In Retrospect - Episode 29

EPISODE 29 – WHAT ‘SASSY’ MAGAZINE MEANT TO 90s TEENS

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Susie Banikarim (00:00):

I just have to say that my 13-year-old self is dying. I’m Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (00:13):

And I’m Jessica Bennett.

Susie Banikarim (00:14):

This is In Retrospect, where each week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that shaped us.

Jessica Bennett (00:19):

And that we just can’t stop thinking about.

Susie Banikarim (00:21):

Today we’re talking to Jane Pratt, the woman behind Sassy, an iconic teen magazine that shaped a generation of 90s girls, including us. Jane Pratt, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jane Pratt (00:34):

I am so excited to be here.

Susie Banikarim (00:36):

I think I told you a story that I will start with, which is that when I was, I think I was a freshman in high school, I went to boarding school, as did you. I went to boarding school in Connecticut to a much less prestigious school than Jane did, for the record.

Jane Pratt (00:50):

Oh, hello. I was barely surviving at mine, by the way. The whole impetus for Sassy Magazine came out of what a loser I was at that school.

Susie Banikarim (00:57):

I was not the coolest either. But I was in town, my sister was at Barnard and I came to town to visit her, and she knew how much I love Sassy, and she was like, “You know what? Let’s go visit.” And she took me to the offices and we just came, which is a crazy thing for us to have done, and we just went to the front desk and my sister was like, “This is my sister. She’s obsessed with Sassy.” And I don’t remember the names of anyone, but everyone was so nice to me. They gave me a tour, I think they gave me copies of the magazine. It was just this really formative experience for me, and I just thought, oh my God, this is so cool. This is what people get to do for a living. So I feel like I should thank you for that.

Jane Pratt (01:40):

I actually have a recollection, because I was basically living in those offices at that time. I think it was when we were at One Times Square?

Susie Banikarim (01:48):

Yeah.

Jane Pratt (01:49):

Yep, and we had a neon Sassy when you got off the elevator, that was our big fancy little thing. And I remember Andrea Lynette, who worked at the front then and then became a beauty editor and then went on from there. I remember her telling me that when I was in a meeting, this girl and her sister had come by the offices, so I think it might, that was you.

Susie Banikarim (02:09):

Oh my God, that’s so amazing.

Jane Pratt (02:11):

Isn’t that crazy?

Susie Banikarim (02:11):

Yeah. What a full circle moment this is for me.

Jane Pratt (02:13):

I know.

Susie Banikarim (02:15):

Yeah, it really was so special. And I think it really speaks to just what Sassy was. It was just this really accessible place for girls to go. It felt like a community more than even a magazine, which really did feel ahead of its time.

(02:29):

So let’s start at the beginning, just for people who might not be as familiar with Sassy as I clearly am. You famously became the editor of Sassy Magazine in 1987 when you were just 24 years old, which blows my mind, because what I was doing at 24 was not running an iconic magazine. And I think that made you the youngest editor in history at that time. Tell me how it happened.

Jane Pratt (02:57):

It’s so funny. My daughter is now turning 21 this week, and so I too now have contact with people that are the age that I was on a pretty regular basis, and I mean, it seems crazy to me now too. At the time I thought, God, I’ve been out of school for a year and a half and I haven’t gotten this magazine started yet? Come on. This is crazy.

Susie Banikarim (03:20):

You felt like you were behind the eightball?

Jane Pratt (03:23):

Behind. Really, seriously, I was really agonizing about it. But it was really the foresight of the original president of our publishing company that was based in Australia who saw that someone young could actually be more adept at accessing the way that young people talk to each other, and better able to produce this magazine for teenage girls.

(03:48):

So my age actually was helpful to me, but I knew so little. I just knew nothing. Because what happened was there was word out that this Australian publishing company was interested in getting into the American market, and they were interested in the teen market in particular. So I was like, well, that is exactly what I’ve wanted to do since I was 15 years old. So I made up a whole presentation. I accidentally, in my presentation, I did a fake editor’s letter and I said something about panda bears instead of koala bears for Australia.

Susie Banikarim (04:20):

That’s funny.

