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 posturingâ“Who Says I Have to Have to a Boyfriend?” read one cover line (to which one might like to answer, “Well,
you
do”)âand 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.”
Enter Bonnie Fuller. She's the stuff of magazine legend nowâin March 2004,
Vanity Fair
ran a profile chronicling the illustrious editor's successful reign of terror at such publications as
Glamour
and
Us Weekly
âbut then she was a thirtysomething Canadian editor who had just nailed her dream job at the hemorrhaging teenybop rag. Bonnie was smart enough to know that her inherent uncoolness would never allow her to tap into youth culture the way that Jane Pratt and her ilk had. Instead, according to Crow, her revamped
YM
would be “all about getting along with, and getting it on with, boys.”
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 readâespecially 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 ageâor perhaps their parents' conservatismâby 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 controlâwithout 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 topâwearing 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.”
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 heterosexualityâthat was
Ms
.'s territoryâ
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 close-minded 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 Ingall (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 boy-band 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 manhoodâthe 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 girlfriendsâunlike, 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 pitfalls. “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.”
“Girls are still understood more clearly as victims of culture and sexuality than as cultural and sexual creators,” Naomi Wolf said in
The Beauty Myth.
But
Sassy
reported with a vengeance on creative women who were making a living representing the female experience. The October 1993 issue, for example, includes book reviews of some of the coolest, most pro-girl books of the nineties, all of which would become part of the essential girl-culture canon, including cult hero Francesca Lia Block's
Missing Angel Juan
; Susanna Kaysen's memoir of teen madness,
Girl, Interrupted
(later turned into a movie starring
Sassy
heroine Winona Ryder, who appeared in the magazine long before the other teen mags caught on); Joyce Carol Oates's
Foxfire
(about a girl gang); and the much-maligned Katie Roiphe anti-girl diatribe
The Morning After
, which receives a single star and is referenced with venom in subsequent issues. A record review for Liz Phair's subversive, now classic
Exile in Guyville
exudes, “Orgasmic is not too strong a word to use here.”
Blake Nelson, for one, was impressed. In 1990, he was living in Portland, Oregon, when he picked up his girlfriend's copy of
Sassy
. “I remember
having this deep feeling like, âOh my God, teenage girls are exactly the right thing to be at this exact moment,'” says Nelson. “Like
Sassy
. I had never seen anything so dead-on.”
Nelson was working on a novel called
Girl
. “When I named
Girl
, I did it because you weren't even allowed to say
girl
,” he says. “And that was the thing that made
Sassy
so great. It was time for girls to just take it away from the super-theoretical and sometimes over-serious and energize it with youth, just have fun with it, and totally be it instead of think it. In a weird way, that was the crowning achievement of all the feminism that had gone before it, none of which ever really got the people involved and never made anyone comfortable. And then
Sassy
comes along and it's just all these girls who are totally cool and will do anything they want.”
Nelson was so impressed with the magazine in general and with Christina in particular that he sent her his manuscript. She immediately wrote to him and said she wanted to run an excerpt. In fact, she ran three. Nelson was having trouble getting the book published, until the day when Christina sent him a pile of letters that had arrived at
Sassy
, all from teenage girls, asking where they could buy the novel. “So I immediately ran over to my prospective publisher, dropped them on the desk, and said, âThis is who is going to buy it.'” (Since the book was published in 1995, Nelson has gone on to become a successful young-adult fiction author whose books have been adapted into films by the likes of Gus van Sant.)
“When I was writing
Girl
, the person I was writing it for was Kim Gordon,” says Nelson. “I just remember this triumvirate: Kathleen Hanna, Christina Kelly, Kim Gordonâpeople that were sort of gods of the cultural moment.” Hanna was a former stripper and frontwoman for punk feminist band Bikini Kill. She sang about rape and abuse; in concert, she would lift her shirt and scream, “Suck my left one!” Gordon and Sonic Youth had written “Teen Age Riot,” a song that would become an anthem of the time. She was skinny and sexy and dyed her hair platinum and wore miniskirts in her forties. She was married to nerd god Thurston Moore. She played the bass and sang in a growl. Thanks to Christina, both Hanna and Gordon made frequent appearances in
Sassy
.
