by Kara Jesella
The fickle and boy-dominated indie-rock press gave the band a reception ranging from lukewarm (“I thought they were mediocre at best,” sniffs one fanzine) to affectionate (“While there is some hype surrounding this Sassy magazine–associated band, I am not ashamed of loving the catchy violin and guitar riffs,” says zine Browbeat.)
zines
Ian also introduced Christina to brother-and-sister duo Don and Erin Smith, who lived in Bethesda, Maryland. Their zine, Teenage Gang Debs, was a black-and-white photocopied love letter to sixties and seventies pop culture. They would do things like find Eve Plumb (who played Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch) and interview her.
Short for “fanzines,” zines are handmade self-published magazines with limited distribution. They became important in the punk scene of the 1970s as a vehicle for writers and were untouched by editors, corporations, advertisers, and censors. Zines have long been a part of underground culture, but Sassy was one of the first magazines to give zines mainstream exposure.
Zines were, in keeping with the punk ethos, completely DIY—do-it-yourself. They gave voice to those who were too young, too radical, or too weird to be published elsewhere, and their confessional, stream-of-consciousness style bore a resemblance to Sassy’s. Even though zines had been around for twenty years, along with so many aspects of punk culture, the early nineties were a boom time in their popularity.
In the January 1991 installment of “What Now,” Christina launched her “Zine Corner.” It started after she began receiving zines in the mail (she was the recipient of the greatest amount of random mail of anyone at the magazine, perhaps at least partially because she was seen as the staff member most in touch with underground culture and often featured miscellany that people sent her in the pages of “What Now”). “Zine Corner” soon became “Zine of the Month.” (Even Seventeen eventually had its own zine column, though it—predictably—sounded like your parents discussing something they heard is cool. Their first “new zine on the block” featured Cockroach, which wasn’t published by a disaffected teen, but by the daughter of the founder of The Body Shop.)
Christina bought a copy of Teenage Gang Debs at the now defunct zine shop See Hear in New York City. Erin Smith was a freshman in college when her publication was featured in “What Now” and, for the next four years, she would go home to her parents’ house every weekend and fulfill orders.
Another “Zine of the Month” was Super Hate Jr. It was a conceptual zine published by future staff boy Charles Aaron while he was in college. The format was fifty pages of one thing per page that he hated. The reaction to its appearance in “What Now” was immediate. “It was completely insane because I got an avalanche of mail. It was all from teenage girls and gay boys. There were hundreds of them,” he says. “The letters were the most incredible thing; they were all so enthusiastic and passionate, and they must have sent these letters out to all the zines they saw in ‘What Now.’”
Getting into “Zine of the Month” was both a blessing and a curse. It was, on the one hand, a ringing endorsement of your zine from Christina Kelly, one of the country’s arbiters of cool. On the other hand, it might also signal your zine’s demise. “People would almost get mad at me because they would get overwhelmed by the orders they got and couldn’t do their zine anymore,” says Christina. Aaron’s zine, for example, sold for two dollars but actually cost about three dollars to make. After sending out so many copies he ran out of money and ended up having to send out cards saying that he couldn’t afford to keep it going. They read: “The next time I do a conceptual zine about hatred, I’ll keep you in the loop.”
riot grrrl
Christina hired Erin Smith as an intern at Sassy in 1991 after reading her zine. “Erin consistently wrote smart, witty articles about underground, independent music, and she turned a lot of girls on to fanzines and the idea of DIY culture,” recalls D.C. scene veteran Sharon Cheslow, who had discovered punk as a teen girl in the mid-seventies, after reading an article about the Sex Pistols in Seventeen. Besides copublishing Teenage Gang Debs, Erin Smith was also a key figure, as the guitarist for Bratmobile, in the burgeoning punk/feminist riot grrrl movement. Riot grrrl began that summer, when a group of women from the punk scenes in Washington, D.C., and Olympia, Washington, started to hold meetings—loosely modeled after the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s—to discuss how to address sexism they had experienced. There had recently been race riots in D.C.’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. In response, there was a call to start a “girl riot” against a music scene—and society—that didn’t give voice to or validate their experiences. The grrrl part was a combination of an angry growl and a desire to align themselves with the strong self-esteem of the preadolescent years.
