High school sophomore calls out lack of complex female characters in media

When Tavi Gevinson was 11 years old, she founded the fashion blog, Style Rookie. Soon Style Rookie was drawing 30,000 visitors a day, got featured in the New York Times, and Gevinson was invited to Fashion Week.

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Gevinson started blogging because, she was trying to “reconcile all these differences that you are told you can’t be when you’re growing up as a girl. You can’t be smart and pretty. You can’t be a feminist who is also interested in fashion. You can’t care about clothes if it’s not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you.”

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I am so impressed that a pre-teen had the courage to express herself like this. Wow. Her words hit the nail on the head, too. I am so psyched that she calls out the smart or pretty choice foisted on girls and women. It’s bullshit, just a way to keep females down and frightened of power, and teen girls need to know that.

Three years after creating Style Rookie, Gevinson decided to move on from fashion, founding a new feminist site for teen girls, Rookie Magazine, featuring content almost entirely by them.

Gevinson introduced her venture in a TED talk. She begins with the words: “I am a feminist.” Take that Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. Gevinson’s talk is awesome and focused on the theme of female characters in TV and movies. She says that her generation sees few female characters to admire.

“We get these two dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot, like, you know, a Catwoman type who plays up her sexuality a lot and it’s seen as power. But they’re not strong characters who happen to be female, they’re completely flat and they’re basically cardboard characters. The problem with this is is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand… In actuality, women are complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy and women happen to be people.”

I will definitely be following Rookie Magazine.

Here’s the TED talk.

 

 

 

6 thoughts on “High school sophomore calls out lack of complex female characters in media

  1. I love her! I think she’s fantastic, and I love how outspoken she is. I find it inspiring that she’s so prolific at such a young age.

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