 Target for Saturdays, this month we are celebrating, as we always do in March, Women's History Month. And if you're familiar with the Brooklyn Museum and the part we have on the wall and the artists we bring to the museum, we always have a lot of women change makers here in the museum. We're also celebrating the eighth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It was the first center for feminist art in a major museum. We're inspiring all of the programs here tonight. It's from Malala Yusuf Vaz. Sorry, I always get her name wrong. But you know the Pakistani activist, education activist. And she says, when she's talking about women in education, she says, I raise up my voice, not so I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard. We cannot succeed when half of us are held back. So the two dynamic, powerful women we have on the stage today are Tavi Gevinson and Anna Holmes. I'm just going to do a brief introduction of each one of them and then let them get on the stage. So Tavi is a writer, editor, actress and singer. She came to public attention at the age of 12 because of her fashion blog style rookie. By 15 she had shifted her focus to pop culture and feminist discussion. She's the founder and editor in chief of the online rookie magazine aimed primarily at teenage girls. In both 2011 and 2012 she appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 in media list. In 2014 she was named one of the 25 most influential teens of 2014 by Time Magazine. In 2012 she appeared in a public service announcement for women's rights and organized a get well soon car drive from Malala after she was shot and she has been doing amazing things ever since. She's going to be in communication today and she's going to be in conversation and communication with Anna Holmes. And Anna Holmes is the founder of Jezebel.com. Do we have any Jezebel fans here? She has written and edited for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Instyle and New Yorker magazine. She's the founder of Jezebel.com and in 2012 she was the recipient of the mirror award for Best Commentary. In 2013 her Twitter account was named one of the top 140 Twitter feeds by Time Magazine. And she says at which point she became incredibly self-conscious and stopped tweeting as much. She's the editor of two books including the book of Jezebel which is here on the three slides slideshow. And she works as a columnist for The New York Times Book Review and as an editor of Digital Voices at the Future. Please welcome Tavi Gevinson and Anna Holmes. Last thing, there's going to be a book signing in the bookshop. Tavi has her book. She signed all of the copies. She's going to be personalizing them and have opportunity to take a photo, do whatever you want. But that will be on the first floor immediately after the conversation. So can we give them one round of applause? I'm thrilled to be here with Tavi. I haven't seen it in maybe three or four years. I first saw you, met you in Harlem with Jenna. And it was a colleague of mine when I worked with Jezebel and your dad was there, I believe. Or maybe he stopped and checked up on us and loved us a lot. It might be a big deal that I took a cab alone. You may be like 14 or 15 or maybe maybe younger, I don't know. But it was probably 2010. So I haven't seen her since then although of course I've been following everything that she's been doing. And I'm happy that you're here and I'm happy that you're living in New York now. So the discussion is going to be about, or at least it was Bill this being about, us having a conversation about creating media for and by women. So I'm going to, you know, Tavi can ask me questions but I'm going to ask her questions. Which you can throw them back at me. But what I want to know first from Tavi is, I know you've been asked a lot of times about why you created Rookie. What I want to know is, when you were thinking about creating Rookie, what did you want to do? What did you want to accomplish? What did you want to avoid? So I think part of it was that I had been writing my blog for a few years and felt like I'd had this good, this really good formative experience of just like amusing about my life and what inspired me and the things that I was discovering like movies and stuff. And then I felt like I had met other, like in the fashion blogging community I felt like I had met other girls who were into fashion but also interested in feminism and were also starting to kind of write about it. And I felt like there needed to be a kind of home base for all these like really talented other young people that I saw on the internet. And I also felt like I was starting to enter high school around that time. And like when I think back I'm like, I don't know how well-versed you might be and like what I wore when I was 12. But like I see some pictures of like me at Fashion Week when I was 12 and I'm wearing like the craziest shit. And I'm just like the only way that worked was because I was pre-pubescent so I had not yet been hit by just like the like team insecurity. And so then I like kind of stopped being interested in fashion and also was hit with team insecurity. But also saw all these really cool writers and artists online who were going through the same things and it seems like natural then to kind of want to collaborate with them. Yeah, just create something that wasn't condescending, wasn't trying to sell its audience something all the time. It's you know when I think about Jezebel I mean there were we tried to cover a lot of different topics but there were some topics I didn't feel like I knew how to cover which meant we just didn't do it. One of which was makeup. Man, I'm wearing makeup. I have no problem with makeup. But one of the ad sales guys had made a comment about us wanting to or him wanting us to do more makeup, post about makeup because it might attract advertisers. And my first reaction was I don't care about advertisers. But the second reaction was I don't know how to talk about makeup in a smart way other than that's a nice color lipstick. Right. And so I just avoided it altogether. So I'm wondering for you are there certain topics that you with Rookie don't feel that you are equipped to cover because you don't feel that you would do it in the right way or you don't know how to do it in the right way. I think that I mean with something like that I wouldn't know how to write about makeup. And also one thing I was conscious of was I don't want to feel like I'm trying to sell people something based on their insecurities which is what a lot of media for women is kind of based on. And I also had these ideas about fashion and beauty which was like I'd been wearing this crazy shit and I was like it's fun and it's a way to express yourself and it for me it was I mean this word is kind of overused but it was empowering and it was like a way of expressing my identity and to me that felt fabulous. But I mean I remember though that when I started Rookie I felt like there were a lot of websites for women just not ones that I saw and really connected with for teenagers but like when Jezebel started there wasn't even that landscape like it was kind of the first like what do you feel like it's been the biggest change from then to now? Well there were definitely sites that I think that I mean basically what I should say is just go back to like my teen years I was a teenager I guess in the late 80's which dates me and I read Sassy and that was like the Crème de la Crème. If I could inspire that feeling in other people I wouldn't want it life at least temporarily. I'm not sure that Jezebel did that