Speaker 1: I just have to say that my thirteen year old
Speaker 1: self is dying.
Speaker 2: I'm Susie Danacarum.
Speaker 3: And I'm Jessica Bennett.
Speaker 1: This is in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a
Speaker 1: cultural moment from the past that shaped.
Speaker 2: Us and that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1: Today, we're talking to Jane Pratt, the woman behind Sassy,
Speaker 1: an iconic teen magazine that shaped a generation of nineties girls,
Speaker 1: including us.
Speaker 2: Jane Pratt, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3: I am so excited to be here.
Speaker 1: I think I told you a story that I will
Speaker 1: start with, which is that when I was I think
Speaker 1: I was a freshman in high school, I went to
Speaker 1: boarding school, as did you. I went to boarding school
Speaker 1: in Connecticut, to a much less prestigious school than Jane did,
Speaker 1: for the record, and.
Speaker 3: I was barely surviving at mine.
Speaker 4: By the way, the whole impetus for Sassy magazine came
Speaker 4: out of what a loser I was at that school.
Speaker 1: I was not the coolest either, but I was in
Speaker 1: My sister was at Barnard and I came to town
Speaker 1: to visit her, and she knew how much I love.
Speaker 2: Sassy, and she was like, you know, what let's go visit.
Speaker 1: And she took me to the offices and we just came,
Speaker 1: which is a crazy thing for us to have done,
Speaker 1: and we just went to the front desk and my
Speaker 1: sister was like, this is my sister. She's obsessed with Sassy.
Speaker 1: And I don't remember the names of anyone, but everyone
Speaker 1: was so nice to me, like they gave me a tour.
Speaker 1: I think they gave me like copies of the magazine.
Speaker 1: It was just this really formative experience for me, and
Speaker 1: I just thought, oh my god, this is so cool,
Speaker 1: like this is what people get to do for a living.
Speaker 2: So I feel like I should thank you for that.
Speaker 4: I actually have a recollection because I was basically living
Speaker 4: in those offices at that time. I think it was
Speaker 4: when we were one time Square. Yeah, and we had yep,
Speaker 4: we had like a neon Sassy when you when you
Speaker 4: got off the elevator. That was our big fancy look. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I remember Andrew Lynnette, who worked at the front
Speaker 4: then and then became a beauty editor and then went
Speaker 4: on from there. I remember her telling me that when
Speaker 4: I was in a meeting, this girl and her sister
Speaker 4: had come by the offices.
Speaker 3: So I think it might that was.
Speaker 2: Ah, oh my god, that's so amazing.
Speaker 3: Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2: What a full circle moment this is for me?
Speaker 1: Who Yeah, it really was so special, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, it really speaks to just what Sas was.
Speaker 1: It was just this really accessible place for girls to go.
Speaker 1: It felt like a community more than even a magazine,
Speaker 1: which really did feel ahead of its time. So let's
Speaker 1: start at the beginning, just for people who might not
Speaker 1: be as familiar with Sassy as I.
Speaker 2: Clearly, you famously.
Speaker 1: Became the editor of Sassy magazine in nineteen eighty seven
Speaker 1: when you were just twenty four years old, which blows
Speaker 1: my mind because what I was doing at twenty four
Speaker 1: was not running like an iconic magazine, and I think
Speaker 1: that made you the youngest editor in history at that time.
Speaker 2: Tell me how it happened.
Speaker 3: You know, it's so funny.
Speaker 4: My daughter is now turning twenty one this week, and
Speaker 4: so I too, now have contact with people that are
Speaker 4: the age that I was on a pretty regular basis,
Speaker 4: And I mean it seems crazy to me now too.
Speaker 4: At the time, I thought, God, I've been out of
Speaker 4: school for a year and a half and I haven't
Speaker 4: gotten this magazine start yet, come on, this is crazy.
Speaker 2: You felt like you were behind the eight ball behind.
Speaker 4: Really seriously, I was really agonizing about But it was
Speaker 4: really the foresight of the original president of our publishing
Speaker 4: company that was based in Australia, who saw that someone
Speaker 4: young could actually be more adept at accessing the way
Speaker 4: that young people talk to each other and better able
Speaker 4: to produce this magazine for teenage girls. So my age
Speaker 4: actually was helpful to me. But I knew so little.
