Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  “But in the two years we were there, there wasn’t even a quarter where we were free of significant business worries that impacted on Madison Avenue and which were used as an excuse or reason not to advertise in the magazine. Maybe we could’ve made it. Maybe. But never under those conditions.”

  According to Ms. staffers, Lang assured Summers that she would be editor of any new version of Ms. that was in the offing—a promise he did not keep. Instead, Summers was named editor-at-large for Lang publications. And when the new bimonthly, ad-free publication Ms.: The World of Women was announced in December of last year, the name topping the masthead came as something of a surprise. My old boss Robin Morgan, child actress and radio personality, founder of the Redstockings, organizer of anti–Miss America protests, international activist, antiporn crusader, prolific writer (most recently of The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism), had been anointed. Her name and high historical profile clearly signaled the latest direction Ms. would take, the language it would speak, and the women it would speak to.

  “In this Ms., there will be no slick pages and no slick thinking,” Robin Morgan announces in her ringing voice. She stands at about five feet and is waving one of the cigarettes she’s forever trying to give up. “It was amazing what the magazine tried to accomplish in its pre-Australian period, considering all the tightropes that it walked. But the sheer effort of trying to be everything to everybody meant reaching a lowest common denominator to some degree.”

  It is May 1990 in the offices of the new Ms., and I have left Steinem to her rounds of meetings, interviews, and phone calls. It has been seven years since my last phone conversation with Morgan, during which time I navigated my way through several magazine jobs—leaving one when the editor resigned after refusing to pander to advertisers, and another just before the owner pulled the plug, citing lack of advertiser enthusiasm—before moving west to work at Mother Jones. Morgan and I have just had lunch. We have caught up. I have been held out to younger staff members as a shining example of where a Ms. internship will get you. Now she is walking me through the new magazine.

  “I’m trying to put together a magazine that’s lively, fair, beautiful, funny, and moving,” she tells me. “A magazine that will get people to act.” As she begins to run down the list of articles in the first issues, though, I hear a litany of familiar, venerable names—Adrienne Rich, Lily Tomlin, Andrea Dworkin, Alice Walker, Marilyn French—and predictable topics that make me uneasy. This sounds like a narrowly focused Ms., a magazine that will appeal overwhelmingly, perhaps exclusively, to its original constituency.

  To its credit, and especially to Morgan’s credit, the new Ms. places a particular emphasis on features and news briefs about women around the world. But the rest of the magazine seems designed not just for women who identify themselves as feminists, but for women who define feminism in a specific way, who want the best and the worst of their worldview confirmed rather than challenged. There is a “Feminist Theory” section on the centrality of ageism to the patriarchy; “Inner Space,” on the angry face of the goddess; Bella Abzug on widowhood; an arts section featuring an essay hailing last year’s release of Camille Claudel.

  “The Accidental Activist,” which spotlights ordinary people who were made political by circumstance (such as Karen Bell, whose daughter died from an illegal abortion and who was also featured in a recent issue of People), is the only nod to the uninitiated. There’s even a section in the new magazine called “Instant Classics,” which will reprint what Morgan calls “basic clicks that are hard to get ahold of.” The first one is Judy Brady’s “Why I Want a Wife,” which appeared in the first issue of the old Ms. (It also appeared in the December 1979 issue, and its companion piece, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” appeared in the October 1980 issue.)

  I ask Morgan what she is doing for young feminists and for could-be feminists. She squints at me as if I’ve hit a sore spot, and lights another cigarette before responding. “There aren’t as many young feminist voices in the magazine as I want,” she says. “But I think they’ll begin coming in. We’re going to have a piece on frat gang rape in the second issue, and a young feminists’ dialogue in the third issue. . . . But I’m not going to search out younger women—thirty and under—to the degree I abandon baby boomers, people forty-five to fifty-five.”

