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Today, Babble editor-in-chief Ada Calhoun talks to the former editor-in-chief of the Nerve print magazine, Susan Dominus.
Ada Calhoun: When I left New York magazine, the source of several Nerve staff members, the managing editor said it would be a blotch on my resume because it was a sex magazine, and online. Did they say that to you when you left New York, and when was that?
Susan Dominus: I came on in 1999, which didn't feel like the early days of Nerve then, but now it does! Well, I asked the editor in chief, Caroline Miller, if she thought some places wouldn't hire me because I'd worked at a sex magazine, and she said, "You don't want to work anywhere that wouldn't hire you based on that." I thought that was great advice.
It certainly didn't hurt your career. You've done a lot for the Times since.
promotion
And certainly it helped my dating life! I met my husband at a party. We joke about it. If we had met and I'd said I was an editor in the Simon & Schuster children's-book division he's probably have thought he'd met a dozen girls like that. I saw his eyes light up when I said what I did. Of course, I had a boyfriend before my husband who worked for a conservative judge, as a clerk. There was a dinner for the clerks and their significant others, and he said he didn't want me to come because he didn't want to explain what I did. I think it's safe to say that was the beginning of the end of our relationship.
How did your other friends feel about your running a sex magazine?
The whole sex thing wasn't really my agenda. My goal wasn't to promote free love or non-judgment. It's true that I was pretty non-judgmental about most transgressive sex if it was happening between consenting adults. My goal was to get great writing out into the universe, and Nerve was a great way to do this. I wrote an essay about the things people told me when they found out I worked at Nerve. One guy I'd known for a long time told me his father was a crossdresser. Another woman I knew made her boyfriend have sex with a dog when she was twelve. What I learned is that people are dying to tell someone these crazy — or not-so-crazy — details of their lives. And you realize there are very few outlets.
There are blogs.
Well, certainly there are more blogs now, but I think that's too public. They just need to whisper it to the reeds.
What was the Nerve office like?
In the very beginning it was classic dot-com world. There was a huge freezer of ice cream. This ice cream company couldn't pay for advertising, so in exchange for free advertising they supplied a freezer and ice cream to put in it. That to me was the greatest thing in the world. The brave new world of work. There was beer in the fridge, too. People rarely drank it but it was nice to know it was there.
Where They
Are Now...
Susan Dominus is a contributing writer at the Sunday New York Times Magazine and at Glamour magazine. She lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, with her husband and two sons.
There was music playing all the time, but as an old-media person I couldn't work with it on, so there was some tension over that. It was a very quiet place to work. It was a loft. If you spoke too loudly, people would give you dirty looks. It felt loose, but it was the hardest working place I've ever been.
How debauched were your colleagues?
I don't think any employee of Nerve was ever that debauched, actually. Jack certainly played the field, but a lot of us were in serious relationships. We were pretty studious. There was this idea, at once point, that we were going to take a staff photo naked. Everyone but me thought it was a hilarious idea. I put an end to that. So you marked the end of the hedonistic days?
I might make that shameful claim, yes. But certainly, the parties were wild. There was definitely some public oral sex happening at that weird HBO party. A lot of the things that our readers and writers were doing were sort of creative, and we tried to be non-judgmental about it.
What drew you to Nerve in the first place?
I was working at New York magazine and edited an issue of the hottest New Yorkers under thirty, or the New Yorkers of '97 or '98 or whatever. There was an awards event and everything. When I read the one about Rufus and Genevieve, I thought, these people have the dream job. It has literary merit, it's hot, it's working with the dot-com moment. I thought it was brilliant. When I heard they were starting a print magazine I got really excited about it and was really blown away by how good the writing on the website was. I'd wanted to be a writer with a capital "w", but I'd become a reporter. Writing was not always so literary at magazines. At New York magazine, you couldn't call up any writer on the planet, ask them to write something about sex and have them say yes, but at Nerve you could.
