By aurora linnea

There are those who will tell you that ours is a golden age of “gender fluidity,” that the drab boundaries of the “binary” are being blurred out of existence everywhere you look, hastening a glorious expansion of “gender creativity” and “gender diversity.” I am uncertain precisely which rocks the people who say this have gone peeking under to find all that free-flowing creative diversity, but I can tell you one place they’re not looking: the children’s section of their local library. Having worked in public libraries for nearly a decade, I have dipped my toes a time or two into the waters of contemporary children’s media—and with each dip I’ve sensed myself a drowning woman and scrambled, gasping, back to shore. Because the waters are dyed as screamingly pink-and-blue as they’ve ever been (the introduction of picture books calling on kindergartners to fritter away their childhoods pondering pronouns notwithstanding). Rather than busting down the mean ol’ “gender binary,” children’s media reverences sexist stereotypes with all the subtlety of a TV evangelist. To the boys go the basketball-playing dinosaurs and wisecracking anthropomorphized heavy machinery, while girls are herded into a glitter-spackled dollhouse of mirrors populated by cupcake-baking fairy princess kittens and locked there to practice braiding one another’s hair and using good manners until they expire, very politely, from toxic sparkle-shock syndrome. 

To contend with the worst of it, just head on over to the magazine racks. Flip through an issue of Girls’ World, if you dare, and discover within life’s most essential lessons for female children, ages six through twelve. Namely, how to “get along with anyone, anywhere.” Or how to bake a cake that resembles a unicorn’s head. Or how to look, like, extra adorable in a hairbow, just like your favorite pop star! 

Girls’ World and its ilk stand as grim evidence of just how far we’ve not come in transforming the children’s media landscape into a gender-creative Shangri-La. It remains a gender-conservative wasteland which, if you’re me, triggers panicky promises to whisk any hypothetical daughters off to a cabin deep in the woods, far, far removed from all societal pressures to bake unicorn cakes. Or, if you’re former Conde Nast editor Erin Bried, it motivates you to do something more productive with your fury and despair, and devise an antidote to the mindwarping, stereotype-enforcing menace that is mainstream girls’ magazines. 

Bried hatched the idea for Kazoo after a fateful visit to the bookstore with her young daughter opened her eyes to the soul-corroding bleakness of girls’ magazines in general. Bried recalls in an interview, “I don’t think there was a single title for girls that didn’t include a story on pretty hair. What’s more, every cover I saw featured a princess, a doll, or a little girl wearing makeup.” The daughter was sensible enough to be bored by this rubbish and so the pair left the store empty-handed, but Bried’s was disturbed by the relentless feminization she’d seen displayed on the magazine rack. She wanted an alternative for her daughter, and for all girls, a magazine that would not brainwash them into becoming mini Stepford Wives, but would instead “give girls the tools, and the space, to dream, build, explore, think and ask questions.” Since no magazines fitting the bill existed, Bried realized she’d have to create one herself. 

Bried started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the launch of Kazoo in 2016. “In a world where girls are constantly being fed information on how to look and act,” she wrote in her pitch, “Kazoo offers them something radically different.” Banking $171,000 in 30 days, the project became the most successful journalism campaign in Kickstarter’s history. Now in its sixth year, Kazoo has won the Parents’ Choice Gold award three times, and in 2019 it was the first children’s magazine ever to receive the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for General Excellence. It has earned nods from the New York Times, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Real Simple—and while the overlap between what these publications endorse and what I can stomach is virtually nanoscale, I have to go along with them on this one. Kazoo is fantastic. 

It is, to begin with first impressions, a genuinely gorgeous publication. Bold shapes, vibrant color-blocking design, and a quirky diversity of illustration styles give Kazoo a distinct, poshly zany alterna-twee aesthetic that is cute but not cutesy, kid-friendly without being condescendingly childish. Even girls on the more mature edge of the magazine’s 5-12 age range, who may have developed a severe allergy to “kid stuff,” are liable to be charmed by Kazoo’s visual appeal. Of course, appearance isn’t everything, and luckily Kazoo is as fun as it looks. Each issue is jam-packed with puzzles, mazes, and brain-teaser activities ideal for occupying small persons on long car trips. Add to that science experiments, artsy-craftsy DIY projects, and recipe ideas, and you’ve got your rainy afternoons at home covered, too. (Clearly, my long-dormant inner babysitter was resurrected as I browsed through the magazine and found myself gleefully thinking, “This would keep them busy for hours!”) As for reading material, Kazoo offers interesting, informative articles on neat subjects from how trees communicate to the color wheel to the biology of tears, depending on the issue’s central theme. Regular features also include comic biographies of remarkable women, interviews with (female!) artists and scientists, and girl-centered short stories by top (female) authors. I was awestruck to learn that an early issue even snagged a story by Joyce Carol Oates, the four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and endlessly prolific Queen of Creepy. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, because Kazoo’s rolodex of contributors is a staggering who’s-who of all-star female talent in every field. 

Bursting with brilliant women artists, musicians, scientists, scholars, and athletes, Kazoo presents girls with a legion of potential role models to choose from, none of whom are made-for-TV Disney replicants or lifesize Barbie dolls. No matter what a girl’s interests or aspirations may be, she’ll find a woman she can look up to in the pages of Kazoo. 

