From the Editor: All good things must come to an end, by Nikko Snyder
(Editorial, originally published in good girl magazine No. 6, Summer/Fall 2004.)
Well, this is it. This marks the end of good girl as we’ve come to know her. After six issues, tears shed, friends and lovers won and lost, and a whole whack of cash down the drain, we’ve finally decided to let the girl go. But not without first publishing a last, long overdue issue - one that just might be our strongest yet. So Manias goes out to all the good girls and boys who have read, written for, subscribed to, supported and challenged good girl over the past three and a half years (particularly those that didn’t contact the Better Business Bureau!).
There’s no point denying that it’s been a rough year. At the time the last issue of good girl was published (almost one year ago to the day), I was working full-time, preparing to submit my master’s thesis, trying to keep my relationship alive across the Atlantic ...oh, yeah, and publishing good girl. Twelve months later, I’m still recovering. I wish I could tell you what three years of pouring tears, sweat and savings into the black hole that is Canadian feminist magazine publishing has earned me (I mean,aside from crippling debt, 15 extra pounds and slightly more battered than average self-esteem), but to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure. Some days I feel like a hero, others a martyr, and still others a fool. All that I really feel certain of is that, as hard as it’s been, it’s important for me to send good girl off in a way that I’ll be able to look back at and say, yeah, it was worth it. Worth it to reach out to as many people as we could,screw up as many times as we did, and learn as much as we have. That is what this issue is for.
It also feels important to leave you, dear readers,with an honest picture of good girl’s importance, struggles and ending. So heed fair warning! My intent is not to make excuses, depress or inspire you, or lecture you on feminism or magazine publishing. This is a story still in progress, with no neat and tidy resolution. The following is a messy, painful yet hopeful historical account of what has been a messy, painful yet hopeful project: good girl magazine (2001-2004).
Why did I start good girl in the first place? It was simple, not to mention self-serving. I was searching for something that I felt represented me (me being female, feminist, Canadian and young - only 23 at the time!), and when I couldn’t find it, I undertook to create it. I was naïve, unprepared and naïve (did I mention naïve?), and I’ve since often berated myself for my brazen feminist folly. On the other hand, many of my original instincts,which at the beginning weren't’t well thought through or even conscious, have managed to stick around. good girl has always been about trying to create an environment where multiple voices communicate across difference - not to come up with answers or judge “good” vs. “bad.” This kind of space is rare in a culture where the mainstream media has few qualms simply telling us how we’re not good enough, not feminine enough, or not feminist enough.
At the end of the day, my hope is that others will be able to learn from good girl’s sweet successes and spectacular screw ups to continue building similar spaces. But it’s not enough for such spaces to simply exist (if a feminist magazine falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it even make a sound?). From the very beginning I knew that my goal for good girl was that she be big enough to make a difference - to sit proudly next to Cosmo on the newsstand and offer a subversive yet widely accessible alternative to the mainstream media.
Not being prepared or organized enough for this ambitious vision was ultimately what bit me in the ass, but if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t plan small. The problem is, it takes big money to publish a big magazine. For a long time I clung to the idea that if I invested my own savings for long enough good girl would take off financially. Unfortunately, the reality is that’s just not how magazines work, big or small, good or bad, mainstream or alternative. The bottom line was that good girl is a business, and to make the project fly required a Business Plan.
It took two full years of avoiding any and all number crunching before I could actually accept this. It wasn’t until midway through my master’s degree that my advisor suggested I make my project a feminist Business Plan for good girl, based on both my theoretical vision and the reality of the situation. I knew I couldn’t float the mag indefinitely, and my credit card was maxed. So I finally decided to bite the bullet.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the idea of “feminist business” is a contentious one. Instinctively, I had always wanted good girl to be a self-sustaining, profitable enterprise, and though I couldn't articulate why, something in my gut railed against the perception of social justice as charity and the common judgment that feminist work that operates within a “for-profit” structure is somehow “not feminist enough.” In my mind, feminist business was nothing short of a necessity. If feminism can’t exist and thrive in the real world along with racism and fundamentalism (which seem to be doing just fine), what good is it?
Of course, trying to reconcile these lofty ideas with the realities of trying to run a functional, sustainable and healthy feminist magazine was another story altogether. One volunteer stopped contributing to good girl because she felt I was exploiting unpaid labour to “get my business off the ground.” Another acquaintance called me a Capitalist when I told her I wanted good girl to be a sustainable, independent business. I couldn’t seem to please anyone, including myself!
The irony is that good girl never made a dime, which apparently makes me a Bad Feminist Wanda Bad Capitalist. So why on earth, you might ask, would I persist with this crazy notion of feminist business? On bad days I do wonder if I’m nothing more than a Sell-Out Capitalist Pig, not to mention a Failure, since the whole thing’s stopping anyway. But on my good days (and there are a few) I can see that the process of envisioning and planning my own feminist business has crystallized my values in a way that is stronger and more grounded than ever.
For me, “for-profit” has little to do with actual profit. Instead, a for-profit good girl means an independent,self-sustainable good girl not at the whim of fickle government support. (I break into cold sweats just thinking about the number of magazines that will simply collapse if and when the federal Department of Canadian Heritage axes its Canada Magazine Fund.) Unlike much of the socially responsible work going on out there, where committed people struggle against the burnout that inevitably comes from working too long with too few resources, my vision for a profitable good girl involves having enough resources to not only survive, but also thrive and grow. This means giving people what they’re worth: a living wage at an industry standard,in a healthy work environment. It also involves creating a high quality product and having enough resources available to invest towards the long term viability of the project, other worthwhile causes and the greater community - not just the bare minimum required to scrape by.