The riot grrrls’ frequently heard manifestoes, like “revolution girl style now,” found a perfect platform in their zines, like Girl Germs, Riot Grrrl, Bikini Kill, Jigsaw, and Gunk, which also dealt with seldom-discussed subjects like rape, incest, eating disorders, and sexual harassment. Many of the girls behind these riot grrrl zines were also members of all-girl (or mostly girl) bands whose lyrics echoed the same confessional, confrontational subject matter and who sounded a bit like punkified versions of the women’s liberation bands of the 1970s. Zines and bands were a way for girls across the country to meet and share experiences. Besides riot grrrl’s overt feminism, perhaps most important was its egalitarian message that you don’t have to be special—talented, rich, connected—to be in a band.
When Sassy started covering riot grrrl, this relatively obscure punk-rock movement suddenly had an audience of three million impressionable girls who had been reared watching fearless and feisty—but not necessarily self-proclaimed feminist—singers like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner on MTV in the 1980s.
“What Now”’s pictures of girls in bands with SLUT and RAPE scrawled across their stomachs (intended to draw attention to women’s sexual oppression), interviews with band members, and coverage of riot grrrl zines seduced girls across the country. “I would have never known about riot grrrl were it not for Sassy,” says Julianne Shepherd, who grew up in the isolated town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, in a Mexican Catholic family. She was neither a cowboy nor the class slut she was rumored to be. Inspired by “Zine of the Month,” Julianne started her own fanzine called Lick that covered music, skateboarding, and “my lady experience.” She says, “It wasn’t just about fanzines and Bikini Kill. It was bigger than that—it was Third Wave feminism. I clocked time in a cultural island, pre-Internet. If I’d stayed on the path ignorant of feminism, I would probably still be living in Wyoming right now, freebasing something.”
The phenomenon of riot grrrl was not ignored by the rest of the media. Soon, sensationalistic articles appeared in Newsweek (where it was called “feminism with a loud happy face dotting the ‘i’”), USA Today (“From hundreds of once pink, frilly bedrooms comes the young feminist revolution. And it’s not pretty. But it doesn’t wanna be. So there!”), and Melody Maker, the British music tabloid (“The best thing that any Riot Grrrl could do is to go away and do some reading, and I don’t mean a grubby little fanzine”), all claiming that the movement was juvenile and unimportant.
In the fall of 1992, in reaction to all the negative publicity the women of riot grrrl declared a media blackout. This extended to all corporate-owned TV shows, newspapers, and magazines—except Sassy. In solidarity, a February 1993 “Diary” features a list of things the staff loves and hates, with “riot grrrl media overkill” under “hate.” Roni Shapira was interning at Sassy at the time. “There was a real sensitivity in the office. The grown women on staff were still very cautious about what younger women in the rest of America were trying to do, and they didn’t want to betray that,” she says. The first mainstream publication to cover riot grrrls, and to do so positively, Sassy had a certain amount of credibility with them and clearly felt a sense of responsibility as well.
But despite Sassy’s unconditional support, the riot grrrls hardly
embraced their more mainstream sisters. “We weren’t punk enough; we were co-opting the scene; we were basically evil,” Christina says. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I met you before you even had a band.’” Even some Sassy readers began to take sides, sending Christina hate mail for exposing their counterculture, which angered her further. “‘You found out about it from us, and now all of a sudden you’re cooler than me?’ I’d get so annoyed.”
The sad truth is that despite riot grrrls’ agitations for equality, the doyennes of the larger underground culture had an elitist attitude toward the kids who learned about indie music, zines, and activism through Sassy. “There are some people in the zine community to this day who look down at the kids who were introduced to zines by Sassy,” says Sarah Maitland, who was one of those teen girls who discovered zines through the pages of “What Now.” She started a zine-distribution business at nineteen, and put out her first zine at twenty. “They don’t seem to understand that not everyone lives in a city with a punk scene or a hip coffee shop, or has an older friend or sibling who introduces them to cool new things.”
