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Authors: Kara Jesella

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Sassy
encouraged girls not to just consume culture—be it indie or mainstream—but to create it themselves, whether it was by publishing a zine, forming a band or indie label, or becoming an activist. Underground culture had always been covered, however briefly, in hipper glossy magazines like
Spin
or
Details
but, before
Sassy
, no one had ever thought to cover it for teenage girls.
Sassy
single-handedly shifted the paradigm of what kinds of things were cool for a teenage girl to do; in the pages of
Sassy
, being a drummer or a zine publisher was way better than being on the prom committee.
Sassy
's concept of DIY was not limited in scope. Beyond the magazine's boosterism of zines, indie music, and riot grrrl, it had long touted making one's own clothes and beauty products as not just thifty, but chic as well.
Sassy
not only told its teen readers that they could do anything they wanted, but also how to do it. Articles like “Kicking Out the Jams,” on how to start a band; “How to Have a Job in Music and Be Female”; and “You Can So Be a Writer” featured words of wisdom and practical advice from successful women, proving to
Sassy
readers that their goals were attainable. Even if you didn't specifically want to start a band or become a writer,
Sassy
assured you that those options—and more—were there for you. The very act of demystifying access was reminiscent of both Second Wave feminism and the DIY ethos of punk.
All of
Sassy
's talk about independence had a major impact. “It was my first introduction to DIY that did not involve sewing, canning, or making crafts,” says Caitlin Kuleci, who grew up Mormon in Utah and always felt like an outcast. It was “as if everyone had gotten some sort of rule book at birth, which I was mysteriously born without. Nothing really spoke to me, not just as a teenage girl but as a teenage girl who was pissed off and annoyed at the world.” That changed when Caitlin discovered
Sassy
through two non-Mormon friends of her sister. “My world was a chorus of no—no sex, no hair dye, no short skirts, no music with cuss words, no causing a scene—no, no, no.
Sassy
was the first time I heard yes in a way I understood—yes to college for learning instead of just husband-hunting, yes to speaking your mind, yes to being smart and being proud of it. It was a
yes I desperately needed to hear.” Maria Cincotta remembers, “
Sassy
definitely made me want to start a band. I actually started my first band at age fifteen with a bunch of other
Sassy
readers.” Irene Huangyi Lin, in an article on her Web site called “
Sassy
Girls Are Still Around,” agrees. “
Sassy
taught me that teenage girls were supposed to be creative, outspoken, and independent instead of mindless, unquestioning consumers.”
Some
Sassy
readers, like Alice Tiara, created a sort of lifestyle around
Sassy
's DIY cheerleading. Besides being introduced to indie rock in
Sassy
, Alice proudly recounts writing a column in her school newspaper “in which I deplored the conformity of the Gap and the apathy of my fellow students”; making a T-shirt that read HOMOPHOBIA IS QUEER (and wearing it, in true
Sassy
fashion, with ripped-up fishnets and a kilt); and protesting a policy that required girls and boys to wear graduation gowns segregated by color. She notes that although she and her friends did not succeed at that one, they did get a “statement about gender equality” read at graduation.
“One thing the religious right didn't really count on when they freaked out about sex in the first few months of the magazine was that we ended up being much more subversive when we couldn't talk about sex,” Margie has said. “Telling girls to be independent thinkers—that's much scarier than telling girls how to give a blow job.”
The
Sassy
ethic of doing it for yourself is a direct descendant of a very American notion of non-comformity. Both
Sassy
's readers and editors, for the most part, were members of Generation X, derided at the time for being low-achieving slackers. In fact, “slacking” was a new, different definition of achievement, where meaningful work and following your bliss trumped wage-slave jobs.
Sassy
was certainly an arena where following your bliss was encouraged. At the same time, as high-school students,
Sassy
's readers were studying the American ideals of civil disobedience under the likes of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Even as parents and teachers were asserting their authority,
Sassy
was reinforcing the idea that girls should question adults' decisions and power.
