After a curious three-month absence, loyal
Sassy
readers eagerly plucked the March 1995 issue from the newsstands. “I knew right away something had happenedâthe logo was in this horrible shade of neon, and the girl on the cover
looked really corny and fresh-faced and false,” says Julianne Shepherd. Someone else's signature was on “Diary,” and “What Now” didn't have a single snarky reference, nor any hint of Christina's crankiness. In fact, there was no Christina. And no Mary, Margie, or Andrea. And who were Betsy and Caroline and Nina?
After anxiously wondering where the magazine had disappeared to, readers soon discovered that
Sassy
had undergone a complete change of staff and editorial philosophy, rendering it a kind of “Stepford
Sassy
,” as
Bust
magazine called it. “It was as if a best friend, someone we used to go on pro-choice marches with, staying up late eating Mallomars and talking about vibrators, had turned up after a long trip with a bad case of amnesiaâgiving us blank looks when we started talking about ârestrictive gender roles' and blowing us off to go to the movies with her boyfriend,” said
Bitch
magazine cofounder Lisa Jervis in “Kicking Sass,” an article in
Salon
.
“The original vision for
Sassy
, there was really nothing wrong with,” Jay Cole,
Sassy
's executive publisher (who was also
Teen
's publisher), told Daniel Radosh in a
New York Press
article at the time of the relaunch. “It was designed to give teens a sense of inner self-confidence, to develop self-respect, to empower young women. That concept is something we're planning to continue.” Sound okay so far? “We're planning to use a lot of personalities, celebrities who have accomplished something, to give teens a sense of how they can be the best that they can be.” And, he continues, “There will be a lot more fashion and beauty.”
The new vision was incredibly misguided. Nothing about the new
Sassy
earned the trust of its old audience. Cole opined that “there were some issues of
Sassy
that were somewhat irresponsible. We have to be responsible not only to readers, but to parents and advertisers as well.” He cites the “fringe-type” articles that were so beloved by readers. “There's no point in saying, âthe prom sucks,'” he says, sounding like he has zero knowledge of the teen-girl psyche.
So, in a sneaky ploy, the revamped
Sassy
tried to substitute the same breathless content so perfected by
Teen
âbut flavored with the same outspoken style as the old
Sassy
. The language, which was affected and laughably “hip,” was especially off. Compare the old
Sassy
's “Mary asked me to go to Los Angeles for a beauty symposium. I thought, âBummer, there goes the weekend,'” with the new copy: “So you look mah-ve-lous in your high-school prom pic, but the then-love-of-your-life has since turned out to be a major creepo-la. What's a gal to do?”
The Petersen-owned
Sassy
kept a few of the magazine's original columns, but they were the same in name only. “It Happened to Me” remained, but now included cheesy
YM
-style reenactments of the action contained within, like the shadowy portraits of a model looking on in disgust as her “mom” snorts a line in “My Mother Was a Coke Fiend.” “What Now, What Next?” was supposed to be a revamp of the much beloved “What Now” column, but it lacked Christina's deadpan writing style and any sense of what was cool or important. “I was horrified to discover that
concepts I invented were being defiled monthly by this clueless new staff,” Christina wrote in
Ms
. Every month the column began with a “
Sassy
or Sissy” list, which was the new staff's way of conveying what was in and out. (
Sassy
and sissy are, in their warped version of the teenage universe, as follows: hackers and slackers; cuddlecore and riot grrl [sic]; thongs and bongs; skydiving and stagediving; Mattus nonfat ice cream and cellulite cream.) The new
Sassy
covered zines, but often missed the point that they were cut-and-paste affairsâone “Zine of the Month,”
Foxy
, is a colorful endeavor produced by a big-name skate company.
Similarly, instead of pro-girl, unapologetically feminist articles, the new
Sassy
offered outdated and offensive advice about just about everything. On flirting: “Men think about sex all the timeâsome studies show as much as six times an hour. So any given time you're flirting with one of them, there's a chance he's wondering what you look like without your clothes on.” Sounding like it was from a blame-the-victim, well-she-asked-for-it school of sexual assault, the magazine then went on to warn girls not to flirt with anyone inappropriate. In contrast to the original
Sassy
's groundbreaking health stories, which put a primacy on female pleasure, there was now a sex column from two men: the conservative TV doctor Dr. Drew and former MTV
Headbanger's Ball
host Riki Rachtman. Sex education, in the Petersen
Sassy
, insisted that most “girls get emotionally attached after they've had sex with a guy. Guys usually do not.” The empathy that
Sassy
had always shown its teen subjects was decidedly absent. For instance, the article “(Un)planned Pregnancy: Teen Moms Tell All” calls one girl it profilesâa teenage mother of a baby who is again pregnantâ“a living, breathing statistic.”