  Steinem had told me that she always saw Ms. as an “intake mechanism” for the feminist movement. “We’ve never been like Commentary, where you grow old right along with Norman Podhoretz,” she said. But that seems to be exactly what the new Ms. is doing, and, in the process, it may be giving up the last shred of hope of reaching beyond its natural grasp. Neither Steinem nor Morgan sees reaching younger, more casually feminist women as the critical focus it was back in 1972. Steinem says that there are now other intake mechanisms for the feminist movement, like women’s-studies courses (Ms. is attempting to market itself to colleges as a text in women’s-studies departments), but those certainly aren’t comparable to a mass-market glossy magazine. When I persist in raising questions about this shift, Morgan finally says, exasperated: “Look, this is me you’re talking to. I’m not going to go in for that either we’re this or we’re that. Reaching you women of whatever age is one function. But another and, quite frankly, more basic one is to speak to our own constituency, which has been ignored by everybody. Some of the feminist media, in trying to do outreach, has ignored the long-distance runners. We deserve some sustenance, too.”

  Since Lang now refuses to talk to the press, it’s hard to say what his real intentions and plans for Ms. are; but a look at his business plan—in which the ad-free publication runs solely on its forty-dollars-a-head subscription revenue (with only a few targeted mailings to lure subscribers) and newsstand sales—leads one to suspect that the new Ms. may really be a step toward no Ms. In fact, fewer than one hundred thousand subscribers have signed on for the new Ms., less than half of the original estimate.

  When his business plan was originally unveiled, Lang told Newsday that magazines such as The Nation, New Republic, and Commentary have long thrived on subscription revenue—which isn’t true. The Nation runs at a deficit, made up by owner Arthur Carter. According to publisher David Parker, the publication also takes in $350,000 worth of ads each year. “There’s no reason not to take some advertising, for products the readers might really want to see, except as a marketing ploy,” says Parker. “Not that they were getting ads anyway. It’s sort of like saying, ‘I would never marry Princess Caroline of Monaco.’ Well, she never asked.” In reality, the most prominent of the few American newsstand magazines that survive without advertising revenue are Consumer Reports and MAD.

  The fact is, Americans are used to magazines that are heavily subsidized by advertisers; we aren’t accustomed to paying production costs of the media we read and watch. “There’s no way Ms. is going to get away with charging three or four times more than other magazines,” says Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s. “It would be great if they succeed, because I’d be happy to imitate them. But we know from experience that readers won’t do it. There’s an immediate impact if you raise your rates.”

  Neither Steinem nor Morgan is a likely mark for the false promises of a male corporate executive, and each seems fully confident of Lang’s integrity. “He may be discovering it feels good to feel good,” Morgan says. “He was amazed by the mail when he suspended publication, by the real-life stories. Part of it is probably a sense of pride—he’s big enough to own Ms.”

  Still, there was the little matter of the letter. When the new Ms. was announced, subscribers received an exuberant pink-and-purple mailing from Steinem and publisher Ruth Bower, offering them the chance to “vote” with their dollar: since they had already paid fifteen dollars for the old Ms., they could cast their “ballot” for the first year of the “editorially free” Ms. for a mere twenty-five dollars.

  The trouble was, not all subscribers got that letter. An unspecified number received a more s
ubdued note on official stationery, informing them that Ms. had ceased publication and offering to fill the subscription with Ms.’s “sister publication” Working Woman. If that proved unsatisfactory, loyal subscribers could switch instead to Working Mother, “another sister publication to Ms.” Far down at the bottom of the letter was a little PS: “Should a newly formatted version of Ms. emerge in the future, please let us know if you wish to be contacted.”

  Morgan says the second letter was a mistake; it was composed in October, when Ms. was in limbo, and should never have been mailed. “It was fuckups within fuckups. There was an error in circulation, one in fulfillment, one in the mailing place. It seems to not have been a mistake of venality, but of different layers of incompetence.”

  “The coincidence in timing is pretty strange,” counters a Lang Communications insider. “No one knows how many people got it or how they were chosen. The truth is, Working Woman has a rate-base problem. They need to guarantee a million readers to advertisers and they can’t. So they gave a certain number of people the second letter, then the next week dumped five months of back issues in their mailboxes.” Magazine insiders took the episode to mean that Ms. was hanging by a thread, dependent on the whims of Dale Lang.

