The Girls' Life vs Boys' Life Magazine post

[Anakin McFly]

http://www.refinery29.com/2016/09/12211 ... ifferences

It's been making the internet rounds. It sucks how many (mostly male) commenters are saying that no one forces people to buy those things, that magazines only print what sells, and that if your children are influenced by what they read in a magazine it means you're terrible at parenting. As a media studies grad working in marketing, it infuriates me how people think that media exists in a void and does absolutely nothing to influence our expectations and desires. Because that's pretty much the whole point of marketing.

also lol at the guy who went to find out who was behind Girls' Life, discovered it was a woman, and complained about how feminazis still blamed The Patriarchy when a woman publishes things for girls to read. and then I stopped reading the comments.

(People have pointed out that the magazines are under different companies and Boys' Life is published by the Boy Scouts of America. Fair enough, but no one has yet been able to produce a boys' magazine that promises to tell them secrets of obtaining their dream hair. Someone tried searching for a girls' magazine with similar subjects as the boys' one, and the closest they could find was American Girl by the Girl Scouts. But even with that, it's telling how its content has changed over the years - past versions had things like feature articles encouraging them to consider a career in science, recent ones tell you how to have a sparkly sleepover or bake holiday cookies. Cookies are great though. The world could use more cookies.)

[Monk]

Yeah, it's a bullshit argument and a bit of catch-22. You see this kind of thing with superhero action figures, where women superheroes are rarely included under the assumption that 1) boys don't like toys of girls and 2) girls don't want superhero action figures. I don't think either of these are accurate