Catching up with Slate’s celebrated culture critic.
by Joanna Demkiewicz
If you want to have sex with Amanda Hess, you can, but you should probably study up first. Hess works at the center of hard-and-fast journalism, and she’s constantly picking up cues and making them her own, whether it’s about the NFL, Bustle, Brangelina, Lifetime movies or child abuse.
As a staff writer for Slate, she fields all the unwieldy bullets the internet throws our way but makes it her mission to cover the everyday stories we sometimes forget are important, too. Writing a reactionary piece is “easier than writing a story about women and things women are experiencing that might be an untold story,” she told me over the phone. “I’m always struggling to do more stuff like that. It’s my greatest challenge right now to write quickly but surprisingly while not being bogged down in pettiness.”
Hess has the chops to weed out pettiness, that’s for sure. In January of this year, she wrote a story about the verbal abuse women face on social media based on her personal experience with Twitter rape threats. Her piece won the February 2014 Sidney Award for addressing a contemporary civil rights issue. She was also behind the one-stop-shop magazine Tomorrow, along with The Cut’s Ann Friedman, after being fired from GOOD magazine. She’s written about boobs and female athletes for ESPN The Magazine and heterosexuals and rimming for Playboy; she’s also really into 1990s James Spader and rosé.
I had a great time with her. This is more like “10 Minutes With Amanda Hess.”
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ON HOW SHE LEARNED ABOUT SEX, ANYWAY:
Hess’s first “real” journalism job was writing a sex column for The Washington City Paper, where she wrote about other peoples’ sex lives and gender, but she was no sexpert as an adolescent or even a teenager. Growing up, she received most of her information on the playground. Cosmopolitan was no help.
“At a certain point [when I was a teenager]–I don’t think I’ve ever bought a Cosmo–I paged through Cosmo online. They have this ridiculous compendium of Cosmo sex moves, like their kama sutra, but it’s also weird. That was way advanced of my understanding. It also wasn’t ringing a bell with me. I was like, ‘This seems like an exercise, or something that’s complicated.’”
ON THAT JAMES SPADER THING SHE HAS:
“Hmm. Who’s my dream lunch date? So teenager me–actually, I don’t know how I forgot about this – teenager me would have lunch with James Spader. And this is in the middle of your question of where I learned about sex–I watched “Sex, Lies and Videotape” on this small TV in my brother’s bedroom when he was gone, and I just watched it by myself, and I was like, ‘This seems kind of messed up but also hot?’ It’s one of the first things where I was like, ‘I think this is sexy.'”
We all have our James Spader.
ON THE NEW RESEARCH PROCESS:
When researching for her 2013 Playboy rimming piece, Hess reached out to friends and friends of friends before turning to social science research, academic journals and experts.
“I would go through every G-chat contact I had, like people I didn’t really know, but were somehow on there. I was like, ‘Just wondering if you’ve heard about this.’ They probably thought I was really weird for checking in four years later about this weird thing.”
ON HER WRITING PROCESS:
“I have a writing process that probably–if people actually saw me do it, like when I’m really getting into something that I find difficult, it’s kind of disturbing, because it doesn’t seem like I’m a healthy person. I can sit for a few minutes and write something and then I’ll have to get up and lay down in my bed, shower, take a nap or something. I incorporate sleep in my writing a lot. I think work happens in my brain while I’m sleeping. Sometimes I’ll drink a lot of coffee and sometimes alcohol. Sometimes I use alcohol to write things where it’s like idea-generation or if I’m trying to get past a block and I need to move on to something else and put ideas down. It’s definitely not something I can use to finish a story.”
ON WHAT THAT ALCOHOL IS:
She’s only a little ashamed, but her drink of choice is rosé.
“I went into this wine store the other day, and they had a sign under the rosé that was like, ‘Don’t worry, rosé is badass,’ and it made me feel like the least badass person ever.”
ON WHAT’S ON HER BEDSTAND RIGHT NOW:
1. The Empathy Exams, by Leslie Jamison
2. The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News, by Sheila Weller, which Hess is reviewing for Slate. (Out September 30).
3. A candle (“that sounds so like–gross”) that she uses as a bookend
4. Nicotine patches
ON PERSONAL INTERESTS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WORK:
“Like most people who write online, I have to produce a lot. The culture that I consume will become an impetus for a blog post. It’s hard to establish interests outside of that sometimes. But when I do, it usually tends to be stuff that’s not thought provoking at all, that’s really easy to consume and that doesn’t engage me intellectually. So I’ll watch ‘Frasier.'”
ON WHETHER OUR CULTURE ALLOWS FOR INDEPENDENT REFLECTION OUTSIDE OF THE DAILY CALL-AND-RESPONSE:
In short, she says yes. But because of our investment in communication that keeps us constantly stimulated, it’s difficult.
“In general, the media economy is so invested in volume and covering every single turn in a news story and getting another page up that can go into Google that people might click on and that might serve enough ads that [a publication] can thrive. Especially for women who are still underrepresented in media–young women who are coming in now are getting those jobs, where they have to write all the time. It can become more difficult, because there’s just not enough time and money and investment in doing our own stuff. I don’t think that’s solely a problem with women’s publications; I think that’s an internet problem.”
ON FEEDBACK FROM READERS:
Reader feedback is constant and sometimes wonderful, like when the conversation turns productive, i.e. after the publication of Hess’s internet bullying piece, when readers started to agree women should no longer ignore Facebook threats. But sometimes the feedback “goes into insane-person territory.”
“The weirdest feedback I’ve ever gotten was for a story where I argued that the boys convicted in the Steubenville rape case, after serving their time, should be able to return to high school without being ostracized and shamed by the media. Some of the response to that story was heated and critical–that’s all fine–but a few readers moved the needle by wishing that I would get raped so that I could write more intelligently on the issue. The victim’s advocate who promotes the raping of people they disagree with was, uh, a new category for me.”
ON THE PRESSURE TO ALWAYS BE POLITICALLY CORRECT:
“I think there is more pressure on women like me who are writing in this women’s space, because people aren’t really sure if it’s journalism or activism. I don’t identify as an activist in any way, although sometimes my work intersects with theirs and talks about the same issues that feminist activism might. So there’s this pressure on female journalists who are writing about women to not only write good stories, but also to be good feminists. And that’s an uncomfortable pressure, I think.”
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Joanna Demkiewicz is The Riveter‘s co-founder and co-editor. Find her on Twitter at @yanna_dem.
Read more from The Riveter’s Q&A series 2.5 Minutes With.
