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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101503171 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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Chapter One
Our Womanly Ways
I'VE GOT TWO WORDS FOR YOU: TITS AND TWAT. WE GIRLS ARE obsessed with them, and boys, well, (straight) boys just gotta have 'em. These two terrific T's are the most sexified parts of our bodies, the most fetishized, the very hot spots of our pleasure zones, and we pamper, powder, and play with them to our heart's content. However, our bodies are more than these twin peaks; it's not just stacked and snatch, it's also our hips and our dimples and our toes and, well, our weight. We poke and prod our bodies with a psychological microscopic lens that ranges from the schizophrenic to the esoteric. But as we try to grow into and learn to accept our own bodies in a world that is full of mixed messages, it's possible for an unabashedly feminist sense of fun, pride, and pleasure to emerge. Ah, the joys of our womanly ways.
Boys seem to have it so easy: Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex that "at the moment of puberty, boys also feel their bodies as an embarrassment, but being proud of their manhood from an early age, they proudly project toward manhood the moment of their development; with pride they show one another the hair growing on their legs, a manly attribute." There is little mystery to the body by boy, a sporty number that is often competitive and occasionally crude: grow a few inches, pop boners, maybe suffer through an embarrassing voice change, and voilà, what a man, what a man, what a man. Proud. Posturing. Pumped.
But where boys are driven by their need to achieve, girls arepropelled through puberty by something else, something less celebratory, more painful. As Peggy Orenstein tells us in Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, "For a girl, the passage into adolescence is not just marked by menarche or a few new curves. It is marked by a scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy." The pretty poison formula begins coursing through our veins while we are still little girls—be good, eat right, look pretty, and then you'll marry Prince Charming! We're thrust into a pool of other girls who are cuter, skinnier, more of something we are suddenly aware of not being ourselves. "A girl's identity and her sense of worth is suddenly wrapped up in her bra size, something she has no control over," Judy Mann says in The Difference. This is an argument that did little to help the ever hopefuls: those girls taunted by the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, who mimicked Judy Blume's Margaret by desperately chanting, "I must, I must, I must increase my bust," and who sometimes ended up falling just a little flat.
It really doesn't seem fair that so much of a girl's self-worth depends on the boob patrol. A boy isn't judged and scrutinized on a daily basis by his penis size—his package is tucked in his pants. Instead of compare-and-contrast cock contests, boys brag; a girl's breasts, however, are always on display, front and center, and are therefore vulnerable to evaluation. As soon as boobs bud, they become an unconcealable barometer of worthiness. Self-conscious, a girl looks inward, more embarrassed by her new body than excited and proud, not fully realizing yet that her coming-of-age should be a point of celebration, exultation, discovery. The bigger, the better, the tighter the sweater.
But then, we grow up and realize: "TITS!!! I got them! They may be an A or a triple Z, but I got 'em." Suddenly, boobs once hidden by baggy shirts now get put on display by baby T's. And we BUST girls, we love our breasts. We love the strength we derive from them, the sense of femininity they endow us with, their ability to seduce and attract. Sure, there is the occasional insecurity of not passing the pencil test, or not being a desired cup size, or of falling a little too low, but for the most part, our breasts do wonders for us—we can share them if we like, show them off, or remain selfish. Breasts empower us.
Let's face it, our culture is obsessed with breasts. And nowadays, if a girl wants 'em bigger (or smaller), she can make it happen easily. In Marilyn Yalom's History of the Breast, an unnamed female psychologist calls implants a "status symbol" and maintains that a "woman can buy the perfect body the same way she can buy anything else." If she can afford the operation, that is. (If she can't, there's always the Wonderbra.) Or the legal fees. Implant manufacturers such as Dow Chemical, Bristol Meyers, Baxter, and 3M were taken to court for failing to warn recipients of the risks involved with implants. But while awareness grows as to the dangers of breast augmentations, boob jobs are still popping up everywhere.
Have men driven women to prettify, boobify, skinnify themselves? Some feminists think so. In Backlash Susan Faludi states that the medical profession, as well as the male-dominated media and fashion industry, are guilty of conspiracy against women. And Susan Brownmiller, in her book Femininity, opines that "enlarging one's breast to suit male fantasies" furthers the exploitation of women. Plastic surgery offers some women the opportunity to indulge men, to appease men, to continue to give men more of what they want: big-breasted bombshells that they cannot, do not, will not need to take seriously. In objectifying women and compartmentalizing them ("she's got big ta-tas"), the patriarchy can keep on keeping on. But only if the girls let them.
