March 22, 2024 • 34 mins
It was the iconic and irreverent magazine that shaped a generation of 90s girls, teaching them about pop culture, fashion and feminism. Sassy was accessible and relatable, willing to openly talk about taboo subjects like sex and teen suicide when nobody else would. In this episode, we chat with the founding editor and perennial cool older sister Jane Pratt about why Sassy still resonates for so many nearly 40 years later.
FOR MORE:
- My Totally Normal Addiction To Buying Teen Magazines (NYT, 2021)
- How Sassy Is Tavi Gevinson? (NYT, 2011)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
I just have to say that my thirteen year old
self is dying.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Susie Danacarum.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
And I'm Jessica Bennett.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
This is in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a
cultural moment from the past that shaped.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Us and that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Today, we're talking to Jane Pratt, the woman behind Sassy,
an iconic teen magazine that shaped a generation of nineties girls,
including us.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Jane Pratt, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I am so excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I think I told you a story that I will
start with, which is that when I was I think
I was a freshman in high school, I went to
boarding school, as did you. I went to boarding school
in Connecticut, to a much less prestigious school than Jane did,
for the record, and.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I was barely surviving at mine.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
By the way, the whole impetus for Sassy magazine came
out of what a loser I was at that school.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I was not the coolest either, but I was in
My sister was at Barnard and I came to town
to visit her, and she knew how much I love.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Sassy, and she was like, you know, what let's go visit.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And she took me to the offices and we just came,
which is a crazy thing for us to have done,
and we just went to the front desk and my
sister was like, this is my sister. She's obsessed with Sassy.
And I don't remember the names of anyone, but everyone
was so nice to me, like they gave me a tour.
I think they gave me like copies of the magazine.
(01:30):
It was just this really formative experience for me, and
I just thought, oh my god, this is so cool,
like this is what people get to do for a living.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So I feel like I should thank you for that.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
I actually have a recollection because I was basically living
in those offices at that time. I think it was
when we were one time Square. Yeah, and we had yep,
we had like a neon Sassy when you when you
got off the elevator. That was our big fancy look. Yeah.
And I remember Andrew Lynnette, who worked at the front
then and then became a beauty editor and then went
(02:01):
on from there. I remember her telling me that when
I was in a meeting, this girl and her sister
had come by the offices.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
So I think it might that was.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Ah, oh my god, that's so amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
What a full circle moment this is for me?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Who Yeah, it really was so special, and I think,
you know, it really speaks to just what Sas was.
It was just this really accessible place for girls to go.
It felt like a community more than even a magazine,
which really did feel ahead of its time. So let's
start at the beginning, just for people who might not
be as familiar with Sassy as I.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Clearly, you famously.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Became the editor of Sassy magazine in nineteen eighty seven
when you were just twenty four years old, which blows
my mind because what I was doing at twenty four
was not running like an iconic magazine, and I think
that made you the youngest editor in history at that time.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Tell me how it happened.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
You know, it's so funny.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
My daughter is now turning twenty one this week, and
so I too, now have contact with people that are
the age that I was on a pretty regular basis,
And I mean it seems crazy to me now too.
At the time, I thought, God, I've been out of
school for a year and a half and I haven't
gotten this magazine start yet, come on, this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
You felt like you were behind the eight ball behind.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Really seriously, I was really agonizing about But it was
really the foresight of the original president of our publishing
company that was based in Australia, who saw that someone
young could actually be more adept at accessing the way
that young people talk to each other and better able
(03:45):
to produce this magazine for teenage girls. So my age
actually was helpful to me. But I knew so little.
I just knew nothing, because what happened was there was
word out that this Australian publishing company was interested in
getting into the American market, and they were interested in
the teen market in particular. So I was like, well,
(04:07):
that is exactly what I've wanted to do since I
was fifteen years old. So I made up a whole presentation.
I accidentally in my presentation I did a fake editor's
letter and I said something about Panda bears instead of
Koala Bears for Australia.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I'll never forget, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
But I did a whole presentation of what the magazine
would be if I were to do it.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And I also.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Remember that in the meeting with her with Sandr Yates.
She asked me something about what causes I supported, and
I had just recently given some money to Nayral, the
National Abortion Rates actionally and I mentioned that to her,
and because I kind of wanted to be right up
front with who I was and what I was going
to do with this magazine if we got to do it,
(04:52):
and she was really supportive of that, and so anyway,
from there, I got a chance to start it, and
I hired a bunch of people, mostly slightly older than me,
but you know, but all within the same age range
for the most part, So like a group of kids.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'm curious, did it feel like an enormous amount of
pressure or were you so young that you had the
confidence of not knowing the way you didn't know?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Thank you, Thank you for recognizing that. I mean, I
was ballsy. And then, funnily enough, when I went to
start Jane Magazine, which was you know, nobody needs to
know about this.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
But it was.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
It was maybe eight years later than that, after Sassy
had been going on that long, I did not have
the same confidence.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
It took me so much longer to get it going.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But this was just one of those like, yeah, I
deserve this I have a good idea, let's get it
out there.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
How did you conceive of the magazine at the time,
because one thing I think about a lot is how
much intention we ascribed to art in retrospect, right, and
often I think lots of things happen by instinct, and
I'm curious for you how much of this was just instinct.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Yeah, it was very verre cause oriented. I remember from
very early days talking to Christina Kelly, who was one
of my first hires as an editor there, and I
remember us saying, well, we don't know that this magazine
is going to be around forever, and that's not our goal.
