The more personal and vulnerable a writer is, the better, says Jane Pratt. Thisis the guiding ethos behind xoJane,the women's website she set upin 2011. It began with a post in whichPratt described going for a Brazilian wax, and overheard the receptionist saying she looked old. Thisleft her shaking, crying and calling close friend Courteney Cox for advice onwhether to have "emergency work" on her face. The launch also included a woman writing about monitoring her husband's masturbatory habits, and a post by the executive editor, Emily McCombs, entitled My Rapist Friended Me on Facebook (and All I Got Was This Lousy Article).
McCombs is an excellent writer, as are many of xoJane.com's staff and contributors, and the site often runs strong, political, opinionated pieces. But the general tone is set by those grabby headlines. Over the years they have included "I had pinworms in my vagin*", "My new addiction is completely hating myself all the time", and "I took the advice to call my father before it was too late, and he told me about how cocaine makes him horny".
XoJane has quickly established itself as one of the most notable examples of the galloping trend for confessional writing (a UK branch of the site began last year). In an age where so much personal information is shared via socialmedia, and revenues for journalism have plummeted, this form can attract enormous audiences and doesn't require expensive reporting. XoJane's freelance contributors are generally paid just $50 a post.
Confessional pieces are also innately controversial, often derided as the realm of the sad and self-obsessed. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan summed up one side of the argument earlier this year, in a much-shared post headlined "Journalism is not narcissism". He argued that first-person essays offer a "path that ends in hackdom" for aspiring journalists. "For those who own the publications, they're great," he wrote. "But for the writers themselves, they are a short-lived and ultimately demeaning game."
Pratt, 50, naturally disagrees. It's 25 years since she set up the alternative, much-loved US teen magazine Sassy, which closed in 1996 after she had left. In the very first issue she ran an "It Happened To Me" (IHTM) piece; a woman writing about having an abortion. She continued using the IHTMtag in her women's magazine, Jane, which ran from 1997-2007, and hascarried it into this latest project. She says she's always found it's the confessional pieces that really stand the test of time.
Pratt speaks to me by phone from New York, and her description of the site's offices makes it clear what appeals to her staff and 2.6 million monthly readers – it sounds like a constant party, with her as a cool big sister figure. Some of her staff are so devoted they even have "xo" tattoos. In the last series of Lena Dunham's Girls, Dunham's character met a website editor called "Jame" and asked what she should be writing about. "You could have a threesome with some people that you meet on Craigslist," came the answer, "or do a whole bunch of co*ke and then just write about it!" The Girls team denied this was based on Pratt, but it doesn't sound a massive stretch. She once convinced a colleague to snort bath salts, and tells me she's pretty disappointed she couldn't convince any of them to lick someone's eyeball, when this emerged as a Japanese trend.
Some of her writers have personal policies about not mentioning children or partners, but, beyond that, she likes them to go as far as possible. She cites a post by her deputy editor, Mandy Stadtmiller, as a good example. It followed a day in the xoJane offices in which "a bunch of us were going around saying 'What smells so bad?', trying to find the source, and see if there was a dead animal. And then she got home and realised she had gotten her period, and it smelled so bad, and she wrote about it, and I thought: that is brilliant. To be willing to put yourself out there, and make yourself that vulnerable." I ask if there's any subject she's turned down for being too disturbingly personal, and she says no. She's only felt compelled to edit pieces that strayed into p*rnography.
One of the site's most controversial figures was its erstwhile beauty editor, Cat Marnell, who wrote regularly about her drug use until last spring, when xoJane's publishers, Say Media, sent her to rehab. Not long afterwards, Marnell decided she'd rather spend the summer "smoking angel dust with my friends and writing a book", and left the site, soon landing a $500,000 publishing deal. She has described her former boss as an Andy Warhol figure. When I put this to Pratt, she asks: "Do you think she meant I'm an observer of people's behaviour, and someone who attracts a lot of interesting people?" If so, she decides, she loves it.
The Warhol reference was perhaps a nod to the unusual way Pratt staffs her projects, which is designed to maximise drama. She has eight full-time employees on xoJane – two more on beauty site xoVain – and thinks of it as casting "a reality show, or a soap opera". The writers and editors are characters, whose lives the readers follow closely. "I'm casting people I think the audience will love, or will love to hate," she says. At Sassy, she called her three star writers Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll.
Pratt has been accused of exploiting her writers' problems – especially Marnell's drug issues – for traffic, but shedenies this. She describes the struggle to help Marnell, and says she "actually felt showcasing her writing about what she was going through was helpful to other people". This idea is at the heart of the site. It features women writing about problems they're still experiencing – while at the same time celebrating them as fabulous, witty, successful human beings. It embraces the contradictions everyone experiences, within an arena that feels friendly and inclusive.
Some see women writing about their insecurities and vulnerabilities as anti-feminist, but Pratt, a feminist herself, believes "in order to get past anything you have to be open about it, and I think that to just present ourselves as though we don't have insecurities, and don't sometimes do things for the wrong reasons, is very, very alienating". (Notably, women get considerably more flak for writing personally than men.)
She has been accused of pushing writers past their natural boundaries, but says she's "very upfront, before they're hired, that they're expected to be open books". She's willing to put herself out there, too – the site regularly shows the contents of her phone, and she recently asked readers: "Should I bring my 10-year-old [daughter] to a sex shop?" (They weren't overwhelmingly keen.) She encourages people to try confessional writing and the positive feedback usually convinces them to continue, she says. This rings true. Journalists know such writing can prompt a big, potentially enticing response. But how long before you start creating drama for the sake of it? And how will you feel when you stop?
Curriculum vitae
Age 50
Education Oberlin College (BA communications, with a minor in modern dance)
Career 1988 founds Sassy magazine, aged 24 1997 launches Jane magazine, for 18- to 34-year-old women 2007 starts weekly radio show, Jane Radio, on satellite station Sirius 2011 founds xoJane.com