Jane Pratt (04:22):

I’ll never forget, oh my God. But I did a whole presentation of what the magazine would be if I were to do it. And I also remember that in the meeting with her, with Sandra Yates, she asked me something about what causes I supported, and I had just recently given some money to NARAL the National Abortion Rights Action League. And I mentioned that to her because I kind of wanted to be right up front with who I was and what I was going to do with this magazine if we got to do it, and she was really supportive of that. And so anyway, from there I got a chance to start it. And I hired a bunch of people, mostly slightly older than me, but all within the same age range for the most part. It’s like a group of kids.

Susie Banikarim (05:09):

I am curious, did it feel like an enormous amount of pressure, or were you so young that you had the confidence of not knowing what you didn’t know?

Jane Pratt (05:16):

Thank you. Thank you for recognizing that. I mean, I was ballsy, and then funnily enough, when I went to start Jane Magazine, which was, nobody needs to know about this, but it was maybe eight years later than that after Sassy had been going on that long, I did not have the same confidence. It took me so much longer to get it going, but this was just one of those, “Yeah, I deserve this. I have a good idea. Let’s get it out there.”

Susie Banikarim (05:41):

How did you conceive of the magazine at the time? Because one thing I think about a lot is how much intention we ascribe to art in retrospect, and often I think lots of things happen by instinct, and I’m curious for you , how much of this was just instinct?

Jane Pratt (05:58):

Yeah, it was very, very cause oriented. I remember from very early days talking to Christina Kelly, who was one of my first hires as an editor there, and I remember us saying, “Well, we don’t know that this magazine is going to be around forever, and that’s not our goal. Our goal is to really make an impact on society with what we’re doing.” And at that time, Reagan was president, and I had just been able to vote, I think twice at that point. So I was, that’s how young I was, right?

Susie Banikarim (06:33):

Yeah.

Jane Pratt (06:33):

But I remember saying, well, with what we’re doing here, we could have an impact on the next election because they’re not that age yet, but they will be. Because it was 14 to 19 year olds that we were gearing toward. And so it was always about changing the world. That was always the goal, and that was very intentional.

Susie Banikarim (06:53):

And how did you conceive of the subject areas or the coverage areas? I know for example, you referred to your three most popular writers as sex, drugs and rock and roll, which I love.

Jane Pratt (07:06):

Yep. Christina was rock and roll, catherine was drugs because she did all the kind of nitty-gritty reporting stuff, hardcore reporting, and Karen Catchpole was sex, because she wrote about sex in a very open way. I hired her from Australia. She was one of the few people I brought over from there, because it was really hard to find somebody in this country at that time, this sounds insane, but who could write so openly to women about sex. And even… I mean, you would think that’s crazy. You would think Cosmo had been out for many years, but particularly for this age group, so there was just no, there wasn’t even sex information for girls out there. There was no birth control, there was nothing like that.

Susie Banikarim (07:51):

That’s interesting, because I feel like, of course, Cosmo existed, but Cosmo was still very geared towards landing a man. So much of the stuff that was out there, the other teen magazines at that time were really focused on how to be thin, how to get a boyfriend, how to make yourself this very stereotypical, almost 1950s ideal. So was that something you were really conscious of, or was that just not what you were interested in?

Jane Pratt (08:15):

I was extremely conscious of it, and it’s funny because in thinking about talking today and thinking about what am I proud of, and a lot of what I’m proud of with Sassy is what we didn’t put in. I had a list of mandates to anyone writing or contributing that included things like no diets, no calorie counts. If a reader… A lot of what we did, there were advice columns in the magazine. So if a reader wrote in and said, “My crush has been ignoring me” or whatever, nobody was allowed to assume that that crush was a boy.

Susie Banikarim (08:48):

I mean, but that’s a big deal, considering sort of the context of the time. Reagan’s America was not particularly LGBTQ friendly.

Jane Pratt (08:55):

Right, right, exactly.

Susie Banikarim (08:57):

And the voice was so specific and irreverent. Is it something that you sort of did consciously or were you just like, this is the way I talk?

