Another trying website ‘for women’?
Yahoo! has launched into the internet another website purporting to be aimed at all women.
As you can tell from the logo, Shine borrows generously in style and content (and some of the editorial is literally cut and paste) from glossy women’s magazines. It makes liberal, if not offensively brash, use of the colour pink and other pastel shades. Not being a reader of those magazines, I couldn’t really tell you how similar it is in content, but suffice to say, typical items include advice about ‘wedding season’, weight loss and an interview with Kate Bosworth.
Like Jezebel, I find it a bit dull. Too dull to even click through onto many of the stories. It doesn’t speak to me, even if I am a woman between 25 and 54.
I think this is the problem, both with Shine and, well, pretty much everything aimed at women, generally, as a class. Women make up half the population. That makes for a huge amount of diversity, in age, job, background, taste in, well, everything, sexuality, wage, etc. No single magazine or website could rationally hope to address itself to women en masse, and any that attempts to do so inevitably makes irritating assumptions and gender stereotypes about what women are like.
What happens instead is that these magazines, etc, narrow down their audience. While purporting to be for ‘all women’, they in fact aim themselves squarely at a much smaller spectrum of women, often white, affluent enough to appeal to advertisers, straight, etc. But because they still claim to be aimed at half the population, they come across as exclusionary.
Posted by Jess McCabe on 31 March 2008, at 11:18 PM | Comments (2)
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Lesbilicious said:
Totally agree. It's such a tired old formula, and it really adds nothing new to the glut of magazines that already exist saying the same things to the same demographic. But hey that's why I don't read these things in the first place...
Posted on 01 April 2008 at 10:05 AM
Jules said:
I am going through exactly the same problem with my own blog at the moment. Trying to find the interesting line between mumsnet types ie., babies and family; la petite anglaise - I live in Switzerland so could be the Swiss cow and Greek Tragedy which is single/divorced dating again too straight talking and smutty. 95% of the content of womens mags is boring and stale - it is only a matter of time before the advertisers cotton onto this. But what comes next, get it right and you will be onto a winner? Any ideas? Julesritter.com
Posted on 09 April 2008 at 4:35 PM