Responding to a recent Wired Magazine cover with full-page photo of an anonymous woman’s naked torso Sheril Kirshenbaum of Discover Blogs says

Recently I asked why science magazines seem to be marketed to men. On newsstands, they frequently appear alongside GQ, Esquire, Playboy, and other male-oriented content. Yes, men purchase science magazines more frequently than women, but I also think this is–at least in part–a chicken and egg problem: What’s traditionally marketed to male audiences gets purchased by them. A solution might be to change the target a bit, gear some more content to women, attract a wider audience, and–in doing so–maybe even encourage greater numbers of women to pursue the STEM areas over time.

Source: Sheril Kirshenbaum of Discover Blogs.

In comments Wired Magazine senior editor Adam Rogers said

Well, for sure you should read the story.

I certainly won’t deny that we chose a cover to be provocative. That’s in our job description. Got lucky in that a subject that famously sells magazines also, in this case, happens to be a brilliant science article.

But I also disagree with your premise, Sheril. I pay a lot of attention to so-called women’s magazines, and to my eye it seems like women’s cleavage (and legs, butts, abs, etc.) must sell awfully well to that market, too. And this is a story about, among other things, post-mastectomy reconstructive surgery, a subject that (if you were going to be reductionist about it) has more appeal for women then men. And that sense is right there in the display copy on the cover.

Here’s my take:

@Adam Rogers: Women’s magazines of course have their own cleavage factors. (Heck, without cleavage Cosmopolitan would be indistinguishable from Details!) But I don’t think that’s necessarily the point. What I think Sheril is suggesting is that if for some reason magazine vendors suddenly started stocking Wired over by Martha Stewart and Vogue you’d almost certainly get a significant shift in your reader demographics. And for entirely mechanical, non-mysterious reasons: more (but obviously not all) women drift towards traditionally women’s magazines, same tendency for men and men’s sections.

@Sheril Kirshenbaum: Context being everything I’m pretty sure that if Bust magazine, say, or even Oprah’s ran the same cover image Wired used to highlight the same article then two things would happen. First, it probably be accepted without commentary. Second, despite the visuals most men who saw it would assume, falsely, that it was a “chick thing” — albeit one “chosen to be provocative” — and not buy it. Of course it didn’t appear on the cover of a magazine associated with women’s sections but I think the point about context remains. That said…

Back to @Adam Rogers: Not to put too fine a point on it but based on the online version of the article (we’re talking about Sharon Begley’s piece about breasts and tissue regeneration, right?) if Wired wasn’t geared towards the lad mag demographic the lead and second paragraphs wouldn’t have used phrases like “encounter the damned things any time, anywhere” and “and there they are: conical and cantaloupy.” Yeah, if it was written for a women’s mag it would have it’s own cliche’s but you probably shouldn’t try the doe-eyed look about where your mag is stocked or who you’re pitching to. If you like your demographic that’s fine, it’s your magazine, your editorial decision, and your advertiser base as well. But even if you agree it would be good if there were more women in science (and I’m pretty sure you do agree) you’re not being part of the solution here.

Incidentally I agree that trite lad-mag lead paragraphs and glamor/fashion-magazine-style photos of women notwithstanding the article itself is a creditable report about some promising science.

The author known as James Chartrand of Copyblogger explains why it’s still not a “post-feminist” world.

You know me as James Chartrand of Men with Pens, a regular Copyblogger contributor for just shy of two years.

And yet, I’m a woman.

This is not a joke or an angle or an analogy — I’m literally a woman.

This is my story.

Read the quote in context here.

James was out of work, with two young children, out of savings, out of luck. She began doing freelance copywriting and struggled her ass off. Then something happened.

One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn’t want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.
My life changed that day

Instantly, jobs became easier to get.

There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.

Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.

I was still bringing in work with the other business, the one I ran under my real name. I was still marketing it. I was still applying for jobs — sometimes for the same jobs that I applied for using my pen name.

I landed clients and got work under both names. But it was much easier to do when I used my pen name.

Understand, I hadn’t advertised more effectively or used social media — I hadn’t figured that part out yet. I was applying in the same places. I was using the same methods. Even the work was the same.

In fact, everything was the same.

Except for the name.

The blog she started as James, Men with Pens, is a well-respected resource for professional bloggers.

Pretty wild when you think about it. Discouraging too.

She doesn’t mention it but my peripheral experience in the publishing world makes me pretty confident the new work wasn’t all coming in from men who preferred to hire (what they believed to be) male writers.

