I remember first reading wired in 1994 - when it was a wholly different magazine. It was packed full of insightful and interesting articles about the rising tech-scene and it really had a huge effect me. I found it completely inspirational. A mix of social theory, art, design and technology - articles about memetics (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html) and 'the well' (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well.html) .. and a whole host of interesting stuff, that I don't think I'd have been exposed to otherwise.
There was a UK edition for a while, which wasn't profitable enough (eventually leading to it being pulled). I bought every issue and read it religiously.
Then, around the height of the first dot-com bubble - it morphed into a different beast, and in my opinion began to distance itself from its original core readership. It seemed that it was gearing itself as a publication for geeks-with-money, and the articles were also distanced from each other by multiple pages of adverts for the kind of luxury-tech products that only the very rich could afford.
I put up with it for a while, it had a kind of aspirational appeal .. but after a while, became very fed-up with the inverse-proportionality of magazine thickness to interestingness.
The style of the journalism has always involved a degree of wide-eyed hyperbole .. but I think this is understandable. For a long time the magazine championed technology's ability to change the world in an exciting and positive way. There weren't many other publications which were seeking to do the same.
I wouldn't consider buying it now.. it's not the same as it was. I've also noticed that the blog has undergone a change - I'm kind of shocked by the poor level of journalism .. I suppose - like much of the web - the wired blog is trying to attract eyeballs. It's sad, but things aren't like they used to be.
Depends what you mean by "Early Wired" - around '95 it was interesting enough but by '99 or so it had got trashy enough that I stopped reading it regularly.
Glanced through the wiki; I didn't see much about its amazing journalistic past that sets it apart from today.
Wired is a geeky magazine with sensationalist headlines that nevertheless can be interesting most months. Once again, a woman is complaining because a magazine accurately targets its readers (though, even I was put off by the almost desperate obvious baiting with this month's cover).
When I saw the 'boob' cover on TFA, before seeing the blog title, I knew it was going to be a feminist complaining about how misogynist and mean geeks and the geek ecosystem are.
P.S.: Misogyny is the hatred of women. Most geeks love women! Their lack of presence in the IT world is what makes us surprised to find a competent female in our field... there are so few competent IT people anyway, so the cross-section of two minorities is rare.
When Wired came out the first time it was very much better than anything they publish today. But the context was also much different and the contrast with the competition was much higher. Today you have many online magazines / blogs etc. which makes what Wired was, look less today than it did at the time.
The Wired issue which was nearly twice as thick as a normal Wired issue, because of the Neal Stephenson's story of the undersea fiber optic cable FLAG, stands out as one of the highlights: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
And why should we? Show me one craft where newbies are respected without proving their skills and I'll reconsider. I personally would like to see more women choosing careers in IT, not because we need something pretty to look at, but because they want to be in IT. No healthy industry can be all but exclusive to one gender.
Maybe you should offer respect because your perspective on the world is not the only valid perspective. Maybe your perspective limits you from seeing other aspects that could be worthy of respect.
I think the two sides are talking about different things. Parent (and its GP, etc) are talking about respecting someone as a person, and GP (and its GP, etc) are about respecting someone's technical opinion on the relevant subject. Not sure if I've interpreted them correctly, but if I have, I don't think those ideas are mutually exclusive.
Now, do some people think they're just not respecting a newbie's technical opinion but come across as/are actually disrespecting the person? Quite possibly.
Agreed. I'm pretty sure the message here was "hey you can enhance things and this is usually the most common surgically-enhanced body part," not "women are items and you should make sure to keep her in the kitchen lest she learn how to work a computer or something."
According to sources I can find that actually seem legitimate, we have a toss-up between liposuction and gasp breast enhancement.
She makes a good case. I'm no die-hard feminist, but this strikes me as trying to appeal to that most basic element of their mostly male readership at the expense of their female readership.
Wired shouldn't be about that. Even though the whole magazine is kind of campy, and more reminiscent of science fiction than any serious study, this strikes me as more distasteful than funny or sexy. I don't want Wired to become prudish, but they have an opportunity to lead by example here.
Why oh why, do most women focused magazines (which I see at the checkout counter, etc) have attractive women on them (Cosmo, etc) in various stages of undress?