but that's what I was trying to go for although for an older audience not a teen audience. But you know there were certain like we were taking a page from different types of media that were out there at the time in 2007 what I noticed I'm not saying this was objectively the truth but what I noticed in online media were that young women my age younger and younger were being marketed to there were websites for them that it was either like very broad stuff like I village I don't even know what that was supposed to be about it was like a collection of things about women like in parenting and stuff and then there were sites that tried to sell you things like fashion or beauty or lifestyle sites like Daily Candy which were actually trying to push products on young women with disposable income and there were gossip sites and you know this was the rise of from a possession of celebrity culture and so it made sense that there were lots of websites that had pictures of celebrities mostly paparazzi photos but the ways that women were presented on those were in my opinion really destructive they were usually being pulled and picked apart by the male bloggers for the ways they looked she's fat, she's pregnant, she looks so sad it's stuff that has to do with their appearance and their romantic status and nothing to do with their talent as an actress or something else so I figured well women are obviously spending a lot of time on those gossip celebrity websites and yeah even I'm kind of fascinated looking at paparazzi pictures of people but we're going to put that stuff on the site but we're not going to tear the women apart for you know a wrinkle in her dress that might be a pregnancy or the fact that she doesn't have makeup on or yada yada yada so I was trying to kind of bring I was trying to make a site that would appeal to young women that wouldn't be insulting to them because you know I was lucky enough to grow up when there was no internet and so I was not being bombarded with images well I was being bombarded with images that were unrealistic but they were pretty contained you know they were in Cosmo or Glamour or Vogue but they weren't all over the internet they weren't in my Facebook feed because it was my Facebook I mean it just felt I felt really sorry and that sounds patronizing and I don't mean to be that way but I felt pained at what it must be like to be a teenage girl being inundated with the sort of stuff that I was seeing and as then 34 year old I found problematic myself and that was your question yeah absolutely well I think also Sassy for me was like I was 13 or 14 and found out about Sassy magazine for the late 80s and early 90s for teenage girls and I found out about it through having I think on like other friends blogs or something and then I did a trade with a girl because I was trying to find copies and she like mailed me like a year's worth what did you give her in return? I think I gave her a mixtape I hope she still has any I hope so too I hope she wasn't just like fuck you well yeah and they were so I felt like they were still I mean other than certain things like new kids on the block which I was still also like alright I felt like they still resonated with me you know like 20 years later just because the women and who wrote for Sassy were um I don't yeah they weren't out to make anyone feel bad the other thing is that we're like oh we have like all this culture that's made for us by men I think a lot of media that I find not particularly feminist is also often made by women and it's like internalized internalized misogyny like you're like like a on a different scale a version of that is like judging what your friend eats because you're like I don't want to do that like just projecting your own and then it becomes like a magazine and it's like in CVS that's crazy well having having worked with all those magazines some of which are better than others well first of all I think a lot of them are better than they used to be I think a lot of them are better than they used to be because the internet demonstrated women's websites the good ones demonstrated how kind of out of touch those magazines were there is a very big difference between Cosmo and Glamour of 2008 which made Fana mercilessly on Jezebel every day there was so much stuff there was so much material and those magazines now like they I think they got a little freaked out by the sort of you know stuff that was being lobbed at them by us and by other sites like us and also saw that there was a hunger for something that was more than 52 sexy sex tips to make him sex you up on sexy saturday I mean like that sort of stuff I mean I know we're joking but like yeah I had to write some of those stories because I worked at Glamour when I was in my late twenties and the Glamour that I read as a teenager was a different Glamour than I encountered as an adult the Glamour I read as a teenager was very good actually and I would actually describe it as a feminist magazine it wasn't overly so but it was and it was edited by I believe it's founder the woman who founded it with Whitney then she passed away and then the editor that I worked for came on board and she had come from Cosmo so she was Cosmo-ing of Glamour and it was not the magazine I read as a teenager and it was I was asked to write the sorts of things that I just made fun of I think the worst story was well in terms of being incoherent I think it was what's your secret sexual personality and usually usually what happened with these stories is the editor would decide on what the story headline was and then she asked you to create a story around it my experience is what I learned in school is that you have a story idea and you report it out and then you see where it takes you and then you figure out the headline yeah and so she so yeah she'd think of things that obviously would look maybe good on the CVS newsstand but didn't necessarily have any basis in reality so like what's your secret sexual personality I don't know I don't know how I executed that but that sort of stuff was upsetting to me as a young woman and as a writer and also having created that sort of material I knew how much women's magazines were just bullshit because I was reading some of it it was like the Wizard of Oz but I will say that a lot of the women that I worked with that most of the people on staff of those magazines and editorial were then and still are women were very smart so I actually couldn't say so much it was internalized misogyny at least in my era so much as it was the mandate of the publisher or the company that owned them to make money and they made money by selling advertising and advertisers would get freaked out by anything that was remotely political or controversial so that all these really talented capable women writers and editors were finding themselves creating crap but not really wanting to and also that they were being bungled into these women's magazines because they were profitable and they weren't going to close down and become the kind of higher ground magazines that existed in New York tended to be staffed by white men just to put it very bluntly and that there wasn't a lot of room for women so I'll just kind of fight for the women that I worked with not always the editors not always the editors in chief who didn't really take chances but we were all very frustrated but actually that was one of my questions for you and I think in the green room we talked about it about well not so much internalized misogyny but I was going to ask you what destructive messages about females you've internalized in your life whether