Of course, there are feminists who are pro-enhancement. Feminist scholar Jan Breslauer wrote an article about her implants for Playboy, "Stacked Like Me," in which she proclaimed, "This boob job is empowering." She goes on to argue that although "I know the party line on breast augmentation that women who have surgery are the oppressed victims of a patriarchal culture ... feminism is about having control over life and one's body." Many famous women, including Courtney Love, Jane Fonda, Cher, and Nina Hartley, agree that a woman's choice to mold her body does not make her a victim. If bigger boobs are what she wants, it's her right to choose both as a feminist and as an individual. Is it a demolition job or home improvement?
It's strange that in our sexual lives, we are so breast obsessed, when sex really happens "down there." "The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris—but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within," says Erica Jong in Fear of Flying. In the '70s, Our Bodies, Ourselves encouraged women to take a mirror and get in there and see what makes us so sugary and spicy, to not feel scared or embarrassed or even shameful. You would think we'd be curious from childhood games of "doctor," but in fact, while we're fascinated with what's "down there," the actual sexual discovery doesn't occur until we start to actually rub and press and get off. We don't learn about our power from the Human Sexuality 101 classes, we learn by doing, on our own or with another. Touching our vaginas isn't oh-so- '70s, it's oh-so-now.
Plenty of women in the '90s are all for checking out their doll parts. Sex for One's Betty Dodson and performer/goddess Annie Sprinkle have done vagina tours, if you will, for audiences in order to educate, enlighten, and entertain. Betty holds masturbation workshops for women, and Annie has been known to sit spread-eagled with a clamp between her legs and her cervix on display. Annie feels very strongly about pussy because, she says, "It's fun.... The cervix is so beautiful that I really want to share that with people.... I think it's important to demystify women's bodies. It wasn't until recently that anyone was allowed to look at pussy.... a lot of women have never even seen their own, and ... in a way I wanna say 'fuck you guys, you wanna see pussy? I'll show you pussy.'" The power of pussy is a force to be tapped into, especially if you get really good at your Kegels. As Julie Covello points out, boys touch themselves several times a day, at the very least—every time they go to the bathroom. What a gift! So why shouldn't we be having the same fun with our Sacred Yonis!
During an interview in a Lifetime special, Roseanne Barr-Pentland-Arnold-Thomas (nowadays known simply as Roseanne) half-jokingly said that one time she had considered running for President: her slogan would have been "Put New Blood in the White House Every 28 Days." Thank the Goddess above that our bodies constantly remind us how special femaleness is—leaks, spills, cycles, and all. Having your period is a fact of life. From the moment we see those first little spots of blood on our cotton undies, we join ranks with our moms and girlfriends. This is OUR time of the month, a natural state of our girlie experience and nothing to be ashamed about. Women in the '90s are lucky (ha!) enough to have access to tons of information about sanitary napkins, tampons, and other women's hygiene products thanks to a multibillion-dollar health and beauty industry, mainstream women's magazines, and savvy media. And yet, we still have lingering doubts aand conflicting feelings abou our smells, our vaginas, and our periods. Is it because we have been conditioned by a society to feel embarrassed about our supposed "sewers"?
Historically, many patriarchal societies treated a menstruating creature differently. For example, Jews sent their married women to the mikvah for a monthly ritual cleansing (a practice that is still very much a part of today's traditional Orthodox and Conservative Judaism). According to Dr. Helen Fisher in The Anatomy of Love, primitive cultures secluded their women in "menstrual huts." In For Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English point out that in the 1800s "medicine had 'discovered' that female functions were inherently pathological." Public health officials, in their war against germs, subjected menstruating women to "new hygienic standards" because they were considered dirty, unclean, and unsanitary by the mostly male public health officials. Please. The patriarchy of yore would definitely have incarcerated Donita Sparks of the band L7 had they seen her at the Reading Festival in England in the early '90s. There Sparks, in response to the mud- throwing audience, reached between her legs, pulled out her tampon, and threw it at the crowd! You go, girl!