Our goal is to really make an impact on society
(06:19):
with what we're doing. And at that time, Reagan was
president and I have just been able to vote I
think twice at that point, so I was, you know,
that's how young I was, right, Yeah, but I remember saying, well,
we could have with what we're doing here, we could
have an impact on the next election, because they're all
(06:41):
they're not that age yet, but they will be. Because
it was fourteen to nineteen year olds that we're gearing
to it, and so it was always about changing the
world like that was always the goal, and that was
very intentional.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And how did you conceive of the subject areas or
the coverage areas. I know, for example, you referred to
your sort of three most popular writers as sex, drugs,
and rock and roll, which I love.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Yeah, yep. Christina was rock and roll.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Catherine was drugs because she did all the kind of
nitty gritty like reporting stuff, hardcore reporting. And Karen Ketchpoole
was sex because she wrote about sex in a very
open way. I hired her from Australia. She was one
of the few people I brought over from there because
it was really hard to find somebody in this country
(07:30):
at that time. This sounds insane, but who could write
so openly to women about sex and even I mean,
you would think that's crazy. You would think Cosmo had
been out for many years, but particularly for this age group,
so there was just no There wasn't even sex information
for girls out there. There was no birth control, there
was nothing like that.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
That's interesting because I feel like, of course Cosmo existed,
but Cosmo was still.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Very geared towards landing a man, like so much of
the stuff that was out there.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
There are the other teen magazines at that time were
really focused on how to be thin, how to get
a boyfriend, how to sort of make yourself this very stereotypical,
almost nineteen fifties ideal. So was that something you were
really conscious of or was that just not what you
were interested in?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I was extremely conscious of it. And it's funny because
in thinking about talking today and thinking about what am
I proud of, and a lot of what I'm proud
of with Sase is what we didn't put in. I
had a list of mandates to all to anyone writing
or contributing that included things like, you know, no diets,
no calorie counts.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
If a reader a lot of what we did.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Were there advice columns in the magazine, So if a
reader wrote in and said my crush has been ignoring
me or whatever, nobody was allowed to assume that that
crush was a boy.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I mean, but that's a big deal considering sort of
the context of the time. Reagan's America was not particularly
LGBTQ friendly, right right exactly? And the voice, the voice
was so specific and irreverent. Is it something that you.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Sort of did consciously or were you just like, this
is the way I talk.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
I knew that I really wanted to be completely different
from what was out there, but it was intentional. Then
what I would do is I would hire a lot
of people that were not writers, but I liked their
personalities and what they had to say, and I would
just have them speak and record it and transcribe it.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Oh interesting, and yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
That was easier than hiring people who had been at
other publications because they were in that mode often of
having been trained to do things like use the words
tresses and locks and seb.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Hair and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
So it was easier to just get somebody who just
talked and had good things to say.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I know this is probably an impossible question, but there
were so many I on the cover, is do you
have a favorite?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
It would be hard to say that I have a
favorite cover because and I don't have a collection assassin,
so it's not like something I look at regularly, but
it'll pop up when they're on sale on eBay or
whatever and make me wish that I had saved them
because they're worth a lot more now. But I would
say that every single issue that I look at has
(10:25):
battles that went into it that I remember vividly. Whether
it was the quirkier looking model that was on the
cover that I had to fight for and to be
able to run this cover with this cover model that
didn't look conventional, to the point where readers in the
early days would write in and they would say, we
(10:46):
know you're just getting started, but maybe soon you'll be
able to afford the good models that the other magazines use.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
What are some of the battles you remember most.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Yeah, there were tons of them. The very first issue
had the word sex on it. It was so you
think you're ready for sex? Read this first? And I
thought that was very, very tame. I actually didn't love
that cover line because I thought it could be a
lot more enticing than that.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I thought that's pretty measured.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
But we went with that in a compromise, and that
was hard to get through because of the fact that
people weren't talking to teenage girls about sex at that time.
I remember also a cover where this is one where
I ended up losing the battle even though I thought it,
(11:38):
which was putting a black model on a cover that
was one of our traditionally bigger selling months, and finally
getting it pushed through to where we got permission to
have the black model on the cover of Sasse, and
then the publisher, I guess, got cold feet and they
put on the newstand copies. Polly bagged a copy of
(12:02):
a beauty booklet with a white model on the cover.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
On top of that, Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
So on the newsstands. Yet it didn't. It didn't come
out on the newsstands the way that it was intended.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
How did you react to that?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It was terrible.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
I think that we we this isn't the this doesn't
paint me in the best light. But I think that
a few of us we went to the press quietly
and leaked that this had happened because we thought that
they should be called out for it. So I think
it came out somewhere the Village Voice or something like that.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It's interesting that you sort of say it doesn't paint
you in the best light. But to me, what it
speaks to is that even as the editor in chief
of the magazine, you didn't have the power to change that.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
That was the only way you could do it.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
You had to be.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Subvertinate, right, right, absolutely, that's absolutely right, And there was
a lot of that, and probably my age might have
hurt me in that regard or my lack of experience
might have hurt me in that regard because I didn't
necessarily know all of the ways that all of that
worked to be able to get in there and make
(13:06):
things go exactly my way. But there were battles constantly.
I was thinking too about people now talk a lot
about that Kurt and Courtney, Kurt Cobain and Courtney love cover.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yes, that's I think the most iconic sassy cover.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
It's so funny because that was a battle too, because
I remember going into my meeting with the publisher, the
president of the company and having to pitch Kurt Cobain
as basically I've hated him to be like one of
new kids on the block or backsheet.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Boys like.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
That.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
He would have hated it.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
And yes, he would have hated it, but that was
what I had to do to get them to accept
it and to say it's going to sell really, really
well and moms are going to love it.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
And all this kind. So we got we got permission
to do that.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
It did not sell particularly well at the time, but
it had as definitely stood the test of time, that's
for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
How did it come to be, Like, how did you
have the idea. How did you approach them about it?
Were you there for the shoot?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
What was it like?
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Christina Kelly, who was the music entertainment editor, she was
talking to the photographer Michael Levine and he had photographed
Courtney Love and he had photographed for us as well
for Sassin. So Courtney said to him that she loved
Sassin magazine and would he consider photographing her for that
And he came to us and we thought that was
(14:30):
a great idea, and to do it with Kurt would
be even better. I did not go to the photo shoot,
but I remember right when that came out, when that
issue came out, I got a phone call from a
friend of mine who worked at Rolling Stone at the time,
Chris Connelly, and he called me after right when that
(14:52):
issue came out, and he said that at the photo
shoot it was so obvious in the writing that Kurt
and Courtney were doing drugs. And did I think it
was irresponsible of us to run that story, and especially
in a magazine for teenagers without disclosing that they were
doing drugs? And was it journalistically sound? I thought, you
(15:14):
run that story, which I thought was really interesting. But
the funny thing was I had to tell them that
we didn't know they were doing drugs. We were very naive.
We were kids, really, so we hadn't done those drugs
and we didn't know much about them, and we didn't
so anyway, we just ran it as a love story
between Curtin Gordon.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
One of the most famous things that came out of
the Sassy era was it Happened to Me, which is
a column that you carried over when you went to
Jaine magazine and you had at Exojane, which was the
digital publication you eventually launched. Why do you think that
sort of first person, confessional style of writing resonated so
much with the audience for Sassy.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I was carefully reading all of the other teen magazines
as I was getting ready to launch Sassy, and I
knew that when I read these articles that they were running,
particularly the more serious subjects, I would zone out and skim.