I think that's a fair question. First of all, feminists typically decry Cosmo just as quickly as they would these Wired covers. So you can't really argue there is an inconsistency there; the fact of the matter is that not all women are feminists, and not all women are Cosmo readers. The two don't usually overlap.
But I'm not going to suggest there is anything wrong with Cosmo. The purpose of Cosmo is to be a woman's magazine that focuses on various traditional interests of women, including attracting men. Their covers reflect that. My problem with Wired doing it is that it doesn't fit what Wired is about. Wired represents the tech community in a sense, so I feel it reflects on me a bit what they do. Historically, it's been a nearly all-male community, yes; but most of us agree we'd like that to change, and getting rid of things like this is not much of a sacrifice. Wired should be about cool tech stuff, and there's no reason that premise should prefer one gender over the other.
Because the advertisers in such magazines are selling that "you too can look like that" if you buy our clothes / make-up / smell / exercise video / diet food or whatever.
How about: Because they are male focused magazines. Sure, it is women buying them at the checkout -- but only to better live up to what men are demanding from them.
(This answer is slightly more radical than I am.... but that doesn't necessarily make it an uninteresting thought!)
I was responding to the idea that the stuff you see on Cosmo/society-at-large is just natural expressions of hard-wired biology -- what I see as a classic sexist cop-out.
I was about to write an answer, but I suddenly find I have troubles even understanding what it is you want. Do you want to change the laws of attraction? Should men (and women) be blamed for wanting attractive mates?
You think attraction has nothing to do with biology at all?
How guilty should I feel for being a man, knowing that my mere existence apparently forces some women to buy Cosmopolitan (the horror!!!)?
You think the "laws" of attraction are somehow writ in stone, unchanging, dictated by biology only and unrelated to culture? Here's a quick counterexample of the western standard of skinny=attractive: http://www.news24.com/World/News/Cow-steroids-fatten-sex-wor...
The problem isn't what we do/don't find attractive: it is the double standard of (de) valuing women solely based upon their (un) attractiveness, while men are judged upon a much wider range of criteria or not judged at all.
The only real thing I have read about attraction so far is that it is probably coined by early experiences (like siblings, parents,...). Also, despite a continued effort by the fashion industry, I never had the impression that anorexia is attractive (hint, think Playboy, not Cosmopolitan). Your link doesn't tell me all that much without photos. In any case, it is obvious that there are all sorts of people (ie men who like fat women, men who like thin women, men who like old women, and so on).
I honestly don't know how to argue with you since I am not sure I agree with your assumption that women are valued solely based upon their attractiveness.
As for biology, there is a difference between men and women - the latter can bear children. Hence the "pairing" market is asymmetric.
Why not? It's one of the few things in the world that almost everyone can agree is worth looking at.
Females are pretty and I thank god that I live in an age where I can see the especially pretty ones on the cover of a magazine (there was a time, no doubt, that a man [or woman] could go their whole life without ever seeing perfection in the female form). That's not a bad thing.
I think we spend too much time demonizing basic human sexuality, and not enough time accepting and understanding it.
removing all semi naked pictures off magazine covers will not change the fact that people find other people sexually attractive...what it will do is make people feel terrible for having natural feelings.
I say this as a sole male bought up in a feminist household. It took me a long time to realise that looking at the opposite sex was not actually a thought crime.
Magazines like Cosmo target women but obviously don't try to sell based on intellectual content. You won't see covers like theirs on, say, Bitch magazine, which is most definitely "women focused."
Of course, the kinds of magazines that the smart girls I know read are traditionally thought of as male focused. I'm talking about the Economist, the New Yorker, etc. And yes, Wired.
Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis
Is a photo of a woman unfriendly to women? I don't get it.
And the cover/article at hand really wasn't sexist ("oh! look at the boobies!"). It was mostly focused on tissue reconstruction, and (as I recall) the rationales for this that they delved into the most were (1) applicability to regeneration of other tissue; and (2) the importance of breasts to women themselves in Japanese culture (due to the ubiquity of public baths).
While this wasn't exactly reaching out to women, I think that anyone finding it off-putting is really looking for injuries.
