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

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. ‘So 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.
    â€œIf 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.”
    underestimating the enemy
    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 about—relationships, suicide, masturbation—we had run in Australia without a problem.”
    When the boycott started, “Sandra was amazing,” says Elizabeth. “She said, ‘Let’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, ‘I’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, quit—aghast at the magazine’s continued pushing of the proverbial envelope—a 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.”
    sex and your body
    Sassy ’s competition lambasted the magazine for its sex coverage. “I don’t think that feature is responsible,” Robert Brown, associate publisher of Teen , has said about the article “Losing Your Virginity.” “I think it’s offensive.”
    That depends, of