An Open Letter to Wired Magazine: We're breaking up
tech.cindyroyal.net
tech.cindyroyal.net
Where did Wired get all the journalistic cred that Cindy seems to be lamenting the loss of?
I've been a reader for years, and it's essentially Maxim for geeks.
Add to that Wired readers are overwhelming male - 75% according to their latest media kit:
http://www.condenastmediakit.com/wir/circulation.cfm
Conde Naste is in the business of making money with Wired, not journalism.
Or is that too cynical?
Wired is a geeky magazine with sensationalist headlines that nevertheless can be interesting most months. Once again, a woman is complaining because a magazine accurately targets its readers (though, even I was put off by the almost desperate obvious baiting with this month's cover).
When I saw the 'boob' cover on TFA, before seeing the blog title, I knew it was going to be a feminist complaining about how misogynist and mean geeks and the geek ecosystem are.
P.S.: Misogyny is the hatred of women. Most geeks love women! Their lack of presence in the IT world is what makes us surprised to find a competent female in our field... there are so few competent IT people anyway, so the cross-section of two minorities is rare.
Yet so few respect them.
Now, do some people think they're just not respecting a newbie's technical opinion but come across as/are actually disrespecting the person? Quite possibly.
But reading that little whine just made me respect "geeks" that much less.
You make it sound like Reddit is a perfect fit for the Condé Nast family.
The Wired issue which was nearly twice as thick as a normal Wired issue, because of the Neal Stephenson's story of the undersea fiber optic cable FLAG, stands out as one of the highlights: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
There was a UK edition for a while, which wasn't profitable enough (eventually leading to it being pulled). I bought every issue and read it religiously.
Then, around the height of the first dot-com bubble - it morphed into a different beast, and in my opinion began to distance itself from its original core readership. It seemed that it was gearing itself as a publication for geeks-with-money, and the articles were also distanced from each other by multiple pages of adverts for the kind of luxury-tech products that only the very rich could afford.
I put up with it for a while, it had a kind of aspirational appeal .. but after a while, became very fed-up with the inverse-proportionality of magazine thickness to interestingness.
The style of the journalism has always involved a degree of wide-eyed hyperbole .. but I think this is understandable. For a long time the magazine championed technology's ability to change the world in an exciting and positive way. There weren't many other publications which were seeking to do the same.
I wouldn't consider buying it now.. it's not the same as it was. I've also noticed that the blog has undergone a change - I'm kind of shocked by the poor level of journalism .. I suppose - like much of the web - the wired blog is trying to attract eyeballs. It's sad, but things aren't like they used to be.
Is it any good?
According to sources I can find that actually seem legitimate, we have a toss-up between liposuction and gasp breast enhancement.
Wired shouldn't be about that. Even though the whole magazine is kind of campy, and more reminiscent of science fiction than any serious study, this strikes me as more distasteful than funny or sexy. I don't want Wired to become prudish, but they have an opportunity to lead by example here.
But I'm not going to suggest there is anything wrong with Cosmo. The purpose of Cosmo is to be a woman's magazine that focuses on various traditional interests of women, including attracting men. Their covers reflect that. My problem with Wired doing it is that it doesn't fit what Wired is about. Wired represents the tech community in a sense, so I feel it reflects on me a bit what they do. Historically, it's been a nearly all-male community, yes; but most of us agree we'd like that to change, and getting rid of things like this is not much of a sacrifice. Wired should be about cool tech stuff, and there's no reason that premise should prefer one gender over the other.
Nope. Wired is an attempt to attract eyeballs to advertisements.
If you think that Wired represents you, great. If not, that's great too. Either way, that's your decision, not wired's.
Of course, the kinds of magazines that the smart girls I know read are traditionally thought of as male focused. I'm talking about the Economist, the New Yorker, etc. And yes, Wired.
Females are pretty and I thank god that I live in an age where I can see the especially pretty ones on the cover of a magazine (there was a time, no doubt, that a man [or woman] could go their whole life without ever seeing perfection in the female form). That's not a bad thing.
What's so wrong with that?
I think we spend too much time demonizing basic human sexuality, and not enough time accepting and understanding it.
removing all semi naked pictures off magazine covers will not change the fact that people find other people sexually attractive...what it will do is make people feel terrible for having natural feelings.
I say this as a sole male bought up in a feminist household. It took me a long time to realise that looking at the opposite sex was not actually a thought crime.
(This answer is slightly more radical than I am.... but that doesn't necessarily make it an uninteresting thought!)
(Edit to add: by answering that way I'm absolutely not agreeing that "sexism is natural" -- just that even if it were, it wouldn't matter.)
