There Goes My Hero—Finally

Like many women I have a complicated relationship with women's magazines; for a lot of us the reputedly progressive Jane was a no-brainer partner in battle against the livid, toxic estrogen cloud engulfing the molten pink and purple side of the newsstand. But like many of those women, especially those who have followed editor-in-chief Jane Pratt's career from girlhood, I felt indifferent to the news that she would be leaving her namesake magazine, Jane, at the end of September,

More than 10 years after the 1994 demise of Pratt's first effort, Sassy, the cult of that teen magazine is still going strong. I am only one of many who still have every issue lovingly boxed in their basement. We can't be blamed for being inspired to such levels of dweebdom: Sassy was, and remains, the greatest thing to happen to teenage girls since the Catholic school kilt.

In 1988, Australian businesswoman Sandra Yates set out to rectify the fact that American teen magazines all felt "like Good Housekeeping for teenagers, speaking with parental voices and looking like they were suspended in aspic." Yates raised the money to launch Sassy and buy Ms. Magazine, vowing "to prove that you can run a business with feminist principles and make money." She hired 24 year-old Jane Pratt as editor-in-chief, she says today, because "she was the youngest applicant for the job, full of ideas and certainly the outstanding candidate." Sassy was modelled on Dolly, an Australian teen magazine also run by women in their mid-twenties, a fact that Yates sees as key to striking the right tone, because "girls can spot a phony in a heartbeat." Dolly is still a market leader, Yates says, and suspects that per capita it is the most successful teen title in the world.

And so Jane Pratt, along with a staff of smart, funny, feminist, young women, like Christina Kelly, Mary Kaye Schilling and Marjorie Ingall, set to the task of making a magazine for girls that didn't treat them like empty, echoing vessels, ready to parrot back whatever was hollered loudest. The impact it had can perhaps be gauged most accurately at this very moment: the girls who read Sassy are now at an age where what they're doing is a fairly good (and encouraging) indicator of where they're going. "If I had had Sassy as a teen I'm sure I would have turned out with a stronger moral fiber," Courtney Love has said, "but I probably wouldn't have started a band. I probably would be teaching retarded children." It's flip and it's overstated—it's Courtney Love—but it also holds a core of truth about the formative connection a young girl, given the opportunity, can make with her culture. It also forebodes the recrimination that can result when that connection gets frazzled.

When I was 18 my dream was to be a Sassy intern. For London, Ontario that's a pretty big dream, but I mailed a heartfelt, dorkball letter to Sassy headquarters anyway. No one I knew read Sassy, which was inexplicable and yet somehow appropriate. I knew all of the writers by name, as that was part of Sassy's charm: writers were often featured as prominently as their subjects, subtly modelling how bias shapes journalism. Staff members would often interrupt each other's columns, like a friend forking something off of your plate mid-discussion. I had tried to look at the other magazines—'Teen, Seventeen, YM—but it was like staring into the void, only the void was looking back at you. And up and down.

Sassy, on the other hand, would put a girl on the cover just for being cool. Brace faces like me, black girls, brown girls, freckly girls, you'd see them all; Kurt and Courtney posed for their only magazine cover; Christina Kelly's uncanny radar enabled her to call bands like Lemonheads before they were famous, call Cobain's suicide in her "In Utero" review ("Kurt, I'm worried about your state of mind"), call Dave Chapelle "one to watch" in 1993, and call homely girls that boys love "the whistle that only dogs hear" in her brilliant ongoing glossary; Margie Ingalls mocked J. Peterman catalogues years before Seinfeld; 20 year-old Spike Jonze used Sassy to try to get a date and J. Mascis advised one insecure girl that "any boy who's not a weirdo will take all the butt he can get." Can you overstate, really, the effect of a totally rad rock star telling a 15 year old girl not to worry about her ass?

So when the phone rang one afternoon after school and I stood in the kitchen talking to Neill from Sassy magazine in NEW YORK CITY, a window cracked open on a world of possibility. I was being taken seriously by people I admired, and it rocked my army boots off: I thought, ' Someday I'll get there, and when I do I'll work at Sassy.'

A lot of people tell Christina Kelly, the de facto force behind the Sassy's spirit, that reading Sassy is what made them want to get into magazines: "They think it's going to be fun, that they'll work in an office like Sassy's, and then they get here (I believe she means NEW YORK CITY) and realize that it's not like that at all." Not that Sassy's trademark prickly camaraderie was the result of a sales meeting: "It was that fun," Kelly insists, "but we were the exception." Kelly is now at ELLEgirl, and when word broke of the vacant editor-in-chief spot at Jane, all eyes turned to her as the likely candidate. "I'm happy where I am," Kelly says, after expressing her surprise at Pratt's decision to step down. Days later her ELLEgirl colleague Brandon Holley was named as Pratt's successor. Kelly was the first person Pratt hired at Jane, three years after Sassy's sale to Petersen Publishing (Guns & Ammo, anyone?), and short-lived re-emergence as its own sparkle-pussed doppelganger.