Susie Orbach declared that "fat is a feminist issue." And for our gal Roseanne, "fat" is an F-word not to be feared, but flaunted. What we see with Roseanne is what we get—a body that is not an object of shame. "Well I'm fat. I thought I'd point that out." Finally, a voice that defies the you-must-look- like-this messages of the not-so-subtle pop media. Oh, let us count the ways we love Roseanne. In her sitcom, her stand-up routines, and her personal life, she is loquacious, loud, and lewd. Roseanne is not another Weight Watchers spokesperson, another large-girl-gone-slim "success sorry." In fact, for most of her sitcom years, Roseanne's show opened with a camera panning around the dinner table, while Roseanne and her family/cast members laughed and ate, reaching over each other as families do during a meal. Chowing down on television, how normal! In Roseanne's world, food is never an enemy; it's an integral part of it. Whereas fitness guru Susan Powter and her ilk espouse the virtues of slimdom under the guise of good health, Roseanne glorifies the reality of the Real Live Girl. The way these fitness freaks confront their bodies as their nemesis, always needing to be tamed, taut, and thinner, makes girls feels worse; we need more Roseannes and Camryn Manheims, women who accept their size with poppy fresh pleasure rather than fall victim to it with self-imposed torture.
Somehow, the body whole can turn into a psychological battleground. We spend a lot of time figuring out ways to lose weight, strategically planning our exercise schedules and checking out the competition—the other girls' merchandise. Call it catty, call it unsisterly, but we're guilty of it. Measuring ourselves against the girl next door is already destructive, but nothing does a more damaging mind-fuck than our fascination with models and the reed-thin bodies that make them (models) millions of dollars. If we dare go over a desired weight, we'll starve, or worse, purge until our faces are riddled with burst capillaries. We diet, we gobble laxatives, we wear girdles. In coveting the "ideals" of model figures, we condemn our bodies ourselves to eating disorders, continually punishing ourselves for not being "thin enough."
The Body Shop took little baby steps toward embracing the real body by girl in one of their advertising campaigns: "There are three billion women who don't look like supermodels and only eight who do." This copy accompanied a photo of a paint-by-numbers, Barbie-like head tacked onto a naked Rubenesque doll figure. This kind of Body Shop model doesn't leave the bitter aftertaste of inadequacy that this year's version of Kate Moss does. It's clear that the Body Shop ideology is on our side, condemning lookism (the disease of judging the body) and encouraging being yourself. Finally, it's okay for us to look like us! Will this pioneer campaign influence others and encourage women to covet real bodies? Only time will tell. But the Body Shop is starting something the BUST girl is hungry for: Reality.
We BUST girls are not immune to feeling insecure about our bodies, but we're smart enough to know that we don't need to be victimized by it. Instead of admiring superfreaks, it's important to remember that there are plenty of famous women with bodies that don't quit being real, who don't make you feel alienated and weird, that are crazy, sexy, cool. Rock chicks Kim Gordon, Cibo Matto, Bjork, Queen Latifah, Missy Misdemeanor Elliot, Salt-N-Pepa are divine—they prance and pose and wink and growl without looking like they've been liposuctioned and airbrushed into toothpickville. Models, to me, are the real freaks of nature: too tall, too thin, too pretty to be perfect in any sense of the word. It's the real girl I aspire to be, the one who is sexy and having fun, the one whose snarliness doesn't feel objectifying or demeaning, but does feel like positively raw girl power and that feels right. I'm just a girl and more.
Don't forget, as Marcia Ann Gillespie reminds us, "Women's bodies have long been considered little more than malleable clay to be reshaped to meet whatever the standard of the day, no matter the risk, discomfort, or pain." The fact is, reinforced ideals which result in our internalized negative body images have always been wreaking havoc on us chicks. It's time to say FUCK YOU to that shit. It's time to say "Mirror, Mirror on the wall, I don't care that I'm not six feet tall!" Whether you are a truly toned athlete (or even someone like Sporty Spice, wwho is by no means an athlet but is finally giving girls everywhere a cue that being a tomboy and/or a jock is cool!) or whether, like me, you are a 100 percent soft couch potato, you don't need to torture yourself about your body. Your scale doesn't need to be your enemy, you don't need to throw out the tape measure, you don't have to give yourself Special K tests. All these parts of ours—our tits and hips and lips—are power tools. And it's time that we, the grande dames of the New Girl Order, defy the backlash with a proverbial middle finger and bust through the Reviving-data of Ophelia's low self-esteem, stop shoving our fingers down our throats, turn our back on skeletal standards, enjoy being the girl with the most cake and ask: Can I have some more?
