Remembering Jezebel

A tribute to Jezebel and a fatter than usual Playback and Mixtape section.

Last week, Jezebel (Jez)—a cornerstone of women’s media since 2007—suddenly shut down. In The Guardian, Moira Donegan writes, “From the beginning, the feminist blogs of the 2000s and 2010s allowed their writers to express anger, frustration, sarcasm and delight – emotions that were banished from the tone of more traditional journalism and frequently taboo for public expression by women to begin with,” offering a post-mortem for what Jez meant for feminism. 404 Media tells it as a business story: advertising algorithms that avoid sex and abortion coverage. Of course, these two angles are linked. The personal forever political.

I reached out to former Jezebel writers and contributors to share their thoughts on the untimely end of an era, bungled by leadership that can’t come to grips with the fact they’ve already written themselves out of anything meaningful in digital media history. — Daisy Alioto

Aimée Lutkin: Jezebel contributor and author of The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search For Love Is Broken

Long before I wrote for Jezebel, it was a habit to check it regularly throughout the day to see what was happening in the world, and what the writers there thought about those happenings. They were allowed to share actual opinions, instead of neutrally repeating back events in terse paragraphs set between clickable ads. It’s hard not to notice how much the job-stealing AI robot posts sound like the kind of regular ‘content’ bloggers are already asked to produce in 2023. Blogging for so many media properties has become bland and repetitive, with a priority on cranking out the 300 words necessary to make a post SEO-worthy. Sometimes it’s permissible to sound intellectual, but not funny or crass and definitely not critical in any meaningful way. Jezebel let writers have identities. It allowed writers to spend time on the insignificant, go on tangents, make unexpected connections, explore a niche and then move onto a new obsession. And there was of course rigorous reporting and huge stories that probably could only have found a place on Jez, because that exploration uncovered those stories. Sometimes Jezebel was navel gazing, sometimes it was nasty, sometimes it made mistakes. But it wasn’t brain dead and boring. It’s also a site that was notorious for commenter engagement, which could make you want to scream at times. That community couldn’t have existed without cultivating the voices of the bloggers, because they encouraged familiarity and participation that seems so uncalculated in retrospect. Most online verticals seem to want to have the exact same voice now, asking us to pretend like things were never inventive or fun. They were! Don’t forget.

Emily Leibert: former staff writer 

On the day of Jezebel’s untimely death last week, I joked that we should plan a proper funeral for our loud-mouthed, raunchy friend that, up until her passing, lacked any sort of meaningful filter. (The old gal was nothing if not consistent.) After all, I can’t think of anything more Jez-coded than gathering at a local watering hole in black platform boots and trench coats, getting piss-poor drunk off dirty martinis and Bud Lights, and presenting vagina jokes and beautifully rhythmic eulogies in turns. 

But the shuttering of a website like Jezebel really does possess all the markings of a tangible loss. It feels like the end of a fleeting moment in time: one in which it was possible to exist as messily as we did in real life—as flawed mothers and daughters, unlikable careerists, internet comedians, elusive shit talkers, thirst trap connoisseurs, and custodians of rage—on the ephemeral digital page. To be all of that in the same breath and still be allowed to publish journalistic musings on Jezebel Dot Com? Lightning in a bottle, as better wordsmiths have put it. 

In a day’s work, we’d have produced a homepage that at once unearthed a senator’s unforgiving abortion politics, while paying homage to the fine art of eating pussy. On May 2, 2022, we alternated laughing and crying over takeout dishes of cacio e pepe when the Dobbs decision leaked just moments after we’d finished up ripping celebrities new assholes for their middling 2021 Met Gala looks. That, to me, was the real Jezebel: This inexplicable mix of devastating women’s rights coverage and clownery. Insomuch as we were historians, we were also unserious cunts. 

Jezebel was in the end as it was in the beginning for me: a damn good website that taught me to be a smarter, more curious, and more justifiably enraged writer and woman. (With teeth.) I will never get over having the opportunity to be a part of it. 

Article continues below.

AD: THE BOOK OF AYN

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death

After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse.

Things look better in Hollywood—until the money starts running out, and with it Anna’s faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother’s house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna’s odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom—communal love, communal toilets—and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself.

“A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times” (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.

Kylie Cheung: former staff writer and author of Survivor Injustice 

I’m 25 and I grew up reading Jezebel, thinking it was smart and hilarious and aspiring to be smart and hilarious. I always loved writing and never had any interest in working in legacy media that prohibits you from saying basic truths about, say, abortion or gender-based violence and enforces rigid ideas of “objectivity” that are at the expense of justice and accuracy. Working somewhere like Jezebel was always my dream. When I joined the team, I was joining people like Laura, Susan, and Caitlin whose work I’d been reading and learning from for years, and I think it’s so special that they were as kind and wonderful as I could have ever hoped.

