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Rookie Magazine respects the teen experience
Questions to Consider:
- Who is the target audience?
- What messages are being sent to their audience?
- Why is it important that teen girls make their own media?
What We Think:
Rookie magazine is the best current alternative to the garbage available for teenage girls today, like Seventeen and Teen Vogue (boo!). It’s an online magazine for teenage girls that covers subjects from fashion to feminist topics and issues that girls are going through. There are tons of great things about Rookie, but key among them:
- covers race and class authentically and realistically
- talks about delicious candy a lot
- editor is a teenager (Tavi Gevinson) who gets some help from grown women
- this book, a compendium of articles from its first year, Rookie Yearbook One
- depiction of real, funny, great relationships between teen girls and women in their 20s and 30s
- this article: “Eating: a Manifesto”, in which this is written:
“Could we stop feeling ‘guilty’ for wanting an effing brownie? Or a plate of fries? Could we stop actively seeking permission from our friends to go ahead and ‘be bad’ and order the cheesecake? Could we all just go ahead and order whatever it is that we feel like eating, instead of saying, ‘Oh, I feel like a pig, you guys are just getting salads’? Because—now I know this will come as a shock—WOMEN EAT. We get hungry. We get hungry for pizzas and Double Stuf Oreos and nachos and ice cream and giant French-toast breakfasts, and you know what? WE DON’T NEED TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT.”
Amen, sisters.
–Jennifer Berger
Laurel Ann Larson on 12-03-2012
Always looking for articles, sites that are not run of the mill for middle school and high school girls. Thanks for sharing.Margot on 02-08-2013
Wow, these sound like great show, websites, and movies. I especially enjoy your points about Rookie. Women do eat. We get hungry and eat junk food. The media may say that women don't eat and are made to look like twigs, but they are wrong. Real women aren't plastic, anorexic, skinny dolls. They get hungry. They also need to eat to live. And sometimes the best people in life aren't super models. Sometimes the best people are just "ugly". But it's not the outside that matters. It's the inside. Good job Rookie for promoting REAL women.