Read Online How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella - Free Book Online

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 pages—a 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 —it made good business sense for a brand with a risqué reputation—kept 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 ‘Sex for Absolute Beginners’ in Sassy nevertheless advertised without complaint in Dolly —the 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.
    â€œThere 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 things—fashion, 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, ‘If 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”— Seventeen certainly did—but Sandra Yates thought the colloquial phrasing would add more fuel to the fire, endangering the magazine’s existence.
    â€œThe language just bothered people, because it was that thing that Time magazine called ‘Pajama-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