The Feministing Five: Debbie Stoller

debbie stoller

Debbie Stoller is the co-founder, co-owner and editor-in-chief of BUST magazine, the magazine “for women with something to get off their chests.” Stoller and the BUST co-founders saw that mainstream women’s magazines focused less on the pleasures of womanhood than on the risks and dangers. “Whereas Seventeen might have been like, ‘now that you’re becoming a woman, boys are going to want to touch your breasts, but don’t let them, and cover yourself up, and just make sure that you’re skinny enough,'” Stoller wanted to create a magazine that would encourage women to embrace their bodies and their lives. And so, inspired by the zine Sassy, they founded BUST in 1993, with the goal of creating a magazine that spoke to young women in the voice of a peer, and that focused on the pleasures and possibilities of being a woman. Fifteen years later, BUST has become synonymous with smart, funny feminist analysis of popular culture.

BUST covers everything from music to movies to what it’s like to be a feminist in high school, and of course, crafting. In fact, Stoller is the New York Times bestselling author of the Stitch’n’Bitch series of books, calendars and journals about knitting and crocheting. So if you like feminism but feel like your life lacks knitting, BUST is for you. If you’d like to hear more from Debbie and happen to be in NYC next week, you can – she’s speaking on a panel at 92Y Tribeca with other kick-ass feminists Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, Veronica Chambers and
Allison Wolfe! Also, if you’re on the hunt for an internship in the city, BUST is hiring.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Debbie Stoller.

Chloe Angyal: How did you become a feminist, and how did you become a feminist publisher?

Debbie Stoller: I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, and when Women’s Lib became popular and was filtered down through the mainstream pop culture to me as a kid, I thought it made a lot of sense and was really awesome. I thought that women were equal to men, and deserved to be called women, not girls, so I came home in the fifth grade and asked my mother if I could have some women from school over to play one afternoon. And I always bought the mainstream presentation that was given to me hook, line and sinker because I was too young to sort things out any better. Although I did know that my mother, who was a housewife, and was from Holland, where being a housewife and the things that have to do with the home are really respected and valued, was not at all unhappy with her role. She actually really enjoyed it, she would have hated going to work every day, and she felt that what she was doing was a lot more fulfilling than what my dad was doing. As a kid I spent a lot of time in Holland, and I really saw how different the roles were in Holland, and how differently they were appreciated. So you know how they say that when a fish is in water it can’t tell? Well I could sort of tell because I was going from one fish tank to another. I could see that the way a culture looked at something made a lot of difference. There was no absolute in terms of the best way to live a life. Things were looked upon very differently in America than in Holland.

Then when I was in high school, I had my first feminist teacher, Ms. Albern. And she had us read this essay by Gloria Steinem, “If Men Could Menstruate.” It was a brilliant essay, and made an extremely important point for me that I will never forget. Back then in the 70’s, women were starting to think about trying to run for President, and the issue that kept coming up was, “Well, a woman can’t be President because they get PMS.” And this was during the Cold War, so “maybe she’s going to be on the rag and emotional and she’s going to hit the button and start World War 3.” This was a real concern, this was something that people bandied about for why a woman couldn’t be President. And as a kid I was like, “Yeah, that’s true! How are they gonna handle that?” And then I read that essay and it talked about the culture and about how because men can’t menstruate they make menstruating a weakness, but if men could menstruate they would make not menstruating a weakness. They would have slogans like “you have to give blood for your country to take blood,” and all that.

So those things formed my identity not only as a feminist, but as a cultural feminist, as someone who really believes that it’s not our economic system that sustains sexism – I think that communist and socialist systems sustain sexism just as well as a capitalist system, and I think that a capitalist system could work just as much in the service of equality as it does in the service of inequality. I think it’s a cultural issue, not an economic or biological one. We view the roles and values of men and women through our culture, and if you can change the culture, then you can change women’s lives.
So as a firm believer in the power of culture, I went on to graduate school and studied the psychology of women, but mainly I was interested in how women’s magazines influenced women’s perceptions of themselves. And when I graduated with my Ph.D, I thought, “Well, I can go on and teach women how women’s magazines fuck with their heads, or I can go and try to create some better culture for women.” I believed that creating a more positive culture would really make a difference, not just be a silly waste of time, that if you could see different images of women in the popular culture, you would come to believe that there were greater possibilities for women. It took me a while to figure out how to do that. I started out working at MTV and Nickelodeon, working really low level jobs, because I thought that maybe I could make a difference there. I was reading Sassy, which was really a magazine for teenage girls, and I saw in their approach one solution to the question of, if mainstream magazines are bad for women, what would be the opposite of that? I think that that an earlier generation of a magazine that only shows women as supermodels would be to have a magazine that only showed women as positive role models, but I thought that would be equally oppressive. The solution in Sassy, as far as I could deconstruct it, was a magazine that instead of a magazine that makes women feel inadequate, a magazine that focuses on pleasure. So whereas Seventeen might have been like, “now that you’re becoming a woman, boys are going to want to touch your breasts, but don’t let them, and cover yourself up, and just make sure that you’re skinny enough,” Sassy was like, “now that you’re growing breasts, boys are going to want to touch them, and that’s going to feel really good, so pick a really cute boy…” I mean, that’s not exactly what it said, but the emphasis was on the new possibilities that came with being a teenager, the pleasure of being female, and that was something that I’d never seen. And of course, it was the approach that’s used in every men’s magazine. It’s all about making men feel so great about being men, and all the women that are there for their pleasure. No magazine was made for women that was really about pleasure, or that had a voice that wasn’t an authoritarian voice, but the voice of an equal.

