Same As It Jez-er Was
Meet the new lady mag, same as the old lady mag
Well, well, well, LOOK WHO CAME CRAWLING BACK.
It’s me! I’m the one crawling back. But also, I would argue, isn’t crawling back the very essence of a nostalgia cycle? Crawling back to those JNCOs, those System of a Down CDs, those Agent Cody Banks DVDs — groveling before the things we once discarded as corny and embarrassing, gnashing our teeth and weeping, “We didn’t know how good we had it! You were the best of us, and we betrayed you! Save us from this wretched future! Save us, From Justin to Kelly!”?
Anyway, I was away for the past six months because I was writing a murder novel about my time in 2010s girlboss women’s media, which you can read in serialized form here.
Or don’t! I’m not your mother! (Or am I???)(Read to find out!)
Anyway, I am back because of two very important 2000s retro developments:
I heard my landlady’s 21-year-old son listening to Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous,” which he immediately followed with Timbaland’s “The Way I Are (featuring Keri Hilson)”
I am not here to eulogize Jezebel — leave that to people who used to work there, or people who have read it in the last 5 years, or people who read anything these days besides Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and three-year-old print copies of New York Magazine (a.k.a. not me). I come to bury Jezebel, not to praise her!
I truly loved Jezebel at one point, but I don’t think its closing right now is especially sad — I don’t think the goal of every publication should be to exist forever! It’s depressing to watch once-innovative sites outlast their period of relevance, and then endlessly try to contort themselves to appear relevant to new generations, in a hollow approximation of whatever once made them special. Sure, sometimes when you try to update a beloved cultural property for a new era, you get the spectacular 1980s run of The Village Voice. But more often, you get the 2017 Tom Cruise reboot of The Mummy.
But as America’s Best and Only Licensed 2000s-Ologist, I’m interested in examining the world that Jezebel helped create — not just because it’s ending, but because the way it ended is fascinating.
We don’t really think of Jezebel as a ‘00s thing because it really hit its stride in the 2010s, which was the Decade of Mainstream LadyBlogging. But Jezebel launched in 2007, the same year as Superbad, Juno, and Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, a.k.a. the final days of a pop culture era mostly defined by men and/ or regressive attitudes towards women.
A lot of tributes to the site position it as a total vanguard, which it wasn’t by a long shot (something founder Anna Holmes addresses in a New Yorker essay earlier this month). In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, feminism — which had been trendy in the mid-’90s (if you don’t believe me, ask yourself how Courtney Love became a mainstream rock star) — was falling out of fashion in the media. Girl power and the Indigo Girls were out; objectifying women and “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” were in!
As happens in any cultural moment, smaller publications presented counter-programming to whatever the mainstream trends were. BUST Magazine, which was originally founded in 1993 as part of the Xeroxed zine revolution, went glossy; I can’t tell you exactly when, but I can tell you that in college in the early ‘00s, I bought it religiously from the school bookstore, and by 2003, they were already established enough to get Juliette Lewis on the cover:
Feminist cultural criticism bible Bitch Magazine went through a similar transition. After being founded in 1996 as a 10-page zine, it also went wide in 2001, and by 2006, had a readership of 47,000 — which is maybe not a lot for the internet era, but was a ton from back when you had to travel all over town to a feminist bookstore/ vegetarian restaurant called Bloodroot (not kidding) to buy it.
And these were just the big guns. Plenty of people, including moi, had tiny piddling feminist zines that explored the weird-yet-thrilling cultural void left by the end of ‘90s Lilith Fair feminism. The mainstream had pumped us and dumped us, leaving us gentle Tori Amos types in the dust while they moved on to go have a torrid affair with Crazytown. I felt abandoned, but also excited — now that feminism had been given back to the people, rather than exploited for Gatorade commercials, who knew what we’d do with it??
On the then-nascent internet, it was happening, too — the most high-profile feminist group blogs included Feministe, which started in 2001, and Jessica Valenti’s Feministing, which debuted in 2004. But the era was filled with personal blogs, MySpace blogs, LiveJournals, Xangas — all devote to discussing feminism in a way that fell completely outside of mainstream conversations. Rising bloggy sites like Salon (founded in 1995) and the once wildly influential but now nearly forgotten Nerve.com (1997) all also published periodic feminist writing in this vein. Salon even opened Broadsheet, which in my memory is the first “women’s vertical” on an alternative blog, in 2005.