  In that transfer of readers from Ms.—even a flawed Ms.—to Working Woman, something tragic occurs. Ms. has been on the ropes for a number of reasons: a decade-long backlash against the women’s movement; mistakes made by its editors in an atmosphere where no mistakes could occur, in an industry where the ephemeral eclipses the enduring, in a culture where a magazine dedicated to selling women’s ideas instead of their bodies is unacceptable; and finally—and perhaps most tellingly—because of the sheer gutlessness among advertisers whose influence over publishing has effectively narrowed the scope of voices on the newsstand.

  But without Ms., or something like it, what is going to convince today’s eleven-year-old girls that they can fly? I imagine Tibetha Shaw, still flame-haired and rebellious, barreling defiantly down some city street in a pro-choice demonstration, clad in her regulation black. Or perhaps she decided feminism was her mother’s trip, and joined the flocks seeking happiness through the great and powerful god, MBA. Either way, part of whoever she has become, and who I am, is due to Ms. We donned those towel capes because we saw, for the first time, that little girls could become not just women, but wonder women, women who could participate in the full scope of public and private life. Ms. was dedicated to that possibility, and no other mass-market magazine has taken up that torch since, or is likely to do so.

  Magazines such as Working Woman, Savvy, New York Woman, and Mirabella may have poached some of the Ms. terrain, but they’ve manipulated the message, reflecting change but not inciting it. Ms. was the only magazine on the newsstand to take as its mission reaching out across lines of class, race, age, and experience to guard the interests of all women. And the potential for a magazine to do that now—when we need it as much as ever—died with a mass-market Ms.

  At press time, Morgan and Steinem appeared confident that Ms. would survive. Although the first run of the magazine sold out at the newsstands, publisher Ruth Bower would not reveal the number of copies printed. Perhaps that’s because, according to sources, the total was only about a tenth of the three hundred thousand copies that flew off the stands during the magazine’s initial debut in 1972. “I haven’t felt depressed about losing the old Ms.,” Steinem mused in our final conversation. “I feel something healthier, which is anger. I feel angry—and we all ought to feel angry—that a magazine like Vanity Fair can waste fifty million dollars on fewer subscribers than we used to have. Or that Time, Inc., can spend more money than Ms. has ever had on testing a magazine that they never even published. I feel angry about that when I walk by the newsstand. And I’ll never stop feeling angry.”

  Phoebe Gloeckner: A Graphic Life

  I originally intended this piece to be about a group of female cartoonists—including Julie Doucet and Debbie Dreschler—who were making radical, authentic work on girls’ sexuality and on sexual victimization. Narratively, though, it worked better to focus solely on Gloeckner. I was (and remain) a huge fangirl, obsessed with A Child’s Life and Other Stories. The piece was published in August 2001, and I’m struck by how girls’ sexuality and their sexual objectification seem to have become both more openly discussed, yet no easier to navigate. Maybe that’s why the release of the film version of Diary of a Teenage Girl in 2016 still felt so relevant. Personally, I loved the movie—almost as much as the book.

  Bob’s diner on Polk Street is just two blocks up from where tourists catch the cable car for a joy ride to downtown San Francisco and just beyond where the hustlers and junkies stroll. Plastic grapes festoon the walls above cracked gray vinyl booths. The chow is strictly short order. In the center of the restaurant, her tweed coat slipping onto the speckled linoleum, a forty-year-old woman sketches in a notebook. When she looks up, time bends. Phoebe Gloeckner has expectant hazel eyes and brown hair shot through with red highlights. She wears round antique spectacles over a small Band-Aid where her two-year-old accidentally jammed them into the bridge of her nose. She may be an established medical illustrator and mother of two married to a chemistry professor, but she also, quite startlingly, has the face of her fifteen-year-old alter ego, Minnie, the subject of Gloeckner’s semiautobiographical cartoons. Minnie, who was booted from some of the finest Bay Area private schools. Minnie, who was sexually involved with her mother’s boyfriend. Minnie, whose best friend dosed her with quaaludes then traded Minnie’s body for more drugs. In fact, if you set the Way Back machine to a quarter-century ago, you could find the teenage Phoebe sitting in this very spot, scribbling in her diary, bearing witness to her life. Bob’s was her refuge; safely above the street scene’s DMZ, she wasn’t likely to run into anyone here who would question what she was writing or why.

