How Sassy Changed My Life

by Kara Jesella

  We’re not saying we’re perfect, but one thing we do know is that Sassy caters to eclectic tastes, not some exclusive girls [sic] club for the terminally hip. What we relate to are readers whose minds are not just bright but open; who have a sense of humor as well as a sense of style; and who aren’t too cool to have fun.

  To those girls who get it, the real fun-smartgroovygoofygreat girls, we say: Welcome to Sassy ’96 … and beyond!

  To this day, none of the former Stepford Sassy staffers have commented on what they hoped to accomplish with such a mean-spirited, bitter, and vindictive letter to their readers.

  Jane remembers reading her name in the despised new Sassy, accusing her of checking out, and likens it to “a mother saying, ‘Your father just ran off, he doesn’t want you!’ It was like, ‘Oh my god, my poor readers!’”

  But nothing could be done to bring Sassy back from the grave. After all, Lang didn’t sell Sassy because of unpopularity or lack of loyalty from its readership. For some, the very presence of the new Sassy served as a nagging reminder that the glory days were over. Fan Cheryl Taruc illustrates this, saying that the mere act of catching a glimpse of the new Sassy would leave her “feeling ashamed when I saw it on the newsstand. I couldn’t even look at it.”

  Predictably, the revamped Sassy failed. In 1996 Petersen folded Sassy into now-defunct Teen. Petersen couldn’t afford to maintain two separate teen publications with virtually the same content and identity. So Sassy, whose history was much less advertiser-friendly, was out. The new Sassy’s failure was seen by former staffers and fans as a kind of victory. The ultimate irony was that Teen, in many ways Sassy’s nemesis, prevailed (though not for long; the monthly edition of the print magazine soon folded).

  chapter 8

  Legacy

  instant nostalgia

  If magazines best represent the time in which they were created, then Sassy is the ultimate avatar of its era. “Sassy was to 1991 what Playboy was to its moment,” says Ann Powers. Playboy helped create an ideal of martini-swilling, urban men-about-town for the average American guy; Sassy created an equally potent image for young women. Powers surmises that Sassy created a “fantasy of liberation for different people. One fantasy was for fifteen-year-old girls, and another was for twenty-eight-year-old men. I don’t think anything now holds that space.”

  That’s why, years later, so many readers can’t stop talking about Sassy. “It’s kind of funny how cultlike Sassy fans can be,” says Ocean Capewell. “I remember when I was eighteen, standing in the kitchen of my first apartment with one of my roommates as she chopped Vidalia onions. She asked if I’d ever had them before. I said no, but I remembered that the girl in the sorority article in Sassy said she was from Vidalia, Georgia, and it was the sweet-onion capital of the world. My roommate looked at me in shock and said, ‘That’s what our other roommate said! That exact sentence!’” And back issues of Sassy hold up surprisingly well—not just for fans to reread, but for a new generation of teens. Capewell’s teenage sister, who was five when Sassy folded, found her copies and has, as Capewell puts it, “become obsessed. Even though she doesn’t really get the pop-culture references, she’s really in love with its utter sassiness. I think it’s really exciting that the message can still get out there. I mean, who cherishes copies of Seventeen from ten years ago?”

  Former staffer Karen Catchpole spent four years backpacking through South Asia in the post-Sassy years. “I remember being in Burma, and we must have been doing introductions and talking about what we do at home. And then the lightbulb went off in this woman’s head and she said, ‘What’s your last name?’ She went bananas—bananas—to the point where I was like, ‘Lady, this is kind of getting embarrassing.’ She was like, ‘You saved my life. I loved the magazine. Oh, what happened? And who killed it? And I’m really mad.’”

  “It’s still my favorite thing, when someone comes out of the woodwork and talks about Sassy,” says Kim France, who was speaking at her alma mater, Oberlin, years after Sassy folded. She mentioned having worked at Sassy and said, “‘I don’t know how many of you guys remember or read it?’ And all these hands went up.”

  There are also myriad heartbreaking stories of how Sassy collections lovingly amassed during the teen years were lost. Alice Tiara started crying when she found out her mother had accidentally thrown away her collection—“I was absolutely dumbfounded that she didn’t realize how much Sassy had meant to me”—but salvation came when her best friend showed up with a duffel bag full of Sassys she had gotten from Craigslist. Now Alice has five years’ worth of back issues organized in chronological order in her bedroom and reads them “whenever I’m feeling nostalgic for some hot nineties clothing or feminist zeal.”