Into this landscape, in 2007, walked Jezebel. One of the true differences between Jezebel and a Bitch or a Feministing is that it had semi-major corporate money behind it — Jezebel was owned by Gawker Media, which at that time was a blog empire overseen by Classic Mercurial Rich Internet Guy Nick Denton.
Because of that, it had the power to reach people who were unable to go to the feminist bookstore/ vegetarian restaurant, or maybe (gasp) didn’t WANT to go to the feminist bookstore vegetarian restaurant. It had the raw power to take this new burbling feminism mainstream.
As founder Anna Holmes wrote in a New Yorker essay earlier this month, “disillusioned by the state of American women’s media, I was given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create and oversee a women’s-media entity—in this case, a Web site. I imagined it as one with a lot of personality, with humor, with edge. I wanted it to combine wit, smarts, and anger, providing women—many of whom had been taught to believe that “feminism” was a bad word or one to be avoided—with a model of critical thinking around gender and race which felt accessible and entertaining.”
Instead of being positioned as a feminist alternative to kind of…everything, a la Bitch or Feministing, Jezebel was positioned as an alternative specifically to traditional women’s magazines, which in the early 2000s honestly could not have been more repulsive.
My friends and I made vicious fun of glossy women’s magazines in this era, and frankly, we were right to! We were concerned about abstinence education in schools, and the mainstreaming of misogyny in popular culture, and figuring out which parts of the new world of internet porn were empowering to us and which parts were fucked up. And Cosmo in 2003 gave us…"eat a donut off his penis.”
And don’t even get me fucking started on Glamour’s 2006 “engagement chicken”!
In contrast, I updated Jezebel all day at my office job . I couldn’t wait to see what transgressive, taboo-busting thing they would post next: Anna Holme’s takedown of a photoshopped image of Faith Hill; Moe Tkacik’s genuinely boundary-breaking story of a lost tampon; an anonymous writer referred to as “Pillhead” on the unique qualities of sex while whacked out on Adderall; Moe Tkacik’s queasily boundary-pushing stories about not having safe sex (Moe Tkacik, our world needs you more than ever, though I also understand why you have not chosen to save us).
I had already been a reader of Bust and Bitch and Feministing for years, but I knew they were niche products. Jezebel felt like the promise that we could take this thing wide.
By 2009, Jezebel was moving into its second stage — some early writers, like Jennifer Gerson and Moe Tkacik had left; new writers moved in and there was a bit of a house style, a Jezebel vibe.
In that same year, Rebecca Traister was both celebrating and chiding the Jezebel voice, specifically for its grossness: “It's about laughing about things that might otherwise make you wail with shame or pain or fear. And at the same time, it can be about getting attention, performing, flaunting and acting out your own vulnerabilities, getting noticed for your willingness to debase yourself or win a gross-out contest that once could have only been dominated by boys.”
I would count 2009 as the moment when the imitators truly began in earnest. And I don’t necessarily mean “imitators” in a negative way; some sites, like the Hairpin, were absolutely unique and amazing, and were only able to convince people to pump any money into them due to the success of Jezebel.
But many more that were not so unique launched too, because, well, shouldn’t we have our own Jezebel?
Slate’s Double X launched in 2009, The Hairpin in 2010, xoJane in 2011, BuzzFeed’s Shift in 2012, Bustle in 2013, and Vice’s Broadly in 2015, while pre-existing sites like travel site Refinery29, pop culture site PopSugar, and New York Magazine’s fashion vertical The Cut shifted their focus to women.
One of these things is not like the other — by which I mean, in 2014, I began working at Bustle as a freelance writer; in 2015, I started there full-time as an editor, a position I would hold for nearly 5 absolutely mentally deranged years.
If you’ve ever read Bustle, you can tell that there’s no real internal motivating philosophy, and it was just created by some guy who thought it might be a good way to make money. But as someone who was on the inside, I’ll confirm that it had no real internal motivating philosophy, and was created by Bryan Goldberg, a less-charismatic Dave Portnoy who thought women’s media might be a good way to make enough money to buy a Napoleon hat.
I didn’t care. At that time period, I would have given my left tit to work at Jezebel; but since that did not seem to be happening, I figured I could create my own kingdom. Jezebel had shown that there was money and interest in talking about women’s lives in a new, frank, funny way. It had spread beyond their garden gates. I’d just do my own thing at this site that was supposed to be a dumbed-down, advertiser-friendly Jezebel and see what happened.
