Photo illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
On Thursday, November 9th, GMG Group CEO Jim Spanfeller announced that he was shutting down women-centric website Jezebel after failing to find a buyer. After 16 years, six editors-in-chief, four presidential administrations, tens of thousands of posts, hundreds of Internet shitstorms, and at least one gallery of digital illustrations of the penises of Walt Disney princes, one of the last remaining adherents of Internet web feminism should fall silent.
Jezebel gave me my first chance to be a writer, and that’s why its demise feels particularly anticlimactic, like learning that the home you grew up in is being razed. While the site’s quiet demise is no surprise – private equity fools don’t care about the cultural significance of the legacies they destroy – it is still an incredible loss.
Jezebel was urgent and necessary when it was founded in 2007 and has remained urgent and necessary throughout its existence. When it launched, the mainstream women’s media was largely uncontrolled, lying to its audience about what women look like, how we should behave, and how much we should weigh. Redbook Magazine photoshopped Faith Hill to make her thin enough for a public display. Perez Hilton still used Microsoft Paint to draw sperm on paparazzi photos of young actresses. Thongs were above the waist. The tans were orange. The girls were wild. Every pubic mound was inches away from being exposed. Jennifer Lopez was the only person allowed to have a butt. It was the heyday of the cool girl, the girl who liked everything boys liked and did everything the boys did and said things the boys found funny and didn’t complain about any of it, and was still fuckable looked like. Women were publicly encouraged to express a particular kind of sexual freedom and punished when that expression deviated from the intentions of the male gaze. And everyone took part in some way. Until Jezebel.
Jezebel took on women’s media bullshit before anyone else did, taking on the role of Ms, Bitch and Sassy for the web generation. The site was riddled with excessive airbrushing and unattainable beauty standards, social media sites’ reluctance to combat content that promotes eating disorders, fat-phobic comments from celebrities, unrealistic expectations of “having it all,” piggish behavior from powerful men, and racist behavior Casting faced fashion shows, television and film, the general sausage fest that took place late into the night in the television writers’ rooms. As the victims of Jezebel’s wrath fought back, Jezebel doubled in internet-capable speed.
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Jezebel was an important political voice and treated women’s concerns as serious, vital issues. In 2006, a year before Jezebel was introduced, the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Carhart, in which newly appointed Justice Samuel Alito joined four other Catholics on the court in favor of a ban on so-called “partial birth abortion.” without exceptions for women’s health. I don’t recall seeing any commentary on the case in any mainstream women’s media. But after the launch of Jezebel, feminist legal voices like Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times were no longer the only Cassandras warning the public about the long-standing conservative conspiracy to use the courts to dehumanize American women. Jezebel has played an outsized role in enforcing the ongoing fight for reproductive rights, from TRAP laws in Texas to Todd Akin’s campaign-derailing “legitimate rape” comments in the Senate to the Trump administration’s disastrous Supreme Court appointments to the Death of Roe and the events that followed continued political mobilization of American women.
When Jezebel was founded, there were other spaces for feminist criticism of culture and politics in general, but Jezebel was most comfortable engaging in a cafeteria argument. The site shouted about things the media told us to hide from women and ridiculed the things the media told us were important. “The Jezebel Blog Isn’t Afraid to Start a Fight,” read a New York Times headline in the summer of 2010, alongside a picture of then-editor-in-chief Jessica Coen grinning with her arms folded across her chest. A few months later, Coen hired me for a weekend job as an editor.
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I have been an active commenter on the site for years, ever since the disastrous and drawn-out 2008 Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The site was the only place I’d found in the entire Wild West of the early 20th century Internet that contained lyrics that actually made me laugh without making me roll my eyes. I wasn’t demeaned. It was confident, honest and, as an added bonus, included a lively comments section that encouraged participation. I was working at a bank at the time because I needed health insurance, but I spent most of my supposed job reading and commenting on Jezebel. The comments section was way better than a bunch of boomer bankers anyway.