Speaker 4: I just knew nothing, because what happened was there was
Speaker 4: word out that this Australian publishing company was interested in
Speaker 4: getting into the American market, and they were interested in
Speaker 4: the teen market in particular. So I was like, well,
Speaker 4: that is exactly what I've wanted to do since I
Speaker 4: was fifteen years old. So I made up a whole presentation.
Speaker 4: I accidentally in my presentation I did a fake editor's
Speaker 4: letter and I said something about Panda bears instead of
Speaker 4: Koala Bears for Australia.
Speaker 3: I'll never forget, oh my god.
Speaker 4: But I did a whole presentation of what the magazine
Speaker 4: would be if I were to do it.
Speaker 3: And I also.
Speaker 4: Remember that in the meeting with her with Sandr Yates.
Speaker 4: She asked me something about what causes I supported, and
Speaker 4: I had just recently given some money to Nayral, the
Speaker 4: National Abortion Rates actionally and I mentioned that to her,
Speaker 4: and because I kind of wanted to be right up
Speaker 4: front with who I was and what I was going
Speaker 4: to do with this magazine if we got to do it,
Speaker 4: and she was really supportive of that, and so anyway,
Speaker 4: from there, I got a chance to start it, and
Speaker 4: I hired a bunch of people, mostly slightly older than me,
Speaker 4: but you know, but all within the same age range
Speaker 4: for the most part, So like a group of kids.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, did it feel like an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: pressure or were you so young that you had the
Speaker 1: confidence of not knowing the way you didn't know?
Speaker 4: Thank you, Thank you for recognizing that. I mean, I
Speaker 4: was ballsy. And then, funnily enough, when I went to
Speaker 4: start Jane Magazine, which was you know, nobody needs to
Speaker 4: know about this.
Speaker 3: But it was.
Speaker 4: It was maybe eight years later than that, after Sassy
Speaker 4: had been going on that long, I did not have
Speaker 4: the same confidence.
Speaker 3: It took me so much longer to get it going.
Speaker 4: But this was just one of those like, yeah, I
Speaker 4: deserve this I have a good idea, let's get it
Speaker 4: out there.
Speaker 1: How did you conceive of the magazine at the time,
Speaker 1: because one thing I think about a lot is how
Speaker 1: much intention we ascribed to art in retrospect, right, and
Speaker 1: often I think lots of things happen by instinct, and
Speaker 1: I'm curious for you how much of this was just instinct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was very verre cause oriented. I remember from
Speaker 4: very early days talking to Christina Kelly, who was one
Speaker 4: of my first hires as an editor there, and I
Speaker 4: remember us saying, well, we don't know that this magazine
Speaker 4: is going to be around forever, and that's not our goal.
Speaker 4: Our goal is to really make an impact on society
Speaker 4: with what we're doing. And at that time, Reagan was
Speaker 4: president and I have just been able to vote I
Speaker 4: think twice at that point, so I was, you know,
Speaker 4: that's how young I was, right, Yeah, but I remember saying, well,
Speaker 4: we could have with what we're doing here, we could
Speaker 4: have an impact on the next election, because they're all
Speaker 4: they're not that age yet, but they will be. Because
Speaker 4: it was fourteen to nineteen year olds that we're gearing
Speaker 4: to it, and so it was always about changing the
Speaker 4: world like that was always the goal, and that was
Speaker 4: very intentional.
Speaker 1: And how did you conceive of the subject areas or
Speaker 1: the coverage areas. I know, for example, you referred to
Speaker 1: your sort of three most popular writers as sex, drugs,
Speaker 1: and rock and roll, which I love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep. Christina was rock and roll.
Speaker 4: Catherine was drugs because she did all the kind of
Speaker 4: nitty gritty like reporting stuff, hardcore reporting. And Karen Ketchpoole
Speaker 4: was sex because she wrote about sex in a very
Speaker 4: open way. I hired her from Australia. She was one
Speaker 4: of the few people I brought over from there because
Speaker 4: it was really hard to find somebody in this country
Speaker 4: at that time. This sounds insane, but who could write
Speaker 4: so openly to women about sex and even I mean,
Speaker 4: you would think that's crazy. You would think Cosmo had
Speaker 4: been out for many years, but particularly for this age group,
Speaker 4: so there was just no There wasn't even sex information
Speaker 4: for girls out there. There was no birth control, there
Speaker 4: was nothing like that.
Speaker 1: That's interesting because I feel like, of course Cosmo existed,
Speaker 1: but Cosmo was still.
