Will the Real Jane Pratt Please Stand Up?

This letter is addressed to Jane--Jane the person, Jane the magazine, Jane the enigmatic figure who has lurked, inconspicuous but ever-present, throughout most of my sentient life. I just bought the one-year-anniversary issue of your new magazine, and my first question is: What happened? Either the irony of the publication is just too subtle for even the most subtle of readers, or someone with big hair and bigger scissors has snipped out your judgment and put it in the crisper of an industrial fridge. This magazine is a slap in the face of everything you used to (seemingly) stand for. In your old Sassy days, you preached independence, freedom from conformity and that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. Less than 10 years ago, you gave us 13-year-old girls stuck in rural Wisconsin a glimmer of hope, a pinky-swear promise that the world could be a funny, smart and even sexy place. You and your writers told us that 14-year-old boys with buck teeth and hard-ons weren't worth our mental energy, that it was more important to rock through school, hang out with our girlfriends and, most importantly, think big. The celebrity articles were blissfully tongue-in-cheek--"Kip Winger, Philosopher" was merciless. Jane, you had balls the size of cantaloupes. Where did they go? Now you've grown out your hair, dyed it blonde and published what is at best W magazine resized to fit the magazine rack. The best way to celebrate a year of Jane is by having "125 Stars" write, photograph and model the magazine? This from an editor who once told us that one of the "Nine Things About America That Make Us Want to Scream and Throw Stuff" was that "we overindulge our celebrities?"

Come on, Jane, celebrity poetry is worse than a fluffer-nutter sandwich on stale matzoh. "I played it like I wanted it/moaning and screaming" is worth the paper it's printed on just because it was written by Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott? And shouldn't the article "Cameron Diaz Hates Everyone" have been titled "Everyone Hates Cameron Diaz?" She's quoted as saying, "I don't believe in technology. I don't believe it has helped anything." Well said, Cam! Why are these people interesting? Your personal love letter to Uma Thurman? I mean, I'm sure whatever species she's from, she's a very attractive member of that species. But as a model of anything important? Thanks, I'll take Katha Pollitt. Sure, Matt Damon is cute, like the way your fourth grade class gerbil was cute, even after it ate pencil shavings and died. You proclaim Vincent Gallo "the most brilliant man ever." His photo-essay reads, and I quote, "And my friend Val Kilmer was dating Cher. Then Cher was my friend, too. I was friends with Cher. I was friends with Val and Cher." Nuanced! Jade Jagger is described as "talented and beautiful and successful." Mightn't it be more worthwhile to feature someone who manages to earn a living making beaded bikini bottoms despite not having been born daughter of the most famous rock musician of all time?

I think you see my point. But then we arrive at Naomi Campbell's horoscope column. She opens with an honestly suspenseful, "I have to tell you the truth--ever since the legendary astrologer Patric Walker died I..." and we're prepared for something fantastic and mystical, like "I can't walk under a ladder without a black cat falling into my Prada purse" or "I threw a Manolo Blahnik mule at a mirror and haven't been able to find comfortable shoes for seven years." But instead she finishes with "I don't look at my horoscope as much as I used to." Okay, maybe flying all the way to Milan only to act like a human clothes hanger for 16 hours at a stretch gives one a real feel for the anticlimactic. Maybe even for the totally useless. What this magazine did for me is confirm my (seemingly common-sense) belief that regular, real people are far more interesting than stars. And not so long ago, you, Jane, as revealed through Sassy, held this view too. Part of the joy of your old magazine was that it applauded the idea that movie stars are a little more than pretty faces and talking heads, and that real people doing real things were a lot more worthy of our attentions. Isn't the fact that we get excited when a star says something coherent an example of the exception that proves the rule?

So is Jane supposed to be reality for the all-grown up Sassy gang? Are we to interpret it as the next logical step? Sassy made the world seem, to me, like a very small place--like a neighborhood filled with sisters who could give you a few pointers along the way and tell you if you had toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Looking at the world through the magazine's rose-tinted cat-eye glasses convinced me to hang in there, that new ideas and a hip new world were around every bend. Maybe I was just projecting my erstwhile wish for a big sister on a bunch of hapless staff writers. I'm glad, though, that I don't need hand-holding anymore, because Jane makes the world feel like a vast desert populated only by celebrity wannabes, empty tubes of M.A.C. lipstick and used condoms tossed aside from a round of star-fucking. Sure, some of Sassy's celebrity-bashing was gratuitous and motivated by the lure of an easy target. But perhaps it was also motivated by some fundamental feeling that it's necessary and right to question what everyone else loves and hates and that only by questioning can one escape the herd-mentality worship of the Lucky Sperm Club.

Of course there is a place in the world for fashion and gossip magazines. I'm not trying to take the moral high-ground; I'm just surprised--shocked even--that the editor of a magazine that ran articles like "This Cat Has Nine Wives" and "How Gangs and Sororities are the Same" is now the force behind articles on professional groupie Pamela Des Barres and damaged-but-still-insufferable Natalie Imbruglia. And there's a whole new generation of 14-year-olds who hate high school and probably Imbruglia and long for something real to hang on to in the meantime.