In planning the new blog Jezebel, managing editor Anna Holmes says, the site had to come up with a motto.
Various losing candidates were kicked to the curb, then Holmes, in a meeting, offered, “It’s like we’re presenting information without airbrushing.”
And presto. So was born not only the blog’s slogan — “Sex. Celebrities. Fashion. Without airbrushing” — but also the unretouched celebrity photo contest that brought the Gawker Media property its first widespread notice (see adjacent item).
The touching up of Faith Hill for Redbook — including the removal of crow’s feet and a tiny bit of surplus flesh on her back and arms — demonstrates how out of touch women’s magazines are, contends Holmes, a 34-year-old New Yorker who worked, most recently, at InStyle.
“I was happy when I saw the photo, because, I was like, ‘Ooh, we got them. She looks so normal,'” says Holmes. “Then I got angry because she looks so normal, and the magazine itself is read by women more mature than the readers of Cosmo.”
For the contest, some other unretouched photos came in, Holmes says, including one of a bigger-name celebrity than Hill. But the Hill image was perfect for Jezebel’s purposes, because you see what was done to the whole body “of a beautiful woman who is not 25 and starving herself.”
Being an antidote to women’s magazines is one of the mantras of Jezebel, she says: “We don’t want to present the things a lot of women are into looking at as being completely stupid. We like looking at clothes too, and celebrities. But a lot of women I come across, the only time they read anything is when they read Us Weekly.
“I like to think we’re planting a little seed, so that maybe people will think about this stuff a little more critically — so that they won’t wholeheartedly embrace the idea of a $2,000 lizard handbag. They won’t wholeheartedly embrace the idea of an airbrushed magazine cover.”
Beyond that, the Jezebel writers — including three other journalists, all women in their 20s or 30s — have one guiding rule: “We think women are taught to hate themselves at a very young age,” Holmes says. “So we don’t say misogynist things about women’s weight.”
The recipe, in the end, is pretty simple, she says: “We want to do the kinds of things I wish I could have written when I wrote for Glamour way back when.”
