in its pursuit of alternative beauty ideals. The images in the magazine were hardly fat-positive, especially as heroin-chic waifs like Kate Moss came into vogue in the early nineties. “There was always a fight with the editors from the beauty and fashion department because they still went for the anorexic models and we always wanted to use more real people,” says Mary Kaye of the features department. Sassy’s models may have been less homogenous compared to its competition—black girls with Afros; white girls with sad faces and long, stringy hair or super-short bleached hair; girls with body piercings—but they were never, ever heavy.

  Sassy redefined the very purpose of fashion and beauty products and rituals in girls’ lives. According to the magazine, you could use your appearance to assert your (unconventional) identity—“Read this before you RSVP or risk being one of the crowd” trumpeted a “Very Party” fashion story that simultaneously mocked and championed conformity. Or you could use it to embody your (left-wing, feminist) politics—as evidenced in a fashion shoot that featured leather-free shoes even a vegan could love. In Sassy, the female body could be an instrument of liberation.

  Sassy’s fashion coverage would infuse the tenor of girl culture for years to come. After all, young feminists never really identified with their mothers’ bra-burning—but they needed something to wear to all those protests and poetry slams. These Third Wavers owe a serious debt of gratitude to Andrea, who in 1993 professed her love of baby tees in the magazine’s pages. Higher-ups at Urban Outfitters took notice of the trend and began producing shrunken, belly-baring tees for adults—the same T-shirts the girls at April 2004’s March for Women’s Lives were wearing, bearing slogans like THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. From a glitter-girl story to grunge prom (pair Doc Martens with baby-doll dresses, why don’t you?) to “Our Gender-Specific Fashion Poll” (“Okay, so you’re a feminist. You don’t care what boys think about your clothes. But don’t you want to read this anyway?”), Sassy made fashion, like feminism, fun—not totalitarian.

  It’s true that girly fashion was partly a sign of the times. While teen magazine readers have been encouraged to aspire to wearing Prada since the launch of Teen Vogue in 2002, in the late eighties and early nineties, “there was a little bit of infantilization running through the culture,” according to Daisy Von Furth, who interned with the Sassy fashion department in 1989 and later founded the X-Girl clothing label with Kim Gordon. “At the time, it seemed fresh to obsess about coming-of-age stuff.” Ravers were wearing diapers. Adult women—like Courtney Love—were wearing kinderwhore dresses, knee socks, underwear as outerwear, and patent-leather Mary Janes. Designers like Anna Sui and Marc Jacobs were appropriating the little-girl look for the runways, so maybe it’s no surprise that they were fans of Sassy, and Sassy was a fan of theirs. (Mary later wrote Jacobs, who had a subscription to the magazine, a letter congratulating him on his infamous and much-derided grunge collection; he wrote back, thanking her for her support.)

  And while the magazine may have had to cool it on the gay-friendly sex articles, Sassy always had a campy aesthetic. One spread touted the joys of using boy beauty products, and featured a model that could only be described as a butch dyke. Another fashion shoot encouraged a kind of polymorphous, playful sexuality by showing female models dressed up like Bob Dylan. Jacinta based an entire gender-bending photo shoot on Mary’s offhand comment to model Amy Smart that she looked just like Axl Rose. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler had made many of the same points about the construction of gender through style in arcane and unintelligible (to the uninitiated, anyway) academic prose; Sassy deconstructed gender much more succinctly, and looked good while doing it.

  It was this kind of approach that made Sassy a cult favorite among gay men, who called it “Sissy.” “I think the interest for gay men might have been the sort of outsider’s view of the world that Sassy had,” say
s fan Richard Wang. “It certainly wasn’t mainstream, and sort of had a ‘we-aren’t-them-and-aren’t-they ridiculous’ sort of mentality that a lot of gays have. In some way, you know that you’re different, special, and probably better than all those fools who make fun of you. But at the same time, you want to be loved by them.”

  boy-crazy ym

  Sassy was a hit with readers from the beginning, and by 1990 it was hotter than ever. Its circulation was climbing, its advertisers were back on board, and the other teen magazines were waking up. For Seventeen, that meant incorporating some unusual displays of feminist posturing—“Who Says I Have to Have to a Boyfriend?” read one cover line (to which one might like to answer, “Well, you do”)—and begrudging coverage of non-mainstream celebrities like cartoonist Lynda Barry. Of course, the industry leader also continued to feature model-worship stories and cheerlead prefab boy bands like New Kids on the Block.

