Four years ago today, exactly, actually,
I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie.
Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine
for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com.
My name's Tavi Gevinson, and
the title of my talk is "Still Figuring It Out,"
and the MS Paint quality of my slides
was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme,
and has nothing to do with my inability
to use PowerPoint. (Laughter)
So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist.
I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about
what makes a strong female character,
and, you know, movies and TV shows,
these things have influence. My own website.
So I think the question of what makes a strong female
character often goes misinterpreted,
and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen
who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot,
like a Catwoman type,
or she plays her sexuality up 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 that then
people expect women to be that easy to understand,
and women are mad at themselves
for not being that simple,
when, in actuality, women are complicated,
women are multifaceted -- not because women are crazy,
but because people are crazy,
and women happen to be people. (Laughter)
So the flaws are the key.
I'm not the first person to say this.
What makes a strong female character
is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws,
who is maybe not immediately likable,
but eventually relatable.
I don't like to acknowledge a problem
without also acknowledging those who work to fix it,
so just wanted to acknowledge shows like "Mad Men,"
movies like "Bridesmaids," whose female characters
or protagonists are complex, multifaceted.
Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO
that premiers next month, "Girls,"
she said she wanted to start it because she felt that
every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions,
and that feels accurate for all people,
but you don't see women represented like that as much.
Congrats, guys. (Laughs)
But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types
of women who are not represented that way,
and one group that we'll focus on today are teens,
because I think teenagers are especially contradictory
and still figuring it out,
and in the '90s there was "Freaks and Geeks"
and "My So-Called Life," and their characters,
Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase,
I mean, the whole premise of the shows
were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically,
but those shows only lasted a season each,
and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since.
So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) —
around the time when I was,
when I started watching those TV shows.
I was ending middle school, starting high school --
I'm a sophomore now —
and I was trying to reconcile
all of these differences that you're 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's 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.
So I was trying to figure all that out,
and I felt a little confused,
and I said so on my blog,
and I said that I wanted to start
a website for teenage girls
that was not this kind of one-dimensional
strong character empowerment thing
because I think one thing that can be very alienating
about a misconception of feminism is that
girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to
being perfectly consistent in your beliefs,
never being insecure, never having doubts,
having all of the answers. And this is not true,
and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling
became easier once I understood that feminism
was not a rulebook but a discussion,
a conversation, a process,
and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year
when I -- I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit
on the illustration front since.
But, yeah.
So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication
for teenage girls and ask people to submit
their writing, their photography, whatever,
to be a member of our staff.
I got about 3,000 emails.
My editorial director and I went through them and
put together a staff of people,
and we launched last September.
And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter,
where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers,
we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to
give girls the answers, and not even give them permission
to find the answers themselves,
but hopefully inspire them to understand that
they can give themselves that permission,
they can ask their own questions, find their own answers,
all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it
a nice place for all of that to be figured out.
So I'm not saying, "Be like us,"
and "We're perfect role models," because we're not,
but we just want to help represent girls
in a way that shows those different dimensions.
I mean, we have articles called
"On Taking Yourself Seriously: How to Not Care What People Think of You,"
but we also have articles like,
oops -- I'm figuring it out!
Ha ha. (Laughter)
If you use that, you can get away with anything.
We also have articles called
"How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes."
So all of that being said, I still really appreciate
those characters in movies and
articles like that on our site,
that aren't just about being totally powerful,
maybe finding your acceptance with yourself
and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those.
So what I you to take away from my talk,
the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks.
Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter)
Because my favorite thing about her,
other than, like, everything, is that
she is very -- has always been
unapologetically present on stage,
and unapologetic about her flaws
and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings
and she makes you listen to them and think about them,
and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks.
Thank you. (Applause)