Speaker 2: Very geared towards landing a man, like so much of
Speaker 2: the stuff that was out there.
Speaker 1: There are the other teen magazines at that time were
Speaker 1: really focused on how to be thin, how to get
Speaker 1: a boyfriend, how to sort of make yourself this very stereotypical,
Speaker 1: almost nineteen fifties ideal. So was that something you were
Speaker 1: really conscious of or was that just not what you
Speaker 1: were interested in?
Speaker 4: I was extremely conscious of it. And it's funny because
Speaker 4: in thinking about talking today and thinking about what am
Speaker 4: I proud of, and a lot of what I'm proud
Speaker 4: of with Sase is what we didn't put in. I
Speaker 4: had a list of mandates to all to anyone writing
Speaker 4: or contributing that included things like, you know, no diets,
Speaker 4: no calorie counts.
Speaker 3: If a reader a lot of what we did.
Speaker 4: Were there advice columns in the magazine, So if a
Speaker 4: reader wrote in and said my crush has been ignoring
Speaker 4: me or whatever, nobody was allowed to assume that that
Speaker 4: crush was a boy.
Speaker 1: I mean, but that's a big deal considering sort of
Speaker 1: the context of the time. Reagan's America was not particularly
Speaker 1: LGBTQ friendly, right right exactly? And the voice, the voice
Speaker 1: was so specific and irreverent. Is it something that you.
Speaker 2: Sort of did consciously or were you just like, this
Speaker 2: is the way I talk.
Speaker 4: I knew that I really wanted to be completely different
Speaker 4: from what was out there, but it was intentional. Then
Speaker 4: what I would do is I would hire a lot
Speaker 4: of people that were not writers, but I liked their
Speaker 4: personalities and what they had to say, and I would
Speaker 4: just have them speak and record it and transcribe it.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, and yeah.
Speaker 4: That was easier than hiring people who had been at
Speaker 4: other publications because they were in that mode often of
Speaker 4: having been trained to do things like use the words
Speaker 4: tresses and locks and seb.
Speaker 3: Hair and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: So it was easier to just get somebody who just
Speaker 4: talked and had good things to say.
Speaker 1: I know this is probably an impossible question, but there
Speaker 1: were so many I on the cover, is do you
Speaker 1: have a favorite?
Speaker 4: It would be hard to say that I have a
Speaker 4: favorite cover because and I don't have a collection assassin,
Speaker 4: so it's not like something I look at regularly, but
Speaker 4: it'll pop up when they're on sale on eBay or
Speaker 4: whatever and make me wish that I had saved them
Speaker 4: because they're worth a lot more now. But I would
Speaker 4: say that every single issue that I look at has
Speaker 4: battles that went into it that I remember vividly. Whether
Speaker 4: it was the quirkier looking model that was on the
Speaker 4: cover that I had to fight for and to be
Speaker 4: able to run this cover with this cover model that
Speaker 4: didn't look conventional, to the point where readers in the
Speaker 4: early days would write in and they would say, we
Speaker 4: know you're just getting started, but maybe soon you'll be
Speaker 4: able to afford the good models that the other magazines use.
Speaker 2: What are some of the battles you remember most.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there were tons of them. The very first issue
Speaker 4: had the word sex on it. It was so you
Speaker 4: think you're ready for sex? Read this first? And I
Speaker 4: thought that was very, very tame. I actually didn't love
Speaker 4: that cover line because I thought it could be a
Speaker 4: lot more enticing than that.
Speaker 3: I thought that's pretty measured.
Speaker 4: But we went with that in a compromise, and that
Speaker 4: was hard to get through because of the fact that
Speaker 4: people weren't talking to teenage girls about sex at that time.
Speaker 4: I remember also a cover where this is one where
Speaker 4: I ended up losing the battle even though I thought it,
Speaker 4: which was putting a black model on a cover that
Speaker 4: was one of our traditionally bigger selling months, and finally
Speaker 4: getting it pushed through to where we got permission to
Speaker 4: have the black model on the cover of Sasse, and
Speaker 4: then the publisher, I guess, got cold feet and they
Speaker 4: put on the newstand copies. Polly bagged a copy of
Speaker 4: a beauty booklet with a white model on the cover.
Speaker 3: On top of that, Oh my god.
