As the first new teen magazine to come along in years,
Sassy
was getting its fair share of attention beyond the magazine industry. Sex stories made a particularly easy subject for the news media to grab onto. Jane was on a national media tour, going city to city and doing local TV, and was often asked whether the question “Are you ready for sex?” was promoting teen experimentation. In the article of the same title, Karen wrote about practicing rolling condoms on a banana. “Even thatâwhich doesn't seem like that big of a dealâpeople were already starting to watch us then,” says Jane.
And, naturally, not all of these people were pleased. Irate parents called
Sassy
's office to complain; some canceled subscriptions. Perhaps even liberated, formerly free-loving,
Cosmo
-reading, baby boomer parents weren't always as comfortable with the concept of teenagers and sexâor the idea that their daughters didn't need to ask permission to lead their own erotic livesâas they thought they were.
In fact, the country was deeply divided about the place of the patriarchy in the lives of teenage girls: the death of Becky Bell in 1988âfrom the complications of an illegal abortion, which she underwent rather than tell her parents about her pregnancy and ask for consent for a legal procedureâwas a lighting rod for abortion-rights groups, who blamed Indiana's parental consent law, and anti-abortion groups, who blamed the country's flimsy moral fiber. Jan Dawesâthe mother of three sons, all grownâwas in the latter camp. The woman from Wabash, Indiana, together with two of her Christian girlfriends, launched a petition campaign against the magazine. And she convinced her local Kmart and Hooks Drug Store to stop stocking
Sassy
.
Dawes was a member of a right-wing group called Women Aglow. The organization, which still exists today, is a proponent of laughably misogynistic beliefs. In an article on their Web site titled “10 Things Men Need to Know About Women,” item number six is “I need your logical, objective perception of things as much as you need my intuitive, subjective sensitivity. I get so emotionally involved in situations that I don't see it clearly.” Item number eight is “I really do want you to be my spiritual leader.”
In the late 1980s, the religious right was just beginning to gather steamâ
The Silent Scream,
a movie condemning abortion, was being screened to young pregnant womenâand targeting teen-agers was a priority. Other like-minded organizations saw what Dawes was doing and decided to join her anti-
Sassy
crusade. In July, Focus on the Family, a California-based group headed by conservative activist James Dobsonâwho would later become known for having the ear of Karl Rove, George W. Bush's chief of staff, and loudly and successfully crusading against gay marriageâpublished an article in the
Citizen
, the group's monthly newsletter, denouncing the magazine as “without question the most sexually provocative teen magazine ever published.”
In America, at least, this was probably true. While
Seventeen
had at least one article pertaining to sex every month, most of
Sassy
's early issues contained more sexual content. The May issue may have been particularly interesting to hormone-addled adolescents. In addition to “She Was a Teenage Stripper” (hardly a how-to), there is “What Your Mom Doesn't Know About You” (“Wow. Only 14 percent of mothers thought their daughters had lost their virginity ⦠But c'mon, moms, this is 1988”) and “How to Kiss” (“Do put your fingers in his mouth. Okay, I was forced to put this one in. A few sickosâI mean people in this officeâbrought it up and I must admit there have been a couple of guys in my past who have gotten into it”). The “Help” section includes a letter from a girl who is having sex with her female friend and wants to stop, and one from a girl who has a teacher who “wants to jump on me.” There's also a “What Now” piece bemoaning the fact that ten states are instating parental consent laws for girls under eighteen who want to have abortions.
But the article that so rankled Dawes, which was published in the second issue, was called “The Truth About Boys' Bodies.” She told Dobson: “Let me just say that I've been married for thirty-one years. There was information in that particular article that I found offensive and shocking. And, having had a fulfilling relationship with my husband for thirty years, it was information I could well have done without.” But it's hard to imagine that a woman who lived with four males wouldn't already be familiar with the article's contents. There wasn't a particularly pornographic element to the high-school health-class basics that
Sassy
was presenting; it was mostly highly uncontroversial facts, like “at about age fourteen, a guy's voice changes from something that sounds like Pee-Wee Herman to something that sounds more like John Wayne (he hopes).” In one section, titled “Below the Belt,” Karen writes, “You can't fool me. I know you're all reading this section first.” And while she goes on to use the words
testicles
,
pubic hair
, and
penis
, it's still science-textbook chaste. The cheekiest part of the article is the cartoon illustration of a dorky-looking dude clad only in heart-covered boxers, accompanied by a few sentences debunking the old wives' tale that the shape and size of a boy's fingers are related to the shape and size of his penisâ“So you can stop staring at that guy in chemistry with the huge hands.”
