Jane was the first magazine I ever really liked. The writers taught me what "Urban Decay" and "zine" and "Pavement" and "backwards cowgirl" meant, and they made me want to be a magazine editor from ages thirteen to eighteen. My friends used to make fun of me for talking about the columnists like I knew them (the way some people creepily refer to celebrities by their first names).

Jane is folding because of financial reasons, but mostly because they failed at being an empowering feminist periodical. (Periodical, amirite?) In retrospect, they didn't make me a feminist, they just made me buy stuff. This Zooey Deschanel/Great Skin cover doesn't even pretend to empower women. The only difference between Jane and Marie Claire is font and a non-facetious use of "scene" as an adjective. Jane ending is some sort of metaphor for my quest to become a self-owned woman but I'm not sure quite what.


Here's a New York Times article about the folding of Jane, and and Bitch Magazine's Ten Things To Hate About Jane. I wish there was an articulate defense, because I usually believe most arguments, and it'd be nice to love a woman's magazine wholeheartedly again.