Jessica Bennett

Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor at The New York Times who has spent her career writing with a gimlet eye about gender, sexuality and culture. She was The Times’ first (and last!) gender editor, where she launched franchises including the Overlooked obituaries project and helped steer the paper’s coverage of #MeToo. She is the author of two bestselling books, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace and This Is 18, about the lives of teenage girls today, and is cohost of the iHeartRadio podcast In Retrospect, which revisits tabloid and pop culture scandals from the 80s and 90s through the lens of today. She is a professor at the NYU Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches a course she designed called “Reporting the Zeitgeist.”

As a writer, Jessica is drawn to subjects that question convention and tell us something about the way we live now. She began her career covering the fight for gay marriage in Massachusetts and California, as a reporter for Newsweek, as well as writing feature stories on any subculture she could sell her bosses on: early preppers; polyamorists; men who fall in love with sex dolls. While at Newsweek, and with two colleagues, she wrote a cover documenting the forgotten story of 46 women who’d sued that magazine for gender discrimination in the 1970s, paving the way for women journalists — which later became a book and TV series, The Good Girls Revolt.

She went on to become a contributing writer for Time and then the NYT, where she built a mini-beat profiling women who’d been publicly sexualized and shamed — Monica Lewinsky, Amanda Knox, Pamela Anderson, etc — and wrote a modern language column for the Style section. She likes to think she can make the most complicated subjects accessible, and the most trivial subjects deep: She has investigated sexual assault allegations against prominent men, including Donald Trump, as part of The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of #MeToo; she has also written about Barbie, the Miss America pageant and her quest to find more fun. In 2023, she spent a year documenting three 13-year-olds through their 8th grade year, as part of a package on phone use and adolescent girls’ self esteem.

As an editor, Jessica has built websites, launched newsletters, developed podcasts, live-GIF a presidential debate (it was 2012), cranked out viral T-shirt slogans, produced documentary shorts and created a massively successful feminist stock photo collection with Getty Images. At The Times, she led a three-year project to expand coverage and readership of women’s and gender issues, and spearheaded a number of special projects: This is 18, an immersive look at the lives of teen girls around the world, which became an internationally traveling photo exhibit and a bestselling book; a project with Modern Love to depict the complexities of sexual consent on college campuses, which became a university course curriculum; The Primal Scream, which documented the plight of working moms in the pandemic — in words, pictures and sound — for which she was also lead writer.

Jessica speaks on journalism and women’s issues around the world, and her work has been honored by GLAAD, the American Society of Magazine Editors, the NY Press Club and the Newswomen’s Club, among others. She grew up in Seattle, and likes to shock her students by telling them she was once the executive editor of Tumblr. You can find her on Substack or bumming around Brooklyn, and sometimes Yucca Valley, CA with her spouse and dog.

Some misc facts about me:

• I have an honorary degree from the nation’s first pot university, which was a thing in California for a while and was maybe my most fun assignment

• I have gone truly viral once, for accidentally making the #PussyGrabsBack meme (remember 2016?)

• I created a primal scream hotline for working moms in the pandemic. It made me never want to have children.

• Worst job: Six month gig as a crime reporter on the overnight shift at The Boston Globe.

• Most fun job: Bartender at a sex club turned dive bar called “The Slide” — once described as “the morally lowest” place in New York by the New York Evening Standard

• Best boss: The great Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who I interned for and most definitely would have been called “bullying” by today’s boss standards. Second best: Sheryl Sandberg (AMA)

• For a while, my face was the photo accompanying the Wikipedia entry for “resting bitch face”

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