Back in March a horrible thing happened. After a few months of checking the newsstands for my beloved Sassy, wondering what the hell was up and why I couldn’t find it anywhere, suddenly there it was—mutilated almost beyond recognition. Peterson Publishing (they also own Guns & Ammo) bought Sassy, replaced the entire staff, and gutted the editorial philosophy—and the new staff is trying to pretend that it’s the same magazine it always was.
I’ve always been a media junkie. Magazines, movies, television—I love them all and tend to consume them voraciously. But indiscriminate media consumption, maybe more than any other binge, can make you sick.
Esquire’s annual “Women We Love” feature gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Hidden behind the premise of honoring them, the article puts women firmly in their place by using the traditional patriarchal tool of male approval—rewarding certain traits in the female while disparaging others.
Silly blurbs about Manhattan bars; mocking interviews with bubbly young celebs; features on why you should quit your job, David Hasselhoff’s mall tour, the rampant hypocrisy among DC lobbyists, and the folding of Lies of Our Times. Oh, yeah, and ads. Lots and lots of ads. Issue #8, with an ad on the cover and a flap proclaiming “Might sells out,” goes where no magazine has gone before. Not only have they sold every bit of possible space (“Goldschlager would like to point out that you are on page 48...”), they write about it. “Might welcomes all correspondence.
This is the magazine I’ve yearned for ever since I realized how shitty Mademoiselle and Seventeen made me feel. A strongly womanist/feminist magazine for women of color, it succeeds where all others have failed: combining fashion and lifestyle topics with serious sociopolitical analysis in an ethnically diverse setting with both integrity and ads. Two of the editors are former Sassy interns, and it shows in the little things like the record review rating system and more broadly in the ironic co-optation of old-school girl-mag themes.
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