Novelist and Esquire fiction editor Adrienne Miller calls Sassy's October 1994 demise inevitable: "It had so goddamn much life and personality and spirit: of course it had to die!" she says. "And isn't it interesting that the only genuinely political, quality magazine that embraced the female body and celebrated the female perspective was for girls. It's like saying, 'All that stuff's fine when you're young—you'll grow out of it.'" Dirt, the Spike Jonze-helmed Sassy spin-off, attempted to give boys a similar alternative, but its audience was already largely tapped by Sassy. Post-1994, Sassy became a kind of password: either you got it or you didn't. In 1995, the Sassy sticker on my Film 101 binder attracted the attention of a boy two rows back, leading to my first conversation with my first love, who tentatively admitted to loving and missing the magazine. "If you were a 16-year old girl in the late '80's or early '90's," Miller says, "and you didn't read Sassy, what was wrong with you?" How about a grown man? Daniel Radosh, writing about Sassy's demise for the New York Press in 1994, discussed the magazine's shortcomings, deciding that, "In the end, a 25-year-old guy can't help but feel admiration when a magazine aimed at teenage girls manages to piss him off."

Radosh's annoyance makes him typical because it's the mark of a Sassy devotee: Christina Kelly recalls with a laugh how a thrilled Sassy intern admitted to having sent hate mail regularly. Passions run highest when people find that rare thing that matters to them, and Sassy really, really mattered. When asked if Sassy fans who have found fault with Jane are impossible to please she erupts, "They are impossible to please! They always were! We had people who were just as critical of us as they are of Jane now: 'How dare you write about riot grrrl? Who are you to co-opt the culture?'"

Sassy lasted only six and a half years, but six and a half years is almost an exact teenage lifespan. "It was the first glossy magazine I read that didn't make me feel lied to," says Miller. Growing up in Akron, Ohio, she was amazed to find that "there were girls like me out in the world. It was geared toward the thinking girl who wore Doc Martens, and I didn't know any of those." Miller counts herself as one of the women inspired to work in magazines by Sassy. When she had the chance, at 22, to work at GQ rather than pursue an MFA she jumped, saying, "I had this idea that magazines could be filled with cool, smart people, and I wouldn't have thought that if not for Sassy. It gave a sense of possibility within a very conventional form, it took risks with journalism in a way that was radical and groundbreaking."

The irony, of course, is that Sassy introduced Miller—and many other smart, ambitious women now working in the media and the arts—to pop feminism, proving that "mainstream women's magazines didn't have to be evil," and yet she has spent her entire editorial career at men's magazines. "We're the perfectionist girl generation," 30 year-old Entertainment Weekly writer Jennifer Armstrong says, "and these magazines feed into that." Armstrong grew up thinking she'd write for a teen or women's magazine, but became disillusioned with their inherent funnelling of every path a woman might choose into one path, and frustrated with the repetitive hard sell of the products—and the life—women are told they should aspire to. "At this point I think we're all capable of assuming a level of confidence in applying mascara. We don't need to be told every month." At age10, Armstrong would sneak out in the suburbs of Chicago to procure the latest copy of Mademoiselle, but remembers Sassy as "more relevant to my life at the time, which I think is something all teen magazines strive for."

Today Armstrong, who considers herself a student of the form, is planning to launch an online women's magazine that addresses the lack she sees. "Men's magazines still have more substance," she says, relating the chagrin with which male writers she knows will admit to switch hitting. "They're far more excited to be doing something for Details, and I would be, too. They talk like they're slumming. They'll write about their penis for Glamour for $2 a word, but it won't go on their résumé."

Jane has always given itself too much credit—touting its ability to address this legitimacy gap between men's and women's magazines and treat young women as more than mannequins with wallets—but never more than in the last year. In the three years between Sassy's demise and Jane's debut I relied on Bust magazine (that would be the voice of the new girl order), for smart, funny content written by women. It was no Sassy, but then I suppose I was no teenager, and in trying to find a magazine that struck that same balance between the self-involved and the self-serious I was bound to run into a few that skewed too far either way. I bought the t-shirt—I bought two—and then Jane finally arrived.

"People love to be super-critical of Jane," Kelly says, "and a lot of the criticism is unrealistic, because it's a commercial magazine, and as a commercial magazine it pushes the limits as far as they can go." But... what about..."Sassy was an aberration," she sighs, wearily, "and we were allowed to exist for a short time..." I can hear the irritation in her voice, and in case there was any doubt, she tells me: "I find it so irritating when people ask me about a modern counterpart to Sassy, like they expect us to spend the rest of our careers trying to create that."

But the fact is, Jane has invited the scrutiny, particularly from Sassyphiles, as almost every element of the magazine's format was lifted wholesale from its predecessor. In the August issue alone at least two of Jane's features are blatant Sassy repeats (1993's "How to Make Him Want You…Bad", in which a writer tries out Cosmo and YM dating tips, and "I Worked for a Sleazy Tabloid and Loved It" from 1992). A 16 year-old might need to be told that dating advice from Redbook is bogus, but wouldn't the "intelligent, self-determined 18-34 year old," Jane claims as its readership know that already? Marketing itself as a place where "you'll never find condescending articles," Jane advises would-be contributors that if their idea "could appear in another women's magazine, pitch it to them." It all sounds mission statement-friendly, but what happened to Jane magazine feels exactly like what's been happening in women's magazines since Virginia Woolf was knee high to a curling iron.

