- Penguin Random House
- There’s a reason so many grown-ass women read this website for the youths.
A review copy of Rookie Yearbook Four just arrived at the office, and I can’t stop reading it. The online magazine for teenage girl geniuses, created by actual teenage girl genius Tavi Gevinson, Rookie has grown a lot in its four years of existence, and Gevinson will be on hand for a book release at Powell’s Cedar Hills on Sunday, November 1 (one of the best arguments I can think of for slogging out to Beaverton).
In the interim, Vanity Fair has a great interview with Gevinson, and it will make you feel (a) old, and (b) full of faith in the children into whose shaky paws we place the future. Here is one such gem, where Gevinson weighs in on pop feminism and its discontents:
Well, I just get frustrated because I do a lot of interviews that will be like, ‘Meryl Streep said this about feminism, Jennifer Lawrence said this about feminism, Beyoncé said this about feminism.’ I’m just very suspect of that because it’s actually a question about a celebrity, I don’t know how much it’s a question about feminism. As feminism becomes more integrated into mainstream publications and conversation, I feel weary of an obsession of celebrity culture masquerading as activism or as conversation or action. It’s clickbait. I think it’s foolish to interview someone who’s just promoting a movie that they’re in and ask if they consider themselves a feminist. That’s not about feminism, that’s about the journalist wanting to gauge how much this person is aware of the world, or is aware of the feminist movement. But that’s the very same thing to me as interviewing a celebrity and asking if they really are on a diet or not. It’s just a test of realness. It’s this weird realness policing . . . I think it alienates people from feminism to think that it’s all about ‘Are you with us or against us.’
There’s also this. Emphasis mine, because Halloween is coming, and with it my annual viewing of a certain 1990s witchy teen movie/revenge fantasy flick. For context, Gevinson has been cast in the Broadway revival of The Crucible:
As soon as I found out I got the part, I e-mailed my English teacher that year and told him and he was so excited, and he’s going to try and come to New York for the show . . . this is the kind of thing where I feel like if you were to go back through stuff that I wrote when I was way younger, there are so many seeds of eventually portraying a hysterical teenage witch. I just feel like this has been brewing inside of me for a long time, by which I mean, I watched The Craft a lot when I was younger.
Aw, I wish Rookie had been around when I was a teenager, but paging through Yearbook Four is the next best thing. It’s the written equivalent of the opening synths on an empowering song by Robyn. I am nearly a decade older than Rookie Editor in Chief Gevinson. To say I’m not in Rookie’s target demographic is to put it charitably. And yet, I am not alone. There’s a reason so many grown-ass women I know read this website for the youths. It’s better than any of the ones we grew up with, and we’re making up for lost time.