When it came to doctor so and so from Harvard
Medical School advises you to do da.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Da da da dah.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
So I thought, what teenagers are going to trust is
someone else their age who's going through it and telling
them about it, not someone who has a degree or
is considered an expert, and so I said, why don't
we have a column called it Happened to Me where
it's strictly first person, and we don't clean up the language,
(16:40):
we don't make it sound magazini. We just leave it
the way that they wrote it and keep it raw
and so that they'll know that this is really real.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And was a true experience.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And I actually had to get my sister to do
the first one because nobody was reading it, of.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Course, so you had no submissions.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
We had none, and then then we got overflowing submissions
after that and all coming through the US mail, but
tons and tons of people's stories, and so she was
my first one writing about her abortion, which was also
very controversial. The advertiser who was opposite that they were
not happy.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Someone one said that you foresaw the dawn of the
age of oversharing, And I think that is sort of true, right.
Something I've thought a lot about is how Sassey predicted
the self confessional era we live in now, and it
explored the impact of trauma even before that was part
of the vernacular or the way we just like talk
(17:38):
about things. Why do you think that was something you
were so drawn to?
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I think It comes from being that isolated boarding school
student who felt really really alone in what I was
going through, and any media that I would turn to
for solas would make me feel more alienated because I
wasn't being reflected in it. You know, I didn't look
(18:03):
like those girls. I thought about other things that they
were not talking about. So I think that that's where
it came from, is just how good it can make
someone feel to hear somebody else's true story that they
are over sharing.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Right. It's just being able to see yourself in the.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Work, Yeah, and being able to not have shame and
be free to say whatever you want. It's that basic, really.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
But at times I feel like there's been criticism of that.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I think Slate once called it the first person industrial complex,
and I think especially you know, with the rise of
the digital age, there's more cost of that sort of
confessional work because now women get harassed online. Have you
thought about that and how you respond to that criticism?
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Yeah, that came up more at Exojane also because it
was digital, and so we were getting more and more
backlash about things that we would run that could be
hurtful to maybe not the person that was over sharing.
But someone else who was implicit in it or something
like that. At the same time, I do still believe
(19:12):
in the idea of people being that open and the
benefits that come from that. So I don't stand behind
every single thing that we published. There was some stuff
that really ended up being really hurtful to people that
I wish we hadn't done, But I still believe in
the concept and I think that it's more good than bad.
(19:36):
And there's a section in the new publication that I'm
working on that goes even deeper. Oh interesting, So yeah,
that takes it even one step further than it happened
to me.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Well, it's interesting, right, because it's an authenticity.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Yes, there's nothing I like less than fake authenticity. And
even the word even someone calling something authentic is already
it already feels like, uh oh, that's already probably big.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So I really think it's.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
So important to keeping it really real and raw for
all of us, because everyone's going through stuff, and just
to have it out there in the real way I
think is so just so so therapeutic.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It is interesting, though, because it is so much of
what we sort of think of as social media now.
Although I think a lot of social media. Is that
performed authenticity versus real authentic.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Yes, right, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Like I do think one of the reasons we don't
see things like SAS and Rookie is that they've been
to some degree replaced by influencers or content creators.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And that's not necessarily bad.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I mean, that is really young women talking to each
other in the same way that SAS did to some degree. Right,
in some ways it has inherited that ethos, but it
doesn't create community in the same way.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
That's right, you know you just because I was just
thinking that, I was just thinking that I really do
appreciate the people that are out there who are being
truly real about who they are and getting an audience
for that and influencing in all those good ways.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
I really appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
At the same time, I feel like that is it's
not what I've ever been interested in, because it's not
what I needed back in those days and still not
what I need. Whereas I feel like I need community,
I need to be able to then respond back and say, well,
this is my reality, and have us all kind of
group together and come to some mutual understanding.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Maybe it was going to Quaker schools when I was
a kid. That got me.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
But that part of it, that component of the community
where it isn't just all of us listening to one
person and what they think, because that's not the point.
It's not what that person thinks or feels or went through.
It's all of us together.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
There is just this generation of women where SASE really
was such an iconic influence, right. I mean, women collect
the magazine, they trade them. Barnard now has every issue,
it has an official archive. It really has had this
enduring influence. And I'm wondering what you think that is,
(22:29):
why it really has captured the imagination of that generation
of women in the way that it has.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Man oh Man, I think that it was how really,
again I go back to this, but how real it was.
How we were when we were producing SAS, We were
living every word. I could practically recite for you every
single article that came out over the first number of
years of SAS and everything that we did. We were
(22:58):
really involved in it our selves, elves. It was never
talking about something, it was always living it and reporting
on it. From that perspective, and I think that still
has a rawness to it when you read it, it's
still kind of surprised, is some of it is still
surprising even so many years later, and even with so
many people doing that same kind of voice.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It really does hold up.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
I mean, I went back and looked at old is Shoes,
and I mean, I'm sure there are things you regret, right,
like any editor does from a certain period of their career.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
God, yes, but for the most part it holds up
right absolutely.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
I think it really does too.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And then there were also the little subversive things we
would do that are just funny. Like we would make
up a slang word just to see how because we
knew that seventeen magazine was copying us, so we'd make
up a slang word and start calling everything that were
daggy or whatever.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
It was like an early one that we took.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
And we would do that and see how long it
took for a to show up in seventeen usually about
three to four months because of the lag time with
publication at that point.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Okay, that's hilarious.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, we were.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Doing a lot of little inside stuff like that too,
which is just funny. There's a lot to read between
the lines there, I'll say that.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
And so that keeps it interesting.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
I think it was also it was truly a no
judgment zone and very very open, and I think that
still carries a lot of weight. I do think also
the fact that we knew that we were the first
ones to run a lot of the kinds of content
that we ran, and that for doing it for teenage
girls was really controversial, And so when the moral majority
(24:40):
got a hold of it, and a group of women
that were part of that, called Women Aglow, they went
out and they went to newsstands and told them they
wouldn't shop there if they carried Sassy magazine, and they
had these little note cards they all were basically the
same thing on that were sent in mass to our
(25:00):
advertisers saying that they wouldn't buy their products if they
advertised in Sassy Magazine because of things we did, like
stories on gay teenagers, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I mean, it's still hard to run ads against a
lot of these kinds of topics, right, I mean, I
think that's one of the things we're seeing.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
It really is crazy to me, in looking back at
all this how the society has made so many inroads
in terms of acceptance of gender fluidity, queer rights, all
of that, but how the stuff geared towards women and
stuff involving women is still it just moves at a
snail's pace and keeps going back.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
I see kind of the landscape, and it's hard to
kind of understand why we don't have voices like Sassy
or even Rookie.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Now.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I mean you were actually listed as the fairy godmother
of Rookie, right, so you were involved in that as well.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
But those voices for girls, it feels like we have
less of them as time goes on.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
And you know, with the recent sale of Jezebel, why
do you think it is such a challenge?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It is really something.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
And when I learned about Jezebel, I was so bummed
out because that just showed me once again how far
we have not come, and the fact that I think
that an issue there was the advertising not being there
to support it, but the readers were certainly there to
support it. And I think that it's that model that
(26:27):
in the advertising world we're still dealing with, for one thing,
a lot of men, a lot of white men in
particular older who just don't get that that actually can
work and can appeal to people who actually do buy things.