In the
Citizen
, Dobson enumerates a number of other articles he finds offensive, including “Swimsuits We Dare You to Wear,” a “Condom Update,” and the “What Now” about parental consent before obtaining abortions. Thumbing his nose at the ninth commandment, he also listed pieces that were blatant fictions: stories titled “Good Manners for Good-Mannered Sex,” “Seductive Nights: Daring Designs That Will Make Any Night a Night to Remember,” and “Snakes and Lovers” (what is
that
?) never ran in the magazine.
But Dobson's piece wasn't meant to be descriptiveâit was a call to action accompanied by a “What You Can Do” sidebar, which directed angry
acolytes to make their displeasure known. Dobson kindly included a list of who's who to complain to, and their addresses. Besides Jane Pratt, it included Revlon, Noxell (owner of Noxzema and Cover Girl), Schering-Plough, Inc. (Maybelline), Carter-Wallace Inc. (Nair, Sea & Ski tanning lotion), and Tambrands, Inc. (Tampax, Maxithins). In other words, all of
Sassy
's biggest advertisers.
Hundreds of letters poured into the 1 Times Square offices. In response, Jane dutifully published a letter in the
Citizen
that read “
Sassy
in no way intends to take the place of parents or to undermine their values. We only hope to be a source of entertainment, companionship, and information for teenagers at a time when such information is potentially a matter of life and death ⦠In the end, our goals are probably not so different.”
But if Jane and her staff weren't particularly concerned by Dobson, they soon had Reverend Donald Wildmon, the head of the American Family Association, to contend with. Wildmon had already launched a successful advertising campaign against the TV raunchfest
Married with Children
when he began publishing articles criticizing
Sassy
in his bulletin, which reached millions. And the Moral Majority launched their own campaign, claiming that
Sassy
promoted sex and homosexuality, and that its stories threatened parent-child relationships.
With three right-wing groups on the attack, letters from parents and other concerned zealots flooded into the offices of Procter & Gamble, Tampax, and the like, threatening the companies that they would lose customers if they continued to advertise in
Sassy
. Within a matter of months,
Sassy
had lost nearly every ad account. To put it another way, the magazine's debut issue was 129 pages; in April 1988, the magazine was 105 pages; and the following month it was 97 pagesâa result of decreasing ads. According to the February 1989 issue of
Adweek
, twelve newsstand chains stopped carrying the magazine.
The staff jokingly referred to the magazine as the “
Sassy
pamphlet.” But the business repercussions were hardly laughable. “We basically had, like, Guess Jeans as our only advertiser. Maybelline pulled out. Cover Girl pulled out,” says Mary. “I have to appreciate Paul Marciano of Guess Jeans,” agrees Jane. “He came to
Sassy
because of the controversy.”
The same thing that got Guess on board with
Sassy
âit made good business sense for a brand with a risqué reputationâkept advertisers with more wholesome images away. It was hardly a moral decision. Though advertisers' unwillingness to support
Sassy
was blamed on the magazine's sexual content, Elizabeth wrote in
Utne
, their concerns were really about sales. “I realized that many of the same companies that objected to âSex for Absolute Beginners' in
Sassy
nevertheless advertised without complaint in
Dolly
âthe most widely read teen magazine in the world in terms of circulation per capita.” (In fact,
Dolly
's sex education stories could make Dr. Ruth blush: “An old man wanking in public is a dirty thing,” advised one on the do's and don'ts of masturbation.) But mass-market companies are intrinsically skittish.
They didn't necessarily think that what
Sassy
was saying about sex was wrong; they simply didn't want to rock the boat and anger any of their potential consumers. It was safer for them to place their ads in less controversial magazines that wouldn't upset an increasingly vocal constituency.
