Girls Gone Smart 

For decades magazines targeting teen girls rehashed banal advice on dating, boys, beauty, and fashion. Then came Sassy. The publication, which debuted in 1988, tackled issues such as heroin addiction and "blow jobs". It mocked manufactured pop culture and encouraged young women to be bold and independent.

Sassy didn’t last a decade, but it still attracts a cult following. (Issues regularly show up on eBay.) Kara Jesella and coauthor Marisa Meltzer examine the phenomenon in their new book How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time.

American Sexuality: Who was the Sassy girl? Did you have to be hip and introspective to be part of the club?

Kara Jesella: A lot of different kinds of girls were Sassy readers, but there were some definite commonalities. Most of us felt like outsiders in some way, we were intellectually curious, we wanted to be culturally literate. But we were also normal teenage girls: We were interested in makeup, fashion, boys (or girls!). And we had the same problems as other teenagers—how to navigate relationships with friends and parents and significant others, depression, stress over getting into college, etc.

American Sexuality: In terms of its articles relating to sex, relationships, boys, how was Sassy different from other teen magazines?

Kara Jesella: Sassy took a very different approach to sex and dating than other teen magazines. Seventeen, which was the grande dame of the teen category, regularly devoted column inches to sexual issues from STDs to how to prevent the “swept away” phenomenon that kept girls from protecting themselves upon first intercourse, but its stories were very clinical, very journalistic, and very moralistic. Sassy spoke to the same issues, but in a much friendlier, down-to-earth tone. It used the real language that teenage girls use—it dared to say “blow job”—and it didn’t tell girls they had to say no to experimentation. It gave them all the information and then left it up to them to decide.

American Sexuality: In what ways did Sassy girls symbolize the late 1980s and early '90s?

Kara Jesella: Girls didn’t get much respect up until the ’ 90s. The culture was interested in them mainly as future consumers and even feminist women, who had worked so hard to garner their rights and the respect of men, found girlishness—and its attendant associations with makeup, clothes, boys, C-list movies, dolls—to be suspect. In the ’ 90s, Sassy made it seem cool and interesting and vital to be a girl, bringing teenagers news of riot grrrl, Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan’s work on girls, the work of female cultural creators. It helped shape a generation of girls—now women—who care about culture, are third wave feminists, and have typically Gen X-like morals (they care about actualizing themselves through work more than they care about money).

American Sexuality: Sassy, in a sense, created a community of girls. Can you comment a little bit on this?

Kara Jesella: Sassy was really the first niche teen magazine. While Seventeen tried to appeal to all girls—about fifty percent of American girls got the magazine—Sassy appealed to a much smaller segment: girls who prioritized being intellectual and creative and free-thinking. As such, many of these girls felt especially connected to the magazine, and to each other. Many Sassy fans quoted in How Sassy Changed My Life noted that they really wished when they were in high school that they could meet other Sassy fans, because they imagined those girls would become their good friends. It’s particularly notable that the magazine was able to create such a community in the pre-Internet era.

American Sexuality: Sassy put boys with tortured souls on a pedestal. Why? What was going on in the cultural landscape of that time that made these forlorn types so attractive?

Kara Jesella: Indie music was coming to the fore in the ’ 90s. At the same time, feminism had denigrated the super-macho guy. Indie rock guys who paid lip service to typically feminine concerns, like romance, who had feminine attributes like sensitivity, and who often looked somewhat androgynous, seemed really attractive to a generation of women who didn’t want to date the kind of men who would order them around.

American Sexuality: Cute-boy stories were popular in the magazine. Were there any attempts to appeal to young lesbians?

Kara Jesella: Sassy ran a number of stories on gay and lesbian teens when it first appeared on newsstands. There was one article, in particular, that provided a really positive and frank assessment of a young lesbian couple. But after a rightwing boycott almost shut down the magazine, Sassy stopped running articles related to sexuality for a number of years. Still, Sassy promoted open-mindedness and certainly never portrayed gay teens as strange in any way.

American Sexuality: What's your opinion on Justin Timberlake, American Idol, My Sweet Sixteen, and the like? Do you think we're back to an era where the all-American girl rules?

Kara Jesella: I think there has always been media for teens that celebrated all-American looks and untold riches—in the ’ 90s, it was 90210, now it’s American Idol, Sweet Sixteen, etc. I still think there are options for teenagers who aren’t interested in this stuff—on the Internet, TV shows like Veronica Mars, musicians like Lily Allen.