This isn’t the only time we’ve seen this sort of discrimination based on name only. It’s a fairly common academic and investigative-journalist exercise to pair individuals who are evenly matched except for, say, age, sex, or race, and send them out to apply for work. I’m pretty sure there’s even a study demonstrating that academics are likely to rank submitted papers more favorably when everything else is identical except for a single letter change in the purported author’s first name — e.g. a submission will get a higher rating just by substituting the single letter “a” for “h” in the name “Joan Smith” to make it “John Smith.”

But that’s all fairly academic. James Chartrand’s story is real as houses.

Something to think about next time you imagine there’s nothing left to be done because everything’s already just hunky-dory.

[See also Blue Gal’s take on assumptions about gender and pen names. —fl]

Via Echidne, via Ann Friedman a dumb question about “women on the web” sites like Slate.com’s Double-X Magazine, an online site for women.

There is all manner of speculation around the internet about whether the real goal of these “lace ghettos,” where ladies to talk about the same things they had been talking about on the (ahem!) “parent” websites (Double-X is to father Slate as Broadsheet is to uncle Salon as Shine is to grandpa Yahoo! and Lemondrop is pinafore’d ward-in-chancery to fusty old major-general AOL) in order to maintain the “serious” and masculine tones of the original sites.

My guess is that it’s not so much that there’s a new grand conspiracy because publishers want to peel women away from “regular” sites. Instead it’s the same grand old conspiracy amongst advertisers. Who not only want to do that but are willing to pay considerable sums to those who are willing to do what it takes to accept it.

This is why, by the way, the answer is not to create more diversity at, say, Slate or Salon or Yahoo or AOL — advertisers want their dollars targeted as narrowly as possible. And since, evidently, not everyone can calculate topical/targeted per-page contexts the way, say, Google (or, somehow, magically, reCaptcha) does “audience diversity” for them equals “diluted ad spending.”

I’d add there’s a very good chance that the advertisers, as much as the publishers, are privately dismayed at the consequences of siphoning both women writers and readers away from what heretofore were often earnestly general-interest publications. But they gotta make a living so they’ll say the magic self-absolving phrase “I don’t like to think that what I’m doing is…” Which is fine because I wish I didn’t think they were retreating into wishful thinking.

Yet another reflection on that horrific situation with the polygamy/pedophilia “compound” in Texas. Despite figuratively (and morally!) bending heaven and earth to create an environment where they could get away with following their “faith”...

The documents released Tuesday also gave details about the hushed phone calls that triggered the raid, by a 16-year-old girl at the West Texas ranch who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. Days after raiding the compound, officials still aren’t sure where the girl is.

...

Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and that all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of “emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse.”

...

“Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the (Yearn for Zion) Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them,” read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.

McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as they reached puberty and were required to produce children.

...

The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would “beat and hurt” her when he got angry, including hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby.

The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to “the outsiders’ world” but didn’t know where.

...

In the March 30 call, the girl told the shelter she was being held against her will. If she left, church members told her, “outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and (modern) clothes and to have sex with lots of men.”

...

The compound was raided Thursday after the 16-year-old girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else’s cell phone and speaking in hushed tones to avoid being overheard, McFadden’s affidavit said.

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

But check out that last paragraph! Despite indoctrinating themselves and their children that what they were doing was right, and despite the extraordinary-sounding means they employed to terrify their victims of the consequences of contact with “outsiders,” and despite the almost constant monitoring, regulating, coercing, beatings, isolation, withdrawal of education (the girl who called may not have been able to spell her own name!), and despite considerable collaboration and/or active engagement by other older women in the cult, word still leaked in that what was going on wasn’t just sick and wrong (sensibility and sentimentality aside I don’t think outside influence is necessary for practitioners to independently reach that conclusion) but that it was illegal. And that there were enforcement agencies that could do something about it. And that there was a phone number one could call to make it stop.

And what’s up with that, just like it was (and unfortunately in too many places still is) with slavery is that all paradigms and ideologies to the contrary not withstanding people are still people, not domestic cattle, not wild animals, not “inferiors” to other people. Race doesn’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter. Gender orientation doesn’t matter. Sexual orientation doesn’t matter. Language, religion, geography, class, education, indoctrination, threats, rape, forced pregnancy, and even torture, kidnapping, and murder don’t matter. Nobody wants to be someone else’s slave, not for real, not for long.

And so, like the “elders” who perhaps even in good faith to their own indoctrinations ran their little patriarchy like a prison camp, you can either live a whole web of lies, dictatorially and mercilessly and because-thinking-about-it-is-unsustainable-reflexively enforced and propagated, or you can live one simple truth: the extraordinary, radical proposition that people are people.