Subject: Sexual Candor Marks Magazine For Teen Girls
Date: Published: 2/17/88 103 lines
Source:  WALL STREET JOURNAL. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

   Sexual Candor
   Marks Magazine
   For Teen Girls
    ---
   By Cynthia Crossen
   Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

   "Losing Your Virginity -- Read This Before You Decide,"
trumpets a headline in Sassy, a new magazine for teen-age
girls due on newsstands this week.  Also in the first issue:  a
full-page advertisement for condoms.  "They're easy to buy -- 
you'll find them in any drugstore, usually on a display
rack," says the ad.
   While other teen magazines have recognized that girls have
sexual relationships, none has approached the subject as
brashly as Sassy intends to.  A slick monthly published by
Australia-based John Fairfax Ltd., Sassy has grabbed the
attention of readers and advertisers with well-publicized
plans to include material competitors call offensive and
exploitative.
   Sassy's arrival comes amid sharpening competition for the
relatively small number of teen-age readers.  In addition to
Seventeen, Teen, YM, Mademoiselle and Sassy, yet another
magazine for teens, Model, is scheduled to be launched this
summer.  Meanwhile, the number of teen-age girls in the U. S. 
has been slowly declining over the past several years to
about 12 million, although that number will start rising
again in a few years.
   At the same time, teen magazines have traditionally had to
struggle for advertising revenue.  Liquor and tobacco
advertising is strictly prohibited, and the magazines
occasionally reject other ads they consider too risque.
Moreover, some large, mainstream advertisers -- including
soft drink, electronics and food companies -- prefer to use
television to reach teens.
   Other teen magazines, however, say their objections to
Sassy have less to do with added competition than with the
subtler matter of taste.  "I don't think that feature is
responsible," says Robert Brown, associate publisher of Teen,
referring to the loss-of-virginity article.  "I think it's
offensive."
   Sassy's forthright approach to sex may shock some girls
into buying the magazine, but that isn't the intent, explains
its president, Sandra Yates.  She says articles like the one
about virginity were researched intensively in focus groups
("We hunted down some of the most burning questions -- you
know, the ones that make even Madonna blush," the magazine
tells readers).  "The teens," Ms. Yates notes, "said their
parents would be happy for them to be getting that
information and glad they wouldn't have to do it themselves."
   Even before Sassy, teen magazines had begun to recognize
that teens were no longer "sweet Sandra Dee types," as Sarah
Crichton, editor of Seventeen, the somewhat sedate leader of
the field, puts it.  The magazines have published stories
about incest, AIDS, birth control, suicide, drugs and child
abuse.
   But teen magazines run articles about sex at the risk of
being barred from homes and school libraries.  "When it comes
to teen-age sexuality, this is still quite a puritanical
country," Ms. Crichton says.  "But for many kids in this
country, we become the sole source of sex education.  So we
try to keep articles very balanced -- and yes, there's a
moral underpinning."
   Sassy's candor creates a bizarre juxtaposition with the
kinds of stories teen magazines have always published.  For
example, future issues of Sassy will feature articles about a
19-year-old who died of AIDS and about a Florida girl who
committed suicide because her mother forced her to be a
stripper.  But they will also explore such classic teen
quandaries as whether friends are talking about you behind
your back and whether "he" really loves you.
   Sassy's decision to become the first teen magazine to run
a condom ad has also drawn fire from other teen magazines,
who see it as an implied endorsement of premarital sex.  "It's
wrong," says Milt Franks, YM's publisher.  "We're not saying
kids don't have sex.  But kids drink and we don't carry beer
ads, and kids get pregnant and we don't carry maternity ads."
Ms. Yates says rejecting condom ads while hundreds of
thousands of teens get pregnant every year would be
irresponsible.  "There's no research anywhere suggesting that
giving teen-agers information about sex leads them to
experimenting any earlier," she asserts.  "It just saves them
from a one-way ticket to poverty."
   Helen Barr, Sassy's publisher, adds that there are many
ads the magazine would refuse on moral grounds.  As an
example, she points to an ad in Seventeen for Oggi shampoo
that shows a nude woman whose long hair covers some -- but
far from all -- of her body.  "It's seductive, and it has a
wickedness about it," Ms. Barr says.
   Ms. Barr says she also would have refused ads for Calvin
Klein's Obsession perfume and the No Excuses jeans ads
starring Donna Rice.  "There are things," she says, "we don't
think are right."

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