Here's what I can't figure out: How, previous to Bust, did we hold ourselves back from storming into the offices of Allure, Cosmo, and Young and Modern, clutching machetes and torches, strong bare hands reaching for long, elegant, corporate necks, muttering, howling, "Goddammit, you traitorous bitches, when are you going to show us what real women look like? When are you going to print what real women think?"

This is not to say that just because mob violence is no longer imminent, Bust has made the world a safer place for vacuous women's magazines. If the editors and business managers at the glossies have a clue, they've been watching Bust's circulation climb from 1,000 in 1993 to 12,000 in 1996, and they're peeing in their Conde Nast pants. Shaking in their Manolo Blahniks. Or else they're trying to think of a way to imitate it.

Bust exists because Debbie Stoller, Marcelle Karp, and Laurie Henzel (a.k.a. editors/publishers Celina Hex and Betty Boob, and art director Areola, respectively) were sick of reading articles about how to lose weight so you can get a man, how to lose weight so you can keep a man, and how to apply lip pencil. They were frustrated that the only publication that spoke to their experience and appealed to their feminist mind-set — and made them laugh — was Sassy, which, for all it once was, was never geared towards women in their twenties and older.

So they started their own rag, and filled it with hilarious and honest essays about men, women, childhood, motherhood, body images, feminism, hot sex, bad sex, relationships (both sexual and non-sexual), masturbation, celibacy, and — my personal favorite, from issue six — a manifesto declaring female reclamation of the word cunt. These chicks are just too cool.

Bust is fierce but not strident, unimpeachable but not too serious. It has created a space in the media where women can feel safe being polemical or horny, or even polemically horny. There's room for radical politics AND mash notes to Keanu Reeves. And there's room for the Y-chromosome, too; boys have written a few articles, and judging from the letters section, they're reading Bust and they're coming away edified. That's a comforting thought.

What Bust is not, thank heavens, is cynical. It's savvy and hyper-critical, for sure, particularly of mainstream media, but its agenda does not include ironic detachment. Irony implies a certain amount of pessimism; the forces of evil are too strong, so the only possible act of dissent is participatory smart-assery. Bust, on the other hand, is genuinely out to fuck shit up, in a positive sense. They want to rock your world, to get your knickers in a twist. And they'll do so by balancing harsh and silly, shocking and sisterly, bitter and optimistic.

In other words, Bust is succeeding on its own terms, and will continue to grow at an astounding rate by being just like all the real women you know.

Now isn't THAT ironic, don'tcha think?

How Bust Began "It was as though women had forgotten about feminism between the '70s and late '80s, just because there was nothing in the media to represent it." more...

How Bust Grew "I'm sure that we're going to get some kind of response from people who have been reading since the beginning: 'You're too big now.'" more...

What Kind of Feminism is Bust? "It's not anti-feminist, but more the evolution of the ideology. Seventies feminism seems real quaint to us, but that's just with the perspective of time." more...

How Big Can Bust Get? "We got a business plan up our butts!" more...

Check out Bust's Web site at www.bust.com. You can subscribe to the print version at the Web site, or by Writing to:

BUST
PO Box 319, Ansonia Station
New York NY 10023
[email protected]

(subscriptions are $14.00)

Marni Davis is a graduate student at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New York Press, Bust and Tripod's Tools for Life magazine.

© 1996 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.