The Best Ever Girlie Mags

by Alexandra Molotkow

I read a lot of girls’ and women’s magazines growing up, and my favorite — well, my favorite was BUST, because it was both juicy and useful and I remember getting The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order for Christmas in grade 8, and while over the years it got waterlogged and illegible, I will always remember most of it, including a personal essay on receiving accidental oral sex from a dog, which is not representative of the kinds of essays featured in the book, but I will always remember it just the same. BUST is responsible for the cat’s-eye glasses I wore for nearly a decade, but I’m still grateful to have had it in my life.

BUST was a world removed from mine, though — the editors were adult women who lived adult lives in New York City, whereas I was a junior high school student in Toronto. I was starting to make friends online, but back then your IRL friends took precedent, and the closest we ever got to discussing masturbation was in the caf one lunch hour, when someone said how disgusting it was that people masturbate. I said, “Well… I would never do that, but I wouldn’t judge if someone else did,” and my friend “Rebecca” said “Yeah, I would never do that either, but it’s maybe OK if other people do,” to which our friend “Teresa” replied, “Masturbation is disgusting, people who masturbate are disgusting,” and that was that. Mostly we talked about cats and the computer game Myst.

So I’m particularly grateful for Reluctant Hero, a zine launched in 1997 by Sharlene Azam, a 26-year-old Torontonian who funded the first issue with her own savings. My mom bought me copies from Another Story, the feminist bookshop near our doctor’s office. It resembled a grocery store flyer (“the Globe and Mail compared the look to Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness publication,” wrote Winnipeg feminist magazine Herizons), and it only came out a few times a year. But I remember feeling very not alone every time I perused a new issue. Herizons wrote:

A spunky layout and intelligent content are both signs that Reluctant Hero fits a niche that’s nifty and nineties. But is it feminist? Since feminist isn’t a label widely used by teen girls, no. But Reluctant Hero’s mission is to see their abilities, interests and curiosities treated respectfully in a magazine forum. Sports excellence, sexual harassment and issues like bulimia fill the pages, but there are no victims here.

Azam was editor, but the magazine was written by dozens of teen girls across Canada. The Ryerson Review of Journalism described a story meeting as like “a rowdy pyjama party — minus the nightgowns and slippers,” with teens rifling scornfully through Seventeen and YM:

Its covers show confident young women in provocative poses that other teen magazines wouldn’t touch. The current issue features a teenage girl pretending to perform fellatio, with the coverline “What Your Sex-Ed Course Should Teach You.” A previous issue’s “covergirl” winks, unabashedly displaying her unshaven armpit.

…“At the Time of My Latest Arrest” was written by former street kid Christine Andrews. She was introduced to life on the streets when she left home to escape sexual abuse at the age of 12. “The days I spent high turned into nights. I started dealing crack and cocaine to junkies or ‘crackheads’ as we called them on the street, and the money started to roll in, increasing all the time….I was hooked on the freedom of the streets, which, even without the drugs, is addictive.” Numerous arrests for robbery, assault and selling drugs finally convinced Christine that her life was self-destructive. She got off the street, but even as she supports herself with full-time work, she says, “I still feel the urge to work in prostitution and indulge in other criminal activity.” Reluctant Hero never forces its stories to end on a happy note.

So much has changed since then, obviously, in fact it’s hard to imagine a world in which teenage girls with questions needed a magazine just to find each other. Now we’re used to a handful of excellent magazines for teens: Rookie, of course, and Shameless in Canada. But the idea was still novel back then, and the cheap presentation and scattershot editorial approach seemed appropriate; the fact that it existed made up the rest. “It is definitely not as superficial as those YMs and Bops,” wrote 14-year-old Monica, in a review. “It’s truly a great magazine. The editor doesn’t try and talk like teens… I like that the magazine is so real. It’s a Canadian magazine. I’m really proud of it.”

In 2001, Sharlene Azam published an essay collection called Rebel, Rogue, Mischievous Babe: Stories About Being a Powerful Girl. In 2009, she published a book called Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss: The Sexual Bullying of Girls with an accompanying documentary. The book is described as a “wake up call for parents” which examines “the recent emergence of teenage prostitution in affluent Canadian suburbs.” I don’t know what to say!