The diversity of female role models goes a long way towards achieving the magazine’s stated mission of “celebrat[ing] girls for being strong, smart, fierce, and above all, true to themselves.” But the real driving force resides in the magazine’s ethos, which radiates a can-do, give-it-a-go, you’ve-got-this positive energy beaming out from every vibrantly colored page. It’s an energy that is infectious, even for a cynical grown-up bummer of an adult human female such as myself. What kept coming back to me as I passed a pleasant Sunday afternoon perusing Kazoo was the irrepressible, exhilarating shimmer of unlimited possibility. Many moons have cycled through since the last time I thought of “anything is possible” as more than a platitude, but Kazoo had me almost convinced again. And little girls really should believe that anything is possible. In spite of what we know about patriarchal society’s ruinous cruelty to girls, we should want that for them. For Bried, it’s key: “I want [every girl] to know that the world is full of possibility. And I want her to know that she can do anything she wants to do.” 

Addressing its readers as “noisemakers” – a counter-hex against the silencing inflicted upon females from infancy – Kazoo encourages girls to come into their own through inquisitiveness, experimentation, imagination, exploration, and self-expression. “Finding your voice” is a consistent theme, as is “fierceness,” a term I typically associate with Tyra Banks’ power smizing but which has nonetheless prevailed as go-to slang for specifically female boldness. (A Nancy-Drew-friendly synonym would be “plucky,” or perhaps “spirited.”) Thoughtfully crafted activity and project prompts invite girls to ask questions, think for themselves, get creative and speak up, while introducing stories of other girls who grew up to accomplish the extraordinary by doing just that: being themselves and believing in themselves. The fundamental lesson in every issue, whether the theme is “Art” or “Magic,” is that it’s fun to try new things, never mind the final result – mistakes happen, the magazine also reminds its readers; making them doesn’t make you a failure – and that every girl is good enough to give it a shot, whatever it is that she wants to get herself up to. 

Kazoo aims to cultivate a self-confidence grounded in competence, consciousness, and action, never appearance. You’ll find no “feel beautiful, girl!” faux empowerment, no enticements to boost self-esteem by means of lip gloss and hair accessories. (Did I mention that Kazoo is ad-free? So there’s no shilling of lip gloss or hair accessories, either.) From the outset, Bried has deliberately steered girls’ attention away from how they look. She even chose to illustrate the magazine entirely with drawings and comics for precisely this reason. “You’ll…notice there are no pictures of girls in the magazine. I didn’t want our readers to be looking at any story and comparing themselves to someone else,” she explains. 

While Kazoo represents the finest in Girl Power feminism, it is not a radical feminist magazine. Do not expect it to probe the problems of patriarchy—though it does hint here and there at some of male dominion’s injustices. (I was especially tickled by a reference in the “Wild” issue to bonobo “girlfriends” going after male apes who failed to respect female boundaries.) Its general tone is uplifting rather than critical, which, considering its audience, is appropriate. I suspect none of us would want a magazine for girls about patriarchal ecocide or child sexual abuse, in any case. More troubling, however, is Bried’s willingness to celebrate men who declare themselves women. Although I could only find one man amongst Kazoo’s cadre of female role models – the trans-identified male dancer and choreographer Leiomy Maldonado – Bried has expressed pride that Kazoo is among the first children’s magazine to include “transwomen and non-binary experts.” Maddening though this may be, Kazoo is nonetheless refreshingly free of gender identity newspeak, and Bried does hold firm on keeping the magazine made for and focused on girls. Which is controversial in itself—the New York Times pointed out that describing Kazoo as a “magazine for girls” could be “unnecessarily prescriptive,” since the content stood to appeal to readers of “any gender.” (The obvious implication being that a magazine should only call itself “for girls” if its content will appeal exclusively to those of girlish gender, meaning…what, exactly? Oh, right. Princess Cupcake Kitten Fairyland. I see how it is, New York Times.) When one interviewer proposed that the “blurring bounds of gender” might render Kazoo’s female-centeredness obsolete, Bried defended her prioritization of girls against the creeping encroachment of “all genders.” “I think it’s okay to say we’re a magazine for girls because girls are so absent from so many of their bedtime stories,” was her response. “When you’re written out of your own stories, it has lasting consequences. We wanted to make this space for [girls].” It’s unfortunate that Bried has not yet considered the consequences of serving up self-feminized men as role models for girls, a substitution which quite literally writes girls out of their own stories and abets female erasure. 

But let’s be realistic here. The culture is rotten, and if we want a radical feminist magazine for girls, we’ll have to do what Bried did when she launched Kazoo, and create it ourselves. For now, though, Kazoo – in spite of its standard procedure liberal lapses into self-sabotaging “inclusivity” – is a delightful start. I read each issue with a growing sense of relief—that at least some girls out there in the big bad male-dominated world were getting this magazine instead of pink-and-purple instruction manuals on how to be sweet and pretty, and that even a few girls, fortified by Kazoo, might be spared the scam of feminization-as-fun, and the swift, painful fade into silence and self-doubt that inevitably follows when we fall for it. 

Kazoo is a quarterly magazine for girls ages 5 to 12. Anti-capitalists will be pleased to know it’s ad-free, while the eco-conscious will appreciate that it’s published on recycled paper. Single issues and subscriptions are available for purchase at www.kazoomagazine.com. WLRN received four recent issues of Kazoo for review purposes.