in your younger years or now for years I've been trying to figure out my secret sexual personality it's just really messed me up I mean that honestly makes me imagine a page where they just have all the characters from like adventure time and they're like pick one um well so I'm trying to think of what I consumed when I was like really young and on one hand I read my older I have two older sisters and I read their magazine so like early 2017 and Cosmo Girl and YM and I guess I don't know I feel like all that really the biggest thing I can think of is like than having a really weird idea about like gender roles and relationships and something yeah your sexual personality like all of these weird things that we invent to try to figure out something that's really just like a friendship with sex editing and I think but I felt like it was countered by a lot of like I really liked reading when I was younger and um I felt like I which we kind of talk about this too like I had really good kind of role models even in just like the picture books or like chapter books that I was reading in elementary school just a good sassy like pippi longstocking or um uh the girl with the purple purse I don't know that one what happened to that one? she was a mouse a purple purse was so inspiring but there are definitely I mean I realize now that I've danced around the question I did think there's something to be said for like my friend was just telling me about an op-ed that she read so I didn't read this but about how by a psychologist in the times about how more women now than ever being diagnosed or being medicated for like anxiety and depression and that does make me wonder I think everyone has to take care of themselves um but it makes me wonder if there's an attitude we have towards sadness or sensitivity or being emotional that's linked to femaleness that type just really feminine and I definitely think that you know I've probably internalized something about that being like um you know too feminine or annoying or something well did you I mean when you were younger or even now we can talk about in the past we'd rather not talk about the present tense but do you um did you worry about your body when you were 11, 12, 13 I mean because I remember very safely feeling those ways and you know it's kind of heartbreaking to look back on it because I grew up in a household I think there was similar to yours I wasn't being raised by parents who were expecting me to look like a parent you know in fact we're trying to communicate the very opposite of that um that I should try and develop my mind and my personal relationships not my physique but yet I was beset like many teenage girls with a lot of insecurity about that I think something crazy has happened which is that I look at my body now in a way where like I um the way that I do it I'm like this never happened before I never had this thought before I made it through all of high school and I think it's without like looking in the mirror in a certain way and I don't know what should have happened in high school and I should be fine now and I don't know what happened there and I think that I mean just to say I don't think that's true in the sense that actually I think this stays with people for a long time so I don't think you should be over it by now and I have a lot of friends who are my age who actually got worse the older they got right well I think part of it is also like in high school I go to school and be like I don't care about like I just have my friends all I needed I I wasn't part of like a circle in high school where looks were much of a currency and now I guess I'm like I live in New York I'm a little young woman and maybe that comes with that and it's like not something I even think I truly care about or yeah I used to give time to and suddenly I'm like oh I guess I have to care I listen to an interview with Christopher Noxon who is a novelist and he's the husband of Genji Kohan who created Oranges the New Black and Weeds and he wrote a novel called Plus One about being the about a man who's the husband of a much more successful woman and he said that he was like I've never been anything but really happy for her but when the man is the successful one people congratulate the wife and when the wife is successful people go up to the husband and go how you doing are you okay and he was like when enough people ask are you okay you're like oh should I be worried so I think maybe even part of it is just like these being the things that I think about all the time with Rookie I don't know well do you think maybe that you're worried I'm just curious because because now you're an act now you're also acting and like that is an industry that historically has been one of the worst in terms of the pressures it's put on women right so but I think because I feel like my home is a community that's like yeah looking at that stuff and talking about why it's what it can be problematic like I feel pretty safe in terms of um like I don't it's not bad I don't know maybe it's just like what you grow up or I mean no one's safe from it I think it goes through phases too I mean I've had better years where I don't care about that stuff in the years where I feel paralyzed by it but I'm not trying to be you know crassly by saying it doesn't go away I do think getting older I can only speak as a female because it does get better absolutely I hated my 20s but I think it does get better in terms of your understanding of yourself and how you how you see yourself in the world and you know but I don't know that that kind of certain little twinges of self-loathing going completely or preparing yourself to other people or standards of beauty and society that said I do think it's a lot better now than it was because you have more examples in the media of different types of beauty different body types, different skin colors and just stuff that I didn't see when I was when I was growing up at all it was all pretty much super models that were size sex and you know were fantastically gorgeous and that's what was really so I think we're in a good period in terms of representations of different types of beauty in women and but it's still very difficult and I I don't wish I was a teenager again but I do think it's some ways it's also better because you can curate what you see more now and there's also like such an amazing community supporting like when I say like I don't think it's because I go on auditions for acting stuff now I think it's because it's like I need to like a tumblr dashboard full of people being like love yourself and that's like a good thing to internalize and I think I mean in a way like I feel like a few years ago people were talking about you know websites being new authorities the way magazines are and now I also think that there's just such a democracy of tumblr like you curate what you want to see and like a thought like a brief post goes around a lot because a lot of people like it and not because they know necessarily who posted it if that person is a writer journalist or authority figure or public figure and I think that's like and like I think the role of a teen magazine like I don't even think 17 or sassy or rookie like I don't think any of those things could be what in a way could be like what sassy was to you just because I think there's a good thing happening which is that teenagers young people like listen to each other more now? Yeah and they can communicate with each other I had a phone I could call my friends that was about it the magazine came in the mail it seems like you can find more of a community now