Adrienne Miller was hopeful about Jane for the first couple of issues back in 1997, but quickly cut her ties. "As I've gotten older I've learned to cast things that make me angry out of my life," she says. "Jane is just like every other women's magazine, except for the obviously self-congratulatory tone." Christina Kelly left Jane in November 2000, to become editor-in-chief of Sassy nemesis YM, describing her time at the latter as "a nightmare from start to finish," though it gave her a greater appreciation for Pratt's skill. Ultimately she didn't feel Jane readers needed her as much as younger girls did, and she wanted to continue her mission "to take them seriously and not do them harm."

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was around this time that Jane slipped further down the silk-lined, skinny rabbit hole. "Jane got bogged down," says Armstrong. "They're the only ones pushing the more 'irreverent' approach but they don't push it far enough." And the result is a magazine that posits itself as a flashpoint in the debate over women's editorial but has ceased to be relevant to anyone, it seems, but themselves.

26 year-old Chicago writer (and mbToolbox editor) Claire Zulkey, a Jane subscriber for three years (and, it should be noted, not burdened with Sassy baggage), recently decided to let her subscription lapse. Sometime after the re-design last fall she noticed that the worst of Jane was starting to get the best of Jane. "The mixed messages got too strong: they're snarky about celebrities but also snarky about celebrity snarkiness," she says of a magazine that gives the gauche Pamela Anderson a column but chastises former cover girl Brittany Murphy for posing for Maxim, or preaches a DIY ethos but condemns knock-offs. "Jane has lost its identity, but it still has the cooler-than-you tone." Zulkey, a contributor to ELLEgirl, now looks to magazines like Allure that don't strain themselves trying to convince you that "it's cool, not that you're cool for reading it."

For me the reluctant end came in April of this year. I'd long grown tired of Ms. Pratt's cloying insertion of herself into the editorial content, but persevered, because there was still funny Jeff Johnson, and lively Katy McColl. Then it became impossible to miss: Pratt's recent contributions to the magazine amount to a demi-diva meltdown: she's so busy she doesn't want to call her friends; she's so busy she can't finish her lunch, she's so busy she'd like to go on the show "Interventions" so people will tell her to concentrate only on herself; loved ones are complaining because she's—wait for it—so busy. If Sassy felt, as Kim Gordon has said, "like it was written by your hip older sister," Jane felt like it was being written by your "groovy" middle-aged aunt, the one who's wearing high-end daisy dukes this summer and boring you with tales of stressful manicures, all the while assuring you how full and exciting her life is.

Pratt's diary entry for April 2005, titled "I Sure Can Pick 'Em", detailed what losers some of her former colleagues have turned out to be. She used the space to mock the former assistant who, at 34, is living with her parents in Michigan, and the writer who—laughably, Pratt implies—went on to write headlines like "How to Rope Him in With Five Simple Moves". This from a magazine that thinks a photo of Ashlee Simpson's hotel bathroom sink is a great back page. The rank bitchery of the letter served no other purpose than inflicting hurt and heralding the spirit of the magazine as officially rancid. April 2005 was also the first issue to feature the slashed price of $1.99, and it's no wonder. I had to face it: at some point Jane Pratt drank the Kool-Aid. The magazine consistently left me feeling defeated, remembering why I don't read women's magazines. I don't care how busy Jane Pratt is, and if I don't care about Jane, how can I care about Jane? I would not be back, though for research purposes I checked out the August issue at the library. Again Pratt's letter sets the obnoxious, exclusive tone: an "inside" look at magazine production that does little more than let cover subject Kelly Clarkson know that she was seventh choice, and that Pratt finds her "cheesy".

Back in Australia, Sandra Yates did not follow her protégée's post-Sassy career, and only saw the launch issue of Jane. "I'm not aware that it was meant to be anything other than a magazine about traditional young women's topics," she says. "I assumed that after the Sassy experience, Jane would have been perfectly justified in opting for something safer." Yates is realistic about the trade-off between advertising and editorial content that women's magazines generally have to make, but still baffled by the idea that fewer than 300 letters to Sassy's five biggest advertisers (part of a boycott spearheaded by Focus on the Family 's Dr James Dobson, whom, Yates notes, "has continued to prosper, and is very close to the President") brought the magazine to its knees in the space of a week.

Clearly, the advertising game is no joke, and perhaps it's better to ante up than fold completely; the problem is that most women's magazines try to double deal, using words like "aspirational" to justify the unrealistic, highly charged standards of beauty and lifestyle they set. Jane, because it held itself above that predictable sleight of hand, and because of its genuinely groundbreaking heritage, made itself a lightning rod for all of the women out there desperate for a magazine they could be proud of. We're used to throwing up our hands, just don't mistake it for a wave good-bye.

Michelle Orange is a Torontonian living in New York. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Sun Magazine and McSweeney's, among others.