I could never say enough good things about the people I worked with, we were such a small team because of gutting and total lack of support from the company, but we were doing work that was funny and smart but also honest, sharp, and deeply reported about issues like abortion, pregnancy-related criminalization, sexual violence, that I just don’t think you’re seeing elsewhere in (what’s left of) women’s media. And it’s such a critical moment, too, post-Dobbs and with 2024 on the horizon.

Every day was so fun, and there was also such a real feeling that the work we did was impactful; I really think we challenged rape myths and horrifying sexist narratives that emerged amid the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, and I really think we brought clarity to the stakes of our post-Roe world, and I’m so proud of that. That a feminist website like Jezebel was folded as a result of male incompetence, corporate incompetence, I think if anything speaks to why a website like ours was needed in the first place.

Harron Walker: Jezebel contributor 

I published some of my smartest work for Jezebel, the most enduring of which was probably a pair of articles from 2018 that concerned media coverage of trans issues—I mean, Jonathan Chait and Helen Lewis are still mad about them, so whatever, I guess. My impact. The first was an off-the-cuff blog responding to Jesse Singal’s infamous Atlantic cover story on trans kids and detransitioners that aimed to answer the immortal question, “What’s Jesse Singal’s Fucking Deal?” I followed that up with a more in-depth critique of the industry-wide exclusion of trans media workers that inevitably leads to such work’s publication, which featured leaked screenshots and discussions from an entirely cis email listserv composed of 400-something industry types, including Singal himself, to show how they talk about us when we’re not in the room—which is to say most newsrooms, then as well as now. At least journalists have generally gotten a lot more trans literate and a lot less transphobic since 2018, a time when many of my colleagues, even some of those in the extended Gawker Media cinematic universe, logged onto Twitter to breathlessly praise a transphobic screed in The American Conservative that described “transgendered women” as men who’d undergone “surgical mutilations”—coincidentally authored by another Jezebel alum.

But when I think back on Jezebel, my mind goes straight to the dumb shit like Frida Garza and Ashley Reese trying to eat a salad “the Amy Klobuchar way,” i.e., with a comb; a roundtable discussion on whether or not we’d phuck the Phillie Phanatic; watching then reviewing A Star Is Born together; or asking Julianne Escobedo Shepherd a question about electroclash and how it figured into aughts New York nightlife that derailed into a 10-minute explainer on all things Kevin Carpet once she realized that I didn’t know who Kevin Carpet was. I think about all the beautiful garbage I got to write, like a deep-dive into which Mario Kart character sounded the horniest, a review of Tara Reid’s Sharknado perfume on the grounds of whether or not it was camp, or an experiment where I threw a football at various Deadspin staffers and whichever guys caught them would then be my new dad—garbage too beautiful for any other site to handle. I miss a lot about that time, back when my optimism for the future of media hadn’t been crushed and skullfucked by venture capitalists and traffic goals. I almost never look back on past workplaces fondly, but even with all the corporate bullshit swirling around our newsroom—a mass layoff that the union negotiated down to voluntary buyouts, a sudden hiring freeze that blocked me from a staff job—Jezebel is the exception.

Hannah Gold: nights and weekends warrior 

I’ll never forget the day I found out I’d gotten a job writing for Jezebel. I was forwarded a news article explaining that Gawker, the website I worked for, would be abruptly closing down. At the bottom of the article was a list of new placements for Gawker staff writers within its larger media company, and it was there I learned that I was being transferred to the women’s vertical (I never asked why, seems safe to assume it had something to do with being a woman who’d never professed any interest in video games or sports). Inadvertently and all at once, the next chapter of my professional life—as a writer for the feminist blogosphere—had begun, and looking back I could not be more grateful for that experience. Jezebel gave me a platform where I could develop my style, my political thought, and my ability to spell (thanks for that, Jezebel Commenters). For much of my time there I worked nights and weekends, unsupervised by editors, and while I do not recommend this as a lasting state of affairs for aspiring writers, it forced me to treat writing as live performance for the benefit of an audience, a lesson I carry with me today even when working on pieces that take weeks or months to write. I hardly have room to recount the enormity of Jezebel’s impact on how we discuss women’s stories and advocate for their rights today, so I’ll just say that for me working there was transformative, liberating, and a continuous surprise. We all need more websites like Jezebel. 

Katy Kelleher: Jezebel contributor 

I was a teenager when I started reading Jezebel, back in 2007. I found it through a blog I liked, which was written by a woman who went by Slut Machine (Tracie Egan Morrissey’s one-time nom-de-plume). At the time, I was a college student at Bard in upstate New York, and I was as depressed as a person can be and still function, though I was functioning pretty poorly. But I made time to read Jezebel—every post. It felt like I had a big sister, finally, someone who was watching out for me and telling me that the general frustration I felt, the anger I felt at the world, the anxiety and depression, that all these things weren’t that abnormal. That the world was fucked, and I wasn’t crazy for feeling like it was sick, sad, and toxic.