In essence,
Sassy
was teaching girls to be hip. In his history of the subject,
Hip
, John Leland writes, “If hip is a form of rebellion—or at least a show of rebellion—it should want something. Its desires are America's other appetite, not for wealth, but for autonomy.” In the past, if it had mostly been men (the Beats, et al.) who won this independence, this time there was a feminist twist.
Hip, of course, is about status.
Sassy
was the first magazine to give being a nerdy girl its own cultural cache. Laura Padilla says that “
Sassy
appealed to the teenage snobbery that I affected … Made me feel smarter and cooler than the girls who read
YM
.” Melody Warnick remembers, “I had this sense of myself as being really different, and a whole lot cooler, than the other people in my high school. And
Sassy
affirmed that for me.
It made me feel hip, smart, a little rebellious, and alternative.”
Sassy
reassured girls that there were other people out there who existed on the fringe of mainstream teen culture.
In fact, according to
Sassy
, being considered a loser at your high school (whether currently attending or in the possession of a diploma) was practically a badge of honor. In “Popular People Are as Insecure as You,” one of many stories designed to soothe the battered egos of its fragile, sensitive readers, Kim deconstructs the cool crowd. The piece lists reasons
Sassy
readers should stay on society's sidelines because, otherwise, “you're forced to conform,” “you have to play dumb,” “you're undoubtedly elitist,” and “your chances of being cool later are inversely related to your popularity level in high school.”
Julie Gerstein—who bonded with her best friend when they first met, over how much they wanted to be
Sassy
editors when they grew up (alas, she didn't get her wish to work at
Sassy
, but she does work in magazines today)—suspects that the girls and boys who read
Sassy
“felt a certain sense of angst-fueled boredom and insecurity that made them feel like outsiders in some way or another. It's something that's permeated a lot of different subcultures—be it riot grrrl or punk rock or whatever—the idea that ‘what we do is secret. ' Even if it's not literally secret, there is a secret language, or knowledge that defines one as either in or out of the club. And in that way,
Sassy
created a legion of girls and boys all speaking a similar outsider language—infused with wit, snark, and sincerity.”
Being saved by the magazine from her dull hometown is a story nearly every
Sassy
fan tells. They were girls who Constance Hwong describes as “quirky, witty types with a penchant for Dorothy Parker, thrift-store clothes, and Doc Martens,” or who Alice Tiara calls “the edgy alternative girls, the feminist girls. Later we'd be the ones who gave political speeches in class about censorship and wore our hair in pigtails while snarling and looking fierce in between going to debate tournaments and doing physics homework.”
Sassy
reassured its readers that there were plenty of girls just like themselves out there (this kind of fringe-leaning teen would later become a commodified persona, perhaps thanks to
Sassy
).
Certain magazines are successful for aiding readers in finding kindred spirits, but publications like
The New Yorker
,
Vanity Fair
, or
Spy
are often for the financial or cultural elite and serve the purpose of reaffirming their readers' rarified status. “
Sassy
was for a totally disenfranchised group—teen girls—or, rather, double-disenfranchised, since these girls also felt like they didn't fit in,” says Professor David Abrahamson, who also thinks that
Sassy
helped create a certain “liberated spirituality,” or an edict to live one's life as honestly as possible.
The girl who read
Sassy
was reluctant to go off the grid in terms of media, so having one foot in mainstream America was still important to her because, as Ann Powers theorizes, “It's a very rare person who is confident and informed enough in high school to be able to completely reject mainstream pop culture. If you're going to live in an alternative
media universe, it takes quite a bit of effort.” The
Sassy
reader was also equally alienated and passionate, culturally literate and adventurous, and interested in self-expression.