As a matter of fact, the company that I worked
for at SASE bought Miss magazine to make it their
second publication way back when I remember the subscription only. Yeah,
(26:50):
because of the advertising battles with that.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
It's interesting because I was running the newsroom Advice when
Black Lives Matter happened, and one of the things we
found that despite the fact that all these companies were,
you know, espousing their support for Black Lives Matter, when
it came to advertising dollars, they still didn't want to
be around a lot of the content we were creating around it.
And I think that's something that's pretty invisible to the audience.
(27:15):
You can still have a lot of traffic, you can
have a big audience, but if the things you're writing
about don't feel brand safe to the brands, it really
doesn't make a difference. And I think that's why we're
actually seeing the ecosystem for really interesting, voicy digital brands
contract in the way we are, because even if there's
an audience for some reason, brands are just really nervous
(27:39):
about being around it. And I don't know that I
can think of a good solution for that, you know,
I mean that just feel, I guess it's subscriptions, but
that is really challenging, right, It's a challenging market for that.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
That's right, That's right.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
And I do think it's subscriptions or it's selling your
own products through your publication or one of those other
revenue streams, because the advertising model doesn't allow for what
Jezebel did, for what SASE did for all of that.
Still still if you tried to come out with the
Sase now, would still have I think many many of
the same battles.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Do you think it's also because it's hard to pinpoint
what exactly it means to be a publication for women now.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
Yes, And as a matter of fact, that's just one
little part of my new project, which I actually wanted
to do back when I started Jane Magazine, but it
wasn't able to because it was it was ad supported.
So with that, I had to be able to present
to advertisers that it was a demographic of women eighteen
to forty nine, that kind of thing. But I've wanted
(28:41):
to ever since then do a magazine that is not
gender based, and so that's actually one of the things
I'm working on now. And so it's not geared toward
any specific gender and at the same time, and the
next battle that I want to wage is about age,
and this particularly does hurt women, I think, but in general,
(29:03):
I think that it's ridiculous that when you read something
or learn something about someone within the first paragraph, is
their age almost always why?
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Why is that significant?
Speaker 4 (29:15):
And I think the same way that the gender thing
is finally getting broken down and people taking control of
that themselves, I think that the same thing is going
to happen with age, where it'll just be considered not
cool to mention someone's age.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I love that. I feel like it's especially for women.
You can really be aged out of a lot of
things in.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
A way that absolutely doesn't feel consistent with how we
experience age anymore. Like the world has changed so much
in terms of how you experienced life that I mean,
I love so many teen things and.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, so I don't know, I don't want to be
aged out of that. So I'm very excited to see
what you do next. Does it get harder? I mean
I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
When you've had so much success at such a young age,
is it harder to sort of do things without worrying
that You're not going to be able to recreate the magic.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
Definitely, it does, and I think that in some ways
I won't recreate what Sas was and what it was
for that audience at that time. But I'm still always
surprised when I look at, for example, what the project
I'm working on now, when I look at it compared
to what's out there, I'm still surprised that I can still,
(30:28):
at this old age, I can still shake things up
and do things that nobody else is doing. So I'm
happy about that and happy to be able to do
that and to get the chances to keep doing it.
It is kind of remarkable, But it does get harder.
As I said, starting Sase, I think I got that
launched in a couple months. Cut to Jane Magazine a
(30:49):
couple of years, cut to Exo Jane five years. Each
subsequent project does get more. Yeah, gets just there are
more questions around it.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Well, I can't wait. I know it's going to be amazing, Jane.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I am going to end speaking of age with a
party trick I know you're famous for, which is that
you can.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Tell people what their emotional age is. So I'm so curious.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
God, if yours is still fifteen, and what you think
mine is?
Speaker 4 (31:20):
This is such a great question. Okay, mine is still fifteen. Absolutely.
My daughter, who is chronologically twenty one, is way older
than I am at this point, especially, but I have Okay,
so now let me key in because I haven't been
doing it and it is something I have to get
in the mindset up. I want to say that you Okay,
(31:41):
let me. Let me just take a moment. I could
see you being also a teenager, but slightly older than me,
So I would give you about seventeen.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
I mean, because you're still you still definitely have that
teen thing.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yeah, that's what I would give you. Does that ring
at all? That feels very right. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
So you're my slightly older friend. You're like a little
wiser than I am. You can help me.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
I love being the slightly older friend, which is crazy
because I feel like Sassy Magazine was my cool older friend.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So that's a perfect way to end it. Jane, thank
you so much for doing this. It really was so
lovely to have this chat with you.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Thank you and thank you for doing this amazing podcast.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Jess, what do we have coming up next week? And
is it something you would have read about in sase?
Speaker 5 (32:37):
Yes, actually it probably was. And also Why I Am,
which I also read it is about lip boss.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Oh I hope we get some really good product placement
out of that.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
I mean, honestly me too.
Speaker 5 (32:47):
We could use some lip glass.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
But this is really about lip bloss as.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
A symbol of teen girl bonding.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
So we're going to go a little deeper.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist,
Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharan
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Do. We are
your hosts Susie Bannacharum.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even more,
check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.