  Some fans wanted to give the magazine a permanent place online. Blair, created by Richard Wang and Bryan Nunez, is a Webzine so Sassy-esque that it even had a “Cute Skater Alert.” It was once described as being “like Tiger Beat for a smarter person, but not that much smarter.” Their first issue, in winter 1994, eulogized the old Sassy. Wang had long had an email relationship with Margie, which turned into a relationship with many staff members; he went to Andrea’s thirtieth birthday party and watched Christina dance to “Superfreak”—the highlight of his night. He and Mary even bonded over whether Clark Wallabees and Ugg boots were ripe for a comeback, and she later leaked the Sassy celebrity issue to him. The lost issue of Sassy was renamed Sissy, not just as a tribute to the teen magazine’s gay fans but also so Wang and Nunez would not get sued. In it, Chloë Sevigny posed as Edie Sedgwick, Joey Ramone went to a spa, Mayim Bialik wrote a guide on how to perform a mitzvah, and drag queen RuPaul guest edited “Zits and Stuff.” “Now what magazine could bring all those people together?” Wang asks.

  In November 1996, Jennifer Baumgardner hired Christina to write about the last days of Sassy for Ms. “I was finally getting a sense of how important Sassy was to feminism,” she says. The article almost didn’t happen: Jennifer remembers Marcia Gillespie, Ms.’s editor in chief, reading Christina’s article and declaring, “We’re not running it. Sassy’s not important. Christina just sounds whiny.” Indeed, Christina’s trademark exasperation is evident: “Now, this insult to the memory of Sassy-as-we-intended-it-to-be is dead and gone. And I’m supposed to feel … what? Vindicated? Happy? Relieved? To tell you the truth, I don’t feel much of anything.” Jennifer was given the order to find another writer and another topic, but she refused. “It was much better than a lot of the shit we ran—a lot more sparkling and new and feminist. A lot of the stuff we ran felt like, ‘Well, people should probably know this by now because they’ve been reading Ms. for the last twenty-five years.’ It felt different,” she says. Gillespie finally caved. Christina’s essay ran and received bagfuls of letters from Ms.’s younger readers, who were thrilled that Christina and Sassy were being name-checked in the premier feminist publication. Paying lip service to Sassy’s death made the older Second Wave feminists at Ms. at least appear to understand the younger generation of Third Wavers, which was a bridge they needed to build if they were going to stay vital as these new feminists came of age.

  mega zines

  “It was like what they say about the Velvet Underground—everyone who listened to them started a band. Everyone who read Sassy started a zine,” says Rita Hao. Sassy’s zine boosterism primed its readers for indie media. When the magazine folded, many longtime Sassy fans, frustrated both by how their favorite magazine was treated by mainstream publishing and by the lack of Sassy-like alternatives, delved deeper into the world of alternative publications. Across the country, zines were started as a grassroots response to Sassy’s demise, and some grew to be nationally circulated publications.

  In 1993, Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller met as twentysomethings when both were working creative corporate jobs at Nickelodeon. They bonded over being devoted Sassy readers, outside of the target teen demographic, and wished that something with a similar sensibility existed for women their age. In t
heir off-hours they began hoarding the company’s office supplies so they could start a paper-and-staple zine called Bust. It had an open, inviting, exploratory approach to sex; was obsessed with Hello Kitty; and celebrated 1950s pinup Bettie Page. There were fun, feminist-y columns like “One Handed Read” (short erotica pieces); an entire issue devoted to gay men; and “News from a Broad,” global news coverage of women’s issues. “The style and the language of Bust came really directly from what the girls were doing at Sassy,” says Karp. In fact, Stoller and Karp became friends with Christina (“I met her because we were at a party and we were both crushing, I think, on the same guy,” says Karp). Bust even flirted with mainstream circulation when the Internet media company Razorfish bought it in 2000. Unlike the staff at Sassy, Stoller and founding creative director Laurie Henzel were able to buy back the magazine after the dot-com bubble burst and make it into a smaller-scale success.

