Girls' Life vs. Boys' Life? Magazine Cover Sparks Uproar | Hacker News Reader

Girls' Life vs. Boys' Life? Magazine Cover Sparks Uproar

mprnews.org

26 pointsmarcusgarvey26 comments

The problem is that with all of the bullshit aside, they need to sell the magazine to some dwindling population still buying them.

The "heartwarming", positive cover is indeed heartwarming and a good message, but is also pretty lame, and unlikely to sell magazines.

I also question whether this is typical shallow/ignorant internet outrage. When I was a kid, Boy'a Life was a Boy Scouts magazine, and had annual themes that appeared every year at the same time. If you looked at the May/June cover, the annual Boy Scout Jamboree issue wouldn't be as "internet offensive".

IIRC, Boy's Life magazine is run by a boy scout organization while Girl's Life is run by a corporation chasing for the most eyeballs possible.

It's mentioned in the article. Boy's Life actually has a noble mission behind it, whereas Girl's Life is for-profit trash (essentially). The parallelism between the names of the two is an unfortunate coincidence. Near as I can tell the Girl Scouts don't have a magazine, but if they did, it would be a better comparison against Boy's Life. Maybe they should publish one?

As an aside, The Girl Scouts is a really fantastic organisation. In particular compared to The Boy Scouts in the US (which is much more religiously affiliated and discriminates against gay people; The Girl Scouts by contrast are trans-inclusive).

I was never in the Scouts myself, but surely one archaic, discriminatory policy doesn't negate all of the good the organization does, right?

Maybe it's just my lack of need for external influence, but why is this a big deal? I think women can and should be whatever they want to be. A trashy magazine shouldn't change that.

Should A Girl's Life change the tone of their stories? That's up to the market. As long as their demographic enjoys what they print (which translates to $$$), they'll continue to run it. Should people be outraged by it? If they choose to be, yes. But at the end of the day a consumer is a consumer, and if they want trash they'll get it.

I can not provide links right now, but reading up on "stereotype threat" will probably explain why this still matters.

I a few words: the same person performing the same task will perform lower if they are aware of a stereotype that says that their group performs worse at the given task. It is reproduced for white and black, male and female, etc.

But why would that mean anything to the publisher? They want to sell the magazine and if soul crushing mind rotting stereotypes sell copies at the checkout line then why would the publisher want to be the moral agents of change?

Fair point. My personal answer, that I do not try to push on others, is that we all should try to be agents of change. To be fair to the publisher they made it clear that they have quality content next to the cheap content.

There are plenty of men's magazines that will offer you a "denim checklist."

This is indeed a humorous juxtaposition, but they wouldn't make crap like that if our society didn't gobble it up.

Why was this flagged?

Some of the flagged comment in the discussion were very sexist. The rest of the flagged comments were people a bit aggressively calling them out. I guess all the up and down voting triggered a flame war detector.

Which is really sad, I really hoped we can all agree that your sex does not determine whether you are a good engineer.

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