How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  Blake Nelson, for one, was impressed. In 1990, he was living in Portland, Oregon, when he picked up his girlfriend’s copy of Sassy. “I remember having this deep feeling like, ‘Oh my God, teenage girls are exactly the right thing to be at this exact moment,’” says Nelson. “Like Sassy. I had never seen anything so dead-on.”

  Nelson was working on a novel called Girl. “When I named Girl, I did it because you weren’t even allowed to say girl,” he says. “And that was the thing that made Sassy so great. It was time for girls to just take it away from the super-theoretical and sometimes over-serious and energize it with youth, just have fun with it, and totally be it instead of think it. In a weird way, that was the crowning achievement of all the feminism that had gone before it, none of which ever really got the people involved and never made anyone comfortable. And then Sassy comes along and it’s just all these girls who are totally cool and will do anything they want.”

  Nelson was so impressed with the magazine in general and with Christina in particular that he sent her his manuscript. She immediately wrote to him and said she wanted to run an excerpt. In fact, she ran three. Nelson was having trouble getting the book published, until the day when Christina sent him a pile of letters that had arrived at Sassy, all from teenage girls, asking where they could buy the novel. “So I immediately ran over to my prospective publisher, dropped them on the desk, and said, ‘This is who is going to buy it.’” (Since the book was published in 1995, Nelson has gone on to become a successful young-adult fiction author whose books have been adapted into films by the likes of Gus van Sant.)

  “When I was writing Girl, the person I was writing it for was Kim Gordon,” says Nelson. “I just remember this triumvirate: Kathleen Hanna, Christina Kelly, Kim Gordon—people that were sort of gods of the cultural moment.” Hanna was a former stripper and frontwoman for punk feminist band Bikini Kill. She sang about rape and abuse; in concert, she would lift her shirt and scream, “Suck my left one!” Gordon and Sonic Youth had written “Teen Age Riot,” a song that would become an anthem of the time. She was skinny and sexy and dyed her hair platinum and wore miniskirts in her forties. She was married to nerd god Thurston Moore. She played the bass and sang in a growl. Thanks to Christina, both Hanna and Gordon made frequent appearances in Sassy.

  Nelson’s obsession with Christina isn’t atypical. “Christina, to me, is the key person,” says Mike Flaherty. “More than anybody, Christina was the embodiment of the magazine.” She was the “soul,” says Blake Nelson. Says Mary Kaye, “She felt everything very, very distinctly and she spoke out about it.”

  In other words, her appeal didn’t lie entirely in her exquisite taste; she represented the apotheosis of the teenage girl, and her sensibility was acutely similar to that of her readers. Christina was fearless—even when she was fearful. After Women Aglow’s anti-Sassy boycott nearly brought the magazine to its knees, Christina verbally flipped the bird to the religious zealots and the namby-pamby advertisers who kowtowed to them by regularly denouncing censorship in her “What Now” column. In one article, she notes that more high-achieving girls than guys have had sex. “What does this mean? I would venture a guess, but I’m afraid I’m going to get in trouble,” she says. (Coming from her, it sounds like a taunt, not a concession.) She called out big companies like Domino’s and Mennen, who had pulled TV ads when they didn’t like the sexual content of certain shows. “I think all of this comes dangerously close to infringement of our constitutional right to free speech. Considering my profession, I consider it particularly scary. And you should, too,” she instructed.

  “Readers seem to have a love-hate relationship with Christina,” Sassy acknowledged in one issue. But her incessant ranting was one of the things that kept Sassy readers coming back for more. “It felt good and right to delight in Christina’s vitriol as we endured the seemingly endless battery of humiliation and frustration that was adolescence,” says Rebecca L. Fox in “Sassy All Over Again.” In one column, Christina asks, “Why is it that MTV shuns real women and only hires inane cartoon characters?” She echoed the thoughts of many of her readers, who then asked themselves: Who was this girl who was so fierce and feminist and fun? Why hadn’t anyone told them that this is what they could grow up to be like? “She oozed cool,” says fan Julie Gerstein. “Plus, she articulated things in a way that pushed us girls to also be articulate, witty, and charming.” Christina provided “a model of the kind of adult I wanted to be: hip, concerned, socially active, taking care of business,” one fan tells Fox.