because of the internet have you ever met the women who worked with sassy you met jimmy right? I think I have in brief ways met some of the other others was it weird for you to read that magazine since it was set in a different era and one thing in the field about it to me was that they talked about New York a lot and that's kind of annoying in a way now because what I was running just while I didn't want to talk about New York a lot I didn't want to make it seem like New York was the center of the universe is it isn't but part of what drew me to New York was sassy magazine and that and the fact I wanted to work in magazines in general and you know I actually saw one of the editors in New York airport when I was returning to college in New York after Christmas break it was like 1992 and I almost fell over she was a bit of rock star I didn't say anything to her but I'm curious to know what your experience reading sassy was seeing that it's from an even earlier era and if there were things you took from sassy that you tried to bring to rookie whether it was that sense of personal connection using writers using their names talking about themselves in the first person yeah I mean one of the first kind of seeds I planted in trying to get to gauge the interest or how realistic the idea of starting rookie was the interest of other people was I gave a talk at an ideas conference in Toronto about sassy and just how each of those things would look today and that basically did I mean I haven't watched this talk or looked at it since I gave it like four five years ago or something but I think a lot of it was like I liked how they didn't like celebrities were in like idolized they were appreciated for their work or could be well that's one thing that's interesting and that I didn't want to do was that sassy in a lot of ways started being sassy about like celebs in a way that I think was at that time really new because other team magazines were just like she's amazing about like someone who maybe sucked um whatever we can talk about like Shen and Doug I don't think that's my point but um so I think like that was one thing that I did take away as not like good for the modern era because I think that was something that started but then like yeah that was like gossip blogs happened like that tone became something that I then felt like and there's no need for um for us to I think you can like be critical of celebrities or artists but it felt like um kind of tired to take on the too much of like a sassy tone and also rookie is so different from what sassy was and that like we're not interviewing the new kids on the walk like we're not they did interview like every mainstream celebrity and everything so it makes sense that it would be more varied and we really just kind of have Q and As with people that we really admire you don't have like pull out posters of like teen idols although you should just for fun one of the ear bucks that would be really fun and that's what I remember about teen magazines not sassy and maybe not even why I'm under 17 but you know they were like the teen magazines that were yeah like teen and there was one called teen that was a done in fluorescent colors and there was always I think it was Sean Aston that was the era like Sean Aston being adorable from Goonies I'm not really dating myself but Goonies please drop that reference at any time it's such a crush on him I saw that maybe like five times I mean my dad taking every single time we were talking about books that we kind of already answered that question oh I wanted to know what's that what's that if you know what the number is what's the percentage of individuals who are reading rookie who are male there's no way for me to know but I feel like we get a fair amount of emails from guys who are like oh this thing about street harassment you know helped me understand why that is me they're not very bright these boys no that was really poor paraphrase they ever ask you to victimize ever write in and say why don't you write more about men I feel like there's some of that but while I feel like there's some like what about guys but there's some but then there's some that's also like what about if I feel like I don't really know if I identify as a girl or a boy and that's when I'm like oh in the language around like I when I started I was like rookies for teenage girls because I was looking at like you know what a teen magazine was normally considered to be and like the other girls that I knew and what we needed and more and more it just seems like it's just for teenagers yeah a lot a lot has changed in terms of our our ideas about gender and also you know when I started it was for women and you know there wasn't even that much content on the site that acknowledged the lives of gay women there was some but there wasn't as much as there should have been I remember when I was much younger I did a book of breakup letters written by women and men because I'd written a breakup letter and I was cathartic and I wanted to collect breakup letters and you know looking back at that book that came out in 2003 which was a while ago but still there were no letters from from one gay woman to another it was all heterosexual relationships being presented and that didn't really even occur to me that much I remember it kind of did but you know that would just be I haven't been ashamed of that I think that because we have evolved in I think very important ways in terms of how we think of the female experience yeah I don't know if I started as well today I would say it was for women or I would have the same sort of content I think I would make a bigger effort to represent the lives of women who are not heterosexual well and I think what you said about how you know the Cosmo today is so different from the Cosmo like I think everything is kind of because of probably mostly like Twitter and Tumblr everything is so like there's not really a line between mainstream and underground like a lot of people are getting the same information so I think more and more like you get called out or someone says that they don't feel represented and it's no longer like something that stays contained in a space it's like the people who work at these larger like condensed publications do hear that it's all mixed in and it's great and I think that's a really good direction to go in and I also think I would say the same in terms of representation issues at Rookie and I feel like the answer is always just like let's get more people in here I don't I mean when you were like are there subjects you feel not good to talk about it's like yeah I have a very narrow experience and a very privileged experience and so then you have to um I feel like there are a lot of people on the internet like everyone wants to be good and nice and figure out how they can be helpful to issues in the world and I have just found that like it's not really they're not really mind to talk about but the good thing about having this platform with a lot of writers is like then you stop like the person who should be talking about it and who can speak to it in a much more real and useful way so I mean that's just like a really basic blanket thing about empathy and not just wanting to like uh hog the stage and stuff like that but I think um yeah no that's it um well did you ever feel like it was important to call Jezmo Feminist website um I purposely didn't call it that because the owner of the company wouldn't have liked that um so I decided to be more I was trying to be someone subversive about it so we would use the word feminist all the time and use the