  Now, in 2001, Gloeckner is only visiting her former stomping grounds. She lives on Long Island these days, where she is finishing Diary of a Teenage Girl, a hybrid between a conventional and graphic novel based on the very journals she penned in this diner. The book mines the same territory as A Child’s Life and Other Stories, Gloeckner’s first book, a story collection in cartoon form that R. Crumb says includes “one of the comic book masterpieces of all time.” Like Crumb’s, Gloeckner’s work is challenging stuff, graphic in every sense of the word. But while the images are similarly explicit—and have raised comparable charges of obscenity—the context could not be more different. The Minnie stories describe an adolescence that is at once traumatic and picaresque. They explore the power a girl feels in her emerging sexuality as well as the damage inflicted by those who prey upon it. In the process, they raise unsettling questions about vulnerability, desire, and the nature of a young woman’s victimization. “Phoebe looks square in the face of extremely disturbing subject matter,” says Kim Thompson, copublisher of Fantagraphics Books, the largest publisher of alternative comics. “But she has this illustrative style that’s so beautiful. It’s like going to a movie that looks like Merchant Ivory but turns out to have a Charles Bukowski story.”

  Confessional comics are an intriguing, surprisingly supple medium in which to tell young women’s stories. Gloeckner is arguably the brightest light among a small cadre of semiautobiographical cartoonists—including Debbie Drechsler and Julie Doucet—who are creating some of the edgiest work about young women’s lives in any medium. The narratives are often presented as diaries, that quintessential literary form of female adolescence. (There is virtually no tradition of diarists among teenage boys.) Perversely, even their marginalization—as cartoonists, as literary cartoonists, as female literary cartoonists—works in these artists’ favor. Free from the pressures of the marketplace, they can explore taboo aspects of girls’ lives with the illusion of safety; since their work is usually hidden behind racks of X-Men in shops that smell like a sweat sock, few people are likely to stumble across it. “They’re like what independent films were
before they stopped really being independent,” says Drechsler, whose collection Summer of Love will be released this month. “You have total freedom. Nobody cares what you’re doing because nobody’s going to make money off of it.”

  That’s how it has been for Gloeckner for years. Some call her a “cartoonist’s cartoonist,” a backhanded compliment that both acknowledges her exacting skill as an artist and the fact that even for comics, her work has not sold especially well. “Phoebe is one of the most accomplished artists in terms of mastery of the medium,” says Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead. Griffith was among the first to publish Gloeckner’s work, when she was in her late teens. “Her drawing conveys a lot of the underlying feeling of what’s going on in the same way a movie can have a shot without dialogue that’s a major turning point or a major insight into a character. It’s a delicate balancing act. The pictures have to propel the story without overtaking it. That balance—it’s almost a tension—occurs when a cartoonist is equally good as a writer and artist, and it’s very rare.”

  Richard Grossinger, publisher of North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd., which put out A Child’s Life, says: “In a perfect world, she would have as large an audience as R. Crumb or Art Spiegelman. She’s that good. But we haven’t been successful in letting that world know about it.”

  Diary of a Teenage Girl, which will be published next spring, could change that. Inspired by, among other things, the illustrated novels of the Victorian period, it takes the form a step further. Instead of a fully illustrated graphic novel, like Spiegelman’s Maus or Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, Gloeckner’s book is largely text that periodically bursts into comics the way a musical bursts into song: with no warning whatsoever, as if it’s normal. Because its raunchier themes are explored through prose rather than through images, Diary has a better shot at being picked up by conventional bookstores than A Child’s Life did. Gloeckner is the first to admit that’s an exciting opportunity. She’s also the first to question whether it’s one she wants.