I was responding to the idea that the stuff you see on Cosmo/society-at-large is just natural expressions of hard-wired biology -- what I see as a classic sexist cop-out.
You think attraction has nothing to do with biology at all?
How guilty should I feel for being a man, knowing that my mere existence apparently forces some women to buy Cosmopolitan (the horror!!!)?
The problem isn't what we do/don't find attractive: it is the double standard of (de) valuing women solely based upon their (un) attractiveness, while men are judged upon a much wider range of criteria or not judged at all.
I honestly don't know how to argue with you since I am not sure I agree with your assumption that women are valued solely based upon their attractiveness.
As for biology, there is a difference between men and women - the latter can bear children. Hence the "pairing" market is asymmetric.
Is a photo of a woman unfriendly to women? I don't get it.
And the cover/article at hand really wasn't sexist ("oh! look at the boobies!"). It was mostly focused on tissue reconstruction, and (as I recall) the rationales for this that they delved into the most were (1) applicability to regeneration of other tissue; and (2) the importance of breasts to women themselves in Japanese culture (due to the ubiquity of public baths).
While this wasn't exactly reaching out to women, I think that anyone finding it off-putting is really looking for injuries.
I guess I should, as a caveat, mention that I'm very sex positive and not entirely straight. But I personally believe that bodies aren't obscene, no matter what context they're in. Even if that context is an attention-getting cover on tissue engineering.
Trust me, that's a pretty good use of boobies.
Using an anonymous woman's chest makes the objectification even more egregious.
Women in tech fight an uphill battle to be recognized for their accomplishments and not just their gender identity. For the author to say that a media mainstay (Wired) in the tech arena should be trying to fight that imbalance instead of aggravating it is justifiable and welcome.
What are people supposed to do? Invent important women in the tech industry out of thin air? The important women make a name for themselves, and I'd argue that the good ones have it better since it's easier to be acknowledge as an important contributor as a woman, since there are so little of them. I'm sure a great developer probably has a harder time getting some exposure, than a women at the same level (a great woman developer, a woman that's just like 90% of them won't get noticed, and neither will the men) and with the same opportunities.
In my experience, great female developers are always a big deal. Everybody loves them, and they get more exposure than their peers at the same level. The one's that complain are the one's in the trenches complaining on why they have to share a bathroom.
Is this really true? To me it seems pretty easy for a woman to get press. Consider, for example, indinero. It was founded by Jessica Mah and some other dude who gets no press. See also Leah Culver, who can barely code and yet is considered a tech icon.
I think it's extremely hard for people not to project their own thoughts and background of abuse (mostly perceived, but also otherwise) on simple things like a picture, a work of art, or a book, while simultaneously invalidating the context it appears in.
Why, I'll never figure out.
But any decision to stop reading Wired seems wise to me - it has its moments but the odd issues I buy when traveling are packed with gimmicks and populist dross. Pick up magazines like Communications of the ACM instead (sadly not at airport stores) - no gimmicky covers or chesticles in sight there!
Pardon me if my tone is a bit harsh, but honestly your comment comes off like you think it's pejoratively "complicated" for this woman to recognize and decry the objectification of her gender and its under-representation in a widely circulated magazine. By contrast you seem to feel that men are approbatively "simple" for not worrying about such things. The reality of course is that there is simply less on this front for men to worry about and this has nothing to do with one gender being complicated and the other simple. Perhaps that was not your intent, although I have to tell you that if it was I find it pretty offensive.
Your pejorative reading of "complicated" is far out of proportion to the original comment. Like it or not, gender differences extend beyond just having different sex organs. Men and women differ in lots of ways, including in typical emotional response. It's entirely reasonable to point out that women may respond differently to visual depictions of nudity in the same way that it's reasonable to point out that they tend to be less hairy.
This may be true (that you don't understand), but I doubt it. If you have ever taken a stance on the wellbeing of people other than yourself, particularly a political stance, or if you have ever defended a friend or family member against an accuser, or any number of other normal human social interactions, then you do understand what it feels like, although perhaps to a different degree than me in this case.
And, I also have to point out that whether you understand why I argue about this has precisely nothing to do with the validity of my arguments.
> It's entirely reasonable to point out that women may respond differently to visual depictions of nudity
Only if it's backed up by evidence and relevant. It is neither in this case. Observing that women are less hairy is a fact, provable, and does not play a role in the argument at hand. Observing that women react differently to nudity than men is wrong on two fronts. First, it may not even be true. Second, in the context of a woman making a political statement about the depiction of her gender, it is a rhetorical device based on a premise of unknown veracity whose primary purpose is to discredit her beliefs to a male audience. It's a variant of "women are irrational, so we don't need to listen to them," albeit less transparently foolish.
