by Kara Jesella
The Sassy ethic of doing it for yourself is a direct descendant of a very American notion of non-comformity. Both Sassy’s readers and editors, for the most part, were members of Generation X, derided at the time for being low-achieving slackers. In fact, “slacking” was a new, different definition of achievement, where meaningful work and following your bliss trumped wage-slave jobs. Sassy was certainly an arena where following your bliss was encouraged. At the same time, as high-school students, Sassy’s readers were studying the American ideals of civil disobedience under the likes of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Even as parents and teachers were asserting their authority, Sassy was reinforcing the idea that girls should question adults’ decisions and power.
In essence, Sassy was teaching girls to be hip. In his history of the subject, Hip, John Leland writes, “If hip is a form of rebellion—or at least a show of rebellion—it should want something. Its desires are America’s other appetite, not for wealth, but for autonomy.” In the past, if it had mostly been men (the Beats, et al.) who won this independence, this time there was a feminist twist.
community
Hip, of course, is about status. Sassy was the first magazine to give being a nerdy girl its own cultural cache. Laura Padilla says that “Sassy appealed to the teenage snobbery that I affected … Made me feel smarter and cooler than the girls who read YM.” Melody Warnick remembers, “I had this sense of myself as being really different, and a whole lot cooler, than the other people in my high school. And Sassy affirmed that for me. It made me feel hip, smart, a little rebellious, and alternative.” Sassy reassured girls that there were other people out there who existed on the fringe of mainstream teen culture.
In fact, according to Sassy, being considered a loser at your high school (whether currently attending or in the possession of a diploma) was practically a badge of honor. In “Popular People Are as Insecure as You,” one of many stories designed to soothe the battered egos of its fragile, sensitive readers, Kim deconstructs the cool crowd. The piece lists reasons Sassy readers should stay on society’s sidelines because, otherwise, “you’re forced to conform,” “you have to play dumb,” “you’re undoubtedly elitist,” and “your chances of being cool later are inversely related to your popularity level in high school.”
Julie Gerstein—who bonded with her best friend when they first met, over how much they wanted to be Sassy editors when they grew up (alas, she didn’t get her wish to work at Sassy, but she does work in magazines today)—suspects that the girls and boys who read Sassy “felt a certain sense of angst-fueled boredom and insecurity that made them feel like outsiders in some way or another. It’s something that’s permeated a lot of different subcultures—be it riot grrrl or punk rock or whatever—the idea that ‘what we do is secret. ’ Even if it’s not literally secret, there is a secret language, or knowledge that defines one as either in or out of the club. And in that way, Sassy created a legion of girls and boys all speaking a similar outsider language—infused with wit, snark, and sincerity.”
Being saved by the magazine from her dull hometown is a story nearly every Sassy fan tells. They were girls who Constance Hwong describes as “quirky, witty types with a penchant for Dorothy Parker, thrift-store clothes, and Doc Martens,” or who Alice Tiara calls “the edgy alternative girls, the feminist girls. Later we’d be the ones who gave political speeches in class about censorship and wore our hair in pigtails while snarling and looking fierce in between going to debate tournaments and doing physics homework.” Sassy reassured its readers that there were plenty of girls just like themselves out there (this kind of fringe-leaning teen would later become a commodified persona, perhaps thanks to Sassy).
Certain magazines are successful for aiding readers in finding kindred spirits, but publications like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, or Spy are often for the financial or cultural elite and serve the purpose of reaffirming their readers’ rarified status. “Sassy was for a totally disenfranchised group—teen girls—or, rather, double-disenfranchised, since these girls also felt like they didn’t fit in,” says Professor David Abrahamson, who also thinks that Sassy helped create a certain “liberated spirituality,” or an edict to live one’s life as honestly as possible.
The girl who read Sassy was reluctant to go off the grid in terms of media, so having one foot in mainstream America was still important to her because, as Ann Powers theorizes, “It’s a very rare person who is confident and informed enough in high school to be able to completely reject mainstream pop culture. If you’re going to live in an alternative media universe, it takes quite a bit of effort.” The Sassy reader was also equally alienated and passionate, culturally literate and adventurous, and interested in self-expression.