  The fans may have loved Christina, but not everyone on staff did. The magazine makes constant references to her mood swings, once calling her “Big Meanie” on the masthead. “One intern said that Christina oozed hostility,” says Mary. “But she never really scared me. She’s very Irish—she’s just got that kind of feistiness. She could be really nice.” Kim France, an assistant at 7 Days who took over when Catherine left Sassy in 1989, didn’t seem to think so—at least not at first. She cried every day her first year at the magazine because she thought Christina hated her. And though they later became close friends—she was even a bridesmaid at Christina’s wedding—the two writers’ rivalry is apparent in numerous issues. Jane devoted an entire “Diary” to Kim after Kim complained that she was “the invisible staff writer,” not pictured as much as Karen and Christina. But many girls were drawn to Kim’s smart, serious persona (she was a proponent of volunteerism, international justice, and hip-hop). Christina also terrorized Margie Ingall. “Margie had a really hard time. She and Christina sat next to each other in the back of the room, and they had completely opposite styles,” says Mary Kaye. Margie was more of a theatre geek; Christina was an East Village hipster who seemed to relish playing mean girl to the new hire. “Everybody kind of worshipped Christina. They just didn’t want to be on her bad side,” says Mary Kaye.

  Though Sassy shared a floor with Ms. magazine, Christina was no Gloria Steinem, preaching the gospel of unqualified sisterhood. Why did Johnny Depp and Jennifer Grey break up? “I think he finally got a look at her in broad daylight,” she opined. Nor was she Betty Friedan, completely uninterested in the conventional trappings of womanliness. “I have a pathological fear of cellulite and have stooped to purchasing all kinds of ridiculous products to rid myself of it,” she admitted in one arguably self-loathing “We Try It.” In fact, Christina’s complicated version of femininity and feminism heralded a changing of the guard in the women’s movement.

  the third wave

  Parallel to all that was happening at Sassy was a resurgence of feminist political activism. In 1991, bands that bridged the divide between independent and mainstream culture—like L7, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Hole—teamed up with the Feminist Majority Foundation to present Rock for Choice, a series of benefit concerts intended to give a stalwart issue some cool clout and raise awareness among a younger audience, who had perhaps grown complacent under the protection of Roe v. Wade. And in 1992, thousands of people marched for choice in Washington. It was the first major activist event for many women in their late teens and twenties, one that is still popularly understood as marking the inception of feminism’s Third Wave. While the Second Wave focused on gender parity, Third Wave feminism sought to expand the feminist debate about gender and sexuality.

  Bad press to the contrary, feminism has never been a one-issue crusade, and the Third Wave’s feminist impulse was part of a larger pro–gay rights, anti-racist, multicultural, Democratic political agenda. It was a mandate that Sassy pushed at every turn. By 1992, the magazine had become increasingly radical and more overtly political. A reviewer gives a record a single star if she’d “rather work for Clarence Thomas” than listen to it. Bush-bashing becomes omnipresent: Kim slams the then president in a story on America’s drug war, and Christina rips him to shreds in a piece on the Gulf War (an article which, incidentally, received more reader mail than any article in the magazine’s history). It was as if the Sassy staff had forgotten that Women Aglow wa
s watching: the October issue makes no fewer than four pro-choice references. And Sassy’s increasingly radical left-leaning political and social agenda wasn’t relegated to the “serious” articles—it permeated the entire magazine. Why is there a beauty story on the best cheap makeup? Because “even though a certain president with the initials G.B. says the recession’s over, we know better.”

  But Sassy made it seem like identifying as a feminist was a must for any self-respecting teenage girl: “These days you may as well eat dirt as admit to being a feminist … We’re not embarrassed to admit in print that we all be feminists,” proclaimed one staff-written story.