Jane Pratt (09:04):

I knew that I really wanted it to be completely different from what was out there, but it was intentional. Then what I would do is I would hire a lot of people that were not writers, but I liked their personalities and what they had to say, and I would just have them speak and record it, and transcribe it.

Susie Banikarim (09:23):

Oh, interesting.

Jane Pratt (09:23):

And yeah, that was easier than hiring people who had been at other publications, because they were in that mode often of having been trained to do things like use the words tresses and locks instead of hair, and all that kind of stuff. So it was easier to just get somebody who just talked and had good things to say.

Susie Banikarim (09:56):

I know this is probably an impossible question, but there were so many iconic covers. Do you have a favorite?

Jane Pratt (10:03):

It would be hard to say that I have a favorite cover because, and I don’t have a collection of Sassy, so it’s not like something I look at regularly, but it’ll pop up when they’re on sale on eBay or whatever, and make me wish that I had saved them, because they’re worth a lot more now.

(10:18):

But I would say that every single issue that I look at has battles that went into it that I remember vividly. Whether it was the quirkier-looking model that was on the cover that I had to fight for, and to be able to run this cover with this cover model that didn’t look conventional. To the point where readers in the early days would write in and they would say, “We know you’re just getting started, but maybe soon you’ll be able to afford the good models that the other magazines use.”

Susie Banikarim (10:56):

What are some of the battles you remember most?

Jane Pratt (10:58):

Yeah, there were tons of them. The very first issue had the word sex on it. It was, “So, you think you’re ready for sex? Read this first.” And I thought that was very, very tame. I actually didn’t love that cover line, because I thought it could be a lot more enticing than that. I thought that’s pretty measured. But we went with that in a compromise, and that was hard to get through because of the fact that people weren’t talking to teenage girls about sex at that time.

(11:28):

I remember also a cover where, this is one where I ended up losing the battle, even though I fought it, which was putting a black model on a cover that was one of our traditionally bigger selling months, and finally getting it pushed through to where we got permission to have the black model on the cover of Sassy. And then the publisher, I guess got cold feet and they put on the newsstand copies, they poly-bagged a copy of a beauty booklet with a white model on the cover on top of that.

Susie Banikarim (12:07):

Oh my God.

Jane Pratt (12:08):

So on the newsstands, yeah, it didn’t come out on the newsstands the way that it was intended.

Susie Banikarim (12:14):

How did you react to that?

Jane Pratt (12:15):

It was terrible. I think that this doesn’t paint me in the best light, but I think that a few of us, we went to the press quietly and leaked that this had happened, because we thought that they should be called out for it. So I think it came out somewhere, the Village Voice or something like that.

Susie Banikarim (12:34):

It’s interesting that you sort of say it doesn’t paint you in the best light, but to me what it speaks to is that even as the editor-in-chief of the magazine, you didn’t have the power to change that. That was the only way you could do it. You had to be subversive. Right?

Jane Pratt (12:48):

Right. Absolutely, that’s absolutely right, and there was a lot of that. And probably my age might have hurt me in that regard, or my lack of experience might’ve hurt me in that regard, because I didn’t necessarily know all of the ways that all of that worked to be able to get in there and make things go exactly my way. But there were battles constantly. I was thinking too about people now talk a lot about that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love cover.

Susie Banikarim (13:17):

Yes. That’s I think, the most iconic Sassy cover.

Jane Pratt (13:20):

It’s so funny because that was a battle too, because I remember going into my meeting with the publisher, the president of the company, and having to pitch Kurt Cobain as… Basically, I painted him to be one of New Kids on the Block or Backstreet Boys.

Susie Banikarim (13:38):

He would’ve hated that.

Jane Pratt (13:40):

He would’ve hated it. And yes, he would’ve hated it, but that was what I had to do to get them to accept it and to say, it’s going to sell really, really well, and moms are going to love it, and all this kind of stuff.

Susie Banikarim (13:53):

That’s amazing.

Jane Pratt (13:55):

So we got permission to do that. It did not sell particularly well at the time, but it has definitely stood the test of time, that’s for sure.

Susie Banikarim (14:03):

How did it come to be? How did you have the idea, how did you approach them about it? Were you there for the shoot? What was it like?