  Similarly, Chicago-based Venus magazine was started by avowed Sassy fan Amy Schroeder. “Growing up, my family moved around quite a bit and I was shy, so Sassy made me feel like, ‘Hey, it’s okay to be different and to challenge the norm,’” she says. “Sassy inspired me to daydream about one day working for a magazine and living in New York. If it weren’t for Sassy, I’m not sure if I would have entered the publishing world.” She started Venus Zine while she was still in college as a venue to write about girls in music, film, and print, and it read a bit like a magazine-sized “Cute Band Alert.” After a brief stint working in publishing in New York post-graduation, she started stepping up Venus’s publishing schedule and ultimately made it her full-time job.

  Andi Zeisler and Lisa Jervis grew up together in New York City, and each of them interned at Sassy. In 1995, after graduating from Colorado College and Oberlin—two of the Sassiest Colleges in America—and shortly after Sassy’s death, they moved to San Francisco. The connoisseurs of high and low culture spent a lot of time reading zines and staring at the television, though they weren’t always happy with what they saw. “It wasn’t really that productive to be complaining to each other or shouting at the TV,” says Zeisler. “There was something to be said from a feminist perspective, but we were stuck because, though we had a lot of ideas, as twenty-two-year-old retail workers we didn’t have a lot of places to publish them.” Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, began as a black-and-white zine printed at Kinko’s with a circulation of two hundred, which would later grow to more than fifty thousand. Zeisler says that her adolescent devotion to Sassy was a big inspiration. “They were really foregrounding the lives of girls, and not in relation to boys or in relation to their parents. That’s what we wanted to do with Bitch, in creating a feminist magazine that we would want to read.” Jervis says that, for her, Sassy was responsible for “my love of magazines and magazine conventions, the way they’re put together.” Some memorable Bitch pieces include a love letter to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a story on the rise of the word lady, and an investigation into the waxing and waning of men’s body hair.

  sassy diaspora

  Bitch was one of the most vocal detractors of Jane magazine, the publication that should have been the most obvious heir to the Sassy throne. In 1997, Jane finally got the publication she had begun to work on in 1993 off the ground—not with Time, Inc., but with Fairchild, which owned Women’s Wear Daily and W. Sassy fans could rejoice—Jane brought Christina on as the launch executive editor; Karen later held the same position.

  Lisa Jervis was initially thrilled at the news of a new magazine from Jane. “I thought it was going to be like Sassy, but for my age now. What a great antidote to that other crap,” she says, referring to the other women’s magazines out there. After reading the first two issues and feeling disappointed, Jervis penned a scathing review for Salon. She writes, “Those of us salivating in front of the newsstand were hoping for something that took Sassy’s early vision of self-confident girl power and critical thinking a step further. I don’t know why we thought that we could expect something different, something intelligent and even mildly subversive, something really good, from a corporate publisher.” Like other Sassy readers, reared on a fantasy of liberation and DIY, Jervis was angry at being let down by Jane.

  Jane and Christina were none too pleased with Jervis, whom they had specifically asked to send in story ideas for Jane’s first issue (though none of them ended up in the magazine). The morning the Salon story ran, Jervis awoke to a seven a.m. phone call from Christina. “She called to yell and to suggest that I was bitter because they said no to the pitches. I was livid. I said I had read both issues cover to cover and wrote my honest opinion about them,” says Jervis.

  Thus began a long-running feud between the two publications. The editors at Bitch retaliated by compiling an article called “10 Things I Hate About Jane,” which later spun off into a regular column called the “Jane Petty Criticism Corner,” in which the editors devoted a thousand words per issue to the failings of the glossy twentysomething magazine. Jane’s editors soon fired back a blind item about the anger of a certain feminist editor who they claimed really wanted to write for the magazine and had been shot down.

  So why has Jane inspired so much fervor among Sassy devotees? According to Bitch: “Sad as it is, we’re used to women’s magazines making us feel that we’re not thin or pretty enough or rich or well-heeled enough, and that’s why many of us choose not to read them. But it’s far worse to be smugly informed that what we’re getting from Jane is different, when in fact the only difference lies in the pitch itself. Jane’s snooty, preening reality is that much more painful for having the initial premise—and Pratt’s own promises—dangled before us.” Says Jessica Nordell, “I think the spirit of Sassy was one of creating stuff, and the spirit of Jane is consuming stuff. I always finished reading Sassy feeling good, and finished reading Jane feeling bad.” Lara Zeises remembers being excited when Jane came out, but quickly feeling let down. “It was just Cosmo in a different dress. I read Jane and I think, ‘Oh, God. Still working that smug superiority thing, aren’t you?’”