So is it your belief that, for example, politicians in Denmark only involve themselves in matters that concern them directly? They do not debate over or attempt to alter the fate of the poor, the sick, or the disenfranchised? Do authority figures of various kinds not intervene when they see a chance to prevent an injustice or correct a false belief? I must say, from your description Denmark sounds like a very unique place on this Earth. Far more unusual than I had been led to believe by the people I know who come from there or have visited the place.
Also, could you explain what connection you think Denmark's legal standards of evidence have to the correct behavior of a person in political debate? Specifically, how is it relevant that Denmark's laws require civil complaints to be brought by the affected party?
Since the above post was neither, I'm going to assume that some people need to reread the below:
I'm not the person you are replying to, so this is from me: It doesn't take "being offended" to hold very little tolerance for sexists.
I can think of one possibility. I have a female friend who is studying massage therapy. The association of massage therapy with prostitution makes it very difficult for her to get people to take massage seriously. I am offended when someone makes this association and usually on my friend's behalf because it makes her job more difficult.
The logic is simple. I'm offended because someone else is causing harm to someone I care about. Granted, this is a specific example. I'm not really offended on the behalf of all massage therapists but I'm fairly sure my friend is.
If you worked with women who have emotional problems due to the way society devalues them it's perfectly reasonable to become offended on their behalf. (Stereotyping devalues everyone involved, there is no excuse for it.)
Being offended on behalf of someone becomes a problem with you either: A. Don't understand the problem or B. Don't have any real connection to it.
Guys, if you don't want to give the wrong impression when you're talking about stuff like this, it's a good idea to reread your posts to see if you're projecting your own experiences (and privilege) in situations where it doesn't apply -- or implying that the way men approach things is better than how women do.
where along the way did we lose respect for women who stay at home to raise a family??
also using hollywood movies as a litmus test is pretty flawed...the modern male hardly comes out unscathed either as they're either bumbling, asshole fathers or will do anything for sex.
Like it or not, a magazine with Caterina Fake on the cover just isn't going to sell as well on news stands as one with Will Ferrell on the cover.
I did not go back all the way in Wired's cover archive to verify Royal's claim that no woman has been on the cover "for an actual accomplishment" since Sherry Turkle in 1996. But that is that is a fairly damning data point, assuming it is true.
(can't believe I made this comparison...)
When ever I hear "But, I'm a <insert victim group here>" I immediately assume they have sour grapes about the lack of achievement in their life. Everyone faces adversity, it's part of life, get on with it. The adversity you faced probably didn't make you a better coder and thus I don't care. I'm not running a welfare shop, if you want to sell you sob story go there. If you want to work, then let me know.
Look at the woman who optimizes Facebook's CSS, the article isn't about how she is a woman, it's about how to optimize your CSS. Why? Because she knows a lot about CSS.
Guess what? She has no problem getting work or respect!
But I have a hard time working up any sympathy on the magazine cover issue, because it's unclear to what extent Wired actually shapes culture as opposed to simply reflecting it, and are we going to start dredging up statistics on covers to show every possible issue that they aren't on the right side of?
Have you asked her? Something like half of the highly competent women I know in tech have some real horror stories to share, mostly about not getting respect. (When you don't get work, you usually don't know it even happened, let alone why.)
Adam Carolla said it best.
When a white guy gets treated poorly, he assumes that the perp is an asshole.
When a woman gets treated badly, she assumes that the perp is a sexist. But the perp is not. The perp is just as asshole. The world is full of assholes. Ask any white guy.
The gender balance in the tech industry skews heavy to male, which engenders sexist bias, which makes it inhospitable to women, in which only the more confident, braver, resilient women will survive without quitting.
Those types of women are more prone to be overtly feminist than average.
(I have no data. Wild supposition. IANAWSM [women's studies major].)
And the reason for that is blindingly obvious: The tech field not only has a gigantic gender disparity, but has actually grown the size of the gap, unlike most other fields.
There are more men 'featured' in tech because women make a small part of the tech industry in general. Last time I checked women accounted to around 7% of of important roles in the tech industry and the number of female students of computer science was something close of 16/17%.
I've worked with women before on two occasions. The first one was a Php developer that was just plain awful, her code sucked, her attitude sucked, and whenever you tried to get her to mend her wrongdoings, the boss would come and ask you to just leave her alone because she loves to make claims of sex based discrimination. The second one was recently and she was one of the most amazing Java developers I've ever met, far better than most men. She was as geeky as could be, could joke with the boys all day (and freaking outdrink half of the men at night!), and she believed that "women play the sex discrimination card when they're so bad they could be replaced by a monkey". Honestly, it's the exact same thing as the just graduated mediocre programmer (not saying all recent graduates are mediocre, I'm targeting a specific group). They complain and complain about the unfairness of X and Y, but are seldom any good anyways.