  But if sixtysomething editor Midge Richardson wasn’t hip enough to realize how unhip she was, YM saw what was going on. “Sassy was another strong competitor,” Elizabeth Crow, then president and editorial director for Gruner & Jahr, YM’s parent company, noted in an interview. “We were in third place in a three-magazine category, and didn’t want to be fourth.”

  Enter Bonnie Fuller. She’s the stuff of magazine legend now—in March 2004, Vanity Fair ran a profile chronicling the illustrious editor’s successful reign of terror at such publications as Glamour and Us Weekly—but then she was a thirtysomething Canadian editor who had just nailed her dream job at the hemorrhaging teenybop rag. Bonnie was smart enough to know that her inherent uncoolness would never allow her to tap into youth culture the way that Jane Pratt and her ilk had. Instead, according to Crow, her revamped YM would be “all about getting along with, and getting it on with, boys.”

  It was a funny thing that Sassy, like many a high-school girl, could never shed its slutty reputation. In fact, YM was arguably a much sexier read—especially in the wake of the right-wing boycott. “The real thing that YM delivered was soft porn,” says Caroline Miller. “There were all of these stories that were really just beefcake.”

  YM, under Fuller, was the spiritual younger sister of Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan (in fact, Bonnie would become Brown’s successor just a few years later). In Fuller’s world, the “Young Miss” was now “Young and Modern,” and she was a lot more interested in achieving orgasms than equality. The publication heralded a kind of sexual revolution for young women, but without any attendant feminist critique. Sure, it had a “You go, girl” tone, but it assumed that what you wanted to get was the guy. Or, guys, as the case may be. “Steady relationships are, in a word, confining,” one article read, mimicking Brown’s mandate that twentysomething single gals should feel free to have as many affairs as they wanted. (It did, however, make a nod to its readers’ tender age—or perhaps their parents’ conservatism—by tacking on some halfhearted moralizing: “When you have sex with a lot of different men, you become emotionally numbed.”) Another piece investigated which partner was responsible for bringing birth control—without any acknowledgment that not all of its readers were sexually active. If this sounds vaguely feminist, the key word is vaguely. Unlike Sassy, YM wasn’t mucking around with ideas like “institutionalized sexism.” When a girl writes in to complain that boys won’t ask her out because she’s a bit big in the hips, the male relationship columnist, with no apparent knowledge of teenage girls’ propensity toward eating disorders, unhelpfully suggests, “If not being asked out by these guys really bothers you, perhaps you should try to shed a few pounds.”

  Many, many girls were seduced by YM’s covers, which frequently depicted the likes of a shirtless Marky Mark with a halter top–wearing model, the top button of her Express jeans suggestively undone, and by the stories inside, which adhered to Fuller’s mandate of “boys, clothes, hair,” in the words of YM entertainment editor Suzan Colon. YM’s circulation almost doubled during Fuller’s five-year tenure, and its advertising skyrocketed as well. It became a formidable competitor to Sassy, but insiders knew that the new YM couldn’t have existed without its antithesis. “I want to say that I love Sassy,” one fan wrote. “I mean, my sister gets the other big teen magazines, and it is so funny. After you came out, I noticed that those guys started to change their format.”

  the sassiest boys in america

  Of course, Sassy had always been boy crazy, from an early blurb titled “Why Am I Such a Queer Ball Spazz Head?” in which Andrea reports that she caught Matt Dillon staring at her breasts; to Jane’s crush on Keanu Reeves, which was dissected ad nauseum; to Christina’s “Cute Band Alert.”

  But Sassy tempered all the swooning with a girl-power tone and a little critique. Instead of deconstructing marriage and interrogating compulsory heterosexuality—that was Ms.’s territory—Sassy ran feminist-inflected articles on how to ask a guy out. Like other teen magazines, it published pieces titled “How to Flirt” and “Why That Patrick Swayze Poster May Destroy Your Love Life”; unlike other teen magazines, it didn’t take its romantic advice too seriously, and didn’t assume that getting it on with a jock was your only goal.