I just have to say that my thirteen year old
self is dying.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Susie Danacarum.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
And I'm Jessica Bennett.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
This is in Retrospect, where each week we revisit a
cultural moment from the past that shaped.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Us and that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Today, we're talking to Jane Pratt, the woman behind Sassy,
an iconic teen magazine that shaped a generation of nineties girls,
including us.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Jane Pratt, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I am so excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I think I told you a story that I will
start with, which is that when I was I think
I was a freshman in high school, I went to
boarding school, as did you. I went to boarding school
in Connecticut, to a much less prestigious school than Jane did,
for the record, and.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
I was barely surviving at mine.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
By the way, the whole impetus for Sassy magazine came
out of what a loser I was at that school.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I was not the coolest either, but I was in
My sister was at Barnard and I came to town
to visit her, and she knew how much I love.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Sassy, and she was like, you know, what let's go visit.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And she took me to the offices and we just came,
which is a crazy thing for us to have done,
and we just went to the front desk and my
sister was like, this is my sister. She's obsessed with Sassy.
And I don't remember the names of anyone, but everyone
was so nice to me, like they gave me a tour.
I think they gave me like copies of the magazine.
(01:30):
It was just this really formative experience for me, and
I just thought, oh my god, this is so cool,
like this is what people get to do for a living.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So I feel like I should thank you for that.
Speaker 4 (01:40):
I actually have a recollection because I was basically living
in those offices at that time. I think it was
when we were one time Square. Yeah, and we had yep,
we had like a neon Sassy when you when you
got off the elevator. That was our big fancy look. Yeah.
And I remember Andrew Lynnette, who worked at the front
then and then became a beauty editor and then went
(02:01):
on from there. I remember her telling me that when
I was in a meeting, this girl and her sister
had come by the offices.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
So I think it might that was.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Ah, oh my god, that's so amazing.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 (02:11):
What a full circle moment this is for me?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Who Yeah, it really was so special, and I think,
you know, it really speaks to just what Sas was.
It was just this really accessible place for girls to go.
It felt like a community more than even a magazine,
which really did feel ahead of its time. So let's
start at the beginning, just for people who might not
be as familiar with Sassy as I.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Clearly, you famously.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Became the editor of Sassy magazine in nineteen eighty seven
when you were just twenty four years old, which blows
my mind because what I was doing at twenty four
was not running like an iconic magazine, and I think
that made you the youngest editor in history at that time.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Tell me how it happened.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
You know, it's so funny.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
My daughter is now turning twenty one this week, and
so I too, now have contact with people that are
the age that I was on a pretty regular basis,
And I mean it seems crazy to me now too.
At the time, I thought, God, I've been out of
school for a year and a half and I haven't
gotten this magazine start yet, come on, this is crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
You felt like you were behind the eight ball behind.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Really seriously, I was really agonizing about But it was
really the foresight of the original president of our publishing
company that was based in Australia, who saw that someone
young could actually be more adept at accessing the way
that young people talk to each other and better able
(03:45):
to produce this magazine for teenage girls. So my age
actually was helpful to me. But I knew so little.
I just knew nothing, because what happened was there was
word out that this Australian publishing company was interested in
getting into the American market, and they were interested in
the teen market in particular. So I was like, well,
(04:07):
that is exactly what I've wanted to do since I
was fifteen years old. So I made up a whole presentation.
I accidentally in my presentation I did a fake editor's
letter and I said something about Panda bears instead of
Koala Bears for Australia.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I'll never forget, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
But I did a whole presentation of what the magazine
would be if I were to do it.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
And I also.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Remember that in the meeting with her with Sandr Yates.
She asked me something about what causes I supported, and
I had just recently given some money to Nayral, the
National Abortion Rates actionally and I mentioned that to her,
and because I kind of wanted to be right up
front with who I was and what I was going
to do with this magazine if we got to do it,
(04:52):
and she was really supportive of that, and so anyway,
from there, I got a chance to start it, and
I hired a bunch of people, mostly slightly older than me,
but you know, but all within the same age range
for the most part, So like a group of kids.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'm curious, did it feel like an enormous amount of
pressure or were you so young that you had the
confidence of not knowing the way you didn't know?
Speaker 4 (05:16):
Thank you, Thank you for recognizing that. I mean, I
was ballsy. And then, funnily enough, when I went to
start Jane Magazine, which was you know, nobody needs to
know about this.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
But it was.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
It was maybe eight years later than that, after Sassy
had been going on that long, I did not have
the same confidence.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
It took me so much longer to get it going.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But this was just one of those like, yeah, I
deserve this I have a good idea, let's get it
out there.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
How did you conceive of the magazine at the time,
because one thing I think about a lot is how
much intention we ascribed to art in retrospect, right, and
often I think lots of things happen by instinct, and
I'm curious for you how much of this was just instinct.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Yeah, it was very verre cause oriented. I remember from
very early days talking to Christina Kelly, who was one
of my first hires as an editor there, and I
remember us saying, well, we don't know that this magazine
is going to be around forever, and that's not our goal.
Our goal is to really make an impact on society
(06:19):
with what we're doing. And at that time, Reagan was
president and I have just been able to vote I
think twice at that point, so I was, you know,
that's how young I was, right, Yeah, but I remember saying, well,
we could have with what we're doing here, we could
have an impact on the next election, because they're all
(06:41):
they're not that age yet, but they will be. Because
it was fourteen to nineteen year olds that we're gearing
to it, and so it was always about changing the
world like that was always the goal, and that was
very intentional.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And how did you conceive of the subject areas or
the coverage areas. I know, for example, you referred to
your sort of three most popular writers as sex, drugs,
and rock and roll, which I love.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Yeah, yep. Christina was rock and roll.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Catherine was drugs because she did all the kind of
nitty gritty like reporting stuff, hardcore reporting. And Karen Ketchpoole
was sex because she wrote about sex in a very
open way. I hired her from Australia. She was one
of the few people I brought over from there because
it was really hard to find somebody in this country
(07:30):
at that time. This sounds insane, but who could write
so openly to women about sex and even I mean,
you would think that's crazy. You would think Cosmo had
been out for many years, but particularly for this age group,
so there was just no There wasn't even sex information
for girls out there. There was no birth control, there
was nothing like that.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
That's interesting because I feel like, of course Cosmo existed,
but Cosmo was still.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Very geared towards landing a man, like so much of
the stuff that was out there.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
There are the other teen magazines at that time were
really focused on how to be thin, how to get
a boyfriend, how to sort of make yourself this very stereotypical,
almost nineteen fifties ideal. So was that something you were
really conscious of or was that just not what you
were interested in?