Jane Pratt (14:09):

Christina Kelly, who was the music entertainment editor, she was talking to the photographer Michael Levine, and he had photographed Courtney Love, and he had photographed for us as well for Sassy. So Courtney said to him that she loved Sassy Magazine and would he consider photographing her for that, and he came to us and we thought that was a great idea, and to do it with Kurt would be even better.

(14:35):

I did not go to the photo shoot, but I remember right when that came out, when that issue came out, I got a phone call from a friend of mine who worked at Rolling Stone at the time, Chris Connolly, and he called me after right when that issue came out, and he said that at the photo shoot, it was so obvious in the writing that Kurt and Courtney were doing drugs, and did I think it was irresponsible of us to run that story, and especially in a magazine for teenagers without disclosing that they were doing drugs, and was it journalistically sound-

Susie Banikarim (15:13):

Oh, that’s interesting.

Jane Pratt (15:14):

… to run that story, which I thought was really interesting. But the funny thing was I had to tell him that we didn’t know they were doing drugs. We were very naive. We were kids, really. So we hadn’t done those drugs and we didn’t know much about them, and we didn’t… So anyway, we just ran it as a love story between Kurt and Courtney.

Susie Banikarim (15:36):

One of the most famous things that came out of the Sassy era was It Happened to Me, which is a column that you carried over when you went to Jane Magazine and you had at xoJane, which was the digital publication you eventually launched. Why do you think that sort of first person confessional style of writing resonated so much with the audience for Sassy?

Jane Pratt (15:58):

I was carefully reading all of the other teen magazines as I was getting ready to launch Sassy, and I knew that when I read these articles, that they were running, particularly on the more serious subjects, I would zone out and skim when it came to, Dr. So-and-so from Harvard Medical School advises you to do dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

(16:20):

So I thought what teenagers are going to trust is someone else their age who’s going through it and telling them about it, not someone who has a degree or is considered an expert. And so I said, why don’t we have a column called, It Happened to Me, where it’s strictly first person. And we don’t clean up the language, we don’t make it sound magaziney, we just leave it the way that they wrote it and keep it raw so that they’ll know that this is really real and was a true experience. And I actually had to get my sister to do the first one, because nobody was reading it, of course.

Susie Banikarim (16:56):

So you had no submissions.

Jane Pratt (16:57):

We had none, and then we got overflowing submissions after that, and all coming through the US Mail, but tons and tons of people’s stories. And so she was my first one writing about her abortion, which was also very controversial. The advertiser who was opposite that, they were not happy.

Susie Banikarim (17:18):

Someone once said that you foresaw the dawn of the age of oversharing. And I think that is sort of true, right? Something I’ve thought a lot about is how Sassy predicted the self-confessional era we live in now, and it explored the impact of trauma even before that was part of the vernacular, or the way we just talk about things. Why do you think that was something you were so drawn to?

Jane Pratt (17:42):

I think it comes from being that isolated boarding school student who felt really, really alone in what I was going through. And any media that I would turn to for solace would make me feel more alienated because I wasn’t being reflected in it. I didn’t look like those girls, I thought about other things that they were not talking about. So I think that that’s where it came from, is just how good it can make someone feel to hear somebody else’s true story that they are oversharing.

Susie Banikarim (18:18):

It’s just being able to see yourself in the work.

Jane Pratt (18:20):

And being able to not have shame and be free to say whatever you want. It’s that basic, really.

Susie Banikarim (18:27):

But at times, I feel like there’s been criticism of that. I think Slate once called it the first person industrial complex. And I think especially with the rise of the digital age, there’s more cost of that sort of confessional work, because now women get harassed online. Have you thought about that, and how you respond to that criticism?

Jane Pratt (18:50):

Yeah, that came up more at xoJane also because it was digital, and so we were getting more and more backlash about things that we would run that could be hurtful to maybe not the person that was oversharing, but someone else who was implicit in it, or something like that.

(19:08):

At the same time, I do still believe in the idea of people being that open and the benefits that come from that. So, I don’t stand behind every single thing that we published. There was some stuff that really ended up being really hurtful to people that I wish we hadn’t done, but I still believe in the concept, and I think that it’s more good than bad. And there’s a section in the new publication that I’m working on that goes even deeper.