Sassy was never meant to be a niche magazine—its circulation was high and its distribution was nationwide. But so effective was its combination of mainstream and alternative culture that there were definitely nonbelievers in the industry who mistook Sassy for a publication for a smaller group. “I remember someone saying to me on an ad-sales call once, ‘Isn’t Sassy just for alienated teenagers?’ And I said, ‘An un-alienated teenager —that’s not a lot.’ What teen-ager doesn’t feel alienated?” says Jane. (Anyone who has ever noted the frequency with which The Bell Jar appears on teen girls’ bookshelves would likely agree.)
And the sense of community that girls felt with the magazine wasn’t just mental. In fact, girls tried to interact with the magazine—and with one another—physically. They sent letters to people who appeared in the magazine, they interned at Sassy, they met one another at thrift stores or at shows for indie bands they read about in Sassy: they sought one another out, which took a lot of effort in the pre-Internet age. Now it’s much simpler for magazine readers (or people with any common interest) to connect with one another; every magazine has a Web site with online forums, Q&As with staff members, and email addresses for each department. If anything, these days such efforts to connect readers to a magazine work as marketing gimmicks. But with Sassy, the evolution of a community of readers wasn’t something the staff planned; according to Christina, “It was this thing that sort of evolved.”
Sarah Crichton says she thinks her readers felt similarly connected to Seventeen, but “Sassy was able to triangulate [their audience].” In other words, they responded both to the magazine and to one another. “Part of it was that you had the girls who had not felt like they had belonged to anything, so they found one another. There was this sentiment that, ‘I’m sure as hell not YM, I’m sure as hell not Seventeen, but I’m not Cosmo, so what am I?’”
In reality, the majority of Sassy’s audience was not urban hipsters. “Most of our readers were in the middle of the country. I mean, we’re talking about Pocatello, not cool places,” says Karen. (In fact, according to Sassy’s marketing kits, their circulation mirrored the U.S. population almost exactly, with 22 percent of their readers in the Northeast, 21 percent in the West, 29 percent in the South, and 28 percent in the Midwest.) But Sassy brought cool to rural and suburban girls in the form of music, books, movies, and other cultural ephemera in a genuinely exuberant way. “And I think that’s part of it, too; people who didn’t live in urban centers are easily alienated by magazines that they perceive for even a second as condescending to them, not including them,” says Karen.
the reader-produced issue
In early 1990, the staff decided to take the idea of letting real girls get involved with the magazine a step further. They held a contest in which readers could apply for positions at the magazine, culminating in the first reader-produced issue (RPI). Both the business and editorial sides take credit for the idea. Either way, according to Mary Kaye, “It was really just for the reader, so that they would know that there was a chance they could be a part of [Sassy].”
Summer Lopez was the editor in chief of the first RPI. She had been a Sassy reader since the premier issue and applied for every single job in the special issue (as did Atoosa Rubens
tein, who was, according to Mary, “rejected for every position,” but was eventually accepted as an intern at Sassy; she later became the editor in chief of Seventeen). Summer was studying geometry in summer school when her mother got the call from Mary Kaye about the job. When she heard the news, on a pay phone at school, she fell down and dropped the phone, crying and laughing. She had two weeks to compose herself and get to New York.
“There were some bumps in the road,” Summer remembers. Like figuring out exactly what her role would be. The reader staff was small, and only a few of them got to fly to New York (most worked long-distance). But the RPI was a success and became an annual event at Sassy.
Tali Edut, a reader from Michigan, was the art director of the second RPI, which had the largest number of readers working out of the New York office and the greatest political bent, which extended to the quiz, “How Much Do You Know About Rape?” a stark contrast to the usual light-hearted fare like “Are You Ridiculously Romantic?” or “Are You a Slacker?” The cover was to be a shot of two models, one African American and the other Asian. But they were asked to make one addition to the shoot, Tali remembers. “They made us put a blond white chick on the cover. They were afraid we would alienate the white readers. And we were all like, ‘Come on.’” It should be noted, though, that the sole model on the cover of the 1992 RPI was African American—something the editorial staff decided to green light despite the publishing side’s warnings that doing so would jeopardize sales. (In fact, Tali and her twin sister, Ophi, went on to found HUES—Hear Us Emerging Sisters—a feminist magazine with a more overtly multicultural mission than that of Sassy.)
