the uneasy relationship between lady dollars and lady mags
We like this piece, from Jezebel’s Frida Garza, about how women’s media is thinning, and we’re worse off for it for the way it teases out the fraught relationship that women’s outlets have always had with consumerism: on one hand, advertisers looking to target a female audience are what made it possible for titles like Vogue and Women’s Health to become the magazine juggernauts they are today.
On the other hand, indie women’s outlets, like The Hairpin, Lenny Letter, and Rookie — ones who neither command a Cosmo-sized audience, nor the glossy adjacency effect of lifestyle content — have struggled to survive without those crucial advertising dollars (notably, often by choice).
So now, we’ve gotten to a point where the biggest voices of women’s media are still the lifestyle mags who, yes, are publishing groundbreaking journalism and nuanced storytelling in really exciting ways, but who still have to toe an uneasy line around their primary role: “one that tells readers the right things to buy”— and appropriating language from our fourth wave feminist times, as Garza points out — “in order to achieve some form of self-actualization.”
It’s an easy two-sidedness to knock, but listen, until we figure out how to establish some kind of underground pan-women’s media subscription bundle where we can team up to funnel our lady dollars to the right places...this is what we’ve got to work with.