I am a woman, and I subscribe to Wired, and my reaction when I opened my mailbox and found that cover was "Oooh look, honey, boobies!" Quite literally.
I guess I should, as a caveat, mention that I'm very sex positive and not entirely straight. But I personally believe that bodies aren't obscene, no matter what context they're in. Even if that context is an attention-getting cover on tissue engineering.
It's not a matter of obscenity. That is not the author's contention. She is pointing out the disparity between covers featuring men and covers featuring women: Men are presented as people--pioneers, leaders, innovators--but women are presented as objects--sex symbols, characters, models.
Using an anonymous woman's chest makes the objectification even more egregious.
Women in tech fight an uphill battle to be recognized for their accomplishments and not just their gender identity. For the author to say that a media mainstay (Wired) in the tech arena should be trying to fight that imbalance instead of aggravating it is justifiable and welcome.
Men make probably more then 90% of the middle to higher up positions in tech. Women founders of startups make around 4% of the total founder pool.
What are people supposed to do? Invent important women in the tech industry out of thin air? The important women make a name for themselves, and I'd argue that the good ones have it better since it's easier to be acknowledge as an important contributor as a woman, since there are so little of them. I'm sure a great developer probably has a harder time getting some exposure, than a women at the same level (a great woman developer, a woman that's just like 90% of them won't get noticed, and neither will the men) and with the same opportunities.
In my experience, great female developers are always a big deal. Everybody loves them, and they get more exposure than their peers at the same level. The one's that complain are the one's in the trenches complaining on why they have to share a bathroom.
Women tech fight an uphill battle to be recognized for their accomplishments...
Is this really true? To me it seems pretty easy for a woman to get press. Consider, for example, indinero. It was founded by Jessica Mah and some other dude who gets no press. See also Leah Culver, who can barely code and yet is considered a tech icon.
I think it's extremely hard for people not to project their own thoughts and background of abuse (mostly perceived, but also otherwise) on simple things like a picture, a work of art, or a book, while simultaneously invalidating the context it appears in.
As Dan Savage said, I'm glad to be a man because we seem less complicated (though he was commenting on genitalia). If Wired had a picture of some guy's schlong on the cover, I wouldn't, as a man, find it "unfriendly." I can't even imagine how it feels to be so intimidated by pictures of other people. Stick goatse on a magazine and it probably wouldn't stop me buying it.
But any decision to stop reading Wired seems wise to me - it has its moments but the odd issues I buy when traveling are packed with gimmicks and populist dross. Pick up magazines like Communications of the ACM instead (sadly not at airport stores) - no gimmicky covers or chesticles in sight there!
I'm sure you would feel differently if the average appreciation of your gender was for its usefulness as a sex object, baby producer, and/or domestic slave. You would not feel intimidated by your representation in this way because there is such a constellation of social roles for men that are portrayed regularly in the media and other venues. Things are certainly not as bad as they once were for women, but a quick glance at sites like http://bechdeltest.com/ will make it clear that all is not well in the world either.
Pardon me if my tone is a bit harsh, but honestly your comment comes off like you think it's pejoratively "complicated" for this woman to recognize and decry the objectification of her gender and its under-representation in a widely circulated magazine. By contrast you seem to feel that men are approbatively "simple" for not worrying about such things. The reality of course is that there is simply less on this front for men to worry about and this has nothing to do with one gender being complicated and the other simple. Perhaps that was not your intent, although I have to tell you that if it was I find it pretty offensive.
I've never understood how it's possible to be offended on someone else's behalf, particularly on a perpetual basis, as your tone leads me to believe you must be.
Your pejorative reading of "complicated" is far out of proportion to the original comment. Like it or not, gender differences extend beyond just having different sex organs. Men and women differ in lots of ways, including in typical emotional response. It's entirely reasonable to point out that women may respond differently to visual depictions of nudity in the same way that it's reasonable to point out that they tend to be less hairy.
> I've never understood how it's possible to be offended on someone else's behalf
I can think of one possibility. I have a female friend who is studying massage therapy. The association of massage therapy with prostitution makes it very difficult for her to get people to take massage seriously. I am offended when someone makes this association and usually on my friend's behalf because it makes her job more difficult.