I hooked up with two other girls who had been working with me at Nickelodeon, Laurie Henzel and Marcelle Karp, and we bandied this idea around, to do a magazine that wasn’t for teenage girls but for girls of our generation, that would be truthful and honest and focus on pleasure, and that would help us sort out what these narrow feminist adult lives were going to be like, because things weren’t turning out exactly the way second wave feminists thought they would turn out for our generation, and we were really kind of improvising a whole new kind of life. We had left the past behind, but there was no real clear solution for the future mapped out yet, and it was important that we have a place where we could try to map that out.

CA: Who is your favorite fictional heroine, and who are your heroines in real life?

DS: I don’t really have that many fictional heroines. I guess Claudine, from Collette’s book series, would be one of my favourites. In real life, my favourite feminists are Simone de Beauvoir, Madonna, Martha Stewart and Courtney Love. Simone de Beauvoir maps out so nicely, and from such a highfalutin position, the importance of culture in women’s lives. There she was dating Sartre, and he was all about existentialism, and nothing limits you, and you can’t blame the problems in your life on where you were born and how you started out, you’re completely able to make your own choices. And Simone was like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that. I think that the outside world really can limit a woman’s choices from the day she’s born, and here’s how.” And she writes this huge tome arguing basically, “existentialism, schmexistentialism,” outlining how society really can limit a person’s options. She really designs the basis of cultural feminism.

Madonna is incredibly important to me because she was solving a different puzzle, which was that if we don’t like the way that women are presented as sex objects and having men consume that image, is the opposite that everybody has to be sex subjects, that nobody can be objectified? And what Madonna solved in that dilemma which had never been solved before, was that it was possible for a woman to be both a sex object and a sex subject, and it completely changes the entire dynamic. Which is why, as much as people always want to rag on Madonna for being just a blonde bimbo, it’s important to notice that men hate her. They hate her. Her biggest fans are women and gay men, both groups that are struggling with issues of identity, and trying to find a powerful way to be sexually objectified. Men hate her because they don’t like their sexual objects to also be sex subjects. They don’t feel like they can really consume her image. She’s completely in control of that image, and that really changes things.

Martha Stewart because she created a whole new spin on domestic work and things that were traditionally women’s work that second wave feminists had been trying to get away from. The reason that second wave feminists realized that that kind of work was so frustrating to women was because they were limited to it, but also that it was never valued by the culture. Women’s work was always much less valued than anything that men did, whether they were garbage men or executives. Anything that men did was more valuable than what women did. Also, all this work was always presented to women as something they had to do to satisfy their husbands and their children. Whereas Martha Stewart that same amount of work, showing its value, and she has no husband, her children are grown – she presents this stuff as something to do for your own pleasure, to enrich your life.

I love the new image that Courtney Love gave to women and to girlhood. I think she also created some other cultural images that have been troubling from the beginning, and what that happens I think it’s important. It shows that she’s really hitting against something that’s just not acceptable. Those are all women who play around with cultural images, in some cases really moving and shifting and changing them. I think Love’s legacy remains to be seen, but I love that she exists. I’m not saying I want to hang out with any of these people, I’m not looking for role models, but I think the images they create in the culture are interesting. They really shook things up and made important breakthroughs.

CA: What recent news story made you want to scream?

DS: One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is this issue of chick flicks, and how completely unvalued they are, and looked down on. The Sex and the City movie is coming out, and people are like, “I really hate to say it, but I think I might have to see that movie,” or, “I’m really embarrassed, but I think I might have to go see that movie.” Whereas, there’s never any apology about what I like to call “dick flicks,” movies that are really nothing more than watching someone else play a video game on screen. That’s just fun, and because it’s aimed at a male audience you don’t have to make an apology or be embarrassed about it. I like chick flicks, not all of them, but what I’m more interested in is how women put them down and how embarrassed we have to be about them. I’m always very interested in how we as a culture look down on things that have to do with women, and how even women do that too. I think it comes down to internalized self-hatred. I don’t think that every single thing about being female needs to be celebrated, and I’m not a choice feminist, I don’t think that every choice you make is a feminist choice because a woman made it. But I do think that a lot of givens have to be questioned. It’s important to think about why we hate so many things that are ultra-feminine when there’s not nearly as much hatred of things that are ultra-masculine.

CA: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?

DS: It’s the same challenge that it’s always been, which is to achieve a culture where women are valued as equally as men, with as much variety of opportunity. But without doing that by assimilating all the aspects of culture that were women’s domain into the male model. It’s the same problem that goes on and on and on. It’s like a shapeshifter. It’s like whack-a-mole: You get this problem solved and the solution accepted here, and then it pops up in a different location, in a different form.

CA: You’re going to a desert island, and you get to take one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you pick?

DS: Lemonade, bagels and lox and Camille Paglia. They’re gonna hate me for it, but I’m interested in what she has to say. Everyone hates Camille Paglia, but I don’t hate Camille Paglia. I’m interested in her outrageousness. I think she’d have really interesting things to say. Anyone else, I’d already have heard what they’d have to say, so she’d keep me entertained.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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