On November 9, 2023, Jezebel.com shut down. Its abrupt closure left a frozen homepage with an above-the-fold article railing against the trailer for the Mean Girls musical. The article is the perfect encapsulation of Jezebel’s particular spirit—a je-ne-sais-quoi that brought it to soaring heights in the mid-aughts and kept it on top (or at least near it) until 2016, when Gawker Media, the site’s parent company, was bankrupted in a lawsuit funded by the Bond villain-esque Peter Thiel.
Post-lawsuit, the website suffered through multiple sales with diminishing returns. The relatively straightforward arts review site Paste Magazine has announced its intention to relaunch the Jezebel brand, despite Paste’s lack of feminist and political coverage. Time will tell what that means. But Jezebel didn’t just suffer under the media industry’s unrelenting precarity. It suffered from changing times. Its signature voice went from cultural vanguard to out-of-step.
The swansong thinkpiece about a hit film that became a hit Broadway musical that became another film is a useful eulogy for a site that promised a feminist perspective on everything from media to politics to gossip about starlets. The thinkpiece’s main targets are title cards that read: “This Isn’t Your Mother’s Mean Girls.” The phrase this isn’t your mother’s is a hackneyed bit of marketing copy that’s been slapped onto jewelry, a range of haircare products, and banana pudding. But the Jezebel writer interpreted the lazy marketing as serious (and potentially ageist) slander against millennials, stating: “For me to have a child who is now the target audience for this reboot starring Fey, Tim Meadows, and Renee Rapp, I’d have to have had a kid around 17. Not passing any judgment on folks who become parents at 17, but a movie franchise centered around teen girls should know teen pregnancy, as a whole, has decreased steadily since 2004!”
It’s all here. Jezebel’s indignant attitude, its hot takes, its mix of political scolding and obsession with pop culture ephemera. It was a mixture that hit perfectly when millennial women occupied the peak marketing demographic of 18-24. But now this pearl-clutching article about title cards insinuating that millennial woman are aging and unhip feels unbearably meta. By the time the article was posted, Jezebel was days from destruction and years away from its peak influence.
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