I've lost count of how many magazines have launched through the years calling themselves a true alternative for women; I guess the fact of the matter is that in order to fund glossy paper and proper distribution, you have to sacrifice pages of real writing for product placement of expensive handbags, make-up and beauty treatments, and fill half your pages with adverts for the same. Once you've done that, you can't really come from a stance *other* than that this is what women want to read about. It does sadden me. Every now and again I will be beguiled into buying a woman's magazine (I currently have Eve on the go at home) and then just throw it down, depressed, because I don't live up to the sleek slender woman they'd like me to be, and I'm not interested in half the stories (this month's Eve features a 'true story' of a woman who went to Paris and spent £2,500 on a little black dress, and a column by a flat-chested woman bemoaning her a-cup, and not in an intelligent or new way).

I also agree about the design of the wowowow site- astonishing. is it just possible that they've somehow published out without style sheets, perhaps because of the large number of visitors placing the site under stress?

It'd be interesting to see a list here of what women would like to see in a magazine. The thing about hair, make-up, fashion, cookery is, presumably, that they end up in women's magazines not because all women are interested in them, but because women are by and large the ones who buy/practice them. Clearly, many women want to read good literature, but a literary magazine would be foolish to restrict itself to a single-gender readership. What could go in a true women's magazine and still be readable?