Susie Banikarim (19:41):

Oh, interesting.

Jane Pratt (19:42):

So yeah, that takes it even one step further than It Happened to Me.

Susie Banikarim (19:46):

Well, it’s interesting, right, because it’s an authenticity.

Jane Pratt (19:48):

Yes. There’s nothing I like less than fake authenticity, and even the word, even someone calling something authentic is already, it already feels like, uh-oh, that’s already probably fake. So I really think it’s so important to keeping it really real and raw for all of us, because everyone’s going through stuff, and just to have it out there in the real way I think is just so therapeutic.

Susie Banikarim (20:16):

It is interesting though because it is so much of what we sort of think of as social media now, although I think a lot of social media is that performed authenticity versus real authenticity. Right?

Jane Pratt (20:28):

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

Susie Banikarim (20:31):

I do think one of the reasons we don’t see things like Sassy and Rookie is that they’ve been to some degree replaced by influencers or content creators.

Jane Pratt (20:43):

Right.

Susie Banikarim (20:43):

And that’s not necessarily bad. I mean, that is really young women talking to each other in the same way that Sassy did, to some degree. In some ways, it has inherited that ethos, but it doesn’t create community in the same way.

Jane Pratt (20:58):

That’s right. You just nailed it, because I was just thinking that. I was just thinking that I really do appreciate the people that are out there who are being truly real about who they are and getting an audience for that, and influencing in all those good ways. I really appreciate that.

(21:17):

At the same time, I feel like that, it’s not what I’ve ever been interested in, because what I needed back in those days, and still not what I need, whereas I feel like I need community. I need to be able to then respond back and say, well, this is my reality, and have us all kind of group together and come to some mutual understanding. Maybe it was going to Quaker schools when I was a kid that got me. But that part of it, that component of the community where it isn’t just all of us listening to one person and what they think, because that’s not the point. It’s not what that person thinks or feels or went through, it’s all of us together.

Susie Banikarim (22:08):

There is just this generation of women where Sassy really was such an iconic influence. I mean, women collect the magazine, they trade them. Barnard now has every issue, it has an official archive. It really has had this enduring influence, and I’m wondering what you think that is, why it really has captured the imagination of that generation of women in the way that it has?

Jane Pratt (22:35):

Man, oh man. I think that it was how really, again, I go back to this, but how real it was. How, when we were producing Sassy, we were living every word. I could practically recite for you every single article that came out over the first number of years of Sassy. And everything that we did, we were really involved in it ourselves. It was never talking about something, it was always living it and reporting on it from that perspective. And I think that still has a rawness to it when you read it. It’s still kind of… Some of it is still surprising, even so many years later, and even with so many people doing that same kind of voice.

Susie Banikarim (23:18):

It really does hold up. I mean, I went back and looked at old issues and I mean, I’m sure there are things you regret, right? Like any editor does from a certain period of their career.

Jane Pratt (23:26):

Oh God, yes.

Susie Banikarim (23:27):

But for the most part, it holds up, right?

Jane Pratt (23:30):

Absolutely. I think it really does too. And then there were also the little subversive things we would do that are just funny. We make up a slang word just to see how… Because we knew that 17 Magazine was copying us, so we’d make up a slang word and start calling everything that word daggy or whatever it was, an early one that we took. And we would do that and see how long it took for it to show up in 17, usually about three to four months because of the lag time with publication at that point.

Susie Banikarim (24:00):

Okay, that’s hilarious.

Jane Pratt (24:02):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (24:02):

That’s so funny.

Jane Pratt (24:03):

We were doing a lot of little inside stuff like that too, which is just funny. There’s a lot to read between the lines there, I’ll say that.

Susie Banikarim (24:10):

Oh, that’s amazing.

