Girl's Life Magazine vs. Boy's Life Magazine

[Stosh]

The more things change the more they stay the same.....

[Cambridgeskip]

@@CalicoPenn

 

I see your point. However I write from the experience of twice having had to phone the parents of female scouts to tell them that, sadly, we've discovered evidence on camp of their daughters having an eating disorder. I can't tell anything more than that due to the confidential nature of the incidents. What I can say though is how angry those incidents left me.

 

I see shelf after shelf of magazines aimed at women and girls that concentrate on little but looks, weight, clothes, diets, make up and generally making girls worry about what they look like. And it's my scouts and other kids who end up suffering the fall out.

[desertrat77]

@@CalicoPenn

 

I see your point. However I write from the experience of twice having had to phone the parents of female scouts to tell them that, sadly, we've discovered evidence on camp of their daughters having an eating disorder. I can't tell anything more than that due to the confidential nature of the incidents. What I can say though is how angry those incidents left me.

 

I see shelf after shelf of magazines aimed at women and girls that concentrate on little but looks, weight, clothes, diets, make up and generally making girls worry about what they look like. And it's my scouts and other kids who end up suffering the fall out.

As the father of two daughters, I concur 100 percent.

[Rick_in_CA]

More manufactured outrage from social media outrage-a-holics (did anyone else notice that the Boys Life is a subscription copy and not a newstand copy?  You can see the printed address on the cover).  My response to those who are outraged?  Suck it up and get over yourselves.

 

Girl's Life magazine follows the same grand tradition as Seventeen, Teen, and other classic magazines for girls.  It does so because it sells.  It sells because, like it or not Mom and Dad, your precious little snowflake who you've been telling all her life can aspire to be anything they want, is interested in these things.  Demanding that the magazine change its covers and focus is a Don Quixote move.  No publisher with a successful magazine is going to completely change its focus without knowing that there is, in fact, a market for the kind of "empowering girls" magazine you want them to be.  The fact that there isn't such a magazine should tell you something about the market for it.  Sure, maybe you'll buy it and give it to your daughters, but how do you know your daughter wlil actually read it?  A publisher isn't going to publish a magazine aimed at teen (and tween) girls that isn't going to be mostly purchased by the girls themselves - and they don't make decisions about what kinds of magazines to publish without doing extensive market research.

You are correct that magazines are selling what they think people want, usually backed up by market research. However, it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing. Part of the reason that girls want stuff like this is because that is what they have been told by the market to want. If all they see are messages in the media that says "this is what girls care about" and "this is what it means to be a girl", then that is going to heavily influence what they think. Look at the color pink. It used to be considered a masculine color. What changed? Marketing in the 30s, 40s and 50s pushed pink as a girls color - and attitudes changed. By the 50s, the whole girls pink, boys blue thing had become established. It didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't done by any one person or magazine. Marketing has significant power to shape peoples attitudes. It's why billions of dollars are spent on marketing every year. Look at fashion, changes in fashion trends are largely driven top-down. The fashion "movers and shakers" decide what will be "in" and communicate that down too the consumers via fashion magazines and other media. And it works. Yes the public has input based on what they choose to buy, but they are limited in the choices by the fashion industry. And are heavily influenced by marketing.

 

You are correct that marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's based on current society attitudes and preferences. But it also seeks to shape those attitudes and preferences - and that is where marketers (and magazine editors) have to take some responsibility for what messages they choose to emphasize.

 

Go ahead and write letters to the editor and publisher all you want - it's not going to actually change anything.  For the vast majority of you letter writers, they know this is just the "cause of the day" for you and you will completely forget about it in a week.  For those who really want to see a magazine for girls that is more like Boys Life, stop demanding that other people do it for you and publish it yourself - but don't take a mortgage out on your home to fund it, and make sure one of you keeps your day job, so that when it fails, as it is likely to do (the success rate of new magazines is very poor), you don't become a burden on society by becoming homeless and jobless.

This I don't understand. Why are you so hostile? Writing letters can make a difference. If enough pressure is put on magazines and retailers to make changes, they will. It has happened before.

 

And the concerns are real. Look at colleges, while women now make up a larger percentage of the incoming class then ever before, the percentage of women entering STEM fields is falling. The rates of eating disorders in girls appears to be increasing. Young girls are increasingly being sexualized at a younger and younger age (try to get a Halloween costume for your daughter that isn't "sexy <insert noun here>"). Parts of our culture are increasingly sending the message that young women have no agency (all women are victims, all men perpetrators). As has been pointed out here many times, the GSUSA has largely abandoned it's outdoor focus for indoor activities.

 

Yes, the reasons for these changes are complex, and changing society is never easy. But telling people to "stop complaining and suck it up" is not helpful.

Edited September 12, 2016 by Rick_in_CA

[NJCubScouter]

More manufactured outrage from social media outrage-a-holics (did anyone else notice that the Boys Life is a subscription copy and not a newstand copy?  You can see the printed address on the cover).  My response to those who are outraged?  Suck it up and get over yourselves.

Well. While I think that this is not the publisher's fault, and it's not the GSUSA's fault, and I don't think it's something to get "outraged" about, I do think there is room for legitimate concern about the some of the messages that "society in general" is sending to girls, and to a lesser degree, boys. I am talking about some of the things that Rick-in-CA mentioned in his last post, and it is only getting worse. I remember 20 years ago when the Jon Benet Ramsey case happened (wow, has it been that long), being shocked to learn (among other things) that there were beauty contests for 6 year old girls, and the photos of this girl made it clear that she had been dressed up and made up to be attractive to men.  I hadn't known that this sort of thing went on.  I am sure a girl that age does not even know the significance of how she was being made to look.  In a more logical world, that case would have created a sense of outrage among the public and those sorts of things would no longer take place.  Instead, I think that sort of thing has become even more prevalent.  Our society is not moving in the right direction when it comes to the messages being sent to young people, and their parents.  I think it is part of an even larger issue about what people find important vs. what they should find important.  But what can you do about it?  We have a "market" economy and a relatively "free" society, and people can make their own (bad) decisions.  There's nothing wrong with writing a letter or circulating a petition or whatever, but one who does so should not expect much in the way of action.  It is possible, through great effort, to change the actions of governments, and it is possible to change the actions of large organizations (as we have seen in the BSA), but changing the priorities of an entire nation full of people, and the resulting actions of the "market", is not so easy.

[AKdenldr]

The GSA used to publish a subscription based magazine called 'The American Girl' latter named "American Girl".  (No relation to the "American Girl" currently published.)  

 

Much like BL of today it focused on interesting "I want to do that" and "You can do it" stuff with a bit of common culture (lip gloss, etc) thrown in.  Much like the video game articles in BL.

 

Really who ever is publishing BL for the BSA should make a proposal.

[NJCubScouter]

Really who ever is publishing BL for the BSA should make a proposal.

 

A proposal to do what?

 

And I think it is the BSA that publishes Boys Life for the BSA. 

[meyerc13]

Ran into this one yesterday, looks interesting (but very, very expensive):  http://kazoomagazine.com/