—Marvelle Karp
Table of Contents
The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Our Womanly Ways
Thanks for the Mammaries: The Rise and Fall of My Boobs
A Fine Spine
Me and My Cunt
Sex, Lies, and Tampax
A Visit to the Museum of Menstruation
Myth of the Black Butt
My Left Hand
She Ain't Heavy, She's My Lover
2. Feminists Fatale: BUST-ing the Beauty Myth
The ABCs of Fashion
Girl's Fashion Tips for Boys
Gotta Git That Stick
The Joy of Slacks
Growing Out of Layers
The Mysterious Eroticism of Mini-Backpacks
Vogue vs. Harper's Bazaar: It's a Catfight!
Be a Model, or Just Act Like One
3. Sex and the Thinking Girl
Betty and Celina Get Wired: Part I
Betty and Celina Get Wired: Part II
More Than a Blow Job: It's a Career
How to Be as Horny as a Guy
Lesson Number One
One Sick Puppy
Fear of a Black Cat
My Friends Don't Touch My Boobs
Boy-dello
Waste: A Short Story
4. Men Are From Uranus
Fear of a Boy Planet
Girlfriend, Listen Up
The Curse of the Mama's Boy
Both Sides, Now
Watching Him Fuck Her
Manthing
Don'ts for Boys
Talking Dick with Cynthia Plaster Caster
My Brother, Myself
My Keanu: A Fantasy
Thurston Moore: BUSTiest Boy in America
5. Growing Up Girl
Dear Diary
Electra Woman and Dyna Girl
One Girl's Vise
Stealing Beauty
Wayward Warden's Wicked War Against Womanhood
The World Moves
Making It
Falling from Grace
6. Yo' Mama, Yo' Self
What to Expect When Your Best Friend Is Expecting
Two Girls and a Baby
Abortion Story
Tie Me Up, Tie Me Off
Motherhood Lite: The Joys of Being an Aunt
We Are Family (I've Got All My Goddesses with Me)
One's Not Enough
Mother-to-Wannabe
7. Media Whores
That Cosmo Girl
Ladies' Night: A Parody
"Women's Network," My Ass
Bitch on Heels: Confessions of a Pop Culture Junkie
Bring Me the Head of Melanie Banderas
Dancing to the Tiger Beat
Desperately Seeking Farrah
A Vindication of the Rights of Cunt
8. Herstory: Girl on Girls
Bad Like Me
Gloria Stein-Mom
Pirate of a Lady
Tura, Tura, Tura: An Interview with Tura Satana
She's Gotta Have It: An Interview with Nina Hartley
Oh, Yoko
Would You Want This Man to Be Your Dog?
Are You There, Judy? It's Me, Tori
Bibliography
Meet Some of Our Contributors
Interviews
barnesandnoble.com: What is BUST?
Marcelle Karp: It's a state of mind.
Debbie Stoller: It's a magazine!
Barnes & Noble.com: Okay, so why did you decide to create this magazine? Where were you in your lives?
DS: The thing that we always felt, and which gave us a desperation to create something like BUST was that we're living in a culture in which we're completely surrounded by all of these stereotypes [of women]. We wanted to tell our own truth. To have a magazine that spoke in a voice that we actually spoke in and talked about sex in a way that we actually talk about it. We didn't want to create a magazine about role models. Just our real voices. And our readers were really desperate to read something like that. And now that voice is one that you can find on the Web in a lot of places.
I think it's really exhausting to constantly be bombarded by all of these myths [about women]. And one of the things we always tried to do with BUST was -- bust those myths! And in terms of our mission, that has remained the same since the very first little Xerox. And we've expanded to include pop culture criticism as well. But the crux of our magazine is personal stories.