The logic is simple. I'm offended because someone else is causing harm to someone I care about. Granted, this is a specific example. I'm not really offended on the behalf of all massage therapists but I'm fairly sure my friend is.
If you worked with women who have emotional problems due to the way society devalues them it's perfectly reasonable to become offended on their behalf. (Stereotyping devalues everyone involved, there is no excuse for it.)
Being offended on behalf of someone becomes a problem with you either: A. Don't understand the problem or B. Don't have any real connection to it.
This is not a feminist issue. It's an issue with the reputation of massage. Addressing it through gender is not just incorrect, but divisive and counterproductive.
I was addressing how it was possible to be offended for someone else. Massage was merely an example I am familiar with. My second example dealing with women is also an example with no relation to massage.
> I've never understood how it's possible to be offended on someone else's behalf . . .
This may be true (that you don't understand), but I doubt it. If you have ever taken a stance on the wellbeing of people other than yourself, particularly a political stance, or if you have ever defended a friend or family member against an accuser, or any number of other normal human social interactions, then you do understand what it feels like, although perhaps to a different degree than me in this case.
And, I also have to point out that whether you understand why I argue about this has precisely nothing to do with the validity of my arguments.
> It's entirely reasonable to point out that women may respond differently to visual depictions of nudity
Only if it's backed up by evidence and relevant. It is neither in this case. Observing that women are less hairy is a fact, provable, and does not play a role in the argument at hand. Observing that women react differently to nudity than men is wrong on two fronts. First, it may not even be true. Second, in the context of a woman making a political statement about the depiction of her gender, it is a rhetorical device based on a premise of unknown veracity whose primary purpose is to discredit her beliefs to a male audience. It's a variant of "women are irrational, so we don't need to listen to them," albeit less transparently foolish.
I'm going to get offended on behalf of jamesaguilar. Why is he getting so many downvotes? Comments shouldn't be downvoted because you disgaree with them, they should be downvoted because they're thoughtless or unconstructive.
Since the above post was neither, I'm going to assume that some people need to reread the below:
99% of the posts and comments here on HN have nothing to do with the readers directly, or, if they do, have no moral connotation one way or another. This does, and it's really uncomfortable to learn about the fact that you are part of a privileged group. You see exactly how unbiased people can be about which comments are worth reading when discussing this topic and others like it. Historically, I've found the answer to be, "Not very."
The legal system here in Denmark requires you to be directly involved if you want to bring charges against someone, ie. you can't accuse someone of making racist comments unless they were about you. The law often has flaws and it does not translate directly to being emotionally offended, but it does politically. Disclaimer: IANAL.
Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You believe that in order to be emotionally or rationally involved in a political debate, it is required that it affect you directly. Is that what you are trying to say?
So is it your belief that, for example, politicians in Denmark only involve themselves in matters that concern them directly? They do not debate over or attempt to alter the fate of the poor, the sick, or the disenfranchised? Do authority figures of various kinds not intervene when they see a chance to prevent an injustice or correct a false belief? I must say, from your description Denmark sounds like a very unique place on this Earth. Far more unusual than I had been led to believe by the people I know who come from there or have visited the place.
Also, could you explain what connection you think Denmark's legal standards of evidence have to the correct behavior of a person in political debate? Specifically, how is it relevant that Denmark's laws require civil complaints to be brought by the affected party?
> I've never understood how it's possible to be offended on someone else's behalf, particularly on a perpetual basis, as your tone leads me to believe you must be.
I'm not the person you are replying to, so this is from me: It doesn't take "being offended" to hold very little tolerance for sexists.
On a level, referring to the role of a mother as a "sex object, baby producer, domestic slave" is pretty flawed
where along the way did we lose respect for women who stay at home to raise a family??
also using hollywood movies as a litmus test is pretty flawed...the modern male hardly comes out unscathed either as they're either bumbling, asshole fathers or will do anything for sex.
Guys, if you don't want to give the wrong impression when you're talking about stuff like this, it's a good idea to reread your posts to see if you're projecting your own experiences (and privilege) in situations where it doesn't apply -- or implying that the way men approach things is better than how women do.