  But feminism was not entirely overlooked at Seventeen. The magazine even went so far as to run some openly activist pieces, like a profile of National Organization for Women president Molly Yard. Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Linda Ellerbee wrote a piece instructing girls to “practice saying these words: ‘I am a feminist,’ and this time, try to understand what the word means. Feminism means you believe in equality between men and women. Justice. Equal justice for all. And that’s all it means.” And Seventeen’s don’t-beat-’em-join-’em brand of feminism realistically mirrored America’s shifting middle-class social mores. The magazine had to appeal to 50 percent of the teenage population—girls who were rich and girls who were poor, girls who lived in suburbs and small towns they never wanted to leave. It was one thing for the magazine to advocate equal pay for equal work, and quite another to question the nature of work itself—or, for that matter, the social hierarchy of high school or the intrinsic elitism of sororities.

  “Do you need armpit hair to be a feminist?” asked Sassy on its June 1992 cover. Mary Kaye didn’t think so. “I’ve never thought twice about whether I was a feminist,” she says in the article. “My beef is with really rigid types who have a lot of criteria for what is or isn’t a true feminist—you know, shaves her pits? Not. Wears a miniskirt? Not.” She also questions “that women-can-have-it-all concept—which sprang up in the late seventies along with the feminist movement … It was probably dreamed up by some male advertiser so women would feel inadequate if they didn’t do it all.” The F-word itself had long been a lightning rod. “People … assume you’re talking about a humorless, intolerant, rage-filled woman. That’s such a stereotype,” railed Margie. But she also conceded, “It’s true that some of the original feminists from the sixties and seventies were pretty radical and angry—they had more of a reason to be.” But by the early 1990s, the staff felt that enough inroads had been made that they could interrogate the movement’s ideals in a public forum.

  Sassy incited political action in some readers: Constance Hwong declared herself pro-choice in 1992, when she was in eighth grade and learning about the issues surrounding the upcoming election. “I brought an issue of Sassy into my social studies class to show my teacher, who seemed impressed at its coverage. I’ve considered myself a pretty diligent feminist since then, and went on to attend an all-women’s college.” Fan Amy Schroeder says that the magazine “helped shape my ideas that women are equal to men and that we have the same amount of power—or we should.” She went on to major in women’s studies in college, and later founded Venus Zine, a feminist magazine about women in the arts. Sassy was “totally responsible” for all the hours a sixteen-year-old Lara Zeises volunteered for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Sassy “influenced my politics. I considered myself a feminist from a young age, thanks to an activist grandma,” says Caitlin Kuleci. She “knew that boys were considered better than girls, that racism existed, and that people who were poor had it worse than anybody else. But I lacked a framework with which to understand these things.” For her, Sassy “was the fertilizer that helped me bloom into my current status as a full-blown dissenter.” Rebecca Walker, daughter of author Alice Walker and the cofounder of the Third Wave Foundation, called reading Sassy “a political act.”

  chapter 6

  The “Sassy” Ethos

  even indier

  Ian Svenonius was a philosophy-spouting, pomade-wearing singer in the D. C.-based punk band Nation of Ulysses. Not a vapid jock, or even a sensitive poetic type, he had been a fan of Sassy since his friend the singer Lois Maffeo showed him an issue. “I was immediately taken by the writing and the way it didn’t condescend to the mythical hoi polloi the way modern journalism condescends to the status quo,” he says in his trademark crypto-intellectual rhetoric.

  Ian applied for 1990’s Sassiest Boy in America Contest (SBIA), a follow-up to the successful Sassiest Girl in America Contest (SGIA)—and won. The impetus behind the competition was one of the staff’s truly unifying interests: cute boys.

  “I wish I could have applied, but I was too old,” laments Calvin Johnson, a longtime fan of teen culture who, in his late twenties at the time, was several years over the cutoff age. But Ian didn’t worry about such trifles; he simply lied about his age. (Something he still won’t exactly cop to—he said that his band had a policy of being eighteen forever, and therefore when he said he was twenty years old, he was lying older, not younger.) But instead of winning a cash prize and corporate sponsorship, like the Sassiest Girl in America, the SBIA merely got a trip to New York City, a Magic 8 Ball, and “they could go through our collection of CDs that were sent to us that we didn’t want,” says Christina.