For the last RPI, Ethan Smith—the staff boy who replaced Charles Aaron, who had written for the first RPI—became the chaperone. “In retrospect it seems so absurd that a twenty-two-year-old would be in charge of ten kids between [the ages of] fifteen and twenty-five,” he laughs. He took them to East Village coffee shops (they were too young to go to bars) and to Maxwell’s, a club in Hoboken, New Jersey, to see Unrest play. One night they were hanging out in pre–chain store Times Square and Ethan realized that he alone was responsible for a group of kids whose parents had signed release forms that were only two pages long—an impossibility in today’s litigation-happy age. But it was in keeping with Sassy’s faith in young people. As Ethan points out, “At the time it didn’t seem that abnormal, in a way. It was sort of typical of the whole Sassy experience, where they would put a recent college graduate in charge of all these minors and just see if it would work itself out. And it did.”
Beyond simply getting the chance to work at their favorite magazine, the RPI provided readers with the opportunity to meet up with fellow Sassy obsessives, a crew that was not made up of typical high-school girls. “We were fifteen-year-old kids comparing notes on Camille Paglia,” says Roni Shapira, who filled in for Christina on the second RPI. “Though we were all really different, we all had the sense that we had found our people.” There was even some talk that the staff was a bit less cool than this highly discerning, authenticity-obsessed group had thought (perhaps it was hard for them to live up to their Sassy personas). But for Shapira, it was an experience in which she could meet and bond with Christina and interview singer Henry Rollins (with whom she remained pen pals for a few months). When her issue came out, she was called into her high-school guidance counselor’s office about a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) scholarship, the counselor probably assuming that such an odd girl must be a lesbian. “Sassy branded me in the eyes of my college counselor,” Shapira laughs. It was further proof, perhaps, that outside of Sassy, it was the rare adult who got it.
But not everyone lucky enough to work on the RPI felt like they had found their community. Lara Zeises replaced Mary Clarke as beauty editor of the second RPI. She had spent the entire year practicing her writing—penning fake articles, short stories, and plays—so that when the call went out for the second RPI she would be ready. When she found out she had the job, it felt like the best thing that had ever happened to her.
But when she got to New York, she felt like she didn’t fit in with the other girls because she “didn’t wear [her] subversiveness on the outside.” Most of the girls who were chosen were the misfits at their own high schools, but when they took over Sassy, suddenly Zeises was the outcast. At fifteen, she was one of the younger RPI staffers. One girl would always ask Zeises’s opinion because, as Zeises puts it, “she thought I was a more typical magazine reader. She meant it almost as an insult.” Furthermore, her RPI editor rewrote one of her articles, an interview with a Cover Girl model, because it wasn’t sarcastic enough.
Zeises felt spurned outside the Sassy offices as well. Every RPI had a slumber-party vibe, and there were lots of late-night conversations at the hotel. One night someone got hold of some alcohol, and everyone was drinking. They started playing the pussy game—taking one word of a song title and replacing it with pussy. The game ultimately became about trying to make Zeises say the word. She wouldn’t—and as a result was branded the issue’s token goody-goody. “I never felt the same about Sassy after that. I felt like Sassy was about celebrating individuality, but to those girls it was about conforming to some standard of nonconformity,” she laments. “I wanted to be cool enough to hang with the kids I considered cool. And I was hurt when those same kids rejected my attempts.”
“At some point, the typical Sassy girl became a smugly superior alterna-chick,” says Zeises, who now writes young-adult fiction. “I was never actually cool enough to read Sassy. I listened to show tunes and wore leggings until my freshman year in college. But I was smart and funny and subversive in my own way.”
the dark side
Zeises is not the only fan who feels betrayed. John Leland calls hipness “a strategy in the face of terror”—and the high-school years can no doubt be terrifying. But this idea of hipness was a strategy that girls could turn on one another. Sassy paid a lot of lip service to the notion of being yourself, but this message felt to some like it came with the caveat that you could be yourself as long as your true self was really cool according to the magazine’s standards. “Sassy had its low points. While they championed the black-wearing, artistic non-cheerleader, they did it at the expense of the bubbly yet still smart cheerleader,” says fan Liz Menoji. In the early years, Sassy’s endless stories excoriating beauty pageants and sororities felt like a huge victory for girls whose worst nightmare was playing the pop tart. But sometimes Sassy cast not just the institutions, but also the people who participated in them, as the enemy.