word feminist and talk about it all the time I had a special plea of putting the F word in the headline just to try it on repeatedly um I had grown up in an era when the word feminist was a bad word I didn't consider it to be that way I never had any problem calling myself a feminist I but I was the minority in terms of my my care group of females of girls in them you know even in college um so I felt that I was aware of the fact that it was a word that a lot of women and young and old tiptoed around or thought meant something negative and I felt the best way to counteract that at least what we were doing was to repeat it over and over and over again to like rob it of its power but also give it power in a way um I never called the site a feminist site and there was a reason for that was again I think the owner would have been like that's not what I hired him to do um but also because there were sites out there that were explicitly feminist in a way that we were not and I felt that to put ourselves in that category with them would have been insulting to them sites whose purpose sole purpose was to examine gender politics right um through a feminist lens whereas we didn't always do that obviously as a writer one of my writers would post about the anthropology catalog and how ridiculous it was this month and then there would be you know something about the Oscars that I didn't want to front and I didn't want to put us at the same level of often times smaller non-for-profit sites that were doing this in a much more sustained and serious way right so I didn't call it a feminist site other people did and I didn't really mind if they did I don't think that we were on the same level as some of these much smaller sites that again were more labors of love I mean again, Jezebel was supposed to make money I was going to pay to do it I wasn't just doing it out of the goodness of my heart so I was getting a paycheck so it was not like my second job and I felt that way about other words words that I called the society or women or just people in general to do it around a bit whether that word was feminism whether that word was racism we're talking about racism I think that some people blanched because of the sheer number of headlines on the posts that we put up that had to do with rape or abortion which I was like we're just going to call them what they are and I'm going to use euphemisms I just felt I personally felt very fed up with women's media women's media at that time and also the ways in which people if you weren't talking about stuff that goes on every day and it is important and that the best way to deal with that was just to throw it out there and hammer it home and we got complaints, I mean not no one complained that it said stop using the word feminist but there'd be a lot of people who'd write it oftentimes dudes who were reading I guess who would say we get it we get it, I get the point stop writing about exploits stop writing about rape and the military the photoshopping of actresses and models and women's magazine stop complaining about this I mean when you tell me to stop something I'm just going to keep doing it more well also that's a weird thing to be like this personally hurts me that you're talking about this horrible issue in the world they just stop reading the internet was also different then because back then people were going to have a home page refreshing out of time and that's not how anyone or at least I don't I find stuff through Twitter or Facebook so I was very aware of what messages the site was communicating to people who came there because they would see you know a home page that had a number of posts with different headlines of photos and everything had to be in my mind created a certain way to to put across a certain sensibility and that might be lost now with online media which isn't a bad thing but just that people don't even go to home pages anymore the way they used to I mean I don't and even my mother doesn't I'm trying to insult her but she's not the one who uses social media even if she doesn't go into NY Times dot com in the same way so I hope I answered your question yeah absolutely I mean I think that I had a same feeling where I never IDed Rookie as a feminist website because I do feel like that's a community of sites where like yeah the primary focus is feminism the movement and I felt like I think I've referred to it as feminist like as an adjective because I think it's part of the lens through which I view my work and my life and I think a lot of our contributors and staffers feel the same way and that just kind of naturally becomes a part of it so yeah it's like walking the line between um wanting to take away the stigma by using it a lot but also wanting to without watering it down like I guess like I had to alright so like on one side you have saying it a lot to remove the stigma talking about it a lot and then on the other side it's like I want a girl who as you know I once thought thinks that um feminism is like man-hating and hairy armpits or whatever to come to the site and immediately go like oh it's not for me so I think um it was always kind of like figuring out a way to take away the stigma while also like slowly brainwashing girls into good self-esteem via being feminist like um but yeah I think but even like when I started rookie which was only like three and a half years ago it was totally different from now where I don't think there's like I don't know what this says about like culture and the way we let ourselves be influenced but the fact that like Beyonce and Taylor Swift will call themselves feminists I think makes a huge difference someone asked me the other day the panel it was on the first director about whether feminism was trendy and I mean I've been hearing this for a year and a half two years and I hate well I don't hate the question but it does I think that part of repeating that word over and over and over again is that then it may lose some meaning it may reduce the stigma but then it may lose some meaning for some people it does for me because I'm not saying I wouldn't call myself a feminist but I do see invocations of feminism or proclamations that seem a little watered down I think I once told someone I was like skim milk feminism and yeah this is getting into like very dangerous not dangerous territory but complicated territory because you know I don't know if there's a checklist that you have to fill out either you are a feminist or not the idea that it's trendy I don't want to think of it as something that is a dress that's in season you know or that's something that's being put on as an accessory and then only to be discarded which is basically kind of what this woman was asking me like isn't an accessory of sorts and you know if you'd asked me six years ago, seven years ago if I'd ever get that question I would have laughed in your face because no one in the broader media in popular culture was talking about this stuff on the other hand it does make me a little uncomfortable like when I saw that big feminist sign behind Beyonce, I could say feminism or feminist I was I mean I was shocked but part of me also was uncomfortable because it was a big spectacle and it was a big award show I'm not accustomed to seeing that sort of things I might just be like an old funny daddy in a way and I'm not accusing Beyonce of watching down feminism but I do it does make me a little nervous sometimes how much it gets bandied about because I'm not sure that what it I'm not sure that people are articulating a vision of feminism beyond girl power in some cases and that's what concerns