Free How Sassy Changed My Life by Kara Jesella

For another, despite Seventeen ’s chaste reputation, some of the stories that ran were as explicit as Sassy ’s early sex articles. “We actually put in a lot of stuff that people didn’t give us any credit for, under the radar,” says Crichton. But there were also articles like “How Do I Know if I’m Doing It Right,” which was about “performing well” when readers “kiss, hold hands, or express any physical form of affection,” and another on sexual dreams. There was even one on—get this—blue balls.
    But no one in the press ever mentioned Seventeen ’s sex articles—even in 1989, when the magazine ran a quiz titled “Are You Ready for Sex?” It sounded suspiciously like Sassy ’s loss-of-virginity piece, which had gotten its fair share of attention from readers, the religious right, and the competition. In fact, during Crichton’s tenure, Seventeen increased its coverage of sex, cutting, divorce—the darker side of teenage life—and its circulation increased exponentially. But while its stories increasingly portrayed the real pathologies affecting girls, the tone was always removed and journalistic, which helped the magazine retain its patina of innocence, even among high-school librarians, most of whom shelved the magazine and looked at it closely.
    A new magazine with an unexpected voice, Sassy was a much more vulnerable target. The religious right wasn’t about to go up against the industry’s kingpin, which had a pristine reputation among the millions of mothers who happily bought it for their daughters. “ Seventeen ’s dirty little secret is that it’s really hard to know whether any of the girls read it. We knew moms read it and filled out subscription cards and renewed it,” says David Abrahamson, a professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “It wasn’t for daughters to enjoy, but for moms to feel good about their daughters possessing.”
    The companies who ran ads in the publication—and who certainly wanted girls’ allowances to line their coffers—kept quiet about the magazine’s sexual content as well. “Most people on the advertising side of the business thought of it as a fashion magazine—because that’s where the money came from,” says Caroline Miller. “But the reality of it is if you talk to girls and you read all the surveys, which we did a lot of, very few people bought it for those fashion stories. They bought it for the personal stuff.” Luckily for Seventeen , its reputation for covering the lighter side of female adolescence remained an effective cover.
    the end of the innocence
    While preparing for the June 1989 issue, the Sassy staff spent a day going through boxes and boxes of “It Happened to Me”s, looking for submissions about incest. They decided to ring a bell every time they found another one, and that
bell rang more than any of them had expected.
    The reason for this depressing exercise was that the editorial staff was trying to prove to the business side that an article on incest was imperative. Says Mike, who remembers that there was hesitation, “We were trying to tell them that we’re constantly getting letters from girls about having been victims of all this.” But not only would an article on incest deal with the most taboo form of sex, it would also tell girls that sometimes their parents are horribly wrong. And undermining the place of parents in their daughters’ lives was a tricky undertaking. Still, the staff prevailed, and six months after their last sex article, “Real Stories About Incest” ran. Written by Catherine, it chronicled the tales of three girls who had been through it.
    It would prove a Pyrrhic victory, though, as Sandra was asked to step down a month before the piece ran.
    â€œI never decided to sell Sassy —I never would have,” says