But some of underground culture’s biggest enthusiasts were also Sassy fans. Guys in their late twenties were psyched to see their indie taste reflected in a magazine where geeks who collected records and wore Jack Purcells were the coolest guys in school.
“The indie-rock world was very interested in youth and the idea of youth,” says Ann Powers. This stemmed partly from the fact that many of the up-and-coming cultural creators—whether they were musicians, artists, intellectuals, or magazine editors—were only in their twenties or early thirties themselves. Notoriously awkward in their youth, they were still trying to make sense of their high-school years.
The general obsession with youth culture at the time was part of the reason so many adults read Sassy. “Subscribing to a teen magazine totally wasn’t embarrassing or weird or a funny fetish. It was part of a general hipness,” says Powers. Since so many of the cultural creators were addressing youth in their creations, Powers says, reading Sassy “became a tool for a lot of us trying to figure out how to talk to kids in our own work.” Powers felt that the existential dilemma of creating and maintaining a pure and idealistic cultural milieu plagued everyone making or commenting on culture in that era. “I can’t overemphasize how constant the sense of ‘Are we betraying our culture?’ was to the indie generation.” The question became how much to popularize it without ruining it.
Christina was painfully aware of this dilemma. The February 1993 issue self-consciously mentions “co-opting” in every “What Now” blurb, like “monthly zine co-opt” and “punk-rock idol co-opting.” The staff was savvy enough to know that giving underground media mainstream attention could be viewed as exploitative, but they also knew that they couldn’t cover only mainstream culture without alienating their readers, who now looked to them as a guide to the indie scene. Erin Smith, finished with her internship but on the masthead as Washington Bureau chief, guest wrote “Co-opting DC Scene Gossip for Our Own Profit”; the magazine details the riot grrrl scene in that same issue.
It’s true that Sassy’s indie coverage had a transformative effect on the American underground. The small college town of Olympia, Washington, even felt different because of the attention it received in Sassy. In the pages of “What Now,” Olympia seemed like the coolest place on Earth. “I have lived here my entire life,” Nomy Lamm, a self-proclaimed “fatass, badass jew dyke amputee” activist and writer who published the Olympia-based riot grrrl zine I’m So Fucking Beautiful, wrote. “And it never seemed cool to me until I read about it in Sassy.”
In a way, Calvin Johnson concedes, Sassy changed Olympia because in the very early nineties, even though it boasted of being home to many important bands (including Nirvana, who moved there from nearby Aberdeen), none had been taken seriously yet by a glossy magazine. But Johnson thinks the changes were bigger for Sassy than for his hometown: “When Sassy discovered this other world and started writing about it, it changed their point of view.” He, like many members of the indie world, pinpoints Ian Svenonius as a presence that helped propel Sassy’s cultural coverage. “I don’t know if Ian knew what he started.”
Ian suspects that his introduction to Sassy caused some unexpected side effects: he felt like the magazine—particularly the music coverage—became knowing and more self-referential about what it was. “In some ways I feel a little bit of guilt, like I destroyed Sassy magazine,” he says. “Instead of talking to thirteen-year-old girls, Sassy became so conscious of its older audience. I think that made it a little bit harder for them to focus on the real mission of helping girls through the horror of American adolescence.”
In a way, Ian is both right and wrong. Sassy was certainly guilty of occasionally appearing to be in love with its indie cred. In May 1991’s “What Now,” Christina even says, “If you read Sassy primarily for the zine reviews, check this out.” And the spine line of the December 1992 issue reads: “Corporate Zine.” It felt like an insular reciprocal world where, for example, Sassy would cover L.A.-based zine Ben Is Dead in “What Now,” and Ben Is Dead would frequently name-check Sassy, even devoting an issue to a Sassy parody.