Speaker 4 (08:15):
I was extremely conscious of it. And it's funny because
in thinking about talking today and thinking about what am
I proud of, and a lot of what I'm proud
of with Sase is what we didn't put in. I
had a list of mandates to all to anyone writing
or contributing that included things like, you know, no diets,
no calorie counts.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
If a reader a lot of what we did.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Were there advice columns in the magazine, So if a
reader wrote in and said my crush has been ignoring
me or whatever, nobody was allowed to assume that that
crush was a boy.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I mean, but that's a big deal considering sort of
the context of the time. Reagan's America was not particularly
LGBTQ friendly, right right exactly? And the voice, the voice
was so specific and irreverent. Is it something that you.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Sort of did consciously or were you just like, this
is the way I talk.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
I knew that I really wanted to be completely different
from what was out there, but it was intentional. Then
what I would do is I would hire a lot
of people that were not writers, but I liked their
personalities and what they had to say, and I would
just have them speak and record it and transcribe it.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Oh interesting, and yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:24):
That was easier than hiring people who had been at
other publications because they were in that mode often of
having been trained to do things like use the words
tresses and locks and seb.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Hair and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
So it was easier to just get somebody who just
talked and had good things to say.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I know this is probably an impossible question, but there
were so many I on the cover, is do you
have a favorite?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
It would be hard to say that I have a
favorite cover because and I don't have a collection assassin,
so it's not like something I look at regularly, but
it'll pop up when they're on sale on eBay or
whatever and make me wish that I had saved them
because they're worth a lot more now. But I would
say that every single issue that I look at has
(10:25):
battles that went into it that I remember vividly. Whether
it was the quirkier looking model that was on the
cover that I had to fight for and to be
able to run this cover with this cover model that
didn't look conventional, to the point where readers in the
early days would write in and they would say, we
(10:46):
know you're just getting started, but maybe soon you'll be
able to afford the good models that the other magazines use.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
What are some of the battles you remember most.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Yeah, there were tons of them. The very first issue
had the word sex on it. It was so you
think you're ready for sex? Read this first? And I
thought that was very, very tame. I actually didn't love
that cover line because I thought it could be a
lot more enticing than that.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
I thought that's pretty measured.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
But we went with that in a compromise, and that
was hard to get through because of the fact that
people weren't talking to teenage girls about sex at that time.
I remember also a cover where this is one where
I ended up losing the battle even though I thought it,
(11:38):
which was putting a black model on a cover that
was one of our traditionally bigger selling months, and finally
getting it pushed through to where we got permission to
have the black model on the cover of Sasse, and
then the publisher, I guess, got cold feet and they
put on the newstand copies. Polly bagged a copy of
(12:02):
a beauty booklet with a white model on the cover.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
On top of that, Oh my god.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
So on the newsstands. Yet it didn't. It didn't come
out on the newsstands the way that it was intended.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
How did you react to that?
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It was terrible.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
I think that we we this isn't the this doesn't
paint me in the best light. But I think that
a few of us we went to the press quietly
and leaked that this had happened because we thought that
they should be called out for it. So I think
it came out somewhere the Village Voice or something like that.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
It's interesting that you sort of say it doesn't paint
you in the best light. But to me, what it
speaks to is that even as the editor in chief
of the magazine, you didn't have the power to change that.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
That was the only way you could do it.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
You had to be.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Subvertinate, right, right, absolutely, that's absolutely right, And there was
a lot of that, and probably my age might have
hurt me in that regard or my lack of experience
might have hurt me in that regard because I didn't
necessarily know all of the ways that all of that
worked to be able to get in there and make
(13:06):
things go exactly my way. But there were battles constantly.
I was thinking too about people now talk a lot
about that Kurt and Courtney, Kurt Cobain and Courtney love cover.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yes, that's I think the most iconic sassy cover.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
It's so funny because that was a battle too, because
I remember going into my meeting with the publisher, the
president of the company and having to pitch Kurt Cobain
as basically I've hated him to be like one of
new kids on the block or backsheet.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Boys like.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
That.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
He would have hated it.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
And yes, he would have hated it, but that was
what I had to do to get them to accept
it and to say it's going to sell really, really
well and moms are going to love it.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
And all this kind. So we got we got permission
to do that.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
It did not sell particularly well at the time, but
it had as definitely stood the test of time, that's
for sure.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
How did it come to be, Like, how did you
have the idea. How did you approach them about it?
Were you there for the shoot?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
What was it like?
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Christina Kelly, who was the music entertainment editor, she was
talking to the photographer Michael Levine and he had photographed
Courtney Love and he had photographed for us as well
for Sassin. So Courtney said to him that she loved
Sassin magazine and would he consider photographing her for that
And he came to us and we thought that was
(14:30):
a great idea, and to do it with Kurt would
be even better. I did not go to the photo shoot,
but I remember right when that came out, when that
issue came out, I got a phone call from a
friend of mine who worked at Rolling Stone at the time,
Chris Connelly, and he called me after right when that
(14:52):
issue came out, and he said that at the photo
shoot it was so obvious in the writing that Kurt
and Courtney were doing drugs. And did I think it
was irresponsible of us to run that story, and especially
in a magazine for teenagers without disclosing that they were
doing drugs? And was it journalistically sound? I thought, you
(15:14):
run that story, which I thought was really interesting. But
the funny thing was I had to tell them that
we didn't know they were doing drugs. We were very naive.
We were kids, really, so we hadn't done those drugs
and we didn't know much about them, and we didn't
so anyway, we just ran it as a love story
between Curtin Gordon.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
One of the most famous things that came out of
the Sassy era was it Happened to Me, which is
a column that you carried over when you went to
Jaine magazine and you had at Exojane, which was the
digital publication you eventually launched. Why do you think that
sort of first person, confessional style of writing resonated so
much with the audience for Sassy.
Speaker 4 (15:58):
I was carefully reading all of the other teen magazines
as I was getting ready to launch Sassy, and I
knew that when I read these articles that they were running,
particularly the more serious subjects, I would zone out and skim.