That's exactly what's being done by women too, in articles like the one posted, and it hasn't stopped anyone from sympathizing or the collective hypocritic outcry of the masses that are offended by public displays of parts of the human body.
Try reading the article again. She was explicitly writing from her own experiences, not projecting them on others. And her primary point was that Wired doesn't feature women on its cover.
No, don't fall into that trap. She was projecting her experiences onto a cover which could be received in many different ways. The way she rejected it as sexist is the result of this underlying process.
Ironically, by stating that "usefulness as a sex object, baby producer, and/or domestic slave" is somehow inferior (ok, let's skip the slave), you actually cement the classic world view. Men are usually only appreciated as "providers", and it seems in your world view that is also the only worthy way to be a human being. Good job.
Things were looking up a couple months ago when you published that great article on Caterina Fake of Flickr and Hunch fame. That could have been a cover… Instead you went with Will Ferrell…
Like it or not, a magazine with Caterina Fake on the cover just isn't going to sell as well on news stands as one with Will Ferrell on the cover.
I'm not sure I buy this argument, because Wired consistently ignores it regards to men. Like in 2005, when they put Blake Ross on the cover (issue 13.02). Or 2006, when Will Wright was on the cover (14.04). Or 2008, when they featured Ray Ozzie (16.12) and Shai Agassi (16.09). Or Craig Newmark in 2009 (17.09). None of these people is particularly well-known outside of tech circles.
I did not go back all the way in Wired's cover archive to verify Royal's claim that no woman has been on the cover "for an actual accomplishment" since Sherry Turkle in 1996. But that is that is a fairly damning data point, assuming it is true.
Combined with another HNer's comment that 3/4ths of Wired's readership is male...well, you're selling to male geeks. So putting Will Wright on the cover of Wired is like putting Jon Hamm on the cover of GQ.
Because they can't code. The ones that can just code don't need to constantly raise the fact that they are women to distract everyone else from incompetence.
When ever I hear "But, I'm a <insert victim group here>" I immediately assume they have sour grapes about the lack of achievement in their life. Everyone faces adversity, it's part of life, get on with it. The adversity you faced probably didn't make you a better coder and thus I don't care. I'm not running a welfare shop, if you want to sell you sob story go there. If you want to work, then let me know.
Look at the woman who optimizes Facebook's CSS, the article isn't about how she is a woman, it's about how to optimize your CSS. Why? Because she knows a lot about CSS.
Guess what? She has no problem getting work or respect!
> Look at the woman who optimizes Facebook's CSS, ...Guess what? She has no problem getting work or respect!
Have you asked her? Something like half of the highly competent women I know in tech have some real horror stories to share, mostly about not getting respect. (When you don't get work, you usually don't know it even happened, let alone why.)
When a white guy gets treated poorly, he assumes that the perp is an asshole.
When a woman gets treated badly, she assumes that the perp is a sexist. But the perp is not. The perp is just as asshole. The world is full of assholes. Ask any white guy.
The other day the headline on HN was that most people quit their jobs because they don't get respect. It's not as if being a male programmer is heaven on earth.
Well, if we're talking about the way women are treated in tech workplaces, then I think there is a real issue to be discussed there.
But I have a hard time working up any sympathy on the magazine cover issue, because it's unclear to what extent Wired actually shapes culture as opposed to simply reflecting it, and are we going to start dredging up statistics on covers to show every possible issue that they aren't on the right side of?
Yup. Cindy here really isn't in technology. I know plenty of women who actually do work in real technology and the few that have public blogs rarely write about women's issues.
The gender balance in the tech industry skews heavy to male,
which engenders sexist bias,
which makes it inhospitable to women,
in which only the more confident, braver, resilient women will survive without quitting.
Those types of women are more prone to be overtly feminist than average.
(I have no data. Wild supposition. IANAWSM [women's studies major].)
Answer: It's just as (more?) often people in gender/women's studies making technology the focus of their work. That's the case here.
And the reason for that is blindingly obvious: The tech field not only has a gigantic gender disparity, but has actually grown the size of the gap, unlike most other fields.
