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| Spare Rib magazine to be relaunched by Charlotte Raven | Spare Rib magazine to be relaunched by Charlotte Raven |
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| Journalist Charlotte Raven is planning to relaunch the radical feminist magazine Spare Rib as early as next month. | Journalist Charlotte Raven is planning to relaunch the radical feminist magazine Spare Rib as early as next month. |
| Raven, a Guardian contributor and one of the founder editors of the now defunct Modern Review, has written to friends and potential backers outlining plans to relaunch the magazine as a glossy new title and a free-to-access website with the tagline "Life not lifestyle". | |
| In the email Raven says she and her supporters have raised the £6,000 needed to launch phase one of the Spare Rib website in May but that an additional £20,000 is required to launch a bimonthly print magazine this autumn. Backers will be treated to a glamorous Shoreditch party where "costumed penitents", including the columnist Rod Liddle and MP George Galloway, will serve cocktails, Raven adds. | |
| "We're looking for a commitment of £100 or more from prominent supporters who are as frustrated as we are by the PR and celebrity-filled women's magazines and long for an alternative," she writes. | |
| Raven insists that the title will also not be niche and promises that it will "sit alongside Cosmo on the newsagent's shelf, instead of on those carousels in Whole Foods alongside Green Parent". | |
| If she is successful it will herald a dazzling comeback for the magazine which first launched in 1972 out of the 1960s feminist movement and whose editors have incluided the former Daily Express editor Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, its first. The magazine folded in 1993. | |
| Describing her team as a "disaffected group of artists, activists and journalists", Raven says that the original plan was to call it Woman's Journal after the old suffragette newspaper but she chose Spare Rib because "we love the 70s version of Spare Rib and didn't want fall prey to the female compulsion to reinvent the wheel". | |
| The new title plans to be funny with Raven insisting that, unlike the satirical magazine Private Eye which she claims to feel "excluded" by, the relaunched Spare Rib will "feel like a girls' club instead of a boys' club". | The new title plans to be funny with Raven insisting that, unlike the satirical magazine Private Eye which she claims to feel "excluded" by, the relaunched Spare Rib will "feel like a girls' club instead of a boys' club". |
| Raven also vows not to be exercised by common feminist canards such as "the dearth of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies" and will not "deal in caricatures". | |
| "SR will revive the spirited and soulful vision of feminism that SR once embodied not the timid liberal one that dominates the mainstream media," she says, adding that it will offer "top tips on keeping our female friends when all around are goading us into 'bitch fests' and 'catfights' – instead of cupcake recipes." | "SR will revive the spirited and soulful vision of feminism that SR once embodied not the timid liberal one that dominates the mainstream media," she says, adding that it will offer "top tips on keeping our female friends when all around are goading us into 'bitch fests' and 'catfights' – instead of cupcake recipes." |
| She adds the new title will "be the first publication ever to be run as a members' organisation" and promises that the first 300 people to donate £100 will be given a year's subscription and become Spare Rib founder members, given access to an "exclusive SR founders' event in July." | She adds the new title will "be the first publication ever to be run as a members' organisation" and promises that the first 300 people to donate £100 will be given a year's subscription and become Spare Rib founder members, given access to an "exclusive SR founders' event in July." |
| This, she says, will be "an immersive political experience in a glamorous Shoreditch space". | This, she says, will be "an immersive political experience in a glamorous Shoreditch space". |
| "At the Restitution Ball, the patriarchal tables will be turned, for one night only," she adds. "Women will be served 'Fucking Mary' cocktails by George Galloway, Rod Liddle and other costumed penitents, while the men are kept pointlessly occupied; sweeping up, 'keeping fit' and worrying about their work/life balance. The star-studded afterparty with renowned DJs will finally scotch the myth that feminists can't dance." | |
| Raven had not returned calls at the time of publication. | Raven had not returned calls at the time of publication. |
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