I applied for an internship at Jezebel while I was still in college. I never met any of the women who worked there in person—I was, honestly, too scared. But after I started serving as an intern, I switched my major from Art History to Literature. I started to seriously consider writing as a skill I could hone and use (against my enemies, for my friends, to let out the pain, to earn some money). I worked as an intern, and later a contributing writer (and occasional weekend editor) until I was laid off during the great pivot to video period. By that point, I had graduated from college, stopped self-harming, and started to think of myself as a person with things to say. The women who founded Jezebel, including and especially founding editor Anna Holmes, didn’t know me IRL, but they generously gave me advice (don’t go to graduate school), connections (helped me find an actual full-time writing job), and a sense of self (probably this would have happened around that time anyway, but probably not quite like it did).

I never stopped reading Jezebel over the years, not even when I was feeling bitter at being cut from the team. I liked the writers too much, and I loved that there was a place I could go to read voices that were sharp, angry, funny, and kind. I wrote for Jezebel as a freelancer throughout the years, and I always loved talking to the editors and reading the commenters who showed up under my pieces. They, too, were weird and combative but oddly sweet and supportive. It’s not something people associate with Jezebel, but for me, it was a kind place, though the kindness was sometimes dipped in rage or soaked in sarcasm. It was still there, a hopeful sense that someday, things would be better. 

Rebecca Fishbein: nights and weekends warrior 

For years, Jezebel was my favorite website, one of the few publications where women could be unapologetic, funny, biting, smart—generally, themselves.  Jezebel never talked down to its readers but talked with them, and as a reader, it felt like you got to be a part of the conversation. As a writer, it was a rare site that let you get as weird as you wanted. When I got laid off from a media job I loved, the one silver lining was that I got to be a contributor for Jezebel. During my first night shift, I pissed off the fanbase of a very popular musical artist and got flooded with threats and outrage. I was terrified that I would get in trouble; instead, the Jez team congratulated me on achieving a rite of passage. That was Jezebel—fearless, aggressively honest and unwilling to cower in the face of standom. The internet is much worse without it.

Joan Summers: former staff writer

I spent almost three years at the site, locked in what I often told my friends was a psychic battle on the astral plane with the fears, hopes, anxieties, and rage of myself and fellow writers. I know that sounds dramatic, but Jezebel felt, for a time, like heaven. Of course, I also spent much of the time awkwardly gawking at my colleagues, who I considered to be the brightest people I'd ever met. I said it when I left and I'll say it again: Stassa Edwards is one of the most brilliant editors and feminists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, or being eviscerated by in a draft—a feeling many of us still crave still. Likewise, It's not lost on me that, in 2019, I was the first trans woman to ever be hired to the site in a permanent position. This is because of Julianne, a literal champion, and one of the primary reasons the website is remembered so fondly for what it was, no matter how badly the losers at G/O tried to tarnish her work and legacy. 

G/O Media put us through fucking hell, but it was Jezebel and it's union reps that helped spearhead the fight for inclusive healthcare amid the pandemic, not just for trans women but everyone. While that loss still stings, I know it wasn't because we didn't fight until we had nothing left to give, and then some. It was because the sites were already walking corpses at that point. It was just a matter of getting everyone off safely until the whole shambling mess collapsed in on itself. 

With Jezebel dies the vestiges of a time that doesn't exist anymore. A time those who worked there are all better off because of. A time that, in too many ways to count, changed the internet forever. 

Rot in hell, Jim fucking Spanfeller. 

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• The internet went nuts for AI Homer spitting lyrics while engaged in what can only be described as Kendall Roy-esque jerky movements 

• I am really enjoying Spiritual Cramp’s new album

• What was Gimlet Media? (n+1)

• Frank Ocean teases new music…It’s been 84 years 

• Pitchfork says ML Buch’s new album Suntub combines, “the chromium glow of her guitar tone, along with the fuzz of shoegaze and the crunch of ’90s indie”... yum. 

• Lil Yachty Says 'Hip-Hop Is in a Terrible Place' (Complex)

• New Babyxsosa, with some aspirational cover art

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Bryan Lehrer asks, What Happened to the New Internet?

• “You feel right next door to extreme poverty when you eat at Joe and the Juice, which is a comfortable place to be.” The Guardian profiles famed literary agent Andrew Wylie aka The Jackal

• "Take Ivy" author Shōsuke Ishizu has died. 

• Digging into the data on literary prizes: “Over the last 35 years, just 25 people have served as judges more than 700 times for over 30 unique prizes. These 25 people make up 25 percent of all jury positions in that period.” (Public Books)

• Rachel Tashjian on Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson (The Washington Post)

• “I became a writer because it was something I could do alone and hidden in my room.” My 2024 goal is to read more Sigrid Nunez. (Bookforum)

• If you like antique markets, this one’s for you. (The New Yorker)

• Hannah Gold on Mary Gaitskill’s Substack, among other things (The Drift)