  A lot of the ire is directed at Jane herself, who left the magazine in August 2005. She’s become the Liz Phair of the publishing world, and openly embracing fame and money has made her anathema to many former fans, as has her lighter take on feminism.

  The promise that Jane was going to arrive just as the Sassy generation was coming into adulthood was seductive, as if another Jane Pratt–helmed magazine, with Christina writing a “What Now” type of column called “Dish,” could help girls navigate their grown-up lives. But maybe that’s too much to expect from a magazine—even a purportedly feminist one. Jennifer Baumgardner says she experienced the same feeling even at Ms. “These things that are special things for women raise your expectations so much, and then you go in there and it doesn’t provide a brand-new you, and it doesn’t meet all of your creative needs, and you do get shot down and you do have to make compromises,” she says. But compromise is exactly what a woman’s magazine needs to do in order to survive—as any Sassy staff member can attest.

  Surprisingly, Kim and Andrea have been looked upon more kindly by Sassy readers, who love Lucky, the popular Condé Nast magazine of which they are editor in chief and creative director, respectively. Though it’s often dismissed as a glorified catalog, Lucky always takes a positive approach to the female figure—never disparaging or making fun—and a joyful, girlfriend-y approach to shopping. There is a pleasant lack of socialites in its pages, and an absence of Absolutely Fabu-lous –style fashionspeak. The magazine is playful, not didactic, and shows a wide range of price points. Plus, there’s the added bonus of the edgy-but-wearable, classic approach to fashion that Andrea is known for. Kim says she was worried about the reaction to Lucky among former Sassy readers. “Sort of like, ‘Kim France is a sellout,’” she says. But not everyone agrees. “I think Lucky is really what became of Sassy,” says former intern and X-girl co-creator Daisy Von Furth. “It’s more of a real heir than Jane. Its obsession with d
etail—a lot of that was in Sassy.” Even Bitch did a feature on their love for Lucky.

  Other Sassy staffers have spread the Sassy aesthetic in both obvious and subtle ways in their prominent positions at publications including YM and ELLEGirl (Christina was editor in chief of both), Entertainment Weekly (where Mike Flaherty, Ethan Smith, and Mary Kaye Schilling have all worked), Shop, Etc. (Karen Catchpole), Spin (Charles Aaron, Maureen Callahan), and Modern Bride (Mary Clarke).

  teen magazines

  “The intriguing thing about Sassy is that it managed to make you feel really subversive and underground and rebellious and smart for basically doing what every other teenage girl was doing: reading teen magazines,” says Melody Warnick, a Sassy reader.

  Sassy left its mark on every teen magazine that followed it. During Christina’s tenure, YM banned articles on dieting; covered such Sassy-esque stories as punk-rock Mormon teens; and featured models with braces. The now-defunct ELLEGirl mirrored Sassy perhaps most obviously—it was targeted to the alternative girl, now a bona fide persona. All teen magazines can thank Sassy for providing them with a new way to cover celebrities, mixing mainstream and indie culture. (Rita Hao sees this as something Sassy contributed to pop culture at large, “like how MTV plays Modest Mouse and then plays Hilary Duff—but that was totally unusual for its time.”)

  Sassy was the first teen magazine to acknowledge that not all teen girls have the same banal desires, and so was born the niche magazine for teens. Today’s teen magazines recognize the need to cater to a psychographic, much like Sassy did fifteen years ago. Celebrity-obsessed girls could buy the now-defunct Teen People, or fashion addicts can pick up a copy of Teen Vogue. Atoosa Rubenstein, a former Sassy intern, was the founding editor of CosmoGIRL! “I loved Sassy, but I didn’t love Sassy for the same reason that many people loved Sassy. I didn’t necessarily relate to the girl they were speaking to,” she says. “That girl was way edgier and cooler than I was. But what I really liked about it was that that girl was different. And I was different.” CosmoGIRL! came complete with a trademark “you go girl” tone and a “Born to Lead” tagline. It was geared toward the geeky, overachieving crowd, and Atoosa offered herself up as a role model to teens who didn’t fit in. “It was essentially a love letter to the girl I was, which was a misfit and sort of an outcast but not necessarily the cool outcast; in a way, Sassy made that girl cool. What about the other girl who’s just truly dorky?” says Rubenstein, who was editor in chief of Seventeen from 2003 to 2006.