Jessica Bennett

Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist who has spent her career writing with a gimlet eye toward gender, sexuality and culture. She was The New York Times first (and only!) 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 the cohost of the iHeartRadio podcast In Retrospect, which revisits tabloid and pop culture moments from the 80s and 90s. 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 The Boston Globe and then Newsweek, where she spent six years writing feature stories on any subculture she could sell her bosses on: early preppers; polyamorists before it was cool; women rejecting marriage; men who fall in love with sex dolls. While at Newsweek, she and two colleagues wrote a cover story documenting the forgotten case of 46 women who’d sued that magazine for gender discrimination in the 1970s, paving the way for her generation of women journalists — which later became a book and TV series called The Good Girls Revolt.

She went on to become a contributing writer for Time Magazine and then the New York Times, where she made a name for herself profiling women who’d been publicly shamed — Monica Lewinsky, Amanda Knox, Pamela Anderson — and as the author of a 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 and producer, Jessica has built websites, launched newsletters, developed podcasts, live-GIFed a presidential debate (it was 2012), cranked out viral T-shirt slogans (see: #PussyGrabsBack), produced documentary shorts, a women’s history walking tour 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 multi-platform 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; Navigating the Gray Zone, 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 other organizations. She grew up in Seattle, back when grunge was cool the first time. You can find her on Substack or bumming around Brooklyn, and sometimes Yucca Valley, CA with her spouse and dog.

Some more misc facts about me:

• I have an honorary degree from the nation’s first pot university, which was a thing in Oakland for a while

• 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, during the coldest winter on record since 1884

• Most fun job: Bartender at an East Vsex club turned dive bar called “The Slide” — once described as “the morally lowest” place in New York City

• Best boss: The great, late Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett. Second best: Sheryl Sandberg (not a joke; AMA)

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

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