Boy-crazy YM

Sassy was a hit with readers from the beginning, and by 1990 it was hotter than ever. Its circulation was climbing, its advertisers were back on board, and the other teen magazines were waking up. For Seventeen, that meant incorporating some unusual displays of feminist posturing -- "Who Says I Have to Have to a Boyfriend?" read one coverline (to which one might like to answer, "Well, you do") --- and begrudging coverage of non-mainstream celebrities like cartoonist Lynda Barry. Of course, the industry leader also continued to feature model-worship stories and cheerlead prefab boy bands like New Kids on the Block.

But if sixtysomething editor Midge Richardson wasn't hip enough to realize how unhip she was, YM saw what was going on. "Sassy was another strong competitor," Elizabeth Crow, then president and editorial director for Gruner & Jahr, YM's parent company, noted in an interview. "We were in third place in a three-magazine category, and didn't want to be fourth."

It was a funny thing that Sassy, like many a high-school girl, could never shed its slutty reputation. In fact, YM was arguably a much sexier read -- especially in the wake of the right-wing boycott. "The real thing that YM delivered was soft porn," says Caroline Miller. "There were all of these stories that were really just beefcake."

YM, under Fuller, was the spiritual younger sister of Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan (in fact, Bonnie would become Brown's successor just a few years later). In Fuller's world, the "Young Miss" was now "Young and Modern," and she was a lot more interested in achieving orgasms than equality. The publication heralded a kind of sexual revolution for young women, but without any attendant feminist critique. Sure, it had a "You go, girl" tone, but it assumed that what you wanted to get was the guy. Or, guys, as the case may be. "Steady relationships are, in a word, confining," one article read, mimicking Brown's mandate that twentysomething single gals should feel free to have as many affairs as they wanted. (It did, however, make a nod to its readers' tender age -- or perhaps their parents' conservatism -- by tacking on some halfhearted moralizing: "When you have sex with a lot of different men, you become emotionally numbed.") Another piece investigated which partner was responsible for bringing birth control -- without any acknowledgment that not all of its readers were sexually active. If this sounds vaguely feminist, the key word is vaguely. Unlike Sassy, YM wasn't mucking around with ideas like "institutionalized sexism." When a girl writes in to complain that boys won't ask her out because she's a bit big in the hips, the male relationship columnist, with no apparent knowledge of teenage girls' propensity toward eating disorders, unhelpfully suggests, "If not being asked out by these guys really bothers you, perhaps you should try to shed a few pounds."

Many, many girls were seduced by YM's covers, which frequently depicted the likes of a shirtless Marky Mark with a halter top-wearing model, the top button of her Express jeans suggestively undone, and by the stories inside, which adhered to Fuller's mandate of "boys, clothes, hair," in the words of YM entertainment editor Suzan Colon.

YM's circulation almost doubled during Fuller's five-year tenure, and its advertising skyrocketed as well. It became a formidable competitor to Sassy, but insiders knew that the new YM couldn't have existed without its antithesis. "I want to say that I love Sassy," one fan wrote. "I mean, my sister gets the other big teen magazines, and it is so funny. After you came out, I noticed that those guys started to change their format."

The sassiest boys in America

Of course, Sassy had always been boy crazy, from an early blurb titled "Why Am I Such a Queer Ball Spazz Head?" in which Andrea reports that she caught Matt Dillon staring at her breasts; to Jane's crush on Keanu Reeves, which was dissected ad nauseum; to Christina's "Cute Band Alert."

But Sassy tempered all the swooning with a girl-power tone and a little critique. Instead of deconstructing marriage and interrogating compulsory heterosexuality -- that was Ms.'s territory -- Sassy ran feminist-inflected articles on how to ask a guy out. Like other teen magazines, it published pieces titled "How to Flirt" and "Why That Patrick Swayze Poster May Destroy Your Love Life"; unlike other teen magazines, it didn't take its romantic advice too seriously, and didn't assume that getting it on with a jock was your only goal.

And writers could be sure they would hear from readers whose consciousness they had raised when they penned articles that were less ostensibly open-minded: in the infamous April 1990 article "Five Things Never to Ask a Guy," Mike admonishes girls not to pose the questions "What are you thinking?" "Do you love me?" "Do I look fat?" "What would you do if I died?" and "Do you think she's prettier than me?" ("You girls really gotta accept that for every beautiful person, there's one even more beautiful. Just worry about what's inside and don't be such a guy.") It might have seemed like a funny article from a publication that spent most of its time encouraging girls to say whatever they wanted, but its chauvinism was diluted by the fact that it was authored by a male editor girls were already familiar with, who often took on the pigtail-pulling persona of an older brother. Still, Mike says he got lots of mail that read, "Oh, that's so sexist and you're so closeminded and you're such a Neanderthal."

Another classic Sassy relationship article was March 1993's "How to Make Him Want You... Bad," which is named after a story that had run in YM. In it, Margie Ingalls (a staff writer who had been hired in 1990) and Mary Ann try out the inane relationship advice given by YM and Cosmopolitan. This includes wearing animal prints, which, instead of making Margie look "feral" (presumably a good thing), incite a homeless man to scream "Meow!" The article's last paragraph pretty much sums up Sassy's worldview on men, which is "boys are cute and we like them (unless we hate them), but they're mere dressing on the salad of life."

The magazine regularly tore down the boyband members and soap-opera stars other magazines were drooling over. (Fan Sarah D. Bunting liked that "they would sometimes call out the famous boys we were all supposed to have crushes on as being tools.") Their coverage of indie bands and indie boys "was giving an alternative to young girls. Sassy considered Sebadoh's Lou Barlow to be sexy when everyone was supposed to be looking at the cast of some horrible TV show," says Ann Powers. "It seemed almost political at the time." In retrospect, she says, it may have not been quite that radical. "But at least Sassy was presenting different images. Popular music is a template for identity, and sexuality in particular. It's a way young people especially come to figure out who they are as sexual beings; it is really important who they identify with in the pantheon of musical celebrities."

In some way, the magazine helped validate a new kind of American manhood -- the kind of guy who would court you with mix tapes, sported Converse Chuck Taylors and shaggy bedhead on his lanky frame, wept over the disappearing rain forest, and had Backlash on his bookshelf.

Indie bands were arguably aesthetically superior, but they were also, stereotypically, patently desexualized and more interested in their guitars than their girlfriends -- unlike, say, the more explicit songs of mainstream groups like Color Me Badd ("I Wanna Sex You Up"). "These guys are scared to death of girls underneath it all," writes Margie in a February 1994 story titled "The Tormented Boy: An Ethnological Study," covering postmodern boy archetypes like the "Disaffected Writer Boy," the "Renegade Skater Boy," and, of course, the "Soulful Musician Boy." He hangs out in suburban garages and pawnshops selling vintage amps; his mating call is "So, uh, are you going to the Fugazi show?"; his mating ritual is "Strums guitar and raspily sings a lovely (or deliberately not-lovely) song written just for you."

Sassy's readers seemed grateful that the magazine was finally coming clean that courting an indie-rock boy was not without its faults. "Not three days after my boyfriend broke up with me, I received my February Sassy," one reader writes. "He is the soulful musician boy to a T! I was totally the strong woman who he said he loved but couldn't commit to."

Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer are New York-based writers. They have written for and edited publications including The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Elle Girl, Bitch, Jane, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Nylon, Nerve, and Elle.

From How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, to be published in April 2007 by Faber and Faber, Inc., and affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2007 by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer. All rights reserved.