Jane Pratt (24:10):

And so that keeps it interesting. I think it was also, it was truly a no-judgment zone and very, very open, and I think that still carries a lot of weight. I do think also the fact that we knew that we were the first ones to run a lot of the kinds of content that we ran, and that doing it for teenage girls was really controversial. And so when the Moral Majority got ahold of it, and a group of women that were part of that called Women of Glow, they went out and they went to newsstands and told them they wouldn’t shop there if they carried Sassy Magazine, and they had these little note cards that they all wrote basically the same thing on that were sent in mass to our advertisers, saying that they wouldn’t buy their products if they advertised in Sassy Magazine because of things we did, like stories on gay teenagers, all kinds of things like that.

Susie Banikarim (25:12):

I mean, it’s still hard to run ads against a lot of these kinds of topics, right? I mean, I think that’s one of the things we’re seeing.

Jane Pratt (25:18):

It really is crazy to me in looking back at all this how society has made so many inroads in terms of acceptance of gender fluidity, queer rights, all of that. But how the stuff geared towards women and stuff involving women is still, it just moves at a snail’s pace, and keeps going back.

Susie Banikarim (25:39):

I see kind of the landscape, and it’s hard to kind of understand why we don’t have voices like Sassy or even Rookie now. I mean, you were actually listed as the fairy godmother of Rookie, right?

Jane Pratt (25:50):

Yeah.

Susie Banikarim (25:51):

So you were involved in that as well. But those voices for girls, it feels like we have less of them as time goes on. And with the recent sale of Jezebel, why do you think it is such a challenge?

Jane Pratt (26:03):

It is really something. And when I learned about Jezebel, I was so bummed out because that just showed me at once again, how far we have not come. And the fact that I think that an issue there was the advertising not being there to support it, but the readers were certainly there to support it. And I think that it’s that model that in the advertising world, we’re still dealing with, for one thing, a lot of men, a lot of white men in particular, older, who just don’t get that that actually can work and can appeal to people who actually do buy things.

(26:40):

As a matter of fact, the company that I worked for at Sassy bought Miss Magazine to make it their second publication, way back when-

Susie Banikarim (26:47):

I remember, yeah.

Jane Pratt (26:48):

… and made it subscription only, yeah, because of the advertising battles with that.

Susie Banikarim (26:53):

It’s interesting, because I was running the newsroom at Vice when Black Lives Matter happened, and one of the things we found is that despite the fact that all these companies were espousing their support for Black Lives Matter when it came to advertising dollars, they still didn’t want to be around a lot of the content we were creating around it.

(27:12):

And I think that’s something that’s pretty invisible to the audience. You can still have a lot of traffic, you can have a big audience, but if the things you’re writing about don’t feel brand safe to the brands, it really doesn’t make a difference. And I think that’s why we’re actually seeing the ecosystem for really interesting, voicey digital brands contract in the way we are. Because even if there’s an audience, for some reason, brands are just really nervous about being around it, and I don’t know that I can think of a good solution for that. I guess it’s subscriptions, but that is really challenging. It’s a challenging market for that.

Jane Pratt (27:50):

That’s right. That’s right. And I do think it’s subscriptions, or it’s selling your own products through your publication, or one of those other revenue streams, because the advertising model doesn’t allow for what Jezebel did, for what Sassy did, for all of that still. If you tried to come out with a Sassy now, it would still have I think many, many of the same battles.

Susie Banikarim (28:13):

Do you think it’s also because it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it means to be a publication for women now?

Jane Pratt (28:19):

Yes, and as a matter of fact, that’s just one little part of my new project, which I actually wanted to do back when I started Jane Magazine, but I wasn’t able to because it was ad supported. So with that, I had to be able to present to advertisers that it was a demographic of women, 18 to 49, that kind of thing.

(28:41):

But I’ve wanted to ever since then do a magazine that is not gender based. And so that’s actually one of the things I’m working on now. And so it’s not geared toward any specific gender. And at the same time, and the next battle that I want to wage is about age. And this particularly does hurt women, I think, but in general, I think that it’s ridiculous that when you read something or learn something about someone, within the first paragraph is their age, almost always. Why? Why is that significant? And I think the same way that the gender thing is finally getting broken down and people taking control of that themselves, I think that the same thing is going to happen with age, where it’ll just be considered not cool to mention someone’s age.

