The demise of Jane magazine, the smallness of our world

On Tuesday, I placed an ad on CraigsList to give away my two enormous boxes of Jane magazines. I’ve been buying Jane (and then subscribing, mostly through the gift of generous friends) since the late 90s, so when the mag folded last year and I received a small index card enthusing about my replacement Glamour subscription, I was more than miffed. The magazine’s content had admittedly been in decline since founder Jane Pratt left in 2005, but after all those years, I got a pre-printed Dear Jane letter, so to speak?

I know - why am I just now writing this? Well, thesis madness and other general excuses about bills to pay aside, I didn’t know what to say for a while. Glamour would come, my partner and I would make fun of it, and eventually, I’d toss it directly into the recycling bin without even glancing at the content. It made me feel bad about being a woman. No one needs that. And I would miss a periodical that got me through a very normative high school where I felt very much the opposite, but it’s also a magazine. I did feel connected to women whose writing I’d read for years, but it’s sort of like when a beloved blogger goes MIA. You unsubscribe, you don’t, it doesn’t matter. Everyone moves forward.

Unbeknown to me at the time, there was also a small feud (rivalry?) between Jane and another of my beloved publications, Bitch. In a somewhat infamous article long ago, Bitch editors slammed Jane magazine for every reason under the sun. And I’ll admit some of it makes sense - why was I so attached to a self-referential white woman’s magazine? (Hint: I was roughly 16 when I started reading, and I’m also white. Do the math.) But since learning of the tiff between lady mags, what has always bothered me about this is that even under the banner of feminists responding to pop culture nonsense, the editors at Bitch discounted something that was, for many women, a small step forward. Jane delivered content to budding feminists who might not have found it otherwise. You don’t wake up one morning and start reading something called Bitch. You might start reading something called Jane though. Despite an early feminist sensibility, I did because where I grew up, good luck finding Bitch even if you wanted to. I, along with young radicals I knew, did the best we could. Sticking around to watch the Jane-mobile veer off the road and burst into flames is sort of beside the point.

It also started me thinking about the history of Jane - what it was and why it doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. Maybe no one cares. It didn’t have Sassy magazine’s cult following, despite it coming shortly after and being produced by some of the same folks. Maybe it’s easier to think material is edgy when you’re 16 instead of 26? I’m not saying Jane was Sassy. I’m saying I missed what was, for the window of my generation, a really helpful publication that understood a young, white demographic of women are whole, complex people: emotional, sexual, and complicated because we might happen to love makeup, cars, guns, and a whole range of things that don’t fit into the pages of Cosmo.

So about three minutes after I posted the ad, I got a very enthusiastic email. “I want them!!” But what caught me most off guard was that the mail came from a very familiar name to me - Cati Vacuelle, who writes the very excellent design/technology blog Architectradure. I wrote back - feeling very fangirly - that of all people, I’d love to give them to such a smart, critically thoughtful home where they might be put to good use (or at least analyzed as more than just an outdated fashion rag). And so, this becomes a story of two events: how I gave away years of media hoarding, and how one of my favorite bloggers came to have tea in my living room. Once coupled together, the former feels much easier, and the latter is just fun karmic connection in what ends up being a pretty small city for media folk.

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Published:
07.05.08 / 1pm
Category:
they are the media