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.