And forget the original
Sassy
's love-your-body-as-it-is ethic. “The prettiest things under the sun are super body-conscious (and, luckily, so are you)” read the copy of one fashion article, effectively shaming the reader into an image obsession or fueling the one she likely already had. Instead of “13 Reasons to Stop Dieting” there was “Safe Munching: Are You Sabotaging Your Diet?” In the place of Kim, Mike, and Margie sampling junk food, the new
Sassy
advised readers in “The Munchies: Defined and Defeated” to eat fruit when they craved candy, advocating the kind of calorie-counting lifestyle one would expect from
Seventeen
. The few times the new
Sassy
used the F-wordâ
feminism
âit was usually to discredit it, with the words
feminist PC thought police
appearing, in one article, in extra-large type. Another article that tackles women's rights, “Feminism 2000,” states that “if it's hard for you to relate to the rules written by old-school feminists (you know, the ones who broke so much ground and burned so many bras back in your mom's day), you're not alone.”
For former staff members, seeing
Sassy
reincarnated as the very teen drivel they despised was like a slap in the face. “I still have [the new version],” says Mary. “It is so awful.” And “I remember the first issue,” Jane says. “It had the calorie counts of your favorite fast foods on a page. And I
actually started to cry there, at the newsstand, so I didn't finish reading it. I thought it was the most horrible, upsetting thing in the world. It was one thing to shut
Sassy
down. It was another to perpetuate the very thing that we had been fighting so hard against for eight years. I was like, âHere we go, backwards.'”
Receiving the new, bad
Sassy
in the mail was also a defining moment for many fans. “I remember pulling that issue with Liv Tyler on the cover out of my mailbox and thinking, âUh-oh.' Then I opened it, and the new editor had her hair in a
ponytail
, with a sporty scrunchie. I cancelled my subscription that very day,” says Laura Padilla. Alice Tiara spent an evening with a friend, systematically ripping the issue to shreds. Disposing of the new
Sassy
was a way for fans, in a small way, to voice their dissent. “All I remember is that I got the Petersen
Sassy
and hated it so much that I threw it in the fireplace,” says Maria Tessa Sciarrino.
Elisa Ung, a
Sassy
fan who was in high school at the time of the change, remembers her first glimpse of the new issue and realizing that everything she had loved about her favorite magazine was gone. “It was such a shock to my fragile teenage system. It was like someone had died. It was like all of my crew had jumped ship.” She emailed
Sassy
's old address in a desperate attempt to reach someone on the New York staff, saying that even though the old
Sassy
was gone, she would always be grateful because it taught her to have her own voice. “Margie wrote back and said thanks and that my email was wonderful. Her response was seriously a highlight of my teenage years.” Kate Tentler was using her period of unemployment to lie on the couch and watch the O. J. Simpson trial, when she got a call from a thirteen-year-old reader from Vermont, who had found her number through information. She wanted to know what the staff was up to, and had one more question: Why don't they just start their own magazine? Readers, reared on zines and blissfully ignorant of the costs of mainstream publishing, wondered why the staff had let the powers-that-be at Petersen get them down.
“I remember feeling really cheated, like it was way too soon for it to go. I was like, âNo! I still need you!'” remembers Michael Kilmis. Sarah Lynn Knowles saw
Sassy
's revamp as an indication of the generational divide: “It proved how little adults understood teen girls. I never felt a wider, more infinite gap between teens and adults. I remember feeling shocked, rendered speechless.” For fans of
Sassy
who were beginning to age beyond their teen years,
Sassy
's demise was a metaphor for the compromised world of adulthood. “The sale happened my first year of law school,” says Rita Hao. “I was miserable and doing finals and kept wondering where my
Sassy
was. I was waiting for my grades to come back, and I got this crappy
Sassy
and it made me feel like all good things eventually sell out. I'm a sellout, too! I was totally depressed. I thought, âThis is what happens to me for going to law school.' I was in a bad mood for the rest of the summer.” She later started a Web page devoted to eulogizing the old
Sassy
and tracking the whereabouts of former staffers. Ocean Capewell felt similarly
“adrift in the world” after
Sassy
was gone. “I remember writing a list of the bad things that had happened to me that year, and the death of
Sassy
was at the top,” she says. “I literally mourned the folding of that magazine and was depressed about it for months, as if it were a living, breathing thing that had died.”
