Fresh, funny and feminist, Jezebel blazed a trail when it launched in 2007. It forced others to follow but does it still have a place on the internet it helped to create?
Anna Holmes first realized that Jezebel, the online womens magazine she founded in 2007, had become culturally significant when it was parodied on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock.
In a 2011 episode, a blogpost on a fictional website called JoanOfSnark which is shown having a design similar to Jezebels original look charges Liz Lemon with hating women. Explaining JoanOfSnark, Liz Lemon says: Its this really cool feminist website where women talk about how far weve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies.
Holmes says she was less concerned with the implicit critique of her website than she was amazed that Jezebel was well-known enough to be fodder for a popular show. I wasnt offended, I was just flattered, she says, sitting at a Brooklyn coffee shop patio on a rainy Sunday.
Its hard to overstate the impact of Jezebel on feminisms modern resurgence, says Jill Filipovic, author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. By 2011, the website had captured the zeitgeist like no other womens publication of its time.
Perhaps the biggest sign of Jezebels impact is that it no longer stands out. It has been so successful in changing womens media that its once-signature blend of confessional essays, raunchy humor and outrage culture is no longer unique. Conversations that used to take place in Jezebels comments section now occur on Twitter. With the sites 10th anniversary this month, its clear that Jezebel changed our media landscape but its unclear if it still has a place on the internet it helped create.
Jezebel was Holmes brainchild sort of. In 2006, she was an editor at InStyle, and had done stints at Entertainment Weekly and Star. She had also been a staff writer at Glamour, where she despised writing vapid relationship articles and ridiculous sex quizzes. She hated the magazines worship of luxury, the lack of racial diversity, and the shallowness of womens publications generally.
Though she rarely read digital media back then, ignoring the web was still an option for journalists Holmes agreed when a friend asked if she wanted to help create a womens vertical at Gawker, the site founded by Nick Denton.
They originally conceived it as a forum about celebrity called Celebutaunt. Holmes offered that they would be presenting information without airbrushing, which led Denton to coin the sites tagline: Celebrity. Sex. Fashion. Without airbrushing. But he didnt have many specific ideas beyond it being a girly Gawker. Holmess friend dropped out of the project, so she was left to fashion the sites identity by herself.
The slogan, coupled with Gawkers existence as a news and gossip site that took on the wealthy, powerful and famous, led Holmes to think it made perfect sense to do things like go after womens magazines. It also made sense that we would do that because I had worked at them, and hated them.
But she also realized that going after Vogue and Cosmo wouldnt be enough to sustain an entire publication, and decided covering politics would be an essential aspect of Jezebels identity. When the site eventually launched, it helped that there was a presidential campaign underway: Hillary Clinton was making history as the first competitive female candidate, and Barack Obama was hailed as a trailblazer.
Though Holmes had long identified as a feminist, she didnt tell Denton or his team that the site would be have a feminist sensibility. She once used the word feminism in a memo, and a member of the Gawker editorial team advised against it. This was a site that was eventually meant to make money, and Holmes was virtually alone in thinking that there was a sizable audience for feminist issues if they were discussed in a certain way. Two of Holmess friends both men told her the site wouldnt work, because nothing else like it existed.
Moe Tkacik, the sites first features editor and star writer, says the things that interested girls like us were not the type of things advertisers sold ads against. But Holmes held on: What I really wanted to do was draw young women in through the things they had been taught most to care about fashion and celebrity and stuff and politicize them that way, kind of in a sneaky way.
Feminist blogs were multiplying at the time, but Holmes hadnt been paying much attention to them. When she did discover them, she understood that Jezebels commercialism and frequent discussion of pop culture would make it distinct. The sites existence as a digital publication was also key: Denton prioritized generating page views, unlike traditional womens publications, which aimed for garnering advertising dollars. That meant humor, provocation, four-letter words and controversy were welcomed rather than eschewed.
Jezebel launched in May 2007. On its first day, the site offered $10,000 to anyone who sent in a pre-airbrushed photo of a model that eventually became a magazine cover. The winner was a photo of Faith Hill, for Redbook magazine.
The contest was vintage Jezebel. It was brilliant in garnering attention, fiercely provocative, unashamedly controversial. It was serious as well, as Holmes writing demonstrated: Is it really necessary, she asked, to shave 10-15lbs off a woman and erase exactly what it is (the freckles, the moles, the laugh lines) about her that makes her human and accessible and interesting in order to sell a bit of fucking soap?
Crucially, the move was also hilarious. Tkacik noted the dozens of ways the photo was manipulated before it became a cover by imagining what Redbooks photo editor was thinking as he went to work with Photoshop: THOSE CHEEKS: what exactly do you think shes hoarding in there? Snacks to get her through Ramadan? And boy could bitch take a little time out on that deviated septum.
Jezebel was an instant hit. Commenters on the site started calling themselves Jezzies and Jezebelles (a Gawker lawyer had given the site its name; Holmes hated it for being too obvious.) By December 2007, Jezebel was generating 10 million monthly page views and sucking traffic from Gawker. That popularity eventually enticed advertisers, including American Apparel, Dentyne, Skyy vodka, Clairol, and Starbucks. The New York Times wrote style pieces on Jezebels frequent commenters, who formed fan groups and socialized in person. The site also reportedly received more complaints from lawyers than any other Gawker vertical.