“There was a kind of sexism back then. Advertisers didn't really believe girls had money and, if they did have money, they really felt like they only understood makeup,” says Sarah Crichton, who was executive editor of
Seventeen
at the time. In the late 1990s, companies started to see that girls had lots of disposable income, and they were spending it on all kinds of thingsâfashion, cars, gadgets. But in the eighties, it was a struggle “to convince advertisers that teenage girls had any impact financially at all,” Crichton says. Clearly, keeping girls' parents happy was more important than impressing young consumers.
Something was going to have to give. And that meant editorial compromise. The September issue was already being printed when a story debunking the myths of masturbation (“maybe you call it jerking off, a hand job, beating off”) was deemed too risky and was pulled. “A big advertiser said, âIf you run that story, we will pull all of our ads.' And we literally stopped the presses and replaced the story with something else,” says Karen, who authored the story. She adds that in her rage, she “was throwing things.” (She later gave the story to riot grrrl zine
Girl Germs
to publish.) So many companies were pulling ads out of the magazine that no one staff member can remember exactly which one delivered the final ultimatum on the piece.
There was also one other matter. A reader had sent in a question to the “Help” column asking if she could get AIDS from giving her boyfriend a blow job. It was one thing to say “oral sex”â
Seventeen
certainly didâbut Sandra Yates thought the colloquial phrasing would add more fuel to the fire, endangering the magazine's existence.
“The language just bothered people, because it was that thing that
Time
magazine called âPajama-party journalism,'” says Jane, referring to the informal way
Sassy
spoke to its readers. “To use that language when you're talking about sex made these old men at the ad agencies feel like we were encouraging it somehow. But we weren't; we were just talking about it the way kids talk about it. They didn't understand half the words we used, and that made it hard. âSo you're promoting blow jobs.' No, we're not promoting them, we're saying you could get AIDS from them.”
The “Help” page of that issue had to be shredded.
“If they had produced the issue as it was, they would have been on their way out of business,” Michael Drexler, the national media director of the Bozell ad agency, told Jonathan van Meter in an article he wrote about the boycott for
7 Days
, a New York City weekly. “No question. The end.”
Before the boycott, “I don't remember her stopping us from doing anything,” says Jane of Sandra. And
though she occasionally vetoed ideas because they were too expensive, “She never vetoed anything on the basis of it being too crazy or wild, ever.”
A quintessentially Australian publisher, Sandra really believed in letting her young staff make the editorial decisions. And why not? In less than six months from its launch,
Sassy
's circulation climbed from 250,000 to 500,000, making it one of the most successful women's magazine launches in history. And though Sandra was business-savvy enough to pull the masturbation and blow-job stories at the crucial eleventh hour, in some ways, it was too little, too late. In fact, she had never really understood the dire threat the right wing posed. No one from Australia did. “I couldn't believe it. Neill was the same,” says Cheryl. “The things we were writing aboutârelationships, suicide, masturbationâwe had run in Australia without a problem.”
When the boycott started, “Sandra was amazing,” says Elizabeth. “She said, âLet's stay the course. We will educate the public about this.'” In many ways, her cultural naïveté was what helped make the magazine so special.
Jane and Sandra embarked on a cross-country tour to try to pacify advertisers and wholesalers, to tell them why
Sassy
should be back on newsstands. They certainly had the blessing of the industry. “Both the Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors were very supportive of
Sassy
when the boycott began,” says Sandra. Support came from a few other unusual sources as well: Kevyn Aucoin, the late celebrity makeup artist, was working with Cover Girl at the time, and told the company he would stop unless they reinstated their ads. “I didn't find this out until later,” says Jane. “He called them and said, âI'm not going to work with you guys anymore unless you put your ads back in
Sassy
,'” He knew that their pulling out was related to the articles the magazine had run on homosexuality, and “he thought that it was amazing, what we had done.”
For the most part, Sandra and Jane's plan worked. Though
Sassy
's first publisher, Helen Barr, quitâaghast at the magazine's continued pushing of the proverbial envelopeâa new publisher was hired, and advertisers slowly came back.
Sassy
even tried to make peace with Women Aglow, doing an “On the Road” on Jan Dawes's hometown of Wabash, Indiana. (“It did nothing to mollify them,” says Elizabeth.)
In November 1988,
Sassy
ran yet another sex article. But this one was just as appealing to the magazine's critics as it was to its young, sometimes inexperienced fans. It was titled “Virgins Are Cool.”