Nelson's obsession with Christina isn't atypical. “Christina, to me, is the key person,” says Mike Flaherty. “More than anybody, Christina was the embodiment of the magazine.” She was the “soul,” says Blake Nelson. Says Mary Kaye, “She felt everything very, very distinctly and she spoke out about it.”
In other words, her appeal didn't lie entirely in her exquisite taste; she represented the apotheosis of the teenage girl, and her sensibility was acutely similar to that of her readers. Christina was fearlessâeven when she was fearful. After Women Aglow's anti-
Sassy
boycott nearly brought the magazine to its knees, Christina verbally flipped the bird to the religious zealots and the namby-pamby advertisers who kowtowed to them
by regularly denouncing censorship in her “What Now” column. In one article, she notes that more high-achieving girls than guys have had sex. “What does this mean? I would venture a guess, but I'm afraid I'm going to get in trouble,” she says. (Coming from her, it sounds like a taunt, not a concession.) She called out big companies like Domino's and Mennen, who had pulled TV ads when they didn't like the sexual content of certain shows. “I think all of this comes dangerously close to infringement of our constitutional right to free speech. Considering my profession, I consider it particularly scary. And you should, too,” she instructed.
“Readers seem to have a love-hate relationship with Christina,”
Sassy
acknowledged in one issue. But her incessant ranting was one of the things that kept
Sassy
readers coming back for more. “It felt good and right to delight in Christina's vitriol as we endured the seemingly endless battery of humiliation and frustration that was adolescence,” says Rebecca L. Fox in “
Sassy
All Over Again.” In one column, Christina asks, “Why is it that MTV shuns real women and only hires inane cartoon characters?” She echoed the thoughts of many of her readers, who then asked themselves: Who was this girl who was so fierce and feminist and fun? Why hadn't anyone told them that this is what they could grow up to be like? “She oozed cool,” says fan Julie Gerstein. “Plus, she articulated things in a way that pushed us girls to
also
be articulate, witty, and charming.” Christina provided “a model of the kind of adult I wanted to be: hip, concerned, socially active, taking care of business,” one fan tells Fox.
The fans may have loved Christina, but not everyone on staff did. The magazine makes constant references to her mood swings, once calling her “Big Meanie” on the masthead. “One intern said that Christina oozed hostility,” says Mary. “But she never really scared me. She's very Irishâshe's just got that kind of feistiness. She could be really nice.” Kim France, an assistant at
7 Days
who took over when Catherine left
Sassy
in 1989, didn't seem to think soâat least not at first. She cried every day her first year at the magazine because she thought Christina hated her. And though they later became close friendsâshe was even a bridesmaid at Christina's weddingâthe two writers' rivalry is apparent in numerous issues. Jane devoted an entire “Diary” to Kim after Kim complained that she was “the invisible staff writer,” not pictured as much as Karen and Christina. But many girls were drawn to Kim's smart, serious persona (she was a proponent of volunteerism, international justice, and hip-hop). Christina also terrorized Margie Ingall. “Margie had a really hard time. She and Christina sat next to each other in the back of the room, and they had completely opposite styles,” says Mary Kaye. Margie was more of a theatre geek; Christina was an East Village hipster who seemed to relish playing mean girl to the new hire. “Everybody kind of worshipped Christina. They just didn't want to be on her bad side,” says Mary Kaye.
Though
Sassy
shared a floor with
Ms
. magazine, Christina was no Gloria Steinem, preaching the gospel of unqualified sisterhood. Why did Johnny Depp and Jennifer Grey break up? “I think he finally got a look at her in broad daylight,” she opined. Nor was she Betty Friedan, completely uninterested in the conventional trappings of womanliness. “I have a pathological fear of cellulite and have stooped to purchasing all kinds of ridiculous products to rid myself of it,” she admitted in one arguably self-loathing “We Try It.” In fact, Christina's complicated version of femininity and feminism heralded a changing of the guard in the women's movement.