13-Year-Old Blogger: I Promise Girls Will Change the World

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Image: iStockphoto, leminuit

By Rebecca Hiscott2014-01-31 16:48:22 UTC

Jules Spector hopes to end child prostitution and child marriage in developing countries. She hopes for equal rights for LGBT couples, not only in the U.S. but around the world. She hopes the media will stop portraying women as sex objects. She hopes the contributions of women will be valued in the male-dominated fields of science, technology and engineering.

And she hopes to pass her midterms — she's still in middle school, after all.

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In December, 13-year-old Spector launched Teen Feminist , a blog devoted to highlighting feminist causes and culture from a teenager's point of view. The blog's readership spiked dramatically after fellow feminists took note, receiving retweets from PolicyMic's Elizabeth Plank, Marie Claire's Lea Goldman and Amanda de Cadenet of The Conversation .

Spector's posts balance heavy topics with lighter ones — impassioned calls to end child prostitution and Internet pedophilia bookmark feminist readings of Frozen and Orange Is The New Black. The writing is usually accompanied by an on-point YouTube video and a rallying cry for young women to unite under the banner of feminism.

"Girls are going to change the world," Spector says. "I promise."

The ideas on Spector's blog might seem half-baked or overly optimistic to the most ardent of feminist theorists, but a modern teenager's passionate interest in gender equality can only be construed as a good thing.

The "Teen Feminist" homepage.

I meet Spector at her parents' apartment in Brooklyn, a sleekly modern home with a lovely view of the Manhattan skyline from the living room window. She wears bright patterned leggings and red lipstick, her short hair styled in a pixie cut. Over the summer it was streaked with green, then pink — something she's embarrassed about now.

Immediately I notice how easy it is to talk to her. Like most precocious teens, she is articulate and poised, but still uses the self-deprecating vernacular ("Sorry, I sound totally illiterate!") and hyper-connected tech savvy ("At least I use the Internet for social good") of today's youth.

We add each other on Instagram (her iPhone home button is adorned with a rainbow heart) and slip from my jotted-down interview questions into an easy conversation: her extra-curricular activities (Drama Club, creative writing, trumpet, piano), favorite movies (she recently re-watched Donnie Darko — "I hope Jake Gyllenhaal is a feminist," she says), books (she just finished The Book of Jezebel and I Am Malala), her musical idols (not Justin Bieber, mercifully — she loves Regina Spektor, Amanda Palmer and Kate Nash).

"I want to get teenagers more involved in learning about who they are and not being ashamed of being a woman," she says.

But the blog is also meant for a wider readership, "from people who know a lot about feminism and want to read a teenager's perspective, to people who don't know a lot about feminism but want to, or people who are totally anti-feminist and [the blog] is like, 'You are wrong, and here's why,'" she says.

As Teen Feminist grows, Spector plans to cover more LGBT issues and outreach while continuing to offer pop culture criticism (a recent post explains why Frozen is Disney's most feminism-friendly movie to date, passing the Bechdel test "with flying colors") and drawing attention to issues that affect young women in developing countries, inlcuding child marriage and prostitution.

Posts about Internet pedophilia and the movie "Frozen" on Spector's blog.

Image: Mashable composite, Teen Feminist

Reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which explores the oppression of women in the developing world and has spawned a global women's empowerment movement, prompted Spector's activism. Two years ago, well before launching into the blogosphere, Spector joined Girl Up, a United Nations Foundation campaign that promotes the education, health and safety of young women in developing nations.

She has since volunteered with Manhattan's LGBT Center and the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, and attended the Social Good Summit as a teen reporter for Girl Up — before rushing off to audition for David Mamet's Revenge of the Space Pandas at school. (She got the part.)

Over the summer, Spector even interviewed Afghan teen activist Malala Yousafzai for an ABC documentary, and she wrote about the experience in a blog post for WNYC.

"The face of philanthropy is changing because of campaigns like Girl Up, which recognizes that average citizens who are mobilized for a cause can really make a difference," she wrote. "We are a product of the digital revolution, and with the tools of social media at our disposal, we can get the message of global change across the world."

Teen Feminist crystallized, as so many blogs do, in a moment of fury. After meeting Elisa Kreisinger, the feminist video mashup artist behind Pop Culture Pirate, Spector felt inspired to do something political. That something turned out to be a 300-word rant on the representation of women in the media posted to Instagram, which she later transferred to the more text-friendly medium of a blog post.

"The way the media presents perfection is horrifying," Spector wrote in what would become the first post on Teen Feminist. "It's a huge step forward for modeling agencies to reject emaciated models from the runways, but it won't stop the thousands of teenage girls reading magazines and believing they are fat because of the photoshopping done to create bodies and proportions that are not even humanly possible."

In person, Spector adds that the debate over whether a woman must be thin to be attractive misses the point entirely.

She brings up the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, which features portraits of women with more realistic proportions and encourages women to see themselves as beautiful. "They're still saying [that] them being beautiful is the only thing they need to learn about themselves," she says. "Not that they're smart, not that they're talented. Teaching young girls to only value themselves as beautiful isn't all that you need to teach them."

A feminist reading of "Orange is the New Black" and a call to arms against child prostitution on "Teen Feminist."

Image: Mashable composite, Teen Feminist

Spector is also still a teenager, which means that time not spent blogging and working for various causes is also spent studying, taking selfies on Instagram, experimenting with veganism — "I don't want to eat anything I would hug," she says — and tweeting at her favorite celebrities, including Regina Spektor, whom she feels was robbed of a Grammy (for "You've Got Time," the theme for Orange Is The New Black).

As we're speaking, her iPhone vibrates and she notices she's gained a new Twitter follower: a syndicated talk show host. "Cool!" she exclaims.

"This has been so exciting for me, to see women really supporting each other and sharing information online," Spector's mother, Nancy — herself a champion of feminist causes — chimes in.

Toward the end of our interview, I ask Spector what advice she would give to her teenage readers. She answers without missing a beat.

"Just because you're a girl, it doesn't mean people don't want to hear from you," she says. "They value your opinion, especially if you're young, because it's a whole new demographic that they haven't necessarily heard from before, with new, innovative ideas."

The line is so dead-on that I ask if she's rehearsed it. She swears she hasn't.

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Topics: activism, blogging, Family & Parenting, feminism, Social Good, teen feminist, teens, U.S., US & World, World