me I think like when I get asked if I think it's trendy like my immediate answer is like no it's not like this year's Beyonce is going to stand in front of a screen that says massage me which just agree but I think the danger is that like the natural cycle of things is that there's then a backlash and that's when you do get dudes going like stop talking about reaping the military so much but it's not just like an email it's like I don't know a piece on the Daily Beast or something I don't know I mean I don't know why I threw a date I was just naming a website you just them no websites have lots of lives I'm just saying it's on a platform that well there was just like a New York magazine thing where this guy was like this guy but where a white man was like you know we need to stop talking about we have to stop being so PC yeah yeah well here's the thing I think in terms of like previous backlashes that perhaps they were more organized I'm not sure that a backlash would actually like previous ones feminism would work in the same way because I think that there's been something unleashed that's great and that people are not going to shut the fuck up about it yeah yeah and the more they get told to shut the fuck up the less they're going to shut the fuck up about it so I think that I think actually I don't think we're going to see what I saw in the 80s or what Susan Coluby wrote about in her award winning book and I'd actually love to ask her in person at some point how she thinks a backlash against feminism would evolve I'm not saying it's impossible but I don't think it would have the same impact I think that there's enough media literacy and media criticism and general politics that is at the forefront of so many conversations now I just don't think that the haters would get away with it easily you know that said there is a backlash against women's reproductive rights many parts of the country it makes me feel like we're in another era but I just don't know that I don't know that the same sort of messaging that took hold in the 80s and 90s would be able to do so today but I would like to speak to someone who actually would be an expert on that which is not me, I would be helping Susan Coluby we had talked about in the green room the idea of being a woman and I said to you you can see yourself a woman and then I admitted that I often find myself like I don't know flinching at using that term to describe myself I wouldn't describe myself as a girl I've referred to women as girls before and then I have to catch myself not in an insulting way but you know if there's someone walking down the street and she looks to be under 25 and thinks that girl is a cute dress on but she's not a girl and so I want to know about self-identify the language that we use and how you use language on rookie and in your conversations with friends are you a girl, are you a woman are you both we say I think on rookie I mostly say girl but I think that's the same as young woman like I call myself a girl but I also call myself a young woman and I don't really find myself identifying as a teenager just because I'm not in high school anymore and I'm not going to college so I feel like I just enter adult world or something but there is something about woman that I said this when we were back there but that feels like like you feel like just by calling yourself a woman it's somehow the equivalent of doing like I am woman hereby rower karaoke like it feels very like I don't like it makes me think of the sex in the city theme song like something about it feels like um which is weird it's just woman I think any guy is like am I a man like no but what is that like I actually can't parse that because I feel similar it's really weird sometimes but it makes me kind of like icky um I mean the idea is like I'm a woman um it's really good to figure out like what kind of person I am I'm not a young woman I mean maybe I don't know maybe there's like an age cut-off at which point I can accept the term to describe myself and I wouldn't if someone described me as a woman I wouldn't argue against it I just don't know that I would maybe I just don't define myself as my gender first and foremost right that could be it um but I don't know it's tough because I don't hear adult men referring to other adult men as boys unless they're racists yeah unless they're friends unless they're talking it yeah I forget I'm sorry I think someone the other race has something about didn't like that crazy conservative guy whose name I'm forgetting now called the president a boy recently I'm going off script but no that's totally the way to go I think this is what's um so yeah I'm not sure there's an answer to this particular question because I don't know that I have an answer myself it's just it's interesting to me that adult females women myself included sometimes to flinch it describing ourselves as women um and and I don't know why that is maybe you can do something for rookie yeah I mean I don't like if someone calls me a young girl I don't like that because that's I think it's like that came about because I'm trying to say young woman but they don't want to say woman so they say girl but a young girl is like a four year old like so I don't I don't know yeah I think I don't think about it though that much just because I don't think gender first yeah I think also with females that youth is prized much more and females than men um and you know specifically regarding their fertility for you know that sounds very scientific but you know whether they are have reached their reproductive age and whether they're sexy or hot maybe that's maybe that's what we've internalized is this idea but that's why we call ourselves girls sometimes it's because our youth is women as females is prized um which I hope changes um considerably over over the next few years and decades because um the people that I admire the most the women I admire the most are all older than I am and they always have been well so prizing youth is or like fetishizing youth is like um fetishizing not life like it's like saying that experience or wisdom or knowledge are like unsexy and weird um I just I mean and it's weird because in a lot of ways I'm like somewhat of a figure of like youth and like powerful youth I don't know but um and at the same I also think like some young people do need to feel like empowered and like given a voice but at the same time I shy away from I'm wary of ever feeling like I'm trying to sell youth or contribute to the culture of like I mean life is good you want to keep living you don't want to like try and be younger you can't it's impossible that means that you're like fighting every second um but and I do think it is more like of a um an asset for women but for men but you know one thing that I had mentioned and I wanted to ask you about is I think that you as a 19 year old are in contact with more older women than most 19 year old young women are um because of you know you have to deal with you know publishers and I mean listen I'll put it this way when I was 19 I was in college and I just dealt with college students like we smoked pot and like had you know sex and like you know I had like a boss at my like work-studying job but I didn't have to deal with young adults I think that you encounter a lot more adults than most people your age and so what I want to know from you is um what would you tell older people um about young women that they don't know or appreciate but what would you tell young women about older people older women that they don't understand and appreciate because I do think that you have a