Chickclick
By Sara Brenneis
Once upon a time, a girl's sole source of girlish glee was the stacks of magazines filling her mailbox: Teen Beat, Bop, Seventeen. And, for Mom's daily dose of femininity, there was Good Housekeeping, Parents, Woman's Day. Those days are gone. In fact, the girls and women are gone, too, replaced by grrls, gyrls, wimmin and womyn.
These fresh culturally-anarchist rumblings from modern females surface in the new crop of post-feminist-era zines. If you're looking for it on the SAT:
zine is to magazine as grrl is to girl.
The slick paper-based magazines of yore still exist for hardcore teenyboppers, but for alternative teens — not to mention housewives, moms, young girls and old ladies — the insurgence of cheap, fast and easy publishing on the web has spawned internet-based zines galore (some born from their paper-based cousins), from Wench to Smile and Act Nice, from Bust to Hipmama. Admittedly, just about everyone can find a zine on the web to suit their tastes and interests, but the grrl zine revolution is especially prominent, and busty, and grrlish.
By far the best jumping-off point for surfing through these new media gems (and the inevitable crap) is Chickclick. Chickclick is a community of female-oriented zines, nicely listed and linked to, with excerpts of the best, or worst, as the case may be. As with many flashy websites these days, Chickclick borders on the gimmicky: offering free email addresses, letting you set Chickclick as your homepage, doling out your horoscope whether you like it or not and subjecting you to sometimes-dizzying eye candy graphics.
Chickclick provides a service, however, that should not be ignored. Back in the day when you could only find the paper-based Bust at a progressive bookstore, the kind that crumble and die under the weight of Barnes and Noble, or only order Hip Mama by calling a scratchy 1-800 number and hoping your check didn't get lost in the mail, these alternative zines were read, but read by relatively few. Many of the zines on Chickclick, normally buried on the back shelf of a web search, are prominently displayed and more accessible than ever. Now that the web has snatched them up, not only are entire high school volleyball teams reading them, but your grandmother in Boise could be reading them, too!
And reading them is a trip. Either a trip back to the boy-crazy, romance-column obsessed media that refuses to die, or a trip into the future of alternative parenting, self-image boosting and mainstream-overturning media that seems to breed exponentially these days. Rebecca Vesely, editorial director of Chickclick, boils its mission down to presenting readers with the "real deal," using the motto: "Girl sites that don't fake it," whatever it happens to be at the moment.
While the big boys — MTV and Rolling Stone come to mind — laud female-oriented events like Lilith Fair, zines like Hissyfit take them at face value. Recent article: "Sit down, Sarah! You're blocking the show! Lilith Fair is a great place to get a henna tattoo. Oh yeah, and there's music or something." Or: "Rapestock '99," an article about the sexual assaults at Woodstock '99 that links to a father's poignant plea on the Woodstock website for information about his daughter's rapist. Many of these zines have no qualms about scathing reviews of otherwise-idolized music, movies, public figures or conventional practices because they're not pandering to an audience, trying to sell records, household cleaning products or makeup. Chickclick itself has chosen to bide its time before selling out to demographics-hungry advertisers like Amazon.com or Ticketmaster. Vesely explains this choice saying: "Ultimately, Chickclick is a community, and we want to maintain that integrity." Chickclick's zines have proven themselves honest in the most stripped-down sense of the word.
And that honesty can, indeed, breed schlock. At times these zines just shovel more of the same teenybopper fan worship and love-stricken advice-seeking crap that is a familiar sight in the magazines they peg as the antichrist.
Case #1: Dawson's Wrap, a zine included for no apparent gain on the Chickclick roster. Dawson's Wrap just blathers on about TV's hunks and cutie pies on "Dawson's Creek." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it seems out of place on Chickclick.
Case #2: Vacuous Discussion Boards. Just about all of these zines have neat little topics that Jane, Jill, and Josephine can chat away about. But the insightful to inane ratio is startlingly low, as manifested in postings like "Unpopular christianity: Is christianity out? Raimi wonders," on Razzberry or "homework...does it really make a difference?" on EstroTeen.
Case #3: Too much advice. Breakupgirl posts a daily activities calendar for the uninspired (or unemployed?), and reminds readers that Wednesday is the last day of the week to get a date (Everyone roll your eyes in unison, now.). A fair number of the zines on Chickclick include advice columns, some of which are somewhat progressive, while others do nothing to advance the genre: there are only so many times the answer to "What the heck is up with guys?" can provide new information.
All this nonsense aside, Chickclick and its zines merit a surf-through. Invariably, there's something for everyone. Just reading Courtney Love's unsolicited and unspellchecked rants is worth turning on the computer, if nothing more. While Chickclick single-handedly demonstrates a gluttonous market for grrl zines, it also celebrates a freedom of expression unseen five years ago. If all these zines were dependent on advertising and corporate publishing dollars you can bet they'd never reach your hungry eyes.
Rebecca Vesely asserts that Chickclick's audience "all want the real deal. They want space to connect with one another, and want to read stories by young women that speak to them. They don't want to be talked down to, and we try to keep it real." Real, of course, is for better or for worse.
In the end, lucky for us, cyberfeminism is alive, growling and well worth exploring. We here at Flak have taken the time to run through a few of the sisterly zines from Chickclick:
E-mail Sara J. Brenneis at sara at flakmag dot com.