Susie Banikarim (29:31):

I love that. I feel like it’s, especially for women, you can really be aged out of a lot of things in a way that-

Jane Pratt (29:37):

Absolutely.

Susie Banikarim (29:38):

… doesn’t feel consistent with how we experience age anymore. Like the world has changed so much in terms of how you experience life that… I mean, I love so many teen things. And so I don’t know, I don’t want to be aged out of that. So I’m very excited to see what you do next. Does it get harder, I mean, I think about this a lot. When you’ve had so much success at such a young age, is it harder to do things without worrying that you’re not going to be able to recreate the magic?

Jane Pratt (30:08):

Definitely it does. And I think that in some ways I won’t recreate what Sassy was, and what it was for that audience at that time. But I’m still always surprised when I look at, for example, with the project I’m working on now, when I look at it compared to what’s out there, I’m still surprised that I can still, at this old age, I can still shake things up and do things that nobody else is doing.

(30:33):

So I’m happy about that, and happy to be able to do that, and to get the chances to keep doing it is kind of remarkable. But it does get harder. As I said, starting Sassy, I think I got that launched in a couple months. Cut to Jane Magazine, a couple of years. Cut to xoJane, five years. Each subsequent project does get more… Yeah, there are more questions around it.

Susie Banikarim (31:00):

Well, I can’t wait. I know it’s going to be amazing. Jane, I am going to end, speaking of age, with a party trick I know you’re famous for, which is that you can tell people what their emotional age is. So I’m so curious-

Jane Pratt (31:15):

Oh my God-

Susie Banikarim (31:15):

… if yours is still 15, and what you think mine is.

Jane Pratt (31:20):

This is such a great question. Okay, mine is still 15, absolutely. My daughter, who is chronologically 21, is way older than I am, at this point, especially. But okay, so now let me key in, because I haven’t been doing it, and it is something I have to get in the mindset of. I want to say that you… Okay, let me just take a moment. I could see you being also a teenager, but slightly older than me. So I would give you about 17.

Susie Banikarim (31:54):

I like that.

Jane Pratt (31:55):

Because you still definitely have that teen thing. Yeah, that’s what I would give you. Does that ring true at all?

Susie Banikarim (32:03):

Yes. That feels very right.

Jane Pratt (32:04):

Okay. Yay. So you’re my slightly older friend. You’re like a little wiser than I am, you can help me.

Susie Banikarim (32:09):

I love it. I love being the slightly older friend, which is crazy because I feel like Sassy Magazine was my cool, older friend. So that’s a perfect way to end it. Jane, thank you so much for doing this. It really was so lovely to have this chat with you.

Jane Pratt (32:23):

Thank you. And thank you for doing this amazing podcast, I love it.

Susie Banikarim (32:31):

Jess, what do we have coming up next week? And is it something you would’ve read about in Sassy?

Jessica Bennett (32:37):

Yes, actually, it probably was. And also YM, which I also read. It is about lip gloss.

Susie Banikarim (32:43):

Oh, I hope we get some really good product placement out of that.

Jessica Bennett (32:46):

I mean, honestly, me too. We could use some lip gloss, but this is really about lip gloss as a symbol of teen girl bonding. So we’re going to go a little deeper.

Susie Banikarim (32:58):

This is In Retrospect, thanks for listening. Is there a pop culture moment you can’t stop thinking about, and want us to explore in a future episode? Email us at [email protected], or find us on Instagram at @InRetroPod.

Jessica Bennett (33:12):

If you love this podcast, please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Susie Banikarim (33:21):

You can also find us on Instagram @jessicabennett, and @susiebnyc. Also check out Jessica’s books, Feminist Fight Club, and This is 18.

Jessica Bennett (33:30):

In Retrospect is a production of iHeart podcasts and The Meteor. Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our engineer and sound designer. Emily Marinoff is our producer. Sharon Attia is our researcher and associate producer.

Susie Banikarim (33:45):

Our executive producer from The Meteor is Cindi Leive. Our executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stumpf and Katrina Norvell. Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Dooe. We are your hosts, Susie Banikarim.

Jessica Bennett (34:02):

And Jessica Bennett. We’re also executive producers. For even more, check out inretropod.com. See you next week.