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There’s a scene from The Virgin Suicides (the movie, not the book, with all due respect to Jeffrey Eugenides) that I think about a lot—probably too much. In it, teenage depressive Cecilia Lisbon attempts suicide and is rushed to the hospital, where a well-meaning doctor asks her what she’s doing there, telling her she’s “not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Cecilia fixes him with a look, haughty even from her hospital bed, and replies: “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”
I first read The Virgin Suicides as a 13-year-old myself, and while my privileged New York City upbringing was nothing like Cecilia’s oppressively strict suburban one, I still connected with her pain. Not only with the horror of actually being a teenage girl, but also with the quiet embarrassment of being told that there was nothing worthy or unique in your suffering; nothing that hadn’t happened before or that wasn’t likely to happen again once you’d left middle school. It was that same year that I found myself spending more and more time on the computer after my eighth-grade friend group ditched me (ah, female adolescence). Eventually, one Tumblr rabbit hole or another brought me to Jezebel.
As an awkward, lonely, mouthy eighth grader, I was certain that I had stumbled across a little corner of heaven. Who cared if my friends didn’t like me anymore, or if my other classmates had zero interest in my passions (a.k.a. rewatching all of Buffy on a loop and dissecting Susan J. Douglas’s 1994 book Where the Girls are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media), or if even my teachers thought I was weird? Here, at last, were the people who’d also read Douglas and wanted to discuss the Tara-Willow relationship, the people who railed against the sexist undertones of yogurt commercials, the people who couldn’t wrap their heads around all the ways—large and small—that women were made to feel unwelcome or unsafe in a man’s world.
None of these things were considered cool or even acceptable to care about at school, but the legendary Jezebel comments section introduced me to a whole world of intellectual debate in which my chief weakness—being 13 years old—was easy to obscure with some big-ticket SAT words and an avatar of Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous. I was ardent enough in my beliefs to actually receive some responses, and when I checked my laptop between classes, I was heartened to see an outpouring of messages. Some pointed out the flaws in my arguments (fair enough, given that I was secretly a literal child), but many agreed with me, offered encouragement about whatever remnant of institutional sexism I was exercised about, or gently shared perspectives I hadn’t considered. I was still friendless at school, but online, I was starting to be someone—or at least I felt like I was. On Jezebel, feminism wasn’t some musty holdover from my mother’s generation; it was raw, and vital, and user-friendly, and *urgent—*and I wanted to read every article, comment on everything, work there the second I was old enough, and never, ever let another douchebag classmate or sexist PE teacher chip away at the confidence that only really entered my life when I began to spend time on the site.
Jezebel is 16 years old now, and it’s survived numerous sales, restructurings, and the input of far too many white men in suits with no clue on how to effectively run the most intelligent women’s media site on the internet, but its time was always coming. Indeed, on Thursday, November 8, Jezebel’s remaining 7 editorial staffers were unceremoniously laid off after its parent company, G/O media, failed to find a buyer. I can’t count the number of current and former Jezebel writers whose expertly expressed opinions have broadened my mind and changed my life, from Moe Tkacik to Ashley Reese to Kylie Cheung. Each new incarnation of Jezebel has come with its own parade of takes, hot and cold and everything in between, but its writers—its workers—have always been the heart and soul of the operation, and my own heart breaks to know that they’ll now be forced to navigate the treacherous waters of the freelance digital-media economy.
Looking back, I can see that it was the staff and commenters of Jezebel who encouraged me to find my voice as a feminist, a writer, and a human being. It was through Jezebel that I learned to educate myself, to clearly define my opinions, and to win an internet fight (not that hard, TBH, as long as you have endless hours to devote to the project). I know it’s not 2008 anymore—thank God, because I didn’t really ever figure out how to apply bronzer—and I know that in 2023, there are new places online for young, weird, lonely feminists like the one I was in eighth grade to convene and discuss everything from abortion care to Olivia Rodrigo tickets. Still, I’m sad that there will be no future generations of middle school misfits (or adults, for that matter) finding each other and themselves on the Jezebel comment boards. They—and the site’s staffers—deserved so much better.