Sassy
was never meant to be a niche magazine—its circulation was high and its distribution was nationwide. But so effective was its combination of mainstream and alternative culture that there were definitely nonbelievers in the industry who mistook
Sassy
for a publication for a smaller group. “I remember someone saying to me on an ad-sales call once, ‘Isn't
Sassy
just for alienated teenagers?' And I said, ‘An un-alienated teenager —that's not a lot.' What teen-ager doesn't feel alienated?” says Jane. (Anyone who has ever noted the frequency with which
The Bell Jar
appears on teen girls' bookshelves would likely agree.)
And the sense of community that girls felt with the magazine wasn't just mental. In fact, girls tried to interact with the magazine—and with one another—physically. They sent letters to people who appeared in the magazine, they interned at
Sassy
, they met one another at thrift stores or at shows for indie bands they read about in
Sassy
: they sought one another out, which took a lot of effort in the pre-Internet age. Now it's much simpler for magazine readers (or people with any common interest) to connect with one another; every magazine has a Web site with online forums, Q&As with staff members, and email addresses for each department. If anything, these days such efforts to connect readers to a magazine work as marketing gimmicks. But with
Sassy
, the evolution of a community of readers wasn't something the staff planned; according to Christina, “It was this thing that sort of evolved.”
Sarah Crichton says she thinks her readers felt similarly connected to
Seventeen
, but “
Sassy
was able to triangulate [their audience].” In other words, they responded both to the magazine and to one another. “Part of it was that you had the girls who had not felt like they had belonged to anything, so they found one another. There was this sentiment that, ‘I'm sure as hell not
YM
, I'm sure as hell not
Seventeen
, but I'm not
Cosmo
, so what am I?'”
In reality, the majority of
Sassy
's audience was not urban hipsters. “Most of our readers were in the middle of the country. I mean, we're talking about Pocatello, not cool places,” says Karen. (In fact, according to
Sassy
's marketing kits, their circulation mirrored the U.S. population almost exactly, with 22 percent of their readers in the Northeast, 21 percent in the West, 29 percent in the South, and 28 percent in the Midwest.) But
Sassy
brought cool to rural and suburban girls in the form of music, books, movies, and other cultural ephemera in a genuinely exuberant way. “And I think that's part of it, too; people who didn't live in urban centers are easily alienated by magazines that they perceive for even a second as condescending to them, not including them,” says Karen.
In early 1990, the staff decided to take the idea of letting real girls get involved with the magazine a
step further. They held a contest in which readers could apply for positions at the magazine, culminating in the first reader-produced issue (RPI). Both the business and editorial sides take credit for the idea. Either way, according to Mary Kaye, “It was really just for the reader, so that they would know that there was a chance they could be a part of [
Sassy
].”
Summer Lopez was the editor in chief of the first RPI. She had been a
Sassy
reader since the premier issue and applied for every single job in the special issue (as did Atoosa Rubenstein, who was, according to Mary, “rejected for every position,” but was eventually accepted as an intern at
Sassy
; she later became the editor in chief of
Seventeen
). Summer was studying geometry in summer school when her mother got the call from Mary Kaye about the job. When she heard the news, on a pay phone at school, she fell down and dropped the phone, crying and laughing. She had two weeks to compose herself and get to New York.
“There were some bumps in the road,” Summer remembers. Like figuring out exactly what her role would be. The reader staff was small, and only a few of them got to fly to New York (most worked long-distance). But the RPI was a success and became an annual event at
Sassy
.
Tali Edut, a reader from Michigan, was the art director of the second RPI, which had the largest number of readers working out of the New York office and the greatest political bent, which extended to the quiz, “How Much Do You Know About Rape?” a stark contrast to the usual light-hearted fare like “Are You Ridiculously Romantic?” or “Are You a Slacker?” The cover was to be a shot of two models, one African American and the other Asian. But they were asked to make one addition to the shoot, Tali remembers. “They made us put a blond white chick on the cover. They were afraid we would alienate the white readers. And we were all like,
‘Come on.'