Others have said it more eloquently, but it's simply that some women have a bone to pick and prefer to offload the burden of actually being good at their jobs, instead acquiring this sense of entitlement and superiority.
There are more men 'featured' in tech because women make a small part of the tech industry in general. Last time I checked women accounted to around 7% of of important roles in the tech industry and the number of female students of computer science was something close of 16/17%.
I've worked with women before on two occasions. The first one was a Php developer that was just plain awful, her code sucked, her attitude sucked, and whenever you tried to get her to mend her wrongdoings, the boss would come and ask you to just leave her alone because she loves to make claims of sex based discrimination. The second one was recently and she was one of the most amazing Java developers I've ever met, far better than most men. She was as geeky as could be, could joke with the boys all day (and freaking outdrink half of the men at night!), and she believed that "women play the sex discrimination card when they're so bad they could be replaced by a monkey". Honestly, it's the exact same thing as the just graduated mediocre programmer (not saying all recent graduates are mediocre, I'm targeting a specific group). They complain and complain about the unfairness of X and Y, but are seldom any good anyways.
It's simple stuff really. Since women are such a small part of the tech community, it's exponentially more probable that more men than women will stand out. On the bright side tough, the women that do stand out, stand out immensely. Oh and the kicker for my story in the past paragraph. The bad developer was really average looking (creeping into not good looking at all territory), while the good one was a stunning blond which would melt your heart in a second. C'est la vie.
Interesting question, and similarly related I think are groups like IEEE's Women In Engineering (WIE) and Society of Women Engineers (SWE). I don't perceive any particularly radical feminist spin with regard to these groups. And the goals seem very commendable.
Because it's easy to manipulate people like that. Have you ever been the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit? Even though I haven't either, it's mighty ugly. And women always come on top, no matter what the final scenes of 'Disclosure' showed you.
My sympathy on that conversation, but I think calling Wired a technology magazine might not be terribly true anymore. It is more a pop culture magazine that happens to show tech.
I read the first paragraph of this article and thought "this article is clearly written by an angry female." Lo and behold, the author's name is Cindy.
Go Wired magazine for choosing your covers based on what will sell and not based on the loss of the five readers who might be offended by it. They can read "Bitch" (which is somehow not an offensive name for a magazine if written by feminists?). If Wired doesn't sell magazines, Wired doesn't exist.
As a point of curiosity, I figured I'd go to Wired's website and search the obvious choice: Marissa Mayer. She was the first female employee at Google and is now their VP of Search Product and UX - easy on the eyes too.
As a fan of the magazine, I was pretty disappointed in the results: 3 articles - none of which were in print (or meaningful.) Of those three, one[1] was pretty procedural, but the other two[2][3] seemed downright dismissive of someone who was the youngest person ever to make Fortune's list of "50 Most Powerful Women in the World"
Is Linux Journal the stand-out Linux publication? I have never gotten around to assessing them all, and if there's one that is head-and-shoulders above the rest, I would love to subscribe to it.
But I am an experienced Linux user and don't want "how to install Ubuntu on your PC alongside Windows" tutorials all the time. (Beginner articles are OK, just as long as it's a part of the magazine and not the front-page focus).
I don't get Wired's strategy. It seems now they're doing anything for readers- you can get a year subscription for $3.99 (if you find a good deal online), and they go with controversial covers like naked women and proclamations that "The Web Is Dead."
Why can't they charge a bit more for a subscription ($36/year is still only $3/issue), and publish much higher quality content? I'd rather pay more for quality than read what they currently mail out every month.
Presuming this is a real question, it's a matter of economics. Magazines like Wired make most of their money from advertising. They've judged, likely correctly, that if they charge more for subscriptions, they will lose more profit than they gain.
Magazines are closing down left and right. Wired is still in business because they have resorted to cheap tricks like "sex sells". While I applaud subscribers deciding they aren't going to put up with this any longer, I think you'd be mistaken if you think they could make more money by doing anything else.
I don't think the 3.99 price is a signal of any kind of desperation. I read recently, I wish I could remember where, that subscription and newsstand sales make a smaller portion of magazine revenue when compared to ads. Publishers would give them away for free to push up their circulation and thereby their ad rates, except advertisers discount ads placed in free publications. So publishers run all kinds of special promotions to push up circulation without appearing to cheapen their product to their advertisers.
