Jennifer Gerson (LA '06) is living a fantasy life. She lives in New York City, makes her living writing about almost whatever she wants and strangers come up to her in bars and ask-in awe-if she really is a Jezebel girl.
While most women would probably take offense to such a question, Gerson can thank the stranger for being a reader of Gawker Media's new blog, Jezebel. Launched in mid-May and tremendously successful - it gets an average of over 145,000 site visits per day - the blog covers sex, fashion, politics, celebrities, feminism, boyfriends, gross out humor and everything in between. As she puts it, Jezebel is "a women's interest site for smart chicks."
As an associate editor of the blog, Gerson has come a long way in New York over the past few years.
She began as an English major at Tufts, aggressively pursuing graduate theory courses as an undergraduate. Jezebel readers might not suspect it, but Gerson says that she was always a huge nerd - albeit one with a sense of fashion.
Gerson found a kindred soul during her freshman year in Assistant Professor of English Lecia Rosenthal. The two shared a moment after the first class.
"We both had noticed each other's shoes," Gerson said. "And we had a long talk after class about footwear."
During her first few summers of college, Gerson focused on politics as she interned for several campaigns. When she moved to New York City, she interned at NBC with Tufts' Susan Eisenhauer, who suggested a career in women's magazines. So she landed another internship with "Topic," a young literary magazine in New York City.
After studying at Columbia as a visiting student during her junior year, Gerson decided to stay for her senior year, which she cut short by graduating a semester early. Her move to New York got her an internship with Sephora, and the rest of her career took off from there. She was hired to ghostwrite "Tips & Trends," and found many of her expectations overturned.
"I was sort of skeptical; I thought I was too cool and studying too much to write about beauty products every day," she said. "But the people working in the marketing department were smart, sexy, bra-burning girls - so much more than you'd ever expect."
Gerson went to her co-workers' weddings, talked politics, went to rallies and honed her writing skills. As she lazed with a friend the night before her last college paper was due, Gerson realized that magazines might just be for her.
That friend turned out to be a vital connection: Within 48 hours, Gerson had found out about an opening at Elle, submitted her r?©sum?©, and was hired. She started working right away, in what she said was the position central to "The Devil Wears Prada" (2006) - editor's assistant.
The movie version of her job, though, was much more glamorous than the reality. "There are no free clothes in fashion," Gerson said. "You're also not going to have hair and makeup done every day, you don't go to 5,000 parties and I didn't have to do all of my boss' personal stuff. But it is an intense job."
True to her roots as a theoretic, Gerson doesn't hesitate to plunge into a discussion of the power relationships inherent in an editorial assistant's job.
"Part of the culture in working in magazines is that you're young, just out of school - you're immediately engaging in the master-slave dialectic," she said. "You want to be a part of that relationship, you want to be abused. You make no money, and the people you work for are telling you how lucky you are, but you're also aware of the facts."
Living above the poverty line, she says, was one major incentive to make the move to Jezebel.
"I was at the right place at the right time," she said.
Gerson met the other women who write for the blog and they all got along, something she says is essential to making a blog work.
Gerson's position at Jezebel is multifaceted: she writes about fashion news and Victoria Beckham, but she also goes out "into the world" and comes back to write about it. The blogging life is still new, though, and a lot of people don't seem to get that it's her job, she says.
"When we were kids, 'I want to grow up and be a blogger' wasn't an option. It's a new, emerging field and it's weird," she said. "It's my day job, it's what I do, but it's definitely not on everyone's radar as mainstream work.
"My relatives totally don't understand what I do - they think you can just go out and go shopping," she continued. "But I get up at 7 a.m., and our first post is up at nine. By the time people get to work, we've been working for three hours."
And writing about her life means that very little is private for Gerson.
"My job is my life; it's my boyfriend, my hobby, my meal time," she said. "I always tell my friends, if you're reading the site you know my life."
The commenters at Jezebel serve as a huge circle of advice-giving friends, too. "I wrote this tiny little post asking 'Is this a date?' I got an insane amount of comments - something like 100 comments in an hour," she said. "Then a friend of mine called me that night and asked who I was going on a date with, even though I'd never told him about it. He found out through Jezebel."
One recent fashion splurge has become public knowledge for the Jezebel readership, even though Gerson's father isn't too happy about it.
"Much to my dad's chagrin," Gerson said, "the whole world knows now that I bought Prada shoes."
Luckily for Gerson, shoes fit right next to feminism and politics at Jezebel.
"Fashion magazines should tell you that shoes are as cool as Maureen Dowd," she said. "That's one of the things I get from 'Mrs. Dalloway' - that writing about clothes is just as significant as writing about politics."
While she may never have imagined using trauma theory or Lacanian theory to write about Lindsay Lohan, Gerson believes that she is making the most of what she learned at Tufts and Columbia. The other editors at Jezebel also come from illustrious careers and advanced education, which makes for lively disagreements.
"The best part of my job," she said, "is that I always have other smart people to fight with."
The Jezebel editors all have at least one belief in common, though, Gerson says: that they know that they aren't the only women in the world who want to read about celebrities and fashion in addition to politics and feminism.
"We all believe that women want to read this stuff," she said. "There's really no one else doing what we're doing; we all obsess over why Brad and Angie don't love Shiloh, but you're going to get all of that with a cynic's eye. There's nothing wrong with reading tabloids; it doesn't mean you aren't smart."
Gerson doesn't think that mainstream women's magazines give their readers enough credit - and definitely not as much as men's magazines give their readers.
"There's this assumption that women don't care about politics, but I think there are a lot of women who care about both fashion and politics. I spend money on clothes that I shouldn't, but I also obsess over all the hard news, over the war, over Hillary. I don't think we have to pick one or the other," she said.
Now that she is writing for Jezebel, Gerson feels as if she's found her place. "The bottom line is that I feel ridiculously lucky that someone pays me to write about whatever I want to write about every day," she said. "I hope that for the rest of my life, there's some fool that's willing to pay me for doing what I want to do."
Gerson's favorite pieces are her most earnest ones: her post about the death of Gianni Versace when she was young and new to the fashion world; her experience at the US Air Guitar Championships; losing her cell phone in a cab on her way back from "America's Next Top Model" auditions, to name a few.
Her role models may never have written about the things Gerson finds herself writing about, but that's not stopping her.
"Susan Sontag definitely never wrote about Britney's vagina," Gerson said. "But I still think it's cool that I get to talk about my life."
