Now that I’m a Den Leader for my son’s Cub Scouts group and my daughter has started the Girl Scouts, I’ve been thinking more than usually about the gender divide in our children regarding interest, behavior, and learning.
Oh boy.
Oh girl.
So when a comparison between Boys’ Life and Girls’ Life made the rounds on the interwebs, I took note. I’ve been “taking note” of the messages between male-center and female-centered magazines for years, often thinking that women’s magazines were shallow and catered only to the baser parts of the same body-shaming culture, and men’s magazines were just as shallow, focusing on all the wrong things just the same.
But as bad as Seventeen Magazine is, for example, I often took comfort in the notion that my daughters wouldn’t have the nonsense of such a publication pandered to them.
Until now. Girls’ Life seems to be the same, shallow nonsense that every other women’s magazine prides itself on, only this panders—I mean “is safe”—to 12-year-old girls.
And to be fair, I am only using the main page and covers of each media company and magazine, which seeks to showcase the most important parts of their themes.
Boys’ Life banner offers games, jokes, and all that “boy” stuff (which is really kid’s stuff) we’ve prided ourselves on for years.
Girls’ Life banner offers “Trending” and “Style” first, and then “Fitness” and “Crushes” because every 12-year-old girl needs to be stylish, thin, and hyper-aware of falling in love.
Boys’ Life features how to explore careers, books, and hiking tips:
Girls’ Life offers how to be chic, take a bath, and references whoever Gigi Hadid is and how she defended herself and her sister from the paparazzi. You know, stuff we should be teaching 12-year-old girls:
Boys’ Life is all about the gear and fun stuff to do.
Girls’ Life wants to teach my girl about her “tummy hair.” What the hell is tummy hair? Bonus: my girls get a sports-bra and skinny-abs picture to burn into their long-term memories as a standard.
Boys’ Life: chess, of course:
Girls’ Life: whatever the hell this is.
or this:
or this (does my 12-year-old need to know about “bae” yet?)—
and this (hey girls, make sure your fatty foods are healthy-looking, amirite?):
And, of course, this comparison.
I’ll just have to keep teaching my daughters to know when to say “this is garbage” because, before you know it, they’ll be reading all about how to please their boyfriends and look their skinniest when it really counts.
See you at the checkout aisle. I’ll be the dad in line ahead of you with the three kids saying no to their constant requests that we buy more gum and candy.
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Photo:Léo Parpais/Flickr, Courtesy of Boys’ Life and Girls’ Life Media
The dollar is gender neutral, buy which ever they are interested in. If they didn’t have a market, they wouldn’t prattle their wares.
Good point, Jeremy. As has been stated, we deluge boys with a different type of message later on, but this is a perfect example of how we drag girls into the beauty myth and tend them onto a life of marketing fodder, seeking out the next product guaranteed to make them look “prettier”. It’s like watching the golf channel and every other advertisement is a new club with a proprietary design guaranteed to drop strokes off your game. The are prepping and marketing to our little girls: Condition them to feel as if they are not good enough, but that… Read more »
Cross-commenting from another recent article talking about the same thing: That magazine comparison, while “true” in a bigger picture sense, is between a trashy thing found on a supermarket shelf, vs. an official Boy Scouts publication. The same issue hits boys/men a little later, and it centers around body image, just as with girls/women. “How to get ripped arms women want to be held by”, “six pack abs you’ve always wanted”, “best protein supplements for working out”, etc. with similarly ‘shopped pictures of guys with perfect, glistening muscles, a smoky glare, and impossible hair. Then there’s car magazines, because what… Read more »
Interesting comparison, Jeremy. This points out a whole host of issues for parents. I guess, for now, I am even happier that my ten year old daughter is still in her “tom boy” and athletics phase, who happens to be an ice hockey goalie for both an all-boys as well as all-girls team. I find it truly concerning, the disparity among topics for the two genders. Thanks for jump-starting a critical look into the not-so-subliminal messages that our children receive. I am equally concerned with the old school expectations and messages that bombard my two teenage sons. And, to trey1963… Read more »
It’s not really an all boys team if she’s goalie for them is it?
mast head of girls life shows 5 women and no men…and has no affiliation with girl scouts the way boys life has with boy scouts…..so its an apples to oranges compairison
It’s obvious you don’t care about boys.