5 Reasons I’m Comfortable Calling Tavi Gevinson A ‘Role Model’ For Girls

Tavi Gevinson“Role models” are tricky business in the parenting sphere. While I personally think parents should discourage their children from admiring anyone in the entertainment industry, there are the usual handful of parents who would have been happy to uphold Kristen Stewart as a role model for their little girl (until last week that is). People in the public eye can be severely flawed just like the rest of us, and generally even more so given what warped values show business tends to espouse. But regardless of how you personally categorize “right” and “wrong,”our daughters have to scour quite a bit to find a figure who didn’t catapult her way to fame via a sex tape, an illicit union, a nose job, or some other scandalous plot line.

If you went by our mainstream media’s script, you’d either have to bang an older man or be an underage Internet porn star to get any press as a young girl. Teen Google winners who develop breast cancer detectors sadly are far and few between, as well as girls who choose to debate political issues publicly. Although part of the problem is definitely what our media chooses to recognize girls for — such as “insatiable” sexuality — I’m going to go a step further and say that we don’t have enough young girls visibly profiting off their perception, their smarts, and their voice.

Enter Tavi Gevinson, “the 16-year-old fashion blogger turned online impresario,” according to The New York Times, who is currently on a 16-city tour promoting her website Rookie. The editor-in-chief may resist the word “role model” — or perhaps just for her website  — as she once said. But over the past five years, since Tavi first appeared in the interwebs as a stylish 11-year-old, she has accrued quite a few attributes that make her one to watch in the very painful “Who Can My Daughter Look up To?” conversation.

[ITPGallery]

(photo: stylerookie.com)

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