Womanly virtues Friday
Let's take on the weird Time cover controversy. These covers all came out for the same week:
This issue has a lot of people asking, Does Time think Americans are stupider than Europeans? And The Last Psychiatrist writing at Partial Objects points out something else:
Only, lets take the "thinks" out of that analysis. Time magazine knows this to be true. And the issue is not intelligence but seriousness. Time knows that there is a large audience of magazine buyers in North America who are not terribly serious people and it knows that a lot of these people are women.
Note that I am not saying that there are no North American women interested in a serious news magazine. Of course there are. You can spot them because they read The Economist.
But anyone who has bought groceries will know that there is a large market for magazines for silly and frivolous people and will further know that this market is made up mainly of women. At Time Inc. they know this better than anyone because they created this market with People magazine. And People made even more money than Time because nobody ever went broke underestimating etc.
And that is a problem. There is a significant subset of women who read tripe like Time and watch tripe like The View because they aren't serious people and they aren't interested in becoming serious people.
The temptation is to blame the supply side of the equation. So long as magazines and shows aimed at women are shallow and unserious, women won't change. But the problem really flows the other way. So long as a lot women keep buying this stuff, they will remain shallow and unserious.
Let's take on the weird Time cover controversy. These covers all came out for the same week:
This issue has a lot of people asking, Does Time think Americans are stupider than Europeans? And The Last Psychiatrist writing at Partial Objects points out something else:
The truth is slightly more complicated and simultaneously a lot scarier.Except, as he acknowledges, not really. The cover is intended to attract newsstand buyers so what Time really thinks is that potential newsstand buyers are more likely to be somewhat less wealthy and more female in the US than other markets and therefore less likely to be interested in hard news.
The problem is that the American audience for Time is 50/50 male/female, but for the European version it’s 66/34 male/female; and the Asian Time is 80/20. In other words, Time doesn’t think Americans are dumber than Europeans, it thinks American women are dumber than European men.
Only, lets take the "thinks" out of that analysis. Time magazine knows this to be true. And the issue is not intelligence but seriousness. Time knows that there is a large audience of magazine buyers in North America who are not terribly serious people and it knows that a lot of these people are women.
Note that I am not saying that there are no North American women interested in a serious news magazine. Of course there are. You can spot them because they read The Economist.
But anyone who has bought groceries will know that there is a large market for magazines for silly and frivolous people and will further know that this market is made up mainly of women. At Time Inc. they know this better than anyone because they created this market with People magazine. And People made even more money than Time because nobody ever went broke underestimating etc.
And that is a problem. There is a significant subset of women who read tripe like Time and watch tripe like The View because they aren't serious people and they aren't interested in becoming serious people.
The temptation is to blame the supply side of the equation. So long as magazines and shows aimed at women are shallow and unserious, women won't change. But the problem really flows the other way. So long as a lot women keep buying this stuff, they will remain shallow and unserious.
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