I picked up a copy of the new women’s magazine on the block, published by Jane Pratt and handily titled JANE, last week. I have to admit that I fell for the advertising campaign — they plastered the city with those little nametag posters, and I thought the logo looked cool. Besides, if something has a nifty little font in its print ads, or runs a clever commercial, they have me. Next to “impulse buying” in the dictionary, a picture of me appears, clutching not only my whimpering credit card but also a double handful of the useless items that retailers artfully display at the checkout. I have zero resistance, seriously — put it at eye level, it goes home with me in a plastic bag. Once upon a time, some guy went into a pitch meeting and said, “Believe me, gentlemen, these insufferable little magnets shaped like food will sell like hotcakes,” and the executives around the table said, “Um, excuse us while we barf, but who would ever buy a magnet shaped like food? Nobody, that’s who,” and the guy stuck his thumbs in his suspenders and said, “Two words — Sarah Bunting,” and the execs nodded and said, “You’ve got a point there. All righty then, give us a gross each of hamburgers and hot dogs and slices of Swiss cheese and a gross of asparagus bundles for the up-market folks and send us an invoice,” and sure enough, it worked, and now I have ten times as much food on the front of my refrigerator as I have in it.

Anyhow. I bought a copy of JANE partly because of the swell ads but mostly because I remember when Sassy first came out, and how loudly it rocked my world. Before Sassy, teenage girls had a bunch of teenybopper magazines with pictures of Menudo on the front (hey, the eighties. ‘Nuff said), and Seventeen. Seventeen kind of sucked, and nobody past the age of fourteen read it except to mock it. We would flip through the pages, which positively reeked of Love’s Baby Soft, and sort of half-heartedly take the quiz, which usually spotlighted some hot topic like “Do You Flirt Too Much?” that had no relevance to my life whatsoever because I went to an all-girls’ school, so I didn’t do much flirting. They had advice columns on how to get into the popular group at school and what to do when your best friend gets a boyfriend and ditches your ass, and their advice marved — I mean, they actually told readers who felt neglected by their coupled best friends to FIND INTERESTS IN COMMON WITH THE BOYFRIEND. Excuse me, but I think “get a boyfriend of your own, and a new best friend while you’re about it” might do more for a young girl’s self-esteem. And let’s not even get near the reader poetry. At the age of fifteen, did you write poems about lakes and flowers and horsies? No. You wrote poems about the dark grey of loneliness, and killing your parents, and how your first kiss didn’t really rule like you thought it would because first of all it felt like someone had inserted a strip of very active wet veal in your mouth and second of all the guy blew you off like a polar wind the next day. NOBODY UNDERSTOOD YOU, MAAAAAAAAAN. Right? But no, Seventeen readers wrote about daisies and hay and happy little rainbows.

So I got an issue of Sassy in the mail randomly, and I loved it. The editors weren’t too much older than I was, and their columns faced reality bravely. Sassy told you how to pop a zit, they talked about birth control, they warned not to drink beer before liquor, and they printed genuine poetry — just as trite as the Seventeen stuff, but way closer to an actual teenage girl’s thoughts. Sassy did not pretend that girls should make nice to boys if they didn’t feel like it, and they did not tell us to sew lace onto hats for a kicky new look. The “It Happened To Me” section ran stories from real girls that had suffered abuse, had abortions, changed schools because other girls picked on them (I could relate to that one, let me tell you), moved out of their houses at age thirteen, or hadn’t had houses at all. They reinvented the wheel when it came to teen mags.

Now Jane Pratt wants to reinvent the women’s magazine wheel. She wants to take Cosmo and Glamour and Redbook and morph them into a Sassy for grownups. A worthy goal, I think, and one that I also think nobody can achieve. Women’s magazines have one function and one function only — to arouse, and then to soothe, the insecurities of the average woman. Women’s magazines pose as authorities on fashion, makeup, and sexual etiquette; women’s magazines dispense advice to common questions on these subjects. Awfully convenient, n’est ce pas? They tell you what kind of relationship to have; they tell you what to do when you don’t have that kind of relationship, which you won’t, because the kind of relationship they champion does not exist. They make you think you have a problem or inadequacy, and then they help you solve it. Women’s magazines survive by encouraging and emphasizing the schizo tightrope that women walk between not caring about this crap and caring very deeply, powerful versus pretty, professional versus feminine, climb the corporate ladder versus give good head.

All of this advertorial condescension makes women’s magazines, on the whole, pretty boring. I buy one once in a while but they all read the same way, so usually I don’t bother. I hoped that Pratt would pull it off; I hoped she would have a magic wand to wave at the genre. Apparently, Pratt and I had the same naïve dream, because sad to say, she doesn’t pull it off. She thinks that injecting a little hip-speak into the mag will resolve the impossible and necessary tension I mentioned before. Her writers write like “real” people talk. The magazine has serious book and movie reviews and candid first-person articles, just as Sassy did. But she doesn’t shake up the structure at all — JANE has all the predictable departments of its cohorts on the market: beauty and health at the front of the book, followed by a fashion spread, media reviews, sex and relationships, more fashion, a “newsy” piece, more fashion, a celebrity profile/interview, yet more fashion. No amount of “you go, girl” posturing can disguise the fact that JANE doesn’t differ from conventional women’s magazines at all.

I don’t know the answer. I surely couldn’t start a new women’s magazine that constituted a radical departure from the genre. But I do know that taking the standard formula and mixing It-Girl vocab into the batter won’t revolutionize the book; it just makes the magazine read sort of snottily.

I also know that, if you want your magazine taken seriously, you don’t put Drew Barrymore on the cover and ask her her secrets for happiness. I would rather take beauty advice from Janet Reno than read six pages of bubbleheaded twelve-stepped “butterflies mean freedom” Buddha-babble from the Drewster. I mean, can we put this in perspective? What did Drew do to get famous? She appeared in a huge movie at the age of five or whatever, became an alkie, went to rehab, and compiled a hideous cinematic resume that lists dry-humping Tom Skerritt as a highlight. She has weird lips. Why does this make her an admirable female icon of the nineties?

If you would like to read a women’s magazine that comes at the whole thing from a completely different angle, find a copy of Bust. The women of Bust sort of make it up as they go along, and most of the time they get it completely right. Plus, they use curse words and they sell a wicked t-shirt, and if you can shred the editorial and the merchandising, you rule.

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