What did we want to change? Nothing short of the whole world.

 

The Soul of a Woman: On Impatient Love, Long Life, and Good Witches

By Isabel Allende

Fondly remembering when my best friend and I started an all girls magazine in fifth grade (It's A Girl's World) and convinced some of our classmates to subscribe for a very minimal fee. I don't think we "published" it for very long, but I'm giving high fives & pats on the back to our former selves for being brave, cute, and feminist, before we even knew what that meant.

"Everything changed for me in 1967 when I started working as a journalist at Paula, a newly launched feminist magazine. (The name has nothing to do with my daughter's; it was one of those names that suddenly became popular and omnipresent.) The editor was Delia Vergara, a young and beautiful journalist who had lived in Europe and had a clear vision of the type of magazine she wanted. With that in mind, she gathered her small team. The magazine saved me from being suffocated by frustration. 

We were four young women in our twenties ready to shake up Chilean prudery. In our country, which was very conservative and had a provincial mentality, social mores had not changed much over the last century. We got inspiration from magazines and books from Europe and North America. We read Sylvia Plath and Betty Friedan, and later Germaine Greer, Kate Miller, and other writers who helped us define ideas and express them eloquently. 

I opted for humor because I soon realized that the most daring ideas can be accepted if they elicit a smile. That's how my column "Civilize Your Troglodyte" came to be. It made fun of machismo, and ironically became very popular among men. "I have a friend who is just like your troglodyte," they would say to me. (Always a friend.) Some female readers, on the other hand, felt threatened because the column shook the very foundation of their domestic world.

I was comfortable in my skin for the first time. I wasn't a lonely lunatic; millions of women shared my concerns. There was a women's liberation movement happening on the other side of the Andes Mountains and our magazine intended to spread it throughout Chile. 

From those foreign intellectuals whose books we read, I learned that anger without purpose is useless and even harmful; I had to act if I wanted change...

My three colleagues and I wrote with a knife between our teeth; we were a scary gang. What did we want to change? Nothing short of the whole world. With the arrogance of youth, we thought that could be done in ten or fifteen years. This was more than half a century ago and look where we still are today. But I have not lost faith that it can be achieved, and my accomplices from that time, who are as old as I, haven't either. And yes, I use the word old, which seems to be pejorative. I do so on purpose because I am proud of my age. Every year I have lived and every wrinkle I have tell my story."

Then I realized that oftentimes existing is activism in itself.

This former Teen Vogue subscriber bought the December 2016 issue as a way to show support for an outlet that published this article during a time when other outlets were still tiptoeing around calling Trump out on his shit. Lauren Duca received a lot of hate on the internet because of it, as well as praise. Editor in chief Elaine Welteroth and digital editorial director Philip Picardi have also been lauded for the work they've done to elevate the magazine's work in the past year. (See this great interview where they explain the magazine's evolution to Trevor Noah.)

Last week, in a weird form of nostalgia, I started watching Girl Meets World on Netflix. I am...a huge Boy Meets World fan. While this "sequel" is extremely cheesy (hi Disney), Girl Meets World has a lot of heart. I like heart and anything that can find the sweet spot of making you both feel good laugh and cry. Maybe because I've felt so conflicted lately, the messages work for me despite the delivery. There are, inevitably, a ton of BMW references and I'm also a new fan of Rowan Blanchard. I admire her commitment and willingness, at such a young age, to speak to female empowerment and human rights. I've said it before and I'll say it again: young women today need organizations and people like her and I wish I had them to look up to when I was younger.

I'm not sure this ever changes (I'm 12 years older than her and still feel this way):

Rowan Blanchard and Gia Coppola on Why Teenagers Are the Best

"Sometimes I notice that I still write exactly how I wrote when I was younger, it’s just that the words are more articulate now. It’s the same emotions, the same feeling like, Gosh, this is never gonna be over and this is the worst time in my life, when it’s not at all. The worst times in my life are the ones I don’t even write about. I can’t put it on paper."
-RB

Rowan Blanchard and Yara Shahidi on Representation
"My need to be an activist came very much from a need to understand history. And how things that happened before have influenced what’s happening now. We covered Rosa Parks for, like, three days in history. But there is so much more than what is in the history books. To me, activism is a need to know, a need to explain, and a need to help. At first I was very scared of the term. I thought, Am I actually doing enough? Then I realized that oftentimes existing is activism in itself. For instance, I think it’s brave for girls to go to college when there is a one-in-four chance that they will be raped. That in itself is activism. I wish all girls and people of color called themselves activists."
- RB

Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste.

Me and my friend Kathleen laughed to the point of tears and aching stomachs the other day from reading this list of the 25 funniest analogies.

As I read through Esquire's September 2010 issue, I noticed this line from Tom Chiarella's "The Itinerant Artist," a profile on James Franco:

"When asked what he's reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste." (p. 124).

Wonderful.

A magazine is an experience that you have as a whole

Esquire, March 2010
The Magazine Is The Message, David Granger
(Editor's letter)

"For the last fifteen years, all the hype has been about laying new pipe to facilitate the dissemination of idea. We've watched, awestruck and credulous, as AOL, and then Google, and then YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have given us new ways to move information from one place to another on all sorts of new machines. These are the technicians of the new media world. These are the pressmen. It's the equivalent of Gutenberg's press that's had us mesmerized, rather than the words and ideas that were suddenly given life because of it."

"The weird power of magazines derives from the unique collision of words and images and design - and it comes from the fact that a magazine is an experience that you have as a whole, that you spend time with, not glancingly as on the Web or in intervals as on mobile devices. None of this is to say we won't continue to experiment to find ways to enhance the magazine or to try to master the new forms. We're enthusiasts, and this is the most exciting time to be in creative media. As technology changes, we intend to harness that change to augment and expand this paper-and-ink creation. But what you are holding in your hand is not incidental to the Esquire experience; it is essential."


I was never too worried about magazines "dying," maybe because as much as I love the Internet, I've always preferred holding a book, holding a magazine, feeling the pages. It could've been denial. But now I think we (as in, the journalism industry), are starting to realize that new media will not replace publications, but give us the opportunity to enhance them