” It should be noted, though, that the sole model on the cover of the 1992 RPI was African American—something the editorial staff decided to green light despite the publishing side's warnings that doing so would jeopardize sales. (In fact, Tali and her twin sister, Ophi, went on to found
HUES
—
Hear Us Emerging Sisters
—a feminist magazine with a more overtly multicultural mission than that of
Sassy
.)
For the last RPI, Ethan Smith—the staff boy who replaced Charles Aaron, who had written for the first RPI—became the chaperone. “In retrospect it seems so absurd that a twenty-two-year-old would be in charge of ten kids between [the ages of] fifteen and twenty-five,” he laughs. He took them to East Village coffee shops (they were too young to go to bars) and to Maxwell's, a club in Hoboken, New Jersey, to see Unrest play. One night they were hanging out in pre–chain store Times Square and Ethan realized that he alone was responsible for a group of kids whose parents had signed release forms that were only two pages long—an impossibility in today's litigation-happy age. But it was in keeping with
Sassy
's faith in young people. As Ethan points out, “At the time it didn't seem that abnormal, in a way. It was sort of typical of the whole
Sassy
experience,
where they would put a recent college graduate in charge of all these minors and just see if it would work itself out. And it did.”
Beyond simply getting the chance to work at their favorite magazine, the RPI provided readers with the opportunity to meet up with fellow
Sassy
obsessives, a crew that was not made up of typical high-school girls. “We were fifteen-year-old kids comparing notes on Camille Paglia,” says Roni Shapira, who filled in for Christina on the second RPI. “Though we were all really different, we all had the sense that we had found our people.” There was even some talk that the staff was a bit less cool than this highly discerning, authenticity-obsessed group had thought (perhaps it was hard for them to live up to their
Sassy
personas). But for Shapira, it was an experience in which she could meet and bond with Christina and interview singer Henry Rollins (with whom she remained pen pals for a few months). When her issue came out, she was called into her high-school guidance counselor's office about a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) scholarship, the counselor probably assuming that such an odd girl must be a lesbian. “
Sassy
branded me in the eyes of my college counselor,” Shapira laughs. It was further proof, perhaps, that outside of
Sassy
, it was the rare adult who got it.
But not everyone lucky enough to work on the RPI felt like they had found their community. Lara Zeises replaced Mary Clarke as beauty editor of the second RPI. She had spent the entire year practicing her writing—penning fake articles, short stories, and plays—so that when the call went out for the second RPI she would be ready. When she found out she had the job, it felt like the best thing that had ever happened to her.
But when she got to New York, she felt like she didn't fit in with the other girls because she “didn't wear [her] subversiveness on the outside.” Most of the girls who were chosen were the misfits at their own high schools, but when they took over
Sassy
, suddenly Zeises was the outcast. At fifteen, she was one of the younger RPI staffers. One girl would always ask Zeises's opinion because, as Zeises puts it, “she thought I was a more typical magazine reader. She meant it almost as an insult.” Furthermore, her RPI editor rewrote one of her articles, an interview with a Cover Girl model, because it wasn't sarcastic enough.
Zeises felt spurned outside the
Sassy
offices as well. Every RPI had a slumber-party vibe, and there were lots of late-night conversations at the hotel. One night someone got hold of some alcohol, and everyone was drinking. They started playing the pussy game—taking one word of a song title and replacing it with
pussy
. The game ultimately became about trying to make Zeises say the word. She wouldn't—and as a result was branded the issue's token goody-goody. “I never felt the same about
Sassy
after that. I felt like
Sassy
was about celebrating individuality, but to those girls it was about conforming to some standard of nonconformity,” she laments. “I wanted to be cool enough to hang with the kids I considered cool. And I was hurt when those same kids rejected my attempts.”
“At some point, the typical
Sassy
girl became a
smugly superior alterna-chick,” says Zeises, who now writes young-adult fiction. “I was never actually cool enough to read
Sassy
. I listened to show tunes and wore leggings until my freshman year in college. But I was smart and funny and subversive in my own way.”

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