You probably get the point without me beating you over the head with a manifesto on my utopian ideas about feminist business. In short, there are a bunch of good reasons for a profitable good girl, none of which can easily be lumped together with Exploitative Capitalism, and all of which push the boundaries of traditional business.
Unfortunately, even after grounding my ideas in some solid research, the practical realities of creating a feminist business remained incongruous with any idealistic or academic theory. Even the big American feminist mags have tiny paid staffs, rely heavily on unpaid interns and rarely pay their writers much, if anything. Most of them operate as charitable organizations, and those that don’t have a helluva time raising the kind of advertising dollars needed to float and grow a magazine. These realities came into harsh focus as I started working on good girl’s Business Plan in earnest. Now, don’t be scared of the numbers that are coming - this is the part of magazine business planning that gets really interesting. In my first round of number crunching the good news was: if good girl got the maximum annual Canada Magazine Fund grant of $40,000 and didn’t have any paid staff, the best-case scenario over five years was a cumulative loss of around $100,000. Yep, you counted the zeros right. But wait! The bad news was that after five years of working for free only to find myself a hundred grand in debt, good girl would reach a circulation of only 2,000 readers per issue.
In case there is any question, this first round of financial planning left something to be desired. So in the next round I took a somewhat different approach, treating good girl like a real business that needed investors to get off the ground, and profit to pay them back with. After several more rounds of acrobatic, imaginative number crunching, I finally managed to squeeze a salary for myself and one other staff person into a scenario that saw the magazine break even and reach a circulation of around 25,000 in about five to seven years. It might seem like a modest accomplishment, and verging on the fantastical, as it required an initial investment of around $330,000. But to me it felt like I was finally starting to see my feminist business dream come true. Hallelujah! Maybe it was possible to be a good feminist and businesswoman after all.
Making it to my master’s defence last fall with these optimistic figures and utopian vision was nothing short of Herculean. I was so physically and emotionally exhausted from the combined total of everything in my life that it didn’t even occur to me to be nervous. In fact, I was feeling downright cheeky, showing up with my project in a shiny, bright pink folder under my arm. (If I was going to be judged a Bad Feminist, I was going down in style, dammit!) My attitude was simple: I had literally paid these people thousands of dollars to act interested in what I was going to say for the next two hours, so I was going to go for it!
It hadn’t quite occurred to me that my panel might actually be interested, at least not in the numbers. So after espousing (at length) the importance of good girl being able to pay its staff a living wage as one of my core feminist values, I was stunned when a wizened feminist prof on my panel broached the subject of my financial plan (1). “You might be surprised,” she said, “to hear that I looked at your numbers line by line.” Then she asked me, point blank, whether the $20,000 per year I’d allotted myself in good girl’s best-case scenario was in fact a living wage. I stared at her, and then replied “no.”
That moment is etched in my mind. All my many months of trying to realize a mythical balance between social responsibility and financial sustainability culminated in this single moment of harsh truth. In that instant I understood that I had sacrificed my own well-being by not applying my so-called feminist values to my own life. good girl’s aim was to create a non-judgmental space for multiple feminist voices, but somehow I’d managed to create a very judgmental space for myself. In an attempt to disassemble assumptions about what “counts”as good feminism, I ended up snaring myself in my own Bad Feminist trap.
I walked away from my defence feeling a curious combination of resignation, glee, sadness and relief, and it was then that I began to make the decision to let good girl go. I knew that I had given all I had to give, but I wasn’t quite ready to accept the possibility that it was time for good girl to end. And so I waited. I slept and I watched TV. I took a solo road trip from Vancouver to Winnipeg, resting on the prairies and remembering where I come from. When I came back I half-heartedly started making inquiries about how to shut down a magazine. When people didn’t respond, I put off doing anything. Time passed, but it was like I didn’t know it was passing.
And so we find ourselves here. My exhaustion is one that inhabits my brain and body and spirit. I’ve given so much to this project, but in the end I’m left dreading the next subscriber who emails, understandably irritated by the delays and demanding a refund. Feeling like a Bad Feminist, Bad Capitalist and Bad Pretty Much Everything Else has made me so tired.
Yet inexplicably, my resolve to prove that Feminism is Not a Charity persists. It may be nothing more than further feminist folly, but for whatever reason this particular value has crystallized into something that I can’t put aside. Making the decision to let good girl go hasn't been an easy process on any level - logistical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. But I’ve begun to understand that the feminism I envision is not one where I have to sacrifice personal health and well-being (and yes, a living wage) for a cause that could give two shits as to whether I’m left standing at the end. My ambition and my feminism are bigger than that, and ultimately, hanging on to that vision is worth giving this magazine up for.
Accepting this has left me without illusion, but curiously optimistic. Ultimately, the feminism I have discovered is neither good nor bad, but rather a wondrously heterogeneous mess, represented by magical people and moments. Like good girl’s first-ever subscriber, whose order was blown clear out of his hand and into oblivion by a blustery Saskatoon wind before he could mail it; or the gifted, polyamorous ex-pat who found us all the way from South Korea, and whose work was some of the most moving we’ve ever published; or four girl break-dancers kicking it at the only good girl fundraiser ever to turn a profit; or twelve squealing girls trying to find each other in cyberspace, lost in transit to good girl’s first online board meeting; or two editors scarfing Butter Chicken and dreaming good girl large and in 3D. This magic (like that of the manic pearls on page 6 of this issue) has appeared in the most unlikely places,and its unexpected and often fleeting nature has made it even more extraordinary. Some people just seem to get this magazine, and you’ve supported it through everything because you believe that as messy and confusing as it’s been, good girl is also something real, rare and very, very special. So thank you for that. It gives me all the faith I need to know that someday soon I will look back and truly understand that good girl was one of the coolest, most important things I’ve been a part of.
1 In the 70s, this particular prof was involved with starting a Canadian feminist magazine that is still around (Women and Environments).