Godspeed, Jane

It was announced last week from the offices of Jane magazine that its editor-in-chief, the legendary Jane Pratt, is stepping down. Rumour has it that her next project will be a trailblazing mag for the fortysomethings. Not sure I have much hope for this putative venture.

These last few years, Jane has been seriously letting the side down. Its precursor, Sassy, was a staple of my youth - a serious antidote to the premasticated, mainstream pap of other teen girlie mags like Seventeen and YM. For a while, after Jane was launched, it seemed as though it would carry on in the spirit of Sassy, but growing along with its target market.

I didn't read Jane while living in Europe, but when I got back to Canada last summer, I started buying it again. And frankly, while I thought it remained head and shoulders above the morass of women's mags generally, I was nonetheless kinda disturbed. Most obviously, installing Pamela Anderson as an advice columnist was staggering in its sheer 'WTF?'-ness. But there were many other, more subtle, clues. For instance, I still can't understand how the magazine could proclaim an unstinting commitment to feminism, while simultaneously (in the same issue) encouraging women's consumption of pornography as A-OK. This strikes me as blindly and dangerously hypocritical. Disillusioned, I stopped buying Jane after a couple of months.

Apparently this trend is not particularly recent - this 1999 article from the Harvard Crimson blew the whistle on Jane, rather insightfully, ages ago. But it is worrisome nonetheless. If even the mighty Jane Pratt couldn't resist the forces that control print media for women, what hope is there?