  And writers could be sure they would hear from readers whose consciousness they had raised when they penned articles that were less ostensibly open-minded: in the infamous April 1990 article “Five Things Never to Ask a Guy,” Mike admonishes girls not to pose the questions “What are you thinking?” “Do you love me?” “Do I look fat?” “What would you do if I died?” and “Do you think she’s prettier than me?” (“You girls really gotta accept that for every beautiful person, there’s one even more beautiful. Just worry about what’s inside and don’t be such a guy.”) It might have seemed like a funny article from a publication that spent most of its time encouraging girls to say whatever they wanted, but its chauvinism was diluted by the fact that it was authored by a male editor girls were already familiar with, who often took on the pigtail-pulling persona of an older brother. Still, Mike says he got lots of mail that read, “Oh, that’s so sexist and you’re so close-minded and you’re such a Neanderthal.”

  Another classic Sassy relationship article was March 1993’s “How to Make Him Want You … Bad,” which is named after a story that had run in YM. In it, Margie Ingall (a staff writer who had been hired in 1990) and Mary Ann try out the inane relationship advice given by YM and Cosmopolitan. This includes wearing animal prints, which, instead of making Margie look “feral” (presumably a good thing), incite a homeless man to scream “Meow!” The article’s last paragraph pretty much sums up Sassy’s worldview on men, which is “boys are cute and we like them (unless we hate them) but they’re mere dressing on the salad of life.”

  The magazine regularly tore down the boy-band members and soap-opera stars other magazines were drooling over. (Fan Sarah D. Bunting liked that “they would sometimes call out the famous boys we were all supposed to have crushes on as being tools.”) Their coverage of indie bands and indie boys “was giving an alternative to young girls. Sassy considered Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow to be sexy when everyone was supposed to be looking at the cast of some horrible TV show,” says Ann Powers. “It seemed almost political at the time.” In retrospect, she says, it may have not been quite that radical. “But at least Sassy was presenting different images. Popular music is a template for identity, and sexuality in particular. It’s a way young people especially come to figure out who they are as sexual beings; it is really important who they identify with in the pantheon of musical celebrities.”

  In some way, the magazine helped validate a new kind of American manhood—the kind of guy who would court you with mix tapes, sported Converse Chuck Taylors and shaggy bedhead on his lanky frame, wept over the disappearing rain forest, and had Backlash on his bookshelf.

  Indie bands were arguably aesthetically superior, but they were also, stereotypically, patently desexualized and more interested in their guitars than their girlfriends—unlike, say, the more explicit songs of mai
nstream groups like Color Me Badd (“I Wanna Sex You Up”). “These guys are scared to death of girls underneath it all,” writes Margie in a February 1994 story titled “The Tormented Boy: An Ethnological Study,” covering postmodern boy archetypes like the Disaffected Writer Boy, the Renegade Skater Boy, and, of course, the Soulful Musician Boy. He hangs out in suburban garages and pawnshops selling vintage amps; his mating call is “So, uh, are you going to the Fugazi show?”; his mating ritual is “Strums guitar and raspily sings a lovely (or deliberately not-lovely) song written just for you.”

  Sassy’s readers seemed grateful that the magazine was finally coming clean that courting an indie-rock boy was not without its pitfalls. “Not three days after my boyfriend broke up with me, I received my February Sassy,” one reader writes. “He is the soulful musician boy to a T! I was totally the strong woman who he said he loved but couldn’t commit to.”

  girl power

  “Girls are still understood more clearly as victims of culture and sexuality than as cultural and sexual creators,” Naomi Wolf said in The Beauty Myth. But Sassy reported with a vengeance on creative women who were making a living representing the female experience. The October 1993 issue, for example, includes book reviews of some of the coolest, most pro-girl books of the nineties, all of which would become part of the essential girl-culture canon, including cult hero Francesca Lia Block’s Missing Angel Juan; Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of teen madness, Girl, Interrupted (later turned into a movie starring Sassy heroine Winona Ryder, who appeared in the magazine long before the other teen mags caught on); Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire (about a girl gang); and the much-maligned Katie Roiphe anti-girl diatribe The Morning After, which receives a single star and is referenced with venom in subsequent issues. A record review for Liz Phair’s subversive, now classic Exile in Guyville exudes, “Orgasmic is not too strong a word to use here.”