Stephen Colbert’s wife of two decades, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, once told Oprah she didn’t like his TV alter-ego—someone she calls “that other guy.” In this video, as he offers advice to teenage girls wearing a plaid button-down and thick-framed hipster glasses, he’s definitely left the other guy behind.
When Loretta, 14, asks why some guys are jerks, he says to confront them (they may just be trying, badly, to get her attention), but also:
For this kind of thing to stop, boys have to be educated. Does our society educate boys to be misogynistic? It probably doesn’t value girls and women as much as it should, and boys probably see that as a signal that they can get away with things like devaluing women.
For Maria, 19, who asks how you can tell when someone likes you, he ends up defining love: when someone thinks “your happiness is more important than their happiness.” And cookies. “Cookies are also a really good sign that somebody likes you.”
The video is part of the girl-positive Rookie Magazine‘s series “Ask a Grown Man.” Earlier last year, Rookie’s fashionista founder, then 16-year-old Tavi Gevinson, was the youngest person ever to appear on The Colbert Report, where she gave the self-proclaimed “pear-shaped” Colbert style suggestions and called him a “Cool Dad” (capitals hers).
At the time, Colbert—a father of three, including 18-year-old Madeleine—wasn’t thinking of dispensing sage advice for Rookie. Instead he proposed a dad-inspired magazine project in which he would veto pictures of teen girls’ skin-baring outfits in a column called “You’re Not Wearing That.”