When it came to doctor so and so from Harvard
Medical School advises you to do da.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Da da da dah.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
So I thought, what teenagers are going to trust is
someone else their age who's going through it and telling
them about it, not someone who has a degree or
is considered an expert, and so I said, why don't
we have a column called it Happened to Me where
it's strictly first person, and we don't clean up the language,
(16:40):
we don't make it sound magazini. We just leave it
the way that they wrote it and keep it raw
and so that they'll know that this is really real.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And was a true experience.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And I actually had to get my sister to do
the first one because nobody was reading it, of.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Course, so you had no submissions.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
We had none, and then then we got overflowing submissions
after that and all coming through the US mail, but
tons and tons of people's stories, and so she was
my first one writing about her abortion, which was also
very controversial. The advertiser who was opposite that they were
not happy.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Someone one said that you foresaw the dawn of the
age of oversharing, And I think that is sort of true, right.
Something I've thought a lot about is how Sassey predicted
the self confessional era we live in now, and it
explored the impact of trauma even before that was part
of the vernacular or the way we just like talk
(17:38):
about things. Why do you think that was something you
were so drawn to?
Speaker 4 (17:42):
I think It comes from being that isolated boarding school
student who felt really really alone in what I was
going through, and any media that I would turn to
for solas would make me feel more alienated because I
wasn't being reflected in it. You know, I didn't look
(18:03):
like those girls. I thought about other things that they
were not talking about. So I think that that's where
it came from, is just how good it can make
someone feel to hear somebody else's true story that they
are over sharing.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Right. It's just being able to see yourself in the.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
Work, Yeah, and being able to not have shame and
be free to say whatever you want. It's that basic, really.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
But at times I feel like there's been criticism of that.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I think Slate once called it the first person industrial complex,
and I think especially you know, with the rise of
the digital age, there's more cost of that sort of
confessional work because now women get harassed online. Have you
thought about that and how you respond to that criticism?
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Yeah, that came up more at Exojane also because it
was digital, and so we were getting more and more
backlash about things that we would run that could be
hurtful to maybe not the person that was over sharing.
But someone else who was implicit in it or something
like that. At the same time, I do still believe
(19:12):
in the idea of people being that open and the
benefits that come from that. So I don't stand behind
every single thing that we published. There was some stuff
that really ended up being really hurtful to people that
I wish we hadn't done, But I still believe in
the concept and I think that it's more good than bad.
(19:36):
And there's a section in the new publication that I'm
working on that goes even deeper. Oh interesting, So yeah,
that takes it even one step further than it happened
to me.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Well, it's interesting, right, because it's an authenticity.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
Yes, there's nothing I like less than fake authenticity. And
even the word even someone calling something authentic is already
it already feels like, uh oh, that's already probably big.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
So I really think it's.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
So important to keeping it really real and raw for
all of us, because everyone's going through stuff, and just
to have it out there in the real way I
think is so just so so therapeutic.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
It is interesting, though, because it is so much of
what we sort of think of as social media now.
Although I think a lot of social media. Is that
performed authenticity versus real authentic.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Yes, right, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Like I do think one of the reasons we don't
see things like SAS and Rookie is that they've been
to some degree replaced by influencers or content creators.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And that's not necessarily bad.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
I mean, that is really young women talking to each
other in the same way that SAS did to some degree. Right,
in some ways it has inherited that ethos, but it
doesn't create community in the same way.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
That's right, you know you just because I was just
thinking that, I was just thinking that I really do
appreciate the people that are out there who are being
truly real about who they are and getting an audience
for that and influencing in all those good ways.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
I really appreciate that.
Speaker 4 (21:17):
At the same time, I feel like that is it's
not what I've ever been interested in, because it's not
what I needed back in those days and still not
what I need. Whereas I feel like I need community,
I need to be able to then respond back and say, well,
this is my reality, and have us all kind of
group together and come to some mutual understanding.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
Maybe it was going to Quaker schools when I was
a kid. That got me.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
But that part of it, that component of the community
where it isn't just all of us listening to one
person and what they think, because that's not the point.
It's not what that person thinks or feels or went through.
It's all of us together.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
There is just this generation of women where SASE really
was such an iconic influence, right. I mean, women collect
the magazine, they trade them. Barnard now has every issue,
it has an official archive. It really has had this
enduring influence. And I'm wondering what you think that is,
(22:29):
why it really has captured the imagination of that generation
of women in the way that it has.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Man oh Man, I think that it was how really,
again I go back to this, but how real it was.
How we were when we were producing SAS, We were
living every word. I could practically recite for you every
single article that came out over the first number of
years of SAS and everything that we did. We were
(22:58):
really involved in it our selves, elves. It was never
talking about something, it was always living it and reporting
on it. From that perspective, and I think that still
has a rawness to it when you read it, it's
still kind of surprised, is some of it is still
surprising even so many years later, and even with so
many people doing that same kind of voice.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
It really does hold up.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
I mean, I went back and looked at old is Shoes,
and I mean, I'm sure there are things you regret, right,
like any editor does from a certain period of their career.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
God, yes, but for the most part it holds up
right absolutely.
Speaker 3 (23:32):
I think it really does too.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
And then there were also the little subversive things we
would do that are just funny. Like we would make
up a slang word just to see how because we
knew that seventeen magazine was copying us, so we'd make
up a slang word and start calling everything that were
daggy or whatever.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
It was like an early one that we took.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
And we would do that and see how long it
took for a to show up in seventeen usually about
three to four months because of the lag time with
publication at that point.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Okay, that's hilarious.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yeah, we were.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Doing a lot of little inside stuff like that too,
which is just funny. There's a lot to read between
the lines there, I'll say that.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
And so that keeps it interesting.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
I think it was also it was truly a no
judgment zone and very very open, and I think that
still carries a lot of weight. I do think also
the fact that we knew that we were the first
ones to run a lot of the kinds of content
that we ran, and that for doing it for teenage
girls was really controversial, And so when the moral majority
(24:40):
got a hold of it, and a group of women
that were part of that, called Women Aglow, they went
out and they went to newsstands and told them they
wouldn't shop there if they carried Sassy magazine, and they
had these little note cards they all were basically the
same thing on that were sent in mass to our
(25:00):
advertisers saying that they wouldn't buy their products if they
advertised in Sassy Magazine because of things we did, like
stories on gay teenagers, all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I mean, it's still hard to run ads against a
lot of these kinds of topics, right, I mean, I
think that's one of the things we're seeing.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
It really is crazy to me, in looking back at
all this how the society has made so many inroads
in terms of acceptance of gender fluidity, queer rights, all
of that, but how the stuff geared towards women and
stuff involving women is still it just moves at a
snail's pace and keeps going back.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
I see kind of the landscape, and it's hard to
kind of understand why we don't have voices like Sassy
or even Rookie.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Now.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I mean you were actually listed as the fairy godmother
of Rookie, right, so you were involved in that as well.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
But those voices for girls, it feels like we have
less of them as time goes on.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
And you know, with the recent sale of Jezebel, why
do you think it is such a challenge?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
It is really something.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
And when I learned about Jezebel, I was so bummed
out because that just showed me once again how far
we have not come, and the fact that I think
that an issue there was the advertising not being there
to support it, but the readers were certainly there to
support it. And I think that it's that model that
(26:27):
in the advertising world we're still dealing with, for one thing,
a lot of men, a lot of white men in
particular older who just don't get that that actually can
work and can appeal to people who actually do buy things.
