“We started this project 25 years ago with a mission of how we were going to present feminism,” says Bust founder and editor-in-chief Debbie Stoller. “Now I have a strong sense that the culture has finally caught up with us. That’s the most surprising feeling to me.”

Since 1993, Bust—along with the likes of Bitch, which also started as a zine—has offered women an alternative to the pages of mainstream glossies like Glamour and Cosmopolitan. According to Stoller, those magazines made the women she knew “feel terrible about themselves” and made little to no mention of feminism. “We wanted to make a magazine that women could actually feel good about reading,” Stoller says. “If Playboy is—or was—entertainment for men, then this would be like entertainment for feminists, to present pop culture from a feminist perspective and give feminism some better PR.”

But unlike other indie publications that sprung up in the name of third wave feminism, Bust has made it to 2018, surviving the decline of print media and even outliving mainstream magazines with far deeper pockets. Stoller attributes this to being “scrappy,” as well as the bimonthly magazine’s investment in events—such as the Craftacular, a crafts fair in its 13th year, as well as lectures and classes—and subscription revenue. (Bust’s current subscriber base is about 12,000.)

“Unlike a lot of other magazines, we have always relied more on subscribers,” Stoller says, noting that other magazines get much of their revenue from advertising. “The other thing is because we don’t have a parent publisher and aren’t running on someone else’s dollar, we cannot afford to do anything other than what we can afford to do. We have to work within our means; we have to have a balanced budget.” That said, Stoller plans to finally seek outside financial support for Bust. “I think with even a small amount of money, there’s so much that we could do,” she says.

The changing landscape of feminism in media

Perhaps more interesting is that Bust has survived the changing tides of feminism and what women demand from their media. One example of the latter is Jezebel, which launched as its own corrective to women’s magazines nearly 15 years after Bust. (“The Bitch and Bust aesthetic, if you can call it that, never really appealed to me,” Jezebel founder Anna Holmes once told the New Yorker. “Probably because I associated it, fairly or not, with cool young white women, and I was neither cool nor white.”) In the years since Bust‘s inception, Cosmopolitan has deemed itself “deeply feminist” and published tough interviews with figures like Ivanka Trump; Barack Obama has written about his feminism for Glamour; the New York Times has brought on its first gender editor; and Teen Vogue‘s political coverage has drawn wide praise since 2016. And over the past year, countless publications have interrogated sexual harassment and sexism in the workplace in light of the #MeToo movement.

Related: The frustratingly familiar history of workplace sexual harassment