Speaker 4: So on the newsstands. Yet it didn't. It didn't come
Speaker 4: out on the newsstands the way that it was intended.
Speaker 2: How did you react to that?
Speaker 3: It was terrible.
Speaker 4: I think that we we this isn't the this doesn't
Speaker 4: paint me in the best light. But I think that
Speaker 4: a few of us we went to the press quietly
Speaker 4: and leaked that this had happened because we thought that
Speaker 4: they should be called out for it. So I think
Speaker 4: it came out somewhere the Village Voice or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you sort of say it doesn't paint
Speaker 1: you in the best light. But to me, what it
Speaker 1: speaks to is that even as the editor in chief
Speaker 1: of the magazine, you didn't have the power to change that.
Speaker 2: That was the only way you could do it.
Speaker 3: You had to be.
Speaker 4: Subvertinate, right, right, absolutely, that's absolutely right, And there was
Speaker 4: a lot of that, and probably my age might have
Speaker 4: hurt me in that regard or my lack of experience
Speaker 4: might have hurt me in that regard because I didn't
Speaker 4: necessarily know all of the ways that all of that
Speaker 4: worked to be able to get in there and make
Speaker 4: things go exactly my way. But there were battles constantly.
Speaker 4: I was thinking too about people now talk a lot
Speaker 4: about that Kurt and Courtney, Kurt Cobain and Courtney love cover.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's I think the most iconic sassy cover.
Speaker 4: It's so funny because that was a battle too, because
Speaker 4: I remember going into my meeting with the publisher, the
Speaker 4: president of the company and having to pitch Kurt Cobain
Speaker 4: as basically I've hated him to be like one of
Speaker 4: new kids on the block or backsheet.
Speaker 3: Boys like.
Speaker 4: That.
Speaker 2: He would have hated it.
Speaker 4: And yes, he would have hated it, but that was
Speaker 4: what I had to do to get them to accept
Speaker 4: it and to say it's going to sell really, really
Speaker 4: well and moms are going to love it.
Speaker 3: And all this kind. So we got we got permission
Speaker 3: to do that.
Speaker 4: It did not sell particularly well at the time, but
Speaker 4: it had as definitely stood the test of time, that's
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 1: How did it come to be, Like, how did you
Speaker 1: have the idea. How did you approach them about it?
Speaker 1: Were you there for the shoot?
Speaker 2: What was it like?
Speaker 4: Christina Kelly, who was the music entertainment editor, she was
Speaker 4: talking to the photographer Michael Levine and he had photographed
Speaker 4: Courtney Love and he had photographed for us as well
Speaker 4: for Sassin. So Courtney said to him that she loved
Speaker 4: Sassin magazine and would he consider photographing her for that
Speaker 4: And he came to us and we thought that was
Speaker 4: a great idea, and to do it with Kurt would
Speaker 4: be even better. I did not go to the photo shoot,
Speaker 4: but I remember right when that came out, when that
Speaker 4: issue came out, I got a phone call from a
Speaker 4: friend of mine who worked at Rolling Stone at the time,
Speaker 4: Chris Connelly, and he called me after right when that
Speaker 4: issue came out, and he said that at the photo
Speaker 4: shoot it was so obvious in the writing that Kurt
Speaker 4: and Courtney were doing drugs. And did I think it
Speaker 4: was irresponsible of us to run that story, and especially
Speaker 4: in a magazine for teenagers without disclosing that they were
Speaker 4: doing drugs? And was it journalistically sound? I thought, you
Speaker 4: run that story, which I thought was really interesting. But
Speaker 4: the funny thing was I had to tell them that
Speaker 4: we didn't know they were doing drugs. We were very naive.
Speaker 4: We were kids, really, so we hadn't done those drugs
Speaker 4: and we didn't know much about them, and we didn't
Speaker 4: so anyway, we just ran it as a love story
Speaker 4: between Curtin Gordon.
Speaker 1: One of the most famous things that came out of
Speaker 1: the Sassy era was it Happened to Me, which is
Speaker 1: a column that you carried over when you went to
Speaker 1: Jaine magazine and you had at Exojane, which was the
Speaker 1: digital publication you eventually launched. Why do you think that
Speaker 1: sort of first person, confessional style of writing resonated so
Speaker 1: much with the audience for Sassy.
Speaker 4: I was carefully reading all of the other teen magazines
Speaker 4: as I was getting ready to launch Sassy, and I
Speaker 4: knew that when I read these articles that they were running,
Speaker 4: particularly the more serious subjects, I would zone out and skim.
