The anti glossy posse
The hotbed of witty feminism has just gone to print, writes Jane Mulkerrins
I didn’t know how to do posts about make-up in a way that I would have felt good about
ANNA Holmes had some fairly lofty ambitions when she launched the website Jezebel in New York in 2007. “I hoped that by using pop culture, celebrity and fashion, we could politicise young women, kind of subversively. It would have a strongly feminist sensibility,” she says. “We would have celebrity pictures, but I would not be putting up pictures of those celebrities’ cellulite. It would have gossip, but it wouldn’t be mean-spirited or misogynistic. It would acknowledge that women like fashion but it wouldn’t be trying to sell them sh*t. My dream was to create a website that made a certain kind of women’s magazine irrelevant.”
Holmes, then 34 and a women’s magazine journalist herself, had been drafted by British expat Nick Denton to help create a “girlie Gawker”, a witty little sister to the arch New York-based gossip website he ran.
What Holmes lacked in new-media CV points (she had no experience of online journalism) she more than made up for in vision. Jezebel is a mix of unashamedly populist and more highbrow material, with a uniquely punchy tone. On a random morning last month I read features about the weirdest lies women have been told by their boyfriends; Christian schools in America rejecting gay children; the death in prison of the kidnapper Ariel Castro; access to abortion in California; and a discussion of the Bridesmaids star Kristen Wiig’s new miniseries.
Technically, Jezebel is a blog, meaning that readers can contribute and respond to stories, creating an online community. “Within a few months of our launch, our commenters started referring to themselves as ‘Jezzies’ and I realised just how much they identified with the site,” says Holmes.
By September 2009 the site — which has a 97% female audience — had surpassed its big brother Gawker in monthly page views. Worldwide it has more than 50 million hits a month, and is considered a modern and irreverent voice of feminism. Its content makes frequent appearances on the Twitter feeds of newspaper commentators and magazine editors such as Lorraine Candy, the editor of Elle.
“Jezebel brought a really playful spirit with it, and we were all addicted when we first discovered it,” Candy tells me. “There would be a story about Alice Munro and a video about a singing sock — it has everything. It has humour and forthright opinions, and it has made me look at what we do in print afresh.”
Holmes, now 40, stepped down as editorin-chief of Jezebel in 2010 — her former deputy, Jessica Coen, now holds that post — but remains closely tied to the site, taking on special projects, and retaining the title of editor emeritus. She has just finished editing The Book of Jezebel, which bills itself “an illustrated encyclopedia of lady things”. There are sparky, entertaining entries on Jezebel’s heroines: from the modern feminist poster-girl Caitlin Moran to the author Iris Murdoch; it is intelligent and witty, full of pithy analysis of art and culture, high and low.
Growing up in a middle-class town in northern California, the teenage Holmes was a voracious consumer of magazines. “I read Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly. I was very into culture and popular culture,” she says.
“I wanted to be a writer and at that time — the early 1990s — if you wanted to work in media you had to live in New York,” she says. Holmes studied journalism at New York University and got a job at Entertainment Weekly after graduation, before moving to Glamour. The homogeneity of the women featured in magazines back then aggravated her. “I’m half-black and half-white,” she says (her father is African-American, her mother is white). “As I got older and the country became more diverse, the glaring difference between what I saw represented in the media and what I saw around me became more pronounced.” It wasn’t just that. “The bread and butter of those sorts of magazines — pieces about sex and love — were presented in a way, I felt, that overemphasised women’s obsession with men.” She lights a cigarette, moving towards the kitchen window to smoke it.
“They drove home this message about how women should comport themselves to attract a man. I felt that I was participating in something destructive. They created insecurities that you didn’t know you were supposed to have.”
She gives the example of a particularly ludicrous headline from that era: “What he thinks of your orgasm face.”
“I don’t know that any young woman had seriously wondered whether a man was going to judge her based on what expression she made while climaxing, but now all of a sudden this was a thing.” When the call came to help launch Jezebel, she jumped. At first, Jezebel’s staff was just Holmes plus two employees, each working from their apartments and communicating via instant messenger. Within two months the team had doubled.
She was regularly working 15hour days, but the rush of living out her ambitions sustained her. “I felt very strongly that young women were interested in politics, and could talk about it as intelligently as they could about fashion, often within the same hour,” says Holmes. “And the experience of covering the 2008 election proved that.” The site became one of heated debate.
It was also ruffling feathers. According to Gaby Darbyshire, the company’s chief operating officer, Jezebel has received more complaints per year than any of Gawker’s other nine sites. “I don’t think I knew that,” Holmes says when I mention this. The most viewed posts were always, she says, “pictures of celebrities with a cute bag, or posts about a kitten. Stories that were political in nature tended to get more comments, but the actual traffic was lower for them.”
In 2007 the site ignited a discussion about Photoshopping, printing a magazine cover of the country singer Faith Hill alongside the original, un-retouched photograph. Publications from The New York Times to the gossip magazine US Weekly picked up the story. In 2010 the site also accused Jon Stewart’s satirical television programme, The Daily Show, of employing an actress for her looks rather than comic talent, prompting a debate about sexism in comedy.
The experience was thrilling, but Holmes’s commitment came at a personal cost. “The more successful it got, the more stressed I got. Instead of exhaling and thinking, ‘Wow, we’re on the right track,’ I thought, ‘Well, if I’m working at 150% capacity and I’m getting this result, I’ll just work at 200% and I’ll get an even bigger result.’ I never left the house,” she admits. “I gained 12kg in three-and-a-half years because I was so sedentary. I lived in the same apartment as my husband, but I was always in the other room working. It was a great experience, but it was unsustainable in terms of me having a life.”
Holmes married in 2008, but has been separated from her husband for six months and recently moved into her new apartment alone. “There are multiple reasons we are not together, but the job probably caused strains in all my personal relationships, in my marriage and with all my friends,” she says.
There was also growing pressure from Gawker to make it less incendiary to increase its appeal to advertisers. “I didn’t want to get fired, and I didn’t want to fight with them, but I didn’t want to turn the site into something I didn’t want it to be,” says Holmes. So, in the summer of 2010, she stepped down, handing the reins on to Coen.
She thinks the “basic DNA” of the site is still the same, though it is more commercial. “Jessica is much more willing to do things that I didn’t know how to execute well,” she says, diplomatically.
“I didn’t know how to do posts about make-up in a way that I would have felt good about.”
What is the legacy of her tenure? “I don’t think the site made women’s magazines irrelevant but I think it did influence them. Some of them no longer Photoshop all their pictures, which was something we complained about a lot.”
There is also growing diversity in women’s magazines: non-white models, the occasional plus-sized model and a broader focus beyond fashion and relationships.
For her part, Holmes has a new column in The New York Times books section but, beyond the publicity tour for The Book of Jezebel , is unsure of her next move. “I would love to run another website,” she confesses. “But I would definitely have to learn to delegate better.”
• The Book of Jezebel, by Anna Holmes, is published by Hachette, R395.