That's one possible explanation, or it could be simple price segmentation - offering different prices through different channels to increase overall revenue.
I have wired magazine sent to me for free (I'm actually not sure exactly how that came about) and I'm this close to calling them up and just having them stop the subscription all together - I barely even read the magazine, probably spending less than 5 mins skimming through it before it goes into the trash or the bathroom.
Magazine uses pretty women to try to attract some men - oh the horror. (However, men as success objects is just fine, but I diagress....)
Look - wired doesn't "represent" anyone. It's a vehicle for attracting eyeballs to advertisements. It isn't obligated to appeal to "you" for any value of you.
Ironi ally this edition was the first inane bought in years not because it had boobs on the cover but despite that. I bought it for departure gAte reading and had old ladies were staring at me like I was reading porn.
If there were more women on the cover, she would probably complain that there are too many women on the cover.
I looked at the cover browser and my superficial impression is that they don't put people that often on the cover anyway, and even if they are male, they also tend to be actors or jokes.
Thank you for the reading recommendation of "The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired." That sounds exactly like the thing I always wanted to read.
So what if Wired Magazine have a gender imbalance over its lifetime. What's the issue here?
Is it more about being offended that wired magazine don't offer equal coverage to women entrepreneurs? Maybe there aren't just many tech entrepreneurs to cover.
It's one thing to have an imbalance of sheer number, which may well be a reflection of reality.
It's another thing entirely to make 90% of the women you do depict into sexbots. Putting ugly people on the covers doesn't sell magazines, but they could at least make some effort to depict reality.
Sexbots? Who would think of women as a bunch of automation, unable to think for herself, with no interests of her own, with no agenda of her own as sexy? It is not.
> Who would think of women as a bunch of automation, unable to think for herself, with no interests of her own, with no agenda of her own as sexy? It is not.
I can think of a few people that seem to think that way in the way they talk about women.
It's one thing to say that the magazine has gender parity issues in its coverage, but c'mon - a huge pair of boobs on the cover isn't exactly a step in the right direction.
I don't have much sympathy for the shameless use of breasts argument, as that's just American prudery.
Having featured only a few women for actual accomplishments could be a real problem - except that it can probably be at least somewhat explained with a few observations: How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5%. What percentage of successful tech entrepreneurs you know are women? How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.
I do hope that changes, I'm always happy to see women entrepreneurs, and Startup School attendance is by no means a valid scientific study, but it does give us some indication as to why so few women are featured.
> I don't have much sympathy for the shameless use of breasts argument, as that's just American prudery.
Where's the prudery in Cindy's article?
> How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5% ... How many women are in YC? Based on these number, women may be over-represented for their digital accomplishments on Wired covers.
Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.
"Your covers aren’t all that friendly to women on a regular basis..."
This implies that showing women with a sexual bent is somehow "unfriendly" to women, or that it limits them to being sexual objects, neither of which is true, and both of which are products of our obsessions and shames regarding sexuality.
> Actually no. Wired and YC both have < 10% women, far less than the broader tech field -- or society as a whole.
I have to assume you are trying to contradict me, although your statement doesn't seem to. The proportion of women in tech is higher than the proportion of women among tech leaders, which is what I was referring to. This is likely because women don't seem as likely to play the founder lottery.
>"How many women did you see at Startup School this year? I'd guess the number was under 5%"
[Assuming the author is accurate] If you go back to 1996 for Sherry Turkle you're at ~0.5% of Wired covers...i.e. about an order of magnitude less than the startup school representation if all covers were technology (which of course they are not).
I was curious if the representation of women in Ted talks tagged with "technology" was skewed, so I searched the Ted talks tagged as "business." 25/156 are women by women. Again about 15%.
Where did Wired get all the journalistic cred that Cindy seems to be lamenting the loss of?
I've been a reader for years, and it's essentially Maxim for geeks.
Add to that Wired readers are overwhelming male - 75% according to their latest media kit:
http://www.condenastmediakit.com/wir/circulation.cfm
Conde Naste is in the business of making money with Wired, not journalism.
Or is that too cynical?