YOYOY

[j4]

In the US earlier this month, a group of women announced that they were launching a website for women over 40, called wowowow.com (a play on "women on the web" — an address that, tellingly, they had to buy from a porn site). [...]

The wowowow launch is yet another sign that women are offering up intelligent online content that stands in stark comparison to the narrow focus of many of the women's magazines to be found on the news stands. Wowowow's content moves from high culture (an interview with avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson), to economics (an interview with eBay's out going CEO, Meg Whitman) to politics (one of the recent "questions of the day" was "Which four women would you like to see on Mount Rushmore?" The results were: Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B Anthony, Rosa Parks and, to the evident surprise of some, Hillary Clinton).

The Wow Factor, Guardian G2, 21.03.08

I don't normally seek out women's magazines, web content for women, books for women, and so on; but I noticed this as I was flicking through G2, and decided to have a look at wowowow.com, just out of idle curiosity. (No, I'm not going to link to it; not because I don't want to worry my pretty little head about hyperlinks, but because I don't really want to give it any more googlejuice.)

So let's have a look at this intelligent content. Starting at the top left:

* Star signs
* "Hair day weather" (it's a really good hair day in Rome, apparently)
* Navbar: Home | Conversations | Posts | The Women | Question of the Day | Change the world
* Latest posts (top of the list: "A how-to video made for the technically challenged")
* Today's feature: "Question of the day: what are you doing for Easter?"
* Poll: If you could choose only one, the beauty aid you can't live without
* "She Said He'd Be Sorry" (Fiction: He said she was plumpish. And it was true. She was fattish)
* Question of the Day: "If Senators Clinton, Obama and McCain were cars -- what would they be?"

I actually can't bear to read any further down the home page, let alone click through. And even letting the content (if you can call it that) speak for itself, the design of the site is scrappy and amateurish (though the five powerful women who threw $200,000 each at the site "hired five full-time, web-savvy members of staff", the Guardian tells us). No, that's not me-as-a-woman saying that I don't like the colour because it doesn't go with my shoes; that's me-with-web-hat-on saying "for god's sake, somebody hire them a web designer -- or maybe, since half of the site seems to be glorified blogging, just get them a LiveJournal and switch them to one of the nice default skins." Hell, everybody expects magazines to have advertising, so they could have had a LiveJournal for free and spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars on hair and beauty treatments.

I honestly don't know what intelligent writing for women would look like, or rather how it would differ from intelligent writing (which seems to be pretty scarce in the magazine world anyway) for any other variety of adult; but I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be limited to horoscopes and hairstyles. There is practically nothing that I can think of that I'd want to read about that has any inherent femaleness to it, anything that would make it belong specifically in a "woman's magazine" rather than, say, the Guardian magazine. The only "women's magazine" I do buy is Scarlet, which to be honest is getting more and more packed with generic rubbish about makeup and massage, but still features a couple of decent articles about sex and alternative lifestyle choices, and -- most importantly -- a decent quantity of reasonably-well-written smut in the sealed central section (you can tell it's porn for women because it has more story than shagging, but despite that, a lot of it's quite hot). I don't think that really counts as what the Guardian means by intelligent content.

I'm currently reading Ulysses. Is that a woman's book? Yes I said yes.

Comments

[mockduck.livejournal.com]

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?

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I looked another site (The Lipster?) mentioned in the article but as less than impressed by both the style and content. I spent about ten minutes wandering in despair around the magazine section in Borders yesterday, trying to find something appealing. Next time I'll just buy a copy of Scarlet.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

There was a mens magazine a few years ago that was launched claiming to be for intelligent men, I can't remember what it was, Jack perhaps, something like that. Well it was rubbish. I can't remember if it went all Loaded/GQ, or if it folded, but it was rubbish. Sometimes you see a reference to some essay or short-story "first published in penthouse" and you kind of wish there was a magazine where it was possible to do that these days.

But there seems to be a real growing divide between discourse and the visceral that seems to make any synthesis impossible.

I suppose it also shows you that there really is not much productive to be done in separating men from women in this domain any more, because the only correlating interests are naff and inane. Which I suppose is some kind of victory.

I remember on one journey we were seriously short of reading material, and we stopped at a service station. I ended up getting Cosmopolitan because they sometimes have good fashion features (and ads) with pretty awsome clothes in (women in men's magazines always look drugged or spoilt, and have breasts which look like peach mint imperials, wearing some dodgy polyester gear knocked up in the back room of the local sex-shop), and the woman I was with got GQ because it had a feature called something like "everything real men know about DIY, which you were afraid to ask: bleeding radiators, fixing leaking taps,...).

[teleute.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether if you looked at the readership of all articles in, let's say, Time or Newsweek (I'm trying to think of pulications that don't seem to advertise specifically to one gender) you would find that women read a certain subset, and men another. If that's true, then you could presumably have a magazine for women focusing on those same subjects (and leaving out the subjects apparently uninteresting to women). However, I suspect that of the men and women picking up magazines which are not oriented specifically to men or women, they wil have such a diverse range of interests that there is no easily definable 'subset' of things women read vs. general interest vs. things men read. But it might be an interesting experiment.

Personally, as far as 'intelligent content for women' I read Real Simple. It's marketed predominantly at women, but has all kinds of fabulous things in like alternate uses for household products you have lying around anyway, road tests of perfumes based on smells you know you like, and recently a run-down of the best blogs in certain categories, like home improvement, the environment, beauty products etc. So yes, it does cover beauty stuff, but in a way that people who don't actually wear make-up can skip by and read the other stuff. It's surprisingly general, and I love it :-) There are even articles on cars. I like reading about cars. ;-)

[redbird]

The one large subject that strikes me as both nontrivial and as inherently "for women" is pregnancy advice. (I'm not looking for same myself, but that is an experience that only women have, and that is a major event.)

[shermarama]

Now yer basic problem there is reading the Guardian, I'd say. I have read the Guardian quite a lot over the years, because I work in universities and it's always around, but I still wouldn't call myself a Guardian reader. The only question for me is whether its generally small-minded, patronising little articles are going to seem endearing or infuriating that particular day. This one I'd file under infuriating...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I can see what they were aiming for in the design spec (classic/simple), but someone's missed the mark quite spectacularly there (busy/confusing). I've only got up to chapter 4 in my CSS book and even I think that's shamefully bad form for a website aimed at intelligent readers. To be fair though it does say 'Beta' up the top there, camouflaged in the messy header.

As for the content, it seems to be watering things down for us technologically-inferior women folk - again, a humourous/casual approach (eg weather forecast in terms of how it will affect my hairstyle) would be fine if a) the humour was funny instead of patronising b) there was some actual content underneath the humour. I mean, the 'Luxury Cockroach' story is a 200-word anecdote of so little relevance to my life (or indeed, anyone else's) that I'd rather have spent my valuable 30 seconds reading the 'Funny Old World' section in the Metro. The political articles aren't much better - the opinion piece on Barack Obama having been photographed in Somali dress is ill-informed bordering on offensive, and EVEN WORSE, hasn't been sub-edited. >:[

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Why would Scarlet's house style guide prefer transexual to transsexual? There's probably a basic grammar reason why they're correct and I'm wrong, but I've completely forgotten it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I know what you mean.

I honestly don't know what intelligent writing for women would look like

I would say, intelligent writing in general, but (most probably) by a woman simply to be free from undesirable slants elsewhere, and to put a highlight on any topics which are more interesting to women in general. I have the impression ladiesloos would be a good example if it were a newspaper.

Nice quote

[(Anonymous)]

If you would know the value of money, go try to borrow some.
-- Ben Franklin


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