Speaker 4: When it came to doctor so and so from Harvard
Speaker 4: Medical School advises you to do da.
Speaker 3: Da da da dah.
Speaker 4: So I thought, what teenagers are going to trust is
Speaker 4: someone else their age who's going through it and telling
Speaker 4: them about it, not someone who has a degree or
Speaker 4: is considered an expert, and so I said, why don't
Speaker 4: we have a column called it Happened to Me where
Speaker 4: it's strictly first person, and we don't clean up the language,
Speaker 4: we don't make it sound magazini. We just leave it
Speaker 4: the way that they wrote it and keep it raw
Speaker 4: and so that they'll know that this is really real.
Speaker 3: And was a true experience.
Speaker 4: And I actually had to get my sister to do
Speaker 4: the first one because nobody was reading it, of.
Speaker 2: Course, so you had no submissions.
Speaker 4: We had none, and then then we got overflowing submissions
Speaker 4: after that and all coming through the US mail, but
Speaker 4: tons and tons of people's stories, and so she was
Speaker 4: my first one writing about her abortion, which was also
Speaker 4: very controversial. The advertiser who was opposite that they were
Speaker 4: not happy.
Speaker 1: Someone one said that you foresaw the dawn of the
Speaker 1: age of oversharing, And I think that is sort of true, right.
Speaker 1: Something I've thought a lot about is how Sassey predicted
Speaker 1: the self confessional era we live in now, and it
Speaker 1: explored the impact of trauma even before that was part
Speaker 1: of the vernacular or the way we just like talk
Speaker 1: about things. Why do you think that was something you
Speaker 1: were so drawn to?
Speaker 4: I think It comes from being that isolated boarding school
Speaker 4: student who felt really really alone in what I was
Speaker 4: going through, and any media that I would turn to
Speaker 4: for solas would make me feel more alienated because I
Speaker 4: wasn't being reflected in it. You know, I didn't look
Speaker 4: like those girls. I thought about other things that they
Speaker 4: were not talking about. So I think that that's where
Speaker 4: it came from, is just how good it can make
Speaker 4: someone feel to hear somebody else's true story that they
Speaker 4: are over sharing.
Speaker 2: Right. It's just being able to see yourself in the.
Speaker 4: Work, Yeah, and being able to not have shame and
Speaker 4: be free to say whatever you want. It's that basic, really.
Speaker 2: But at times I feel like there's been criticism of that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I think Slate once called it the first person industrial complex,
Speaker 1: and I think especially you know, with the rise of
Speaker 1: the digital age, there's more cost of that sort of
Speaker 1: confessional work because now women get harassed online. Have you
Speaker 1: thought about that and how you respond to that criticism?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that came up more at Exojane also because it
Speaker 4: was digital, and so we were getting more and more
Speaker 4: backlash about things that we would run that could be
Speaker 4: hurtful to maybe not the person that was over sharing.
Speaker 4: But someone else who was implicit in it or something
Speaker 4: like that. At the same time, I do still believe
Speaker 4: in the idea of people being that open and the
Speaker 4: benefits that come from that. So I don't stand behind
Speaker 4: every single thing that we published. There was some stuff
Speaker 4: that really ended up being really hurtful to people that
Speaker 4: I wish we hadn't done, But I still believe in
Speaker 4: the concept and I think that it's more good than bad.
Speaker 4: And there's a section in the new publication that I'm
Speaker 4: working on that goes even deeper. Oh interesting, So yeah,
Speaker 4: that takes it even one step further than it happened
Speaker 4: to me.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting, right, because it's an authenticity.
Speaker 4: Yes, there's nothing I like less than fake authenticity. And
Speaker 4: even the word even someone calling something authentic is already
Speaker 4: it already feels like, uh oh, that's already probably big.
Speaker 3: So I really think it's.
Speaker 4: So important to keeping it really real and raw for
Speaker 4: all of us, because everyone's going through stuff, and just
Speaker 4: to have it out there in the real way I
Speaker 4: think is so just so so therapeutic.
Speaker 1: It is interesting, though, because it is so much of
Speaker 1: what we sort of think of as social media now.
Speaker 1: Although I think a lot of social media. Is that
Speaker 1: performed authenticity versus real authentic.