As a matter of fact, the company that I worked
for at SASE bought Miss magazine to make it their
second publication way back when I remember the subscription only. Yeah,
(26:50):
because of the advertising battles with that.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
It's interesting because I was running the newsroom Advice when
Black Lives Matter happened, and one of the things we
found that despite the fact that all these companies were,
you know, espousing their support for Black Lives Matter, when
it came to advertising dollars, they still didn't want to
be around a lot of the content we were creating around it.
And I think that's something that's pretty invisible to the audience.
(27:15):
You can still have a lot of traffic, you can
have a big audience, but if the things you're writing
about don't feel brand safe to the brands, it really
doesn't make a difference. And I think that's why we're
actually seeing the ecosystem for really interesting, voicy digital brands
contract in the way we are, because even if there's
an audience for some reason, brands are just really nervous
(27:39):
about being around it. And I don't know that I
can think of a good solution for that, you know,
I mean that just feel, I guess it's subscriptions, but
that is really challenging, right, It's a challenging market for that.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
That's right, That's right.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
And I do think it's subscriptions or it's selling your
own products through your publication or one of those other
revenue streams, because the advertising model doesn't allow for what
Jezebel did, for what SASE did for all of that.
Still still if you tried to come out with the
Sase now, would still have I think many many of
the same battles.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Do you think it's also because it's hard to pinpoint
what exactly it means to be a publication for women now.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
Yes, And as a matter of fact, that's just one
little part of my new project, which I actually wanted
to do back when I started Jane Magazine, but it
wasn't able to because it was it was ad supported.
So with that, I had to be able to present
to advertisers that it was a demographic of women eighteen
to forty nine, that kind of thing. But I've wanted
(28:41):
to ever since then do a magazine that is not
gender based, and so that's actually one of the things
I'm working on now. And so it's not geared toward
any specific gender and at the same time, and the
next battle that I want to wage is about age,
and this particularly does hurt women, I think, but in general,
(29:03):
I think that it's ridiculous that when you read something
or learn something about someone within the first paragraph, is
their age almost always why?
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Why is that significant?
Speaker 4 (29:15):
And I think the same way that the gender thing
is finally getting broken down and people taking control of
that themselves, I think that the same thing is going
to happen with age, where it'll just be considered not
cool to mention someone's age.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I love that. I feel like it's especially for women.
You can really be aged out of a lot of
things in.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
A way that absolutely doesn't feel consistent with how we
experience age anymore. Like the world has changed so much
in terms of how you experienced life that I mean,
I love so many teen things and.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, so I don't know, I don't want to be
aged out of that. So I'm very excited to see
what you do next. Does it get harder? I mean
I think about this a lot.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
When you've had so much success at such a young age,
is it harder to sort of do things without worrying
that You're not going to be able to recreate the magic.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
Definitely, it does, and I think that in some ways
I won't recreate what Sas was and what it was
for that audience at that time. But I'm still always
surprised when I look at, for example, what the project
I'm working on now, when I look at it compared
to what's out there, I'm still surprised that I can still,
(30:28):
at this old age, I can still shake things up
and do things that nobody else is doing. So I'm
happy about that and happy to be able to do
that and to get the chances to keep doing it.
It is kind of remarkable, But it does get harder.
As I said, starting Sase, I think I got that
launched in a couple months. Cut to Jane Magazine a
(30:49):
couple of years, cut to Exo Jane five years. Each
subsequent project does get more. Yeah, gets just there are
more questions around it.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Well, I can't wait. I know it's going to be amazing, Jane.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I am going to end speaking of age with a
party trick I know you're famous for, which is that
you can.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Tell people what their emotional age is. So I'm so curious.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
God, if yours is still fifteen, and what you think
mine is?
Speaker 4 (31:20):
This is such a great question. Okay, mine is still fifteen. Absolutely.
My daughter, who is chronologically twenty one, is way older
than I am at this point, especially, but I have Okay,
so now let me key in because I haven't been
doing it and it is something I have to get
in the mindset up. I want to say that you Okay,
(31:41):
let me. Let me just take a moment. I could
see you being also a teenager, but slightly older than me,
So I would give you about seventeen.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I like that.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
I mean, because you're still you still definitely have that
teen thing.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
Yeah, that's what I would give you. Does that ring
at all? That feels very right. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
So you're my slightly older friend. You're like a little
wiser than I am. You can help me.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
I love being the slightly older friend, which is crazy
because I feel like Sassy Magazine was my cool older friend.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
So that's a perfect way to end it. Jane, thank
you so much for doing this. It really was so
lovely to have this chat with you.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Thank you and thank you for doing this amazing podcast.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Jess, what do we have coming up next week? And
is it something you would have read about in sase?
Speaker 5 (32:37):
Yes, actually it probably was. And also Why I Am,
which I also read it is about lip boss.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Oh I hope we get some really good product placement
out of that.
Speaker 3 (32:46):
I mean, honestly me too.
Speaker 5 (32:47):
We could use some lip glass.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
But this is really about lip bloss as.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
A symbol of teen girl bonding.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
So we're going to go a little deeper.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist,
Fight Club and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 5 (33:30):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Lauren Hanson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharan
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Do. We are
your hosts Susie Bannacharum.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
And Jessica Bennett. We are also executive producers. For even more,
check out in retropod dot com. See you next week.
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