And I’ll tell you what: I did eventually see what happened!
The reason the study of nostalgia is fascinating (well, fascinating and depressing) is because once you log enough hours, you see that everything is essentially cyclical. Culture is always reacting to the last thing — ‘70s earth tones led to ‘80s neons, which led to — you guessed it! ‘90s earth tones.
Early 2000s feminist blogging was a reaction to anti-feminist early 2000s mainstream culture. In packaging that vibe up for a wider audience, Jezebel was able to pass it around a group of people who didn’t necessarily have the tools to find out about feminist criticism any other way. Those people found that, largely, the preferred Jezebel to the things that had come before it. Jezebel went from being an adversary to women’s mags, to replacing them.
But here’s the thing when an adversarial, outsider trend becomes mainstreamed — it loses a lot of its identity. When your whole existence is fighting the power, what do you do when you ARE the power?
For Jezebel, that involved a shift into covering a wider range of stories and experiences, getting into some hard journalism, making some notable misfires. Since Jezebel could no longer really say “fuck the mainstream women’s media” in 2012 — when any 25-year-old was WAY more interested in Jezebel than Glamour — they had to come up with new things to say “fuck you” to. Sometimes this was really fruitful; and sometimes it was, as others have observed, the first major stirrings of 2010s outrage culture. By 2015, Jezebel was considered so mainstream that they were taken to task for helping create the “first person industrial complex.”
But no one stays in power forever — especially publications that were created to be adversarial counter-programming. In the post-Trump era, Jezebel went through what I would say is a pretty natural process of decreasing relevance, one that sadly was sped up by its 2019 sale to the comedically inept G/O Media.
But what I had been thinking about a lot lately, even before this Jezebel news, was what happened to all the old Jezebel imitators. Almost every vertical on a larger website, including Salon, Slate, and BuzzFeed, closed down. But the more interesting case study to me is what the sites that did stick around look like now.
First, Elle, a legacy women’s site:
Here’s Bustle, a site that was supposedly once an alternative to something
Here’s Cosmo, a site that once recommended you put a scrunchie on your boyfriend’s balls during sex:
I will absolutely be the first to say that at their heart, most Jezebel knock-off sites were always hollow and crass enterprises with no goals besides making money. I will also say that for a while, it didn’t feel like it mattered. I personally got to write about my fucked up relationship with my fucked up mom, and haunted dolls, and all kinds of weird shit that you were not going to find in Cosmo next to the donut-dick tips. Things really were different, for a while.
But then, as time went on, the survivors merged. The legacy women’s mags who held on got a little more Jez-like; the Jezebel knock-off publications became increasingly impossible to tell apart from Glamour.
It’s not necessarily something to feel bad about; I think it’s more the life cycle of any mainstream pop cultural style. Something can only be a new vernacular for so long, before it feels like the old vernacular, and people start to feel oppressed by it. Or, to quote the theme song to CSI: Miami, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
In the late 2000s, I was shocked to find out that Cosmo — that retro regressive trash that my friends and I mocked throughout the Lilith Fair ‘90s — was actually once pretty much the same exact thing as Jezebel: the more accessible, slicked-up version of the new kinds of conversations women were having, the kinds of conversations that got left out of the era’s cooking-and-housework-oriented lady mags.
Back then, I could not imagine that yesterday’s revolutionary is today’s stodgy bullshit. But now I know that’s the way trends work. We all grow old, we all grow irrelevant. The best we can hope is to do it with grace, and try to learn from it.
So in that way, I’m happy Jezebel closed. It never fully morphed into a fucked up, Weekend at Bernie’s zombie of itself, which is the only option for large-scale, money-making women’s blogs at this point in time. It’s better for it to get put out of its misery than to be sold off to an owner that would just turn it into…you know, every other former feminist blog on the fucking planet.
I’m also excited, because this means new things are coming. We’re in the exact same place we were in the early ‘00s when it comes to sexist backlash culture — they’re even rebooting “engagement chicken,” for fuck’s sake — which means that new writing and art that takes the same kind of adversial position to the mainstream that Jezebel once did is assuredly on its way up, and soon to become accessible enough that even middle-aged dorks like me can find it. The Jezebel is dead. Long live Jezebel.
you're right about everything being cyclical. and that they really, really, didn't need to make another Mummy.
Thank you for this! It’s *chef’s kiss*