  Ian’s two days in the city were “like a hothouse forty-eight-hour experiment, like a biodome.” They sent him to see the band Mindfunk (which Ian dismissed as “not the revolution”), and he went dancing, got his palm read, and had a photo shoot on the Staten Island Ferry. His impression of the Sassy office was that magazine people were just like band people. “All of the office talk was about other magazines, just like how bands are obsessed with other bands.”

  Even though the SBIA contest lacked the hoopla of the SGIA contest, something interesting happened: for at least some indie-obsessed readers, it was far more memorable than its sister contest. Don Smith grew up in the Washington, D.C., area with Ian, and he places a great amount of importance on the ensuing piece. “It was hands down the greatest article in any magazine in the 1990s. They really found the sassiest boy in America—that’s the part that was so weird about it—they weren’t lying. Normally you say, ‘I know people sassier than that.’ With Ian it was like the Emmy went to Susan Lucci.” He was not only cute and fond of wearing suits, but, as the magazine Eye once put it, “probably the only Marxist to be named Sassiest Boy in America.” Ian had all of the cool trappings of a hipster, but without the off-putting attitude.

  He also came with a pedigree, having grown up in the 1980s Washington, D.C., punk-rock scene. Ian introduced Christina to the punk scenes in D.C. and Olympia, Washington, and to his indie labelmates on K Records and Dischord. “I was at a party with Calvin Johnson and I said, ‘Don’t you think it would be cool to have a band named Chia Pet?’” she remembers. “And he was like, ‘You guys should start a band named Chia Pet,’ and I was like, ‘No, I don’t have any musical talents,’ and he was like, ‘Well, that never stopped me.’” The next week Johnson called to say Chia Pet had a show at Bard College, opening up for his band Beat Happening and Ian’s Nation of Ulysses—and that they had better start practicing.

  Christina’s announcement that Chia Pet was about to make their live debut didn’t exactly receive the most enthusiastic reception. “I was like, ‘Christina, what are you talking about? We don’t play instruments. We don’t have instruments. We don’t have songs. This is just a game we’re playing,’” Jessica recalls. “And Christina, being who she is, was determined not to take no for an answer. ‘We’re doing this and you’re going to play bass. You’re the bass player.’” She got Karen to share vocal duties with her, and Jane to play the violin. Mary Ann played drums, and Christina’s boyfriend Bobby Weeks played guitar. At Chia Pet’s first rehearsal, Christina brought in Bobby’s brother Eric to teach Jessica bass. (She ended up moving in with him three days later and marrying him a year and a half after that, making J
essica and Christina not only coworkers and bandmates, but sisters-in-law.)

  “The Chia Pet shows were so strange,” Don Smith remembers. “They were like a Sex and the City band—far too sophisticated to be onstage at CBGB’s. The standing joke, of course, was ‘Don’t quit your day job.’ But really, no one wanted them to quit their day jobs!” In fact, the band’s status as Sassy staffers was a bonus. When Johnson booked the Bard show, he just told the promoters that it was a band from New York City. Says Johnson, “When we got there, the two women putting on the show from Bard were like, ‘Hey you never told us it was Jane and Christina from Sassy!’”

  They never played a show outside of New York, but they did record a handful of songs (some produced by legendary indie scenester Kramer), including “Hey Baby,” about street harassment (its sarcastic chorus goes “Hey Baby, Hey Baby, You look so good”); a cover of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby”; and “Blind Date,” which documents actual blind dates the staff went on. The chorus is “Blind date/don’t pick up the phone/pretend you’re not home/it’s more fun,” and the song is set to a bass line lifted directly from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” At one show, Spike Jonze could be found snapping pictures; at another, Ian drew tattoos on everyone with a Sharpie.