MK: We were both kind of nowhere in our professional lives. When I met Debbie, I was 24 or 25. It's all becoming hazy. This was around '89. I was just trying to get my foot in the door, get a career going. When I started working in the department I wanted to be working in, we became friends, talking to each other about mainstream magazines -- like Sassy, which was pathetic because we were both in our 20s and that was a teen magazine -- and things that were going on. About three years after meeting each other, I left the company. We had had conversations [about starting a zine] and maybe even had come up with a title. Then I went away for about a year. When I came back, I called Debbie and said, "Hey, remember that thing we used to talk about? Did you ever do anything with it?" And she said no, and I said "Well, let's do something," and that's how it started.
bn: Did you know what you wanted to do?
MK: Yeah. We used to go to this cafe on St. Mark's Place, and there was this really cool zine store around the corner. We didn't know anything about publishing or magazines, but we knew about about zine culture. We knew about this community of people doing their own thing. Once we went to this zine store and we saw what other people were doing, we were like, we could do that! We both worked in creative fields....
bn: What were you doing?
DS: I was working at Nickelodean as a department coordinator. But I had been to graduate school, I had my Ph.D., and I had studied media and how the media really [messes with] women's heads and makes them feel crappy about who they are. So when I came out of school, I thought I wanted to make a different media format, but I also had no idea where to do that.
bn: When was the first issue of BUST printed? Tell me about the first issue. How has it changed since then?
MK: The ideology of BUST hasn't changed, but the look has changed. The first issue was xeroxed and stapled -- we xeroxed and stapled it ourselves. And for every ten friends we talked to, maybe one friend wrote something. Because nobody wants to write for something that doesn't have some tangible idea. All of our friends were like, "Well, that's a great idea. but let me see...hmmm. I don't know." It was really a tooth and nail kind of thing. We got these girls that Debbie knew to lay out the magazine. It was really exciting. That was July 1993 -- it would never happen now that way.
bn: And if you had just started BUST today, in 1999, you'd probably have started with a web site.
MK: If we were just coming out of school [now], we would have a web site going, we would be investigating what an IPO is, we would be approaching heads of companies.
bn: Is it distributed outside of New York City? Can girls stranded in the suburbs get their hands on it?
DS: It's distributed all around the country and internationally. And anyone can subscribe. We have subscribers in every one of the 50 states.
bn: How much of the writing do you two do today?
MK: Not as much has we did in the early days. It's more fun to farm it out to girls who need their voices to be represented. It's more fun to use what other people write than to be totally self-absorbed and write our own stories over and over again.
DS: Plus, a lot of [the contributors] are better writers than we are. We get stuff from writers that is so good. And the more submissions we get, the better and better the quality of the writers. We get all of this stuff and we can pick the very best ones.
bn: I read that Courtney Love's piece, "Bad Like Me," was totally unsolicited.
MK: Yeah. We did a "Men We Love" issue in 1995, the time of the Lollapalooza that Hole and Sonic Youth were in. Thurston Moore [of Sonic Youth] was on the cover. He's the coolest guy in the world. At that time, they were all friends and [Courtney Love] saw him on the cover of this girl zine and she was like, I want to be in that! Our next [issue] was about girls and their vices, but the ad said we were looking for submissions for "the bad girls issue." She called saying, "I want to contribute to this issue, because I've been a bad girl all my life!" She knew she was the baddest girl there ever was. She's so smart -- she opened up the masthead, but because we write under pseudonyms, there were no real names at that point except for one, Susannah Ko.
DS: Our designer.
MK: So [Courtney Love] called information, found [Susannah], then called from Hawaii in the middle of the night -- and left a very Courtney Love-esque message on her answering machine.
DS: [Susannah] called me and said "There's a message on my answering machine from someone claiming to be Courtney Love Cobain and she's looking for you. Here's my access code so you can listen to it." It was really exciting.
bn: So what's the deal with the pseudonyms? What are yours and how did you choose them?
DS: We chose pseudonyms because we wanted to be able to write honestly about everything -- including sex -- without having to get our phone numbers unlisted. We also found out that letting our writers contribute under pseudonyms helps give them the anonymity to write more honestly than they might otherwise. Plus, it's fun and let's us feel like rock stars! I don't know where I got the name Celina Hex from; it came to me years before we started BUST, but if I had it to do over again, I would have chosen the name Simone deBoudoir instead. Right now so many people know our pseudonyms that sometimes I write under a different pseudonym when I want the protection of anonymity again.