better kind of vantage point than the most people I feel like the gap is closing in a way just because I'm well consuming a lot of similar stuff um online like the generation gap gets smaller and smaller but I think that one thing that frustrates me is when older people um talk about uh social media or just like computers being harmful without also talking about all the ways in which they empower young people um to yeah to like have a voice in a way that didn't when you were you were a teenager it was just magazines um and I guess young I think um I don't know I think the biggest thing is realizing like if I'm like going to my young friends and being like let me tell you something about old people I think that I think the biggest thing is just that it doesn't feel that different like I because also I know a lot of um like I've been approached by women who read rookie who are women who are like in their 20s or 30s and for them it's not like uh like this helps me relive the glory days of high school because that's not even what rookie is about as you probably know if you read it but um they're like that's something I still deal with yeah and I mean even what we were talking about like body image like those things don't really go away so I think um when we um like I like you watch certain tv shows or movies and it's like that are about teenagers or for a teenage audience and it's like they were like okay we gotta give them cell phones and robots and whatever but like freaks and geeks is a show that was short lived but really good and like that a lot of like young people at my high school were watching on Netflix because they just pulled from their own experiences and like I just think that like as a kind of overall writing, creating philosophy I just think that you can't go wrong with just like laying out what you feel and what you know and um with rookie like in trying to like a few weeks ago I did like a tech conference in California where um it was all you know the recode recode and um the q and a that I did the guy was like everyone here is working on something where they're trying to get through to uh like you and your audience and teenagers and like what's the secret and I feel like like when I'm working on rookie I want it to be useful to the reader I want them to like come away from it with something new but uh trying to figure out why like how to grow an audience like all that like I and I should think about that stuff more than I do like I'm not a good business woman but I just feel like it I don't know like every um I feel like all the really strong and popular rookie pieces were just like I'm gonna put it out there and be honest and let's hope people like it not like how do we market to this audience specifically so yeah I don't know that you're a bad business woman and I've said that about myself as well I'm not a business woman at all but people have said to me um how did you know how to do that website and how to be popular I'm like I didn't know how to be popular I did go on my intuition and my own frustration with the status quote at that time but that wasn't because I test marketed anything I didn't know if it was gonna work so I actually think that maybe being a good business person or a good business woman is to just do what you know and do what you want I mean not to I work at a company now that is um mostly trying to attract a millennial audience and I hate the word millennials and I say this quite often I don't want to talk about millennials in the same way I don't want to be discussed as a Joe Nexer the minute you say that you know that you're being marketed to and I'm not sure there's really any difference between myself and a millennial other than the fact that they were born in a different year I think it's very possible that the stuff that I want to read and produce is going to be of interest to them if they have a curiosity about life and I don't think that like that's the domain of anyone over everyone over the age of let's say 35 so I'm I think maybe that's a good way to do this is to just do what you know and do what you love and to use your intuition um yeah that sounds kind of like well so at least that way no I mean at least you have like a clean conscience about not being like I don't like Donald Trump at least you don't feel like you're trying to scam anyone right and also I think it's really transparent when like we all know what link bait looks like or click bait um I think it's work work oh okay good um I don't know yeah they sound the same but like through that stuff and I think the same way we're like in person you can tell if someone's trying to like project an idea of who they are so that you'll like them and feel a certain way about them instead of just like having a conversation and I think I mean that was one thing with rookie when I started it I remember something that I kept saying whenever I had to talk about it was like I felt like I couldn't find a publication for young women teenage girls that respected our intelligence and so I think you become condescending when you like try to market to specifically or something or when you try to give advice to people and you know when you don't mean I mean I don't yeah advice home opinion that nobody knows anything and no one's in a position to give somebody else advice at least generalized advice what are are there any things that you've ever published on rookie or written on rookie or otherwise that you've regretted oh um yeah I mean I the internet I started a club when I was 11 so the internet is littered with my mistakes um I mean nothing comes to mind specifically other than just like general ignorance like a like porous of language like a not inclusive use of language um but things don't stick out as like I mean things do stick out I don't know why I'm blanking trying to get out of this well I think if you ask me the same question I would say yes of course and then if you ask me to give a specific example um I would it would be hard for me to kind of categorize them in terms of like that's the worst thing I ever wrote or published right um I think there are more generally or broadly there are things that I wish that I had done differently like what I talked about earlier not being so focused on the lives of actual women for example both in a book or on a website or both um you know and actually I'm sure if I went back and took the like tour grant tour through everything I've read and I would find lots of things that I wasn't happy about but I don't do that no I know well I yeah um I mean I think it's helpful to get it called out and I think in that way you don't go mining through stuff you wrote years ago I mean I think also outside of just like you know um like ethics I also just don't go back because it's just too weird I mean reading an old diary is weird seeing old pictures of yourself is weird it's just like a mind blowingly bizarre thing um and I also think that you also have yourself creatively and I think it's hard to move forward and yeah it's not it's not good I did though today I mean it's weird that you would ask me that now that we'd be talking about this now because today I did actually look at a blog post from when I was way younger um where I just where I said something like I wish I was a cat because look I would have nine lives and I could do all the things I wanted to do um and that's that's not that's not too bad no it wasn't but I was still just like oh idiot cats why like hey I love cats I mean at least you didn't write a story like I did that I found in my mom's house you know when I was about seven years old that wrote