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Comment by vilda | Hacker News Reader

The whole article is flawed in one major point. They assume that women are buying women's magazines because they are for women. In reality they are buying magazines that are of interest for them. Thus women's magazines are women's magazines because of the content. If you change the content (let it be rocket engine construction) it won't be women's magazine anymore because women won't buy it.

I think this is a typical mistake feminists make. Instead of understanding and accepting what women want, they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors (stereotype anyone?).

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Exactly. "Women's magazines" should really be called something like "women's traditional role model in society". It's something of a remnant of a previous era which is still useable for some purposes. My wife can read Cosmo if she needs women's fashion advice, but we read the same articles in Esquire or TechCrunch.

Fortunately, the internet should help change this. Magazines will die, and be replaced by something much more dynamic and adaptable. With content aggregators like Reddit and Prismatic, viewers can choose what actually interests them. Those sites aren't immune from demographics-based marketing, but I suspect that in the long run, the most efficient kind of marketing will be the kind that tries to learn what you actually like, instead of just prescribing you something based on your age and gender.

> they represents their view of what they should want and blame all other factors.

An interesting point, the magazines are (primarily) written for women by women and as they are not a compulsory purchase I suspect that if there was a demand for tech news in them there would be (I suspect if it increased readership and hence advertising revenue they'd cover ancient Latin if there was the demand).

Making an issue of a womans magazine carry tech to balance misogyny is as strange as getting Linux Format to carry a recipe for buns.

All that said of course this is a Guardian piece and they do tend to write this kind of stuff to insite controversy (in many ways the liberal daily mail).

Also: is there a law that stops women from buying tech magazines? I don't think there is, and I wager that women who are interested in tech do buy them.

Isn't it demeaning to perscribe adult women which magazines and which content to like?

Making tech more accessible to women and less about the cooler-tech-to-get-you-laid attitude that most tech/gear magazines have would be a positive thing.

Tech magazines are written for a predominantly young male audience, not for a broader audience.

Interesting you make the same mistake. Actually, woman magazines are bought by women interested in woman's magazines - this is a subset of all women, and may or may not be particularly representative of women as a whole.

Your mistake is equally as big.

Women who buy women's magazines are women who first and foremost are interested in reading magazines. Out of that subset of women, one can begin measuring who are interested in women's magazines. I would assume the percentage here becomes quite large. I'll leave it up to a potential child to find that magic number and whether or not it can be representative of women in general.

Although, quite frankly, I am quite tired of this kind of "woman analysis" as if there's something inherently wrong with women in our society.

Are you a woman? If not, then you have no right to be tired of this kind of “woman analysis” (which is not, in fact, what the attached article is). It’s analyzing media and its approach to the spending habits of its target market, and how they miss the opportunity to introduce new advertisers to cover the fact that women in the UK spend on average 40% more annually on technology purchases than they do cosmetic purchases.

This is not asking for a Pink Power Wired; it's saying that the publishers of “women’s” magazines are leaving advertising dollars on the table and potentially missing the needs and/or interests of their purported audience by ignoring technology purchases and dealing with them in a non-sexist, adult way.

Quite specifically, this article isn't about you—especially if you're a man. It's about how the magazines, their advertisers, and manufacturers are missing an opportunity to be more meaningful and targeted toward the needs of their audience, which is increasingly more sophisticated than the magazines themselves.

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