But for every time an article was about how Halifax, Nova Scotia, would be the next Olympia, there would be an article to counter it, like Christina’s story on conquering her fear of escalators, the ever-popular “It Happened to Me” column, and countless features tackling subjects like abortion and how to cope when your best friend commits suicide. Despite its indie cred, Sassy never lost focus of the day-to-day travails of teenage life.
According to fan Rita Hao, part of what made Sassy so appealing to all of its fans was that, “You could read zines for underground stuff, or you could read Seventeen for totally mainstream stuff, but it was really kind of weird to read something that had both, which I think was what made it such a seductive read both for people who love zines (‘Wow! I can like 90210!’) and for people who were primarily Seventeen readers (like me, you know, ‘Wow, what’s this crazy super-8 shit?’).”
do-it-yourself
Sassy encouraged girls not to just consume culture—be it indie or mainstream—but to create it themselves, whether it was by publishing a zine, forming a band or indie label, or becoming an activist. Underground culture had always been covered, however briefly, in hipper glossy magazines like Spin or Details but, before Sassy, no one had ever thought to cover it for teenage girls. Sassy single-handedly shifted the paradigm of what kinds of things were cool for a teenage girl to do; in the pages of Sassy, being a drummer or a zine publisher was way better than being on the prom committee.
Sassy’s concept of DIY was not limited in scope. Beyond the magazine’s boosterism of zines, indie music, and riot grrrl, it had long touted making one’s own clothes and beauty products as not just thifty, but chic as well. Sassy not only told its teen readers that they could do anything they wanted, but also how to do it. Articles like “Kicking Out the Jams,” on how to start a band; “How to Have a Job in Music and Be Female”; and “You Can So Be a Writer” featured words of wisdom and practical advice from successful women, proving to Sassy readers that their goals were attainable. Even if you didn’t specifically want to start a band or become a writer, Sassy assured you that those options—and more—were there for you. The very act of demystifying access was reminiscent of both Second Wave feminism and the DIY ethos of punk.
All of Sassy’s talk about independence had a major impact. “It was my first introduction to DIY that did not involve sewing, canning, or making crafts,” says Caitlin Kuleci, who grew up Mormon in Utah and always felt like an outcast. It was “as if everyone had gotten some sort of rule book at birth, which I was mysteriously born without. Nothing really spoke to me, not just as a teenage girl but as a teenage girl who was pissed off and annoyed at the world.” That changed when Caitlin discovered Sassy through two non-Mormon friends of her sister. “My world was a chorus of no—no sex, no hair dye, no short s
kirts, no music with cuss words, no causing a scene—no, no, no. Sassy was the first time I heard yes in a way I understood—yes to college for learning instead of just husband-hunting, yes to speaking your mind, yes to being smart and being proud of it. It was a yes I desperately needed to hear.” Maria Cincotta remembers, “Sassy definitely made me want to start a band. I actually started my first band at age fifteen with a bunch of other Sassy readers.” Irene Huangyi Lin, in an article on her Web site called “Sassy Girls Are Still Around,” agrees. “Sassy taught me that teenage girls were supposed to be creative, outspoken, and independent instead of mindless, unquestioning consumers.”
Some Sassy readers, like Alice Tiara, created a sort of lifestyle around Sassy’s DIY cheerleading. Besides being introduced to indie rock in Sassy, Alice proudly recounts writing a column in her school newspaper “in which I deplored the conformity of the Gap and the apathy of my fellow students”; making a T-shirt that read HOMOPHOBIA IS QUEER (and wearing it, in true Sassy fashion, with ripped-up fishnets and a kilt); and protesting a policy that required girls and boys to wear graduation gowns segregated by color. She notes that although she and her friends did not succeed at that one, they did get a “statement about gender equality” read at graduation.
“One thing the religious right didn’t really count on when they freaked out about sex in the first few months of the magazine was that we ended up being much more subversive when we couldn’t talk about sex,” Margie has said. “Telling girls to be independent thinkers—that’s much scarier than telling girls how to give a blow job.”