Finding the site was like stumbling into the best party ever, a writer at Philadelphia magazinewrote a few years ago. The women who wrote for it Anna Holmes, Anna North, Tracie Egan Morrissey, Moe Tkacik were like the coolest girls ever, except they werent mean to other girls, only to the rest of the world Jezebel felt like home in a way no other website I knew of did.
Tkacik and Egan quickly became mini-celebrities: their confessional writing (10 days in the life of a tampon), frank enjoyment of drugs (If A Guy Gets A Nose Bleed While Performing Oral Sex, Should I Worry?) and sex (Meet Slut Machine: Jezebel Spiritual Leader, No Longer In Hiding), and undeniable smartsmade them unmissable voices. We would get recognized at bars, remembers Tkacik. It was surreal.
This popularity would backfire, too. In one notorious incident, Egan and Tkacik got drunk and made light of rape when interviewed on video by Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead. There was an instant backlash. Holmes almost fired them but didnt want to give in to the pile-on. I dont want to defend them because they were being fucking idiots, she says. Tkacik is less remorseful. Tracie and I pissed off this older generation of feminists. I was baffled by it, she says.
There was indeed a generational split in the response to Jezebel (though criticism of the Winstead interview was cross-generational.) Veteran feminists like Susan Faludi, Linda Hirschman and Katha Pollitt had various critiques of the attitudes Jezebel personified. I dont get their obsession with ads and womens magazines and pop culture and celebrities to me, feminism is about getting that stuff out of your head, not coming up with yet more reasons to object to it while remaining in its thrall, Pollitt wrote.
Soon, a plethora of new sites appeared that mimicked Jezebels formula to one degree or another. Slates Double X, xoJane, The Hairpin and The Frisky were among the most popular. The fact that a womans site could exist that was Jezebel-influenced, says Jia Tolentino, who worked at The Hairpin before moving to Jezebel.
Publications like Vogue, Elle, and Glamour, once the very targets of Jezebels ire, dramatically increased their political coverage, hiring feminist writers and unabashedly supporting reproductive rights and paid parental leave. Even Cosmo was lauded for injecting political issues into the famously sex position-obsessed magazine. For me, Teen Vogue and its politics coverage is the most obvious example of this shift, Tkacik says.
Publications catering to women have also been more conspicuous about having diverse writers and models in the wake of Jezebel, and airbrushing their models less. Jezebel alums now staff major publications, and a new generation of womens media is very much cut from the Jezebel model, with its humor and irreverence and boundary-pushing, says Filipovic.
Jezebels influence also lingers in more negative ways.
I definitely think we contributed to a knee-jerk tendency in digital media (or people who are on digital media) to react to things in a performative way without taking everything into consideration, admits Holmes. There was a certain tone that I think became addictive to the writers of the site and also to the readers of it, that when applied to social media, became [problematic].
Most prominently, in January 2014 Jezebel published a photo of Lena Dunham before it was touched up and put on the cover of Vogue. But the touch-ups were relatively minor, and Dunham had already responded to critics about her acquiescence to being Photoshopped. The exercise felt like an unnecessary stunt that compounded anger at the editors call.
For Holmes, the response to the drunken Egan-Tkacik interview was revealing. It was the beginning of my awareness of what a circular firing squad the feminist blogosphere could be it was really intense, she says. If I had known how much infighting there was in the feminist blogosphere before I started that site, I might not have started it, because it was exhausting, just the fighting between writers and sites. She adds: Now it all plays out on Twitter, which is actually worse.
With any kind of media with women as the target audience, its incredibly hard not to be exploitative in how you try and capture that audience, observes Emily Gould, a Gawker staffer when Jezebel was created. It became stressful to write anything even a little bit unorthodox or nuanced about rape or abortion without having all these daggers thrown at you, says Tkacik.
Jezebel has been so successful in transmitting its perspective that the site is now less distinct from its competitors than it once was. Its a double-edged sword: when you trail-blaze in media, people want to catch up to you, says Emma Carmichael, Jezebels current editor. Its not a new problem: Jessica Coen, the editor-in-chief who took the sites reins after Holmess departure in 2010, says that at a certain point, it became clear that womens media was taking its cues from Jezebel.
Coen moved to make the site more accessible to wider audiences, doing more substantive reporting and hiring fewer people like Egan and Tkacik, who delighted in debauchery and defying establishment feminism. Carmichaels strategy has been to accentuate the sites podcasts, personal essays, videos, and news. She wants to push back against the dilution of feminism that has celebrities embracing the term even as they drop its insurgent leanings. And Jezebel continues to be incubator of top talent recent writers Katie JM Baker and Jia Tolentino are now at BuzzFeed and the New Yorker respectively.
But however popular those attributes are the site still traffics well they are ones now familiar to the industry. That seems less exciting and groundbreaking, but thats only because Jezebel broke the ground so strongly 10 years ago. Thanks to Jezebel, womens magazines have come around to be much more inclusive and feminist-y, says Dodai Stewart, a Jezebel editor for seven years. The flip side is that things you could only get there once upon a time you can now get in other places. Its a more crowded atmosphere.
Inevitably, Jezebels transition to an institution has left it without the manic, experimental feel of the early days. The bomb-throwing at the liberal establishment Egan had a soft spot for Ann Coulter is gone.
I really despise mainstream feminism, Tkacik says. But Jezebel was part of bringing feminism into the mainstream.