It's simple stuff really. Since women are such a small part of the tech community, it's exponentially more probable that more men than women will stand out. On the bright side tough, the women that do stand out, stand out immensely. Oh and the kicker for my story in the past paragraph. The bad developer was really average looking (creeping into not good looking at all territory), while the good one was a stunning blond which would melt your heart in a second. C'est la vie.
It is wholly unnecessary for a technology publication to have that cover. At the very least, they should have limited it the newsstands.
As a fan of the magazine, I was pretty disappointed in the results: 3 articles - none of which were in print (or meaningful.) Of those three, one[1] was pretty procedural, but the other two[2][3] seemed downright dismissive of someone who was the youngest person ever to make Fortune's list of "50 Most Powerful Women in the World"
[1]http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/06/googles_marissa/ [2]http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/04/marissa-mayer-t/ [3]http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/02/marissa-mayer-r/
Go Wired magazine for choosing your covers based on what will sell and not based on the loss of the five readers who might be offended by it. They can read "Bitch" (which is somehow not an offensive name for a magazine if written by feminists?). If Wired doesn't sell magazines, Wired doesn't exist.
golf clap
So, that leads to the question: is there any other technology-centric print media worth subscribing to instead?
Linux Journal http://www.linuxjournal.com/
But I am an experienced Linux user and don't want "how to install Ubuntu on your PC alongside Windows" tutorials all the time. (Beginner articles are OK, just as long as it's a part of the magazine and not the front-page focus).
Why can't they charge a bit more for a subscription ($36/year is still only $3/issue), and publish much higher quality content? I'd rather pay more for quality than read what they currently mail out every month.
That's one possible explanation, or it could be simple price segmentation - offering different prices through different channels to increase overall revenue.
Magazines are closing down left and right. Wired is still in business because they have resorted to cheap tricks like "sex sells". While I applaud subscribers deciding they aren't going to put up with this any longer, I think you'd be mistaken if you think they could make more money by doing anything else.
I don't personally care about it one way or another but they sure can't say it wasn't meant to be provocative.
Or donate to your local library.
Look - wired doesn't "represent" anyone. It's a vehicle for attracting eyeballs to advertisements. It isn't obligated to appeal to "you" for any value of you.
I looked at the cover browser and my superficial impression is that they don't put people that often on the cover anyway, and even if they are male, they also tend to be actors or jokes.
Thank you for the reading recommendation of "The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired." That sounds exactly like the thing I always wanted to read.
Is it more about being offended that wired magazine don't offer equal coverage to women entrepreneurs? Maybe there aren't just many tech entrepreneurs to cover.
It's another thing entirely to make 90% of the women you do depict into sexbots. Putting ugly people on the covers doesn't sell magazines, but they could at least make some effort to depict reality.
Sexbots? Who would think of women as a bunch of automation, unable to think for herself, with no interests of her own, with no agenda of her own as sexy? It is not.
I can think of a few people that seem to think that way in the way they talk about women.
> they could at least make some effort to
> depict reality.
Could it be just your imagination that turns those women on the covers into sex bots?
Having featured only a few women for actual accomplishments could be a real problem - except that it can probably be at least somewhat explained with a few observations: How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5%. What percentage of successful tech entrepreneurs you know are women? How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.
I do hope that changes, I'm always happy to see women entrepreneurs, and Startup School attendance is by no means a valid scientific study, but it does give us some indication as to why so few women are featured.
[Assuming the author is accurate] If you go back to 1996 for Sherry Turkle you're at ~0.5% of Wired covers...i.e. about an order of magnitude less than the startup school representation if all covers were technology (which of course they are not).
Quick & dirty survey of Ted Talks tagged with "Technology" = 38/294 talks by women (~13%). http://www.ted.com/talks?tagid=1
http://mrmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wired.jpg
...which seemed a bit more of a stretch than putting up breasts for the tissue article (albeit this is a back cover).
I was curious if the representation of women in Ted talks tagged with "technology" was skewed, so I searched the Ted talks tagged as "business." 25/156 are women by women. Again about 15%.
Where's the prudery in Cindy's article?
> How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5% ... How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.
Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.
"Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis..."
This implies that showing women with a sexual bent is somehow "unfriendly" to women, or that it limits them to being sexual objects, neither of which is true, and both of which are products of our obsessions and shames regarding sexuality.
> Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.
I have to assume you are trying to contradict me, although your statement doesn't seem to. The proportion of women in tech is higher than the proportion of women among tech leaders, which is what I was referring to. This is likely because women don't seem as likely to play the founder lottery.