And while the staff often boasted of their open-mindedness and encouraged similar behavior from the magazine’s readers, Sassy could, in fact, be really judgmental in its devotion to this ideal. The staff singled out 90210 star Shannen Doherty as an object of their derision because of her hammy acting, but also because of her Republican leanings. Sassy’s staff was certainly entitled to (and for the most part beloved for) their political views, but for a magazine that celebrated the liberated, experimental teen-girl worldview, this could be seen as a touch of tunnel vision.
But you weren’t immune even if you were a card-carrying member of the Democratic party who volunteered at Planned Parenthood and had her sights set on a decidedly liberal East Coast college. As Zeises attests, in the later years Sassy could equate how you looked and what you listened to with the kind of person you were—and that’s where things became increasingly problematic. There’s Chloë Sevigny, for instance, who was always held up as a paragon of sassiness in the magazine—but it seems as if her sassiness was derived entirely from her look, as seen in a February 1993 “About Face” column, where she was praised for cropping her ultra-long hair in favor of a hip, Mia Farrow–esque pixie cut. Similarly, a September 1991 article called “Primal Beauty” celebrates body piercings (including Jane’s nose ring) and tattoos used as marks of individualism. The unspoken idea was that if you didn’t conform to these supposedly daring fashion and beauty statements, which
were associated with Sassy’s liberated paradigm, then you must not be cool.
The question of whether they were cool enough for their favorite magazine still looms large in some readers’ minds. “I was a girl banished into not just the suburbs but the outskirts of the suburbs, and had access to very little,” says reader Kendra Gaeta. “I had a single mom and my life didn’t feel urban enough to identify with what was cool, nor was I privileged enough to buy what I was seeing.” Sassy was a very middle- and upper-class magazine—a junior version of the bourgeois bohemian culture popularized by David Brooks in his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper-Class and How They Got There—in some ways more so than Seventeen, which often ran features on ways to make money over the summer or on proper dress for your first job, and routinely featured less elite colleges than those discussed in Sassy’s pages. For all its liberal leanings and efforts to show a more multicultural view of teen life, the magazine still celebrated a white indie culture whose priority was never about making ends meet.
In a certain way, this kind of underground culture that Sassy was so enamored of was in reach and thus inclusive—thrift-store clothes, cheap cups of coffee, and used record bins were hardly expensive or hard to come by—but for the average self-conscious teen girl, it might be difficult to take on that lifestyle without ridicule. Marla Tiara, who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts and was a Sassy intern, always skipped the fashion pages. “I thought I couldn’t wear that stuff. If I wore anything that wasn’t a Benetton rugby shirt, I would be made fun of for five weeks. In high school I kept my head down and wanted to blend in.”
And Sassy encouraged its readers to see the world in similarly black-and-white terms. Like Zeises’s experience with her fellow RPI staff, some girls felt that they couldn’t live up to the standard, and felt like exiles from yet another community. And some of them blame Sassy for condoning this girl vs. girl behavior. While girls revered Sassy for telling the truth about celebrities—however unflattering that truth might be—the magazine’s own inherent cattiness encouraged a similar outlook from its readers. And while it could be argued that prefab idols like Tiffany, Milla Jovovich, and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen were worthy of being knocked down, it could also be argued that all three were young girls, possibly young girls with less self-confidence and smarts than Sassy readers, and more easily molded. And there’s no excuse, really, for some of Christina’s comments. “I wonder what that sweet little Balthazar Getty sees in that dirty old tattoo-covered Drew Barrymore?” she writes in a February 1991 issue of “What Now.” Even Kim Gordon was less than impressed, noting in a May 1991 Spin article, “I found this knock at little Drew a little uncool.”