It wasn’t wall to wall Kum Bah Yah. At worst, the comments section could be a kind of echo chamber in a snake pit. It was a welcoming place for a certain type of person – but if you were politically conservative, religious, or a somewhat cocky man with an uninformed opinion, commenting on Jezebel would be an unpleasant and probably short-lived experience. There were some gobblers for punishment, but most people who couldn’t hang were shouted down. During the early Jezebel period, comment moderators did something known as “disemvoweling” – they removed all vowels from a comment that violated the rules. Editors selected the worst comment of the day and placed it in a special public post for commenters to appropriately mock. The site’s staff faced backlash for ridiculing non-public figures, offering a bounty for the unretouched photos from Lena Dunham’s Vogue photo shoot, engaging in gross-out stories that some found lurid, and for knee-jerk reactions that perceived them as cynics could be read as anger bait.
Cliques formed. Meetings took place. People were included. People were excluded. The commenting community formed its own exoplanet to the actual content of Jezebel, occasionally allying with the site’s authors. Every few months, founding editor Anna Holmes would post something urging everyone to calm down. It would work for a few days.
After starting as a full-time writer for the website, I quit my job at the bank and moved from Chicago to New York. It was the most stressful and exciting time of my professional life. I wrote between five and ten posts a day and lived on about half a gallon of coffee when I arrived and half a bottle of white wine when I arrived. I wrote furiously, without time to think about what I was doing or had done. When I started I barely knew anything about politics, and when I left I was invited to Christmas parties at the White House. I found myself at the center of some really damaging internet shitstorms. I received death threats. I received marriage proposals. I ended up having a bit of a friendship with a pre-Trump Steve Bannon for a while. There was a particular bar in Nolita, a few blocks from our office on Elizabeth Street, that I privately referred to as “the crying bar.” It was a great place to cry during the work day.
Writing for Jezebel messed me up, made me better, made me tougher, made me meaner. I had to slowly unlearn and solve some of the things I learned there. But without her, I don’t think I would have ever had the courage to pursue a career as a writer.
The death of Jezebel means the death of an important incubator for female writing talent. When I was there between 2010 and 2015, the masthead included other names such as Jia Tolentino, Lindy West, Irin Carmon, Kara Brown, Joanna Rothkopf, Dodai Stewart, Emma Carmichael, Anna North, Tracie Egan Morrissey, Katie JM Baker and Anna Merlan and so many more women (and a few men) whose platforms and reputations have only grown in recent years. The variety of guest posts published on the site would make any publishing editor drool. Beyond the masthead, the comments section was secretly teeming with talent—I met dozens of women in prominent positions in media and entertainment who confessed that they knew me from my days as pseudonymous commentators because they were there too. Jezebel’s fingerprints are everywhere.
A few weeks ago, Holmes, Jezebel’s founding editor, reached out to me about an article she was working on for the New Yorker about Jezebel’s legacy, an article that, eerily, was published just days before Spanfeller pulled the plug. In it, Holmes writes that she envisioned Jezebel as a space “with a lot of personality, humor and poignancy.” I wanted it to combine wit, wisdom and anger, and to give women – many of whom were taught that “feminism” was a bad word or a word to avoid – a model of critical thinking about gender and race that felt accessible and entertaining.”
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Jezebel was indeed a space with personality – and an unvarnished reflection of the people who created it. And so his legacy, like a person’s, is complex. At times it was chaotic, brash, confrontational, disrespectful, argumentative, mean, angry, bitchy, quick to judge. Sometimes it was a chainsaw in a situation that required a scalpel.
At its best, however, Jezebel embodied the qualities that its audience craved: it was passionate, funny, fashionable, cool, intimidating, smart, perceptive, thoughtful, powerful, curious, versatile, clever, absurd, fed up, and, deep inside Inside, a bit hopeful. It insisted on our humanity, but it never asked us to bow to demands that we be more than human. While Jezebel’s now-pervasive influence is undeniable, its demise will leave a void in the media landscape at a time when women – in 2023 as in 2007 – could use a break.