A lot of people talk about rookie as if it was sassy magazine. I was a little too young for sassy, though i do remember my cousin getting them and i would sneak a peak or two. But by the time i was coming of age (12 is a big year y'all) in 95, it had been absorbed into 'Teen magazine. My radicalization was owed to the internet, specifically Pander Zine Distro and Mimi Nguyen radical feminist and Zinester. I would pour over a copy of Factsheet Five trying to figure out where to send my dollars to, but once i found Pander there was no going back. She even distroed my zines eventually and I was really proud of that fact. Some of those zines were written by older people and some of them by teenagers just like me.
That's why it doesn't amaze me that a 17 year old named Tavi Gevinson edits a "casually radically feminist" online magazine called Rookie. Go there now if you have never been, i'll be waiting for when you get back.
I would have been all over this if it had happened back in my time. There is a part of me that wishes the internet hadn't been so disjointed back then. There wasn't one big site you could go to, to find out everything. No myspace, wikipedia, or blogs. You had to have your own website on a server and ftp your html to that shit. When you wanted to talk to people there wasn't even AOL instant Messenger. You had to join IRC chat rooms and wonder around joining "rooms" and saying HI, to total internet strangers. You maybe could have created a chat room called #casuallyradicalfeminists but i probably would have gotten insane amounts of trolls because lets face it, back then, I was a total weirdo as a girl being on the computer all the time. It was mostly a boy's playground. Now it doesn't matter. Everyone is on the internet!
They didn't have to go through the internet gauntlet, the political gauntlet, and they aren't jaded because of it. That is the best part, because don't we all remember that point where we just got tired of the fight. Where we just wanted to be who we were but then we had to listen to
Rush Limbaugh, and therefor the other ignorant men in our lives, using the term feminazi. So maybe we just hid it a little bit? Maybe we just didn't talk to anyone about our ideas on gender and feminism. Rookie and Tavi exist outside of that. Outside of politics. Outside, and on the internet. It's like they've cracked the code to not being affected by any of that, being both under the radar and controlling the radar. And they are giving all of us hope. I am 30! I know so many women in their 20s and 30s who read it. And I am still learning things that I never got the chance to learn as a teenager.
What's happening out there in the internet and the land of rookie gives me more hope for the future than any zine my friend still makes, because it has the capacity to reach millions. It has the capacity to reach anyone who google's a simple question.
We are out here, those of us raised by feminist theory writing, those of us raised by sassy, those of us raised by zines, and now those of us raised by rookie. It's found a way where you don't have to be in the "in" club. You just have to be interested. Thats what I love most about the internet. Regardless of gender, color, or anything else you can google anything and someone will tell you.
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