Speaker 4: Yes, right, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Like I do think one of the reasons we don't
Speaker 1: see things like SAS and Rookie is that they've been
Speaker 1: to some degree replaced by influencers or content creators.
Speaker 2: And that's not necessarily bad.
Speaker 1: I mean, that is really young women talking to each
Speaker 1: other in the same way that SAS did to some degree. Right,
Speaker 1: in some ways it has inherited that ethos, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't create community in the same way.
Speaker 4: That's right, you know you just because I was just
Speaker 4: thinking that, I was just thinking that I really do
Speaker 4: appreciate the people that are out there who are being
Speaker 4: truly real about who they are and getting an audience
Speaker 4: for that and influencing in all those good ways.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate that.
Speaker 4: At the same time, I feel like that is it's
Speaker 4: not what I've ever been interested in, because it's not
Speaker 4: what I needed back in those days and still not
Speaker 4: what I need. Whereas I feel like I need community,
Speaker 4: I need to be able to then respond back and say, well,
Speaker 4: this is my reality, and have us all kind of
Speaker 4: group together and come to some mutual understanding.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was going to Quaker schools when I was
Speaker 3: a kid. That got me.
Speaker 4: But that part of it, that component of the community
Speaker 4: where it isn't just all of us listening to one
Speaker 4: person and what they think, because that's not the point.
Speaker 4: It's not what that person thinks or feels or went through.
Speaker 4: It's all of us together.
Speaker 1: There is just this generation of women where SASE really
Speaker 1: was such an iconic influence, right. I mean, women collect
Speaker 1: the magazine, they trade them. Barnard now has every issue,
Speaker 1: it has an official archive. It really has had this
Speaker 1: enduring influence. And I'm wondering what you think that is,
Speaker 1: why it really has captured the imagination of that generation
Speaker 1: of women in the way that it has.
Speaker 4: Man oh Man, I think that it was how really,
Speaker 4: again I go back to this, but how real it was.
Speaker 4: How we were when we were producing SAS, We were
Speaker 4: living every word. I could practically recite for you every
Speaker 4: single article that came out over the first number of
Speaker 4: years of SAS and everything that we did. We were
Speaker 4: really involved in it our selves, elves. It was never
Speaker 4: talking about something, it was always living it and reporting
Speaker 4: on it. From that perspective, and I think that still
Speaker 4: has a rawness to it when you read it, it's
Speaker 4: still kind of surprised, is some of it is still
Speaker 4: surprising even so many years later, and even with so
Speaker 4: many people doing that same kind of voice.
Speaker 2: It really does hold up.
Speaker 1: I mean, I went back and looked at old is Shoes,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I'm sure there are things you regret, right,
Speaker 1: like any editor does from a certain period of their career.
Speaker 4: God, yes, but for the most part it holds up
Speaker 4: right absolutely.
Speaker 3: I think it really does too.
Speaker 4: And then there were also the little subversive things we
Speaker 4: would do that are just funny. Like we would make
Speaker 4: up a slang word just to see how because we
Speaker 4: knew that seventeen magazine was copying us, so we'd make
Speaker 4: up a slang word and start calling everything that were
Speaker 4: daggy or whatever.
Speaker 3: It was like an early one that we took.
Speaker 4: And we would do that and see how long it
Speaker 4: took for a to show up in seventeen usually about
Speaker 4: three to four months because of the lag time with
Speaker 4: publication at that point.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's hilarious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were.
Speaker 4: Doing a lot of little inside stuff like that too,
Speaker 4: which is just funny. There's a lot to read between
Speaker 4: the lines there, I'll say that.
Speaker 3: And so that keeps it interesting.
Speaker 4: I think it was also it was truly a no
Speaker 4: judgment zone and very very open, and I think that
Speaker 4: still carries a lot of weight. I do think also
Speaker 4: the fact that we knew that we were the first
Speaker 4: ones to run a lot of the kinds of content
Speaker 4: that we ran, and that for doing it for teenage
Speaker 4: girls was really controversial, And so when the moral majority
Speaker 4: got a hold of it, and a group of women
Speaker 4: that were part of that, called Women Aglow, they went
Speaker 4: out and they went to newsstands and told them they
Speaker 4: wouldn't shop there if they carried Sassy magazine, and they
Speaker 4: had these little note cards they all were basically the
Speaker 4: same thing on that were sent in mass to our
Speaker 4: advertisers saying that they wouldn't buy their products if they
Speaker 4: advertised in Sassy Magazine because of things we did, like
Speaker 4: stories on gay teenagers, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still hard to run ads against a
Speaker 1: lot of these kinds of topics, right, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's one of the things we're seeing.