MK: I chose Betty Boob because I loved the campy icon Betty Boop, but also I wanted to stay in the breast family and I wanted to turn around the boobish (dopey, silly) association with the word boob into something fun and well, BUST-y.
bn: If you could get a submission from anyone, who would it be from?
MK: It would be from the girl who hasn't been published yet, but who has a story she wants to tell. I think that story is more important than any famous person's story, because you hear the famous peoples' stories over and over again. But if we wanted to interview someone, I would say the interview we would want would be Madonna.
bn: You wrote in your intro about wishing you could feel pleasure and pride in reading women's magazines, instead of shame and alienation. Are there any magazines today that you do feel good about?
MK: No. They have a higher authority to answer to -- the advertisers. They're not interested in women opening up the magazine and seeing women with real bodies, because that's not going to promote their product.
DS: The also serve to uphold the sexual double standard. No matter how much magazines want to talk about sex, they still never really talk about it the way people we know experience it and talk about it. We really feel that the reasons we have a lot of sexual problems in this country is the sexual double standard. We never empower girls by just being honest about sex. [...] It's not just about teenaged girls; it's about girls our age too. Women our age aren't any better at asserting themselves sexually than teenaged girls are. We still don't use birth control as we should, or know how to say no when we mean no, or yes when we mean yes.
bn: Do you think teenage girls in 1999 are better off than they were in 1989?
DS: No.
bn: So what about this whole riotgrrrl/girl power thing?
MK: Riotgrrrl was a marginal focus. It was something that Time Magazine thought was cool one week, and that was the end of that. People who were interested in riotgrrrl were people who were in the alternative part of society. Girl power is this really great idea that some marketer came up with: "This is about niche marketing. I know how to target young girls. I'm going to come up with some amazing Mountain Dew ads, and we'll get this thing called the Spice Girls and get everyone in on this girl power bandwagon." But that was last year's news. This year it's some neurotic thirty-something woman writing books. Where's girl power now? Nowhere.
DS: I think people are paying a little bit more attention to young girls in popular culture because people are finally realizing that they have some buying power. There are some things that have become more acceptable for teen girls, like being angry and aggressive has become a more accepted part of being female than it was maybe ten years ago. On the other hands, other things have gotten more difficult. I think the sexual double standard is as entrenched if not more so.
bn: Okay, who is not a BUST woman?
MK: Demi Moore is not a BUST woman. Any supermodel you can think of. Although, that's not to say that these women can't have an epiphany and evolve, but if you just look at the face value right now, they're not BUST women.
DS: There are definitely women who don't get it. Women who think that the way things are now are the way things always should be. Or think that women are not at any disadvantage. And then there are women who don't think that women have the same kind of potential that men do.
bn: Do you read Oprah books?
MK: I read She's Come Undone.
DS: I really love Oprah. If there's any group that is more belittled in our culture than teenaged girls, it's middle-aged women. The way she validates them is so moving to me. Oprah's show so understands their issues.
bn: Do you watch the WB network shows?
MK: Oh yeah -- I love them. When I was a kid I loved those John Hughes movies; John Cusack was going to be my husband. I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the coolest show in the world. I watch everything. But I can't really handle that witch show.
bn: Which are your favorite articles from BUST?
DS: They're all in this [book].
bn: Was it hard to narrow it down?
DS: It was hard, but it was also like, we've been living with these issues for a number of years, and there are always some that people mention or people ask you about or want to read.
bn: So these are the BUST classics.
DS: Kinda -- yeah.
bn: Has it been tough keeping BUST alive?
MK: We sacrifice a lot to keep this going. It's a lot of work.
DS: I quit my job a couple of years ago, so I could focus more on the magazine and work freelance, and now I'm hugely in debt. But [publishing BUST] has been immensely satisfying. It's changed our lives.
MK: And it's changed the lives of the people who read it. It's been an amazing domino effect.
bn: Do you get letters?
MK: Yeah, yeah. We get lots of letters that we like to run in the beginning of the magazine.
DS: It sounds corny, but knowing that this thing matters to people....it's worth more than all the money in the world [laughs].