I have lots of stuff floating in my head about feminism, but nothing sounds good on the nifty, new-fangled paper AKA laptop screens, so I’m taking this article from a school assignment.
We had to pretend to be winning Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (POY) award, after being inspired by a humanitarian ( to do pretty much the same thing, but you know, that’s what they told us to do). Somehow I managed to convince my ELA teacher Tavi Gevinson was a really great choice, but she is right? Feminism and all that…
The Fight for Feminism: [Clever Title I have Yet to Figure Out]
According to The Independent, in the United Kingdom, women earn 15% less money than men, doing the exact same jobs. 1.2 million children are sold as slaves each year. 80% of these children are girls. In 10 countries around the world, women are forced to obey their husband, and anything they say. The shocking truth is, in society, women are less respected, less important, and forced to be less independent than men. But it’s not totally a lost cause. Feminists like Nyah Marie have taken the world by storm in their dedication to get equal rights for both genders. It is for this reason that Nyah Marie has been selected as Person of the Year.
Nyah, like many other feminists has managed to travel around the world giving empowering and inspiring talks. She has created an online magazine for young girls all over the world to learn about feminism, to help them “discover their true identity,” and to empower them, so that they can become strong leaders later in life. She had written articles upon articles about important issues for girls at an early age. According to Nyah, “If teens are exposed to issues before their peers they can form valid, informed ideas and opinions that are not tainted by the views of others.”
Such wisdom is unexpected for someone who hasn’t been on earth longer than twenty years. Nyah Marie, currently known a job as an editor, a spokesperson, and a role model for girls everywhere is only seventeen.
It’s not too surprising that she already knows so much for her age. Nyah grew up in a city full of many different opinions, and cultures. This colorful, and creative city is known as none other than New York City. She lived in an apartment with her eminent artistic mother, and her dad, an art museum curator. While attending an exclusive private school in New York City, her mother sent her an email with a link to photographs of handmade paper magazines all about women’s rights. After carefully reading everything, and then rereading to make sure she got the point, Nyah sheepishly admits she was a bit confused about what feminism really was, and what it was trying to accomplish. So she spoke to the other girls in her class, asked them what they thought about feminism, and other major issues like depression. To Nyah’s surprise, they either didn’t care, or they didn’t want to. “They were all happy cheerleaders, they didn’t want to be different, they didn’t want to be creative, and they didn’t want to weighed down with sad thoughts, and rebellious causes. I was going crazy not being able to say something, not being able to make any difference in the world. So I asked my mom to help me put together a blog where essentially I went on and on about world hunger, oppressive leaders, but most importantly, feminism,” Nyah states. Eventually that blog became a little more well known than she had originally planned. She was featured on talk shows, interviewed, was even asked to be the face of a company, which she immediately turned down, for unknown reasons.
One might think that all this power has gone to her head. But Nyah remains humble, both as a person, and as an emerging world leader. She prefers we not refer to her as an idol, or a legacy. In fact, she thinks of herself as a normal person who got lucky doing what she loved, and talking about what she believed in. While she knows that girls look up to her, she uses that to support her cause even further. She tells girls that they can make a difference, that it is possible for them to influence society. That slowly, their world is changing.
Though not as much as she would like it to. Nyah truly doesn’t understand why anyone would be against feminism. After reading many comments, and articles, she was able to draw the conclusion, that people think it’s an angry cause. That feminism is only for women. That feminism is trying to raise the power women have, and lower men’s. But truly, feminism is only asking for equal rights, equal respect, and equal power for both genders.
That is one of the reasons Nyah eventually grew her small blog into the magazine it now is. She believed being a teenager, and being a feminist were closely related. To Nyah, feminism had no rules. Sure there are some basic principles, but everyone is really trying to figure it out. And that’s exactly how a teenager lives their life, trying to figure everything out. So the association was almost natural, as was blogging to her 1,000s of followers that she wanted to start a magazine, and asking them to submit their work to be on the staff. She got an enormous amount of replies, to which she was able to narrow down to a select few. All of those girls had a different opinion on what feminism was, and to Nyah, getting in a fiery hot debate was quite fun.
To Nyah, feminism means fighting. Fighting for equal rights, for ideas to stop oppressing girls. Specifically in pop culture, these films, songs, bands, and idols, quite often display “strong” women as characters with no flaws, that. But in fact, these don’t exist, so it is quite impossible for anyone to be this way, yet we still somewhat expect women to be that simple and easy to understand. But what is even worse is when pop culture portrays girls, especially teens, as one thing or the other. You can’t be smart, and pretty, you can’t even care about how you look without caring about what boys think.
That is everything the magazine rebels against. Quite a lot actually. The whole theme of the website is to empower, inspire, and expose teens to good role models, that have flaws, that are controversial to society’s ideas of strong female characters. A particular person of interest is the young adult, Tavi Gevinson, who Nyah was strongly inspired by. Tavi, very similarly to Nyah, had a blog, but mostly about lighter topics like what clothes she was interested in, and what designers she liked. Eventually she grew this blog into a large website about some of the same things, style, technology, music, basically a collection of all the different aesthetics Tavi was interested in. “I heard about her blog shortly after I began mine, although she had given that up after she lost interest in fashion. It was Tavi who first exposed me to feminism. Tavi who first led to me take a stand. It was all Tavi, and that’s who we should be giving credit to,” she says.
Who is this girl? Person of the Year, a feminist, a leader, a natural born legacy, despite how much she despises when we call her that. She is a seventeen year old girl who loves Lisa Frank glitter stickers, brooches, and aesthetically cataloging little corners of her room. She is the girl in the corner of the room building an empire, and making shrines for her favorite people and places. She is a normal teenager, who just so happens not to have a normal amount of wisdom for her age. She is someone everyone wishes they were as cool as in high school.