Speaker 4: It really is crazy to me, in looking back at
Speaker 4: all this how the society has made so many inroads
Speaker 4: in terms of acceptance of gender fluidity, queer rights, all
Speaker 4: of that, but how the stuff geared towards women and
Speaker 4: stuff involving women is still it just moves at a
Speaker 4: snail's pace and keeps going back.
Speaker 1: I see kind of the landscape, and it's hard to
Speaker 1: kind of understand why we don't have voices like Sassy
Speaker 1: or even Rookie.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I mean you were actually listed as the fairy godmother
Speaker 1: of Rookie, right, so you were involved in that as well.
Speaker 2: But those voices for girls, it feels like we have
Speaker 2: less of them as time goes on.
Speaker 1: And you know, with the recent sale of Jezebel, why
Speaker 1: do you think it is such a challenge?
Speaker 3: It is really something.
Speaker 4: And when I learned about Jezebel, I was so bummed
Speaker 4: out because that just showed me once again how far
Speaker 4: we have not come, and the fact that I think
Speaker 4: that an issue there was the advertising not being there
Speaker 4: to support it, but the readers were certainly there to
Speaker 4: support it. And I think that it's that model that
Speaker 4: in the advertising world we're still dealing with, for one thing,
Speaker 4: a lot of men, a lot of white men in
Speaker 4: particular older who just don't get that that actually can
Speaker 4: work and can appeal to people who actually do buy things.
Speaker 4: As a matter of fact, the company that I worked
Speaker 4: for at SASE bought Miss magazine to make it their
Speaker 4: second publication way back when I remember the subscription only. Yeah,
Speaker 4: because of the advertising battles with that.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because I was running the newsroom Advice when
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter happened, and one of the things we
Speaker 1: found that despite the fact that all these companies were,
Speaker 1: you know, espousing their support for Black Lives Matter, when
Speaker 1: it came to advertising dollars, they still didn't want to
Speaker 1: be around a lot of the content we were creating around it.
Speaker 1: And I think that's something that's pretty invisible to the audience.
Speaker 1: You can still have a lot of traffic, you can
Speaker 1: have a big audience, but if the things you're writing
Speaker 1: about don't feel brand safe to the brands, it really
Speaker 1: doesn't make a difference. And I think that's why we're
Speaker 1: actually seeing the ecosystem for really interesting, voicy digital brands
Speaker 1: contract in the way we are, because even if there's
Speaker 1: an audience for some reason, brands are just really nervous
Speaker 1: about being around it. And I don't know that I
Speaker 1: can think of a good solution for that, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that just feel, I guess it's subscriptions, but
Speaker 1: that is really challenging, right, It's a challenging market for that.
Speaker 3: That's right, That's right.
Speaker 4: And I do think it's subscriptions or it's selling your
Speaker 4: own products through your publication or one of those other
Speaker 4: revenue streams, because the advertising model doesn't allow for what
Speaker 4: Jezebel did, for what SASE did for all of that.
Speaker 4: Still still if you tried to come out with the
Speaker 4: Sase now, would still have I think many many of
Speaker 4: the same battles.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's also because it's hard to pinpoint
Speaker 1: what exactly it means to be a publication for women now.
Speaker 4: Yes, And as a matter of fact, that's just one
Speaker 4: little part of my new project, which I actually wanted
Speaker 4: to do back when I started Jane Magazine, but it
Speaker 4: wasn't able to because it was it was ad supported.
Speaker 4: So with that, I had to be able to present
Speaker 4: to advertisers that it was a demographic of women eighteen
Speaker 4: to forty nine, that kind of thing. But I've wanted
Speaker 4: to ever since then do a magazine that is not
Speaker 4: gender based, and so that's actually one of the things
Speaker 4: I'm working on now. And so it's not geared toward
Speaker 4: any specific gender and at the same time, and the
Speaker 4: next battle that I want to wage is about age,
Speaker 4: and this particularly does hurt women, I think, but in general,
Speaker 4: I think that it's ridiculous that when you read something
Speaker 4: or learn something about someone within the first paragraph, is
Speaker 4: their age almost always why?
