It’s news to no-one that the journalism industry has been devastated—partially because the people who would report that news are also the ones who experienced it. I was reminded of this while vaping over an informal reunion brunch with a handful of former-colleague girlfriends who have all moved on to a variety of post-reporter second-acts ranging from management to podcasting to lawyering to at-home-momming. The other thing I was reminded of over my bowl of asparagus, basmati rice and organic almonds was how incredibly horny we all were back then.
We were all reminded of brunches past—as well as late-night colloquys held in bars, diners and studio apartments where we breathlessly went on and on about this or that boy that we were desperate to “interview”. This was culture journalism, so these boys were hip young artists, underground musicians, up-and-coming actors, fashion designers, skaters, and graffiti writers. We wanted to meet them, we wanted to do drugs with them, we wanted them to take us to parties and show up to parties with them. We very often wanted to fuck them. But first, we wanted to know more about them—so we convinced editors at Vice, The Village Voice, I-D, Paper, Esquire, and Buzzfeed that readers wanted to know more about them, too. And enough of them were enough like us (young, well-educated, a little disaffected with the mainstream, and dying to be cool) that it worked.
We interviewed girls, too, ones we admired or wanted to be. However, despite being firmly bisexual, it never occurred to me back then to do a story on a woman in order to get in her pants. Interviewing women seemed to be part of a different and perhaps purer aspiration, the real work of telling stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told. Boys though—there were so many boys we just wanted to be near. Some of them so much so that they were scared of us.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but when we talk about what happened to the fourth estate in the last two decades we’re not just lamenting the death of truth investigation and alternative culture, we are also lamenting an industry built on the backs of 20something brunettes from Bard, NYU and Sarah Lawrence who got paid to run all over New York, London and LA deciding what was cool by deciding whose lap we wanted to sit on next.
PHOTO: Lynn Yaeger, fashion journalist, by D_M_D