about a girl who loved dolphins which was like so cliche I just feel like every girl loves dolphins every girl wants to be a born free biologist so I was just hitting the stereotype right there um I was ashamed when I read it but no but that's the thing though is that I'm like that's amazing like you're never as bad to anyone else as you are to you this is true um we have to I just got them wrapped up saying we're going to have um questions yeah so we have time so we we thought we'd let you guys just talk for a more time than we planned so we have time for maybe two questions so anybody really really really want to have a question you have to get up and come to that one question here one question there the first one's to make it up are the ones that are going to get one there's also a signing in the gift shop after by the way so people can ask questions in there we can chat we will take if they're short we'll take three questions so one two yeah I actually want to say is please ask a question don't just ask the actual question so let's open you on the right is this on you so um I'm fresh off leaving a job where I was working in a young woman's television network and I'm very curious to hear from both of you about what you see for you know obviously the future of feminist media but specifically for television because I feel like there's a lot of gloomy and shaking happening and you know fusion is one example and I'm just curious what you guys think that well versed in TV like I'm a consumer on television and my role at fusion is more on the digital side but I feel kind of excited about television in general and had for at least a decade it's gotten better it's awesome and you know shows like Orange is the new black I think the the increasing number of outlets are ways to consume or produce and communicate via television means that we're going to have a lot more awesome stuff and a lot more awesome stuff means a lot more awesome stuff for foreign bi women but I thought Taffy is a better person at answering this question does she? Yeah I mean I just think about how like the good thing about technology now is that you can like find the best medium for the thing you're trying to express and TV is becoming something where like I don't know to me it's just exciting that sorry this isn't well I guess I'm sorry it's just a regurgitation of like because of the new all of the new formats or even like Vimeo or like that you can have a show on Vimeo because like the legit people like it and it doesn't have to be on a TV set and stuff like that just means that yeah more voices exciting thank you thank you for your question hi so you guys kind of started you ended off talking about inclusivity and I guess intersectionality a little bit I just wanted to know as women with such you know large platforms access to so many women how do I like when did you guys realize the importance of intersectionality if when did you start writing in an intersectional lens in an inclusive lens and if it wasn't from its inception if that makes sense like when did you guys as women realize that you obviously couldn't speak on the behalf of certain people that you may not you may not have the same experience as like when yeah I think I think so like the article that I mentioned written by that guy yeah I mean the thing with that was that it treated my issue was that was that it treated like intersectionality or empathy or what he called like PC language as just like like people get mad at you because they think you're being wrong and it's like no when a girl says like hey I don't feel represented by these photos it's like like no one's trying to I don't think there was like a moment I think it was just like that I don't know it came from a place like people want to be seen in her no one's trying to be like you're wrong and I called you out and gotcha to answer the question I think that I've I mean I've always okay I'll put this way the phrase intersectionality is not something that I had heard of until like eight years ago but did I try and live that in my life and the work that I did yes not always though the work glamour was mostly it was a magazine geared towards Caucasian women and you know I'm not saying I was writing for white women I'm not white by the way but that was the audience they were going for but did I think about the stuff did I think about the fact that there was no way that I could ever write from the perspective of a gay woman or an Asian American woman or a Native American woman absolutely because I felt that intersectionality was within me that I had been living it but I don't know that I had a word for it it was certainly important to me but I don't know that I wouldn't have used that word to describe it I just would have been I would have said something like diverse representative I would have used something that was less specific kind of more directed towards Tavi but I feel like you were talking about how now on the internet there's a lot more ways for girls and young women to get their voices heard but I feel like also with that there's something to say you know and I think what you've done feel inspiring like you know what you want to do and you do it but I think have you ever felt like you want to do something but you don't know what you want to do you know I think in those periods you just have to be okay with like not knowing what you want to say and you just keep like taking things in and that's a form of like preparing to make something later as well and I mean that's great too taking things in is great books and movies like they're wonderful so I think one great thing about the internet is that it allows a lot of people the ability to say something and have it be heard I think one of the worst things about the internet is that it pressures people to have something to say all the time and you know quite frankly I think there's times when we should just be quiet and not at least not be as reactive as we are I'm talking about Twitter basically that like sometimes I think we could all be better served if we took a deep breath and saw how things played out or like a formative opinion and didn't just be as reactive and I think there's a lot of pressure to be reactive or to have a hot take or to have an opinion and it's hard to do that and then you know acknowledge that things evolve and change I think it's just like a kind of media economy of of hot takes whether that's stuff that's on websites that are for profit or whether it's on your Twitter feed or on Facebook and I wish we could all take a deeper breath but that's not about women at all it's just about the internet economy and actually the great thing about the internet is it has empowered women to speak out and one thing that I felt with Joseph Bell was that there were a number of commenters on that site who were very prolific who were often times paying the ass but who went on to have writing careers because they started writing in the comment section and some of them have written amazing bylines places now and the idea that the internet would have empowered them or that a community of other women would have empowered them to find their voice and to keep pushing themselves forward and find careers as writers is one of the best things I think that's that I've ever encountered in this in my career so I hope that answered your question Thanks Okay, I think that's all the time that we have I'm sorry to pull the plug like that so again our theme is women change makers I want to thank these fantastic change makers on our stage Tavia and Anna for being here for this fantastic conversation