Speaker 3: Why is that significant?
Speaker 4: And I think the same way that the gender thing
Speaker 4: is finally getting broken down and people taking control of
Speaker 4: that themselves, I think that the same thing is going
Speaker 4: to happen with age, where it'll just be considered not
Speaker 4: cool to mention someone's age.
Speaker 2: I love that. I feel like it's especially for women.
Speaker 2: You can really be aged out of a lot of
Speaker 2: things in.
Speaker 1: A way that absolutely doesn't feel consistent with how we
Speaker 1: experience age anymore. Like the world has changed so much
Speaker 1: in terms of how you experienced life that I mean,
Speaker 1: I love so many teen things and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I don't know, I don't want to be
Speaker 2: aged out of that. So I'm very excited to see
Speaker 2: what you do next. Does it get harder? I mean
Speaker 2: I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1: When you've had so much success at such a young age,
Speaker 1: is it harder to sort of do things without worrying
Speaker 1: that You're not going to be able to recreate the magic.
Speaker 4: Definitely, it does, and I think that in some ways
Speaker 4: I won't recreate what Sas was and what it was
Speaker 4: for that audience at that time. But I'm still always
Speaker 4: surprised when I look at, for example, what the project
Speaker 4: I'm working on now, when I look at it compared
Speaker 4: to what's out there, I'm still surprised that I can still,
Speaker 4: at this old age, I can still shake things up
Speaker 4: and do things that nobody else is doing. So I'm
Speaker 4: happy about that and happy to be able to do
Speaker 4: that and to get the chances to keep doing it.
Speaker 4: It is kind of remarkable, But it does get harder.
Speaker 4: As I said, starting Sase, I think I got that
Speaker 4: launched in a couple months. Cut to Jane Magazine a
Speaker 4: couple of years, cut to Exo Jane five years. Each
Speaker 4: subsequent project does get more. Yeah, gets just there are
Speaker 4: more questions around it.
Speaker 2: Well, I can't wait. I know it's going to be amazing, Jane.
Speaker 1: I am going to end speaking of age with a
Speaker 1: party trick I know you're famous for, which is that
Speaker 1: you can.
Speaker 2: Tell people what their emotional age is. So I'm so curious.
Speaker 1: God, if yours is still fifteen, and what you think
Speaker 1: mine is?
Speaker 4: This is such a great question. Okay, mine is still fifteen. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: My daughter, who is chronologically twenty one, is way older
Speaker 4: than I am at this point, especially, but I have Okay,
Speaker 4: so now let me key in because I haven't been
Speaker 4: doing it and it is something I have to get
Speaker 4: in the mindset up. I want to say that you Okay,
Speaker 4: let me. Let me just take a moment. I could
Speaker 4: see you being also a teenager, but slightly older than me,
Speaker 4: So I would give you about seventeen.
Speaker 2: I like that.
Speaker 4: I mean, because you're still you still definitely have that
Speaker 4: teen thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I would give you. Does that ring
Speaker 3: at all? That feels very right. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So you're my slightly older friend. You're like a little
Speaker 4: wiser than I am. You can help me.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: I love being the slightly older friend, which is crazy
Speaker 1: because I feel like Sassy Magazine was my cool older friend.
Speaker 2: So that's a perfect way to end it. Jane, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for doing this. It really was so
Speaker 2: lovely to have this chat with you.
Speaker 3: Thank you and thank you for doing this amazing podcast.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 1: Jess, what do we have coming up next week? And
Speaker 1: is it something you would have read about in sase?
Speaker 5: Yes, actually it probably was. And also Why I Am,
Speaker 5: which I also read it is about lip boss.
Speaker 1: Oh I hope we get some really good product placement
Speaker 1: out of that.
Speaker 3: I mean, honestly me too.
Speaker 5: We could use some lip glass.
Speaker 3: But this is really about lip bloss as.
Speaker 2: A symbol of teen girl bonding.
Speaker 3: So we're going to go a little deeper.
Speaker 2: This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
Speaker 1: about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Speaker 1: Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 5: If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
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Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
Speaker 1: and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist,
Speaker 1: Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 5: In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Speaker 5: Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
Speaker 5: engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharan
Speaker 5: Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 1: Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Speaker 1: Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Speaker 1: Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Do. We are
Speaker 1: your hosts Susie Bannacharum.
Speaker 5: And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even more,
Speaker 5: check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.