Scores of readers voiced their dissent about the new content, writing angst-filled letters to the new publication. Sarah Kowalski was a sophomore in high school when the new
Sassy
appeared. Her letter, which she has now published on her blog, features such laments as “I am saddened and angered that such a beautiful, intelligent, and worthwhile institution has been corrupted. Everything I enjoyed and admired in the old magazine is dead.” Many other readers agreed with her about the new content, but predating the widespread technology of online bulletin boards by a few years, it was difficult for them to commiserate with fellow distraught teens.
In the January 1996 issue (which also featured an interview with Wilson Phillips singer Chynna Phillips on the joys of being young and married), the Petersen editors made the rather bizarre decision to publish fourteen letters on the magazine's letter pageâunaptly titled “Pushing the Envelope”âfrom livid
Sassy
fans. They titled the collection “Best of the Hate Mail.”
“The only reason I even look at the new
Sassy
is so I can phone my friends and trash it. My friend has burned her
Sassy
s,” Samantha Conover wrote, adding that she suggests they “beg Jane, Diane, Margie, and all the old staff to come back, and maybe I'll forgive you.”
Other fans also weighed in. Jenna Harrison wrote, “You have sucked every ounce of what the âold'
Sassy
stood for out of the magazine. This magazine contains nothing but superficial garbage that needs to be thrown away forever. How could you do this to us? We depended on
Sassy
month to month for advice, security, and most of all, a good friend. You're like a guy who broke up with us without a real reason.” Others lament the loss of the old staff members with the kind of vitriol only a scorned teen could muster up: Kyla Brown says, “I miss Jane. What did you do with her? I pray every night that a huge earthquake hits California; maybe then I can have my old
Sassy
back!”
But even more bizarre than publishing hate mail that name-checked the old staff was the magazine's response to its new readers, under the headline “
Sassy
Suggests: Get over It! Get a Clue! Get a Life!” It read:
Jane's gone. She checked out way before Petersen Publishing bought
Sassy
(to save its individual voice within the youth market from extinctionâyou can only offend our readers, their parents, and your advertisers so many times before they call it quits) to pursue talk-show stardom and other flights of celebrity fancy (and we're star-idolizing?).
As to many of the other old
Sassy
staffers, they are currently contributing to such groundbreaking, forward-thinking and
mainstream
magazines as
Rolling Stone
,
Entertainment Weekly
, and
Elle
. While
we respect their work, we're not them, don't want to be them, don't want to adopt their writing style, and refuse to insult your intelligence by trying to sound like them. We're us ⦠and unlike the former staffers, or Madonna, Elvira, Iman, and Cher, we're kind of attached to our last names!
As to the writers of the above-printed paeans to pissiness: First, we'd like to say that we've gotten tons of positive, encouraging mailâand
our
share of letters that made some wonderful suggestions on how we could improve our magazine. We appreciate that so much! But as to the nasty letters, when we first started receiving those missives, we found them amusing. But then we began to feel bad ⦠a little for ourselves but also for you! That you are capable of such whiny evil is disheartening and pretentious. Quit your bitchin', lighten up, and cut us some slack. We welcome all criticism so long as it's constructive, but very few of the hate letters are the least bit enlightening or illuminating.
We're not saying we're perfect, but one thing we do know is that
Sassy
caters to eclectic tastes, not some exclusive girls [sic] club for the terminally hip. What we relate to are readers whose minds are not just bright but open; who have a sense of humor as well as a sense of style; and who aren't too cool to have fun.
To those girls who get it, the real fun-smartgroovygoofygreat girls, we say: Welcome to
Sassy
'96 ⦠and beyond!