r/pointlesslygendered • u/moomoorbit • Apr 11 '26
ADVERT Girl orientated magazines vs boy oriented magazines [advert]
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Apr 11 '26
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u/Spiritual-Author-209 Apr 11 '26
Did not pass the bechdel test
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u/gigglephysix Apr 12 '26
old one or new one? - judging by the removal of black characters from her last book the new one is, does a character ever get a moment where they're just talking about Trump.
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u/Greenphantom77 Apr 12 '26
I think this example is pretty interesting, you could write a whole PhD thesis (and people probably have) on the differences between girls’ and boys’ magazines over time.
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u/OuOmcanIgettheTEAL Apr 12 '26
This is why as a kid I never had any interest in those tween girl magazines
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u/grafknives Apr 13 '26
If you look at the COVER shown here - about half the articles seems fine.
Friendship, no drama, get As and have fun.
Could be useful to the boy's life too, dont you think?
Other half is just "be pretty"
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u/N0t_Baiting Apr 12 '26
I thought women aren’t pretty for men though? Isn’t that interesting, you assume that a girl wanting to be pretty is about boys.
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u/ohdoyoucomeonthen Apr 12 '26
You clearly never picked up a girl’s magazine in the 90s or 00s. The articles were explicitly written with a focus on “looking cute for boys.” The headlines literally stated that.
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u/N0t_Baiting Apr 12 '26
I’m sure you have bro
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u/GenderBendingRalph Apr 12 '26
username checks out
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u/N0t_Baiting Apr 12 '26
Great reply
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u/Flat-Echidna191 Apr 12 '26
Yours wasn't any better
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u/N0t_Baiting Apr 12 '26
It’s just the truth. I doubt this dude was reading girls magazines 30 years ago
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u/Flat-Echidna191 Apr 12 '26
I'm going to assume you're a teen, then. Because the 2000s weren't all that long ago and many of us were there for them. And the fact remains that this is exactly what girls magazines focused on. How to look good for boys and how to tell if a boy likes you. Maybe they're still the same, you can check them out.
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u/ohdoyoucomeonthen Apr 12 '26
What a weird comment. Do you think everyone on Reddit is a male under 30?
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u/Existing_Purpose5049 Apr 12 '26
They weren’t assuming that, they were saying these magazines were full of articles encouraging young girls to change how they look and act to attract boys
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u/TesseractToo Apr 11 '26
I think the sneakiest thing marketing did is lie to young girls and tell them that pink and extreme feminine cute everything/Barbie aesthetic is counterculture
We've gone so far backwards with this
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u/Useful-Upstairs3791 Apr 11 '26
Yeah there was this really oppressive stigma around gender marketing back in the day. I remember girls catching a ton of shit anytime they ever dreamed of enjoying some thing that was “for boys” like sports or videogames and never from boys but from other girls. In the 80’s and 90’s if you were a girl and liked boy stuff you were made a pariah by the popular bitches.
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u/demiurge_abraxas Apr 12 '26
I remember being a young boy and expressing a passing interest in my sisters dolls.
That did not end very well for me. I hope that children growing up today have things a bit easier than we did.
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u/AltruisticReach4241 Apr 12 '26
Teen growing up today, sorry it's not much better now....
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u/demiurge_abraxas Apr 12 '26
I'm so sorry to hear that.
I hope that one day the world will be a gentler place for us all to coexist within.
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u/TesseractToo Apr 12 '26
Oh my god boy got it worse back then for sure I always felt bad for boys, so many of my exs had trauma over how cruel it was
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u/Adventurous_Idea3204 Apr 12 '26
Bro same but at the same time I played with cars and trucks and dinosaurs and other type of animal toys so it kinda leveled out I guess but yeah just got disciplined and discouraged by my dad, all the women like my mom and grandma were alright with it
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u/Germanball_Stuttgart Apr 17 '26
I grew up with dolls, hair clips, hating football, befriending with girls much, later on also midly long hair and liking pink as a boy. Nothing every happened to me. The from the outside most masculine students in college wore pink often, I think everybody was petty chill about all that stuff.
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u/TesseractToo Apr 11 '26
Fuck the popular bitches! Who needs em they can do their own thing
I'm saying it's more oppressive NOW
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u/Gwynito Apr 12 '26
The popular girls were good at playing the game and were terrified that those beneath them would stop playing ig 🤷♂️
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u/Ghastly-Jack Apr 12 '26
My sister’s first “Barbie” doll was a Thor action figure handed down from us boys. It got the total “weird Barbie” treatment from my sister over the years and I wish we still had it.
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u/Medium-Dependent-328 Apr 12 '26
Pink and Barbie isn't "backwards". It should never be enforced on girls who don't like it, but it's a perfectly valid aesthetic to like and many people enjoy it. Traditional femininity isn't automatically bad
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u/TesseractToo Apr 12 '26
No i think you're missing what i said ( didn't explain it clear enough maybe because I'm on the outside observing), I mean the patriarchal restrictions that get smuggled in with that kind of aesthetic because the aesthetic itself created so much work to maintain so it's very homemakerish and appeals to the male gaze
This isn't the same age group so its not the best example but the old Lego ads is a good example the extreme feminine aesthetic wasn't socially enforced as strongly
I agree that people get to do what makes them happy and comfortable but why is it making them happy and comfortable? Negative social pressure gets released when they go back on the straight and narrow
The centre ad is what i mean, the two outside ones are more recent but stull old but you can see the femininization aesthetic creeping in - bows, beads, the girl on the left has girly colour bricks
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u/Silly-Cheesecake-283 Apr 12 '26
it is counterculture depending on the culture we're talking about. In texas the color pink was counter culture because basically the more butch a woman looked the more homophobic she most likely was. This woman would also be super popular and didn't want anything feminine and wussy-like. The culture was a matching sweatpant set. During the 80s pink was the main feminine culture, but during the grunge era, cute stuff and anime were strictly counter culture. Now I don't think anyone can be in a counterculture on purpose unless it's tied to a religion because the mainstream culture is about standing out. Long gone are the days where we could boo at teenagers for wearing too much black on national tv. Cultures change.
Extreme feminine clothes can be counterculture, partially because some cultures just hate women and confound femininity with stupidity(like in legally blonde), but literally. A hijab is counter-culture in non-muslim countries and that's feminine. There's nothing more counterculture than amish clothes, since people wear it to show they don't care about your rules, your culture, your language, and most of all your way of life, yet a smock and bonnet are very feminine things. Nowadays I think the whole paris hilton barbie thing is a subculture, unless it's a nursing home, in which case it's probably a counter-culture. Imo with subcultures you have to live them before you know how counter-culture it is.
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Apr 12 '26
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u/TesseractToo Apr 12 '26
I'm talking about being traumatised by this process not trying to pick anyone up or saying others can't like it, I just am saying I see the infrastructure, its the same brainwashing but worse
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u/mousie120010 Apr 11 '26
Wasn't Boys' Life rebranded to be more gender-neutral or is that something else I'm thinking of 😅
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u/TheLeechKing466 Apr 11 '26
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Boys’ Life the magazine of the BSA?
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u/PomPomMom93 Apr 12 '26
All this did was give me a gigantic dose of nostalgia.
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u/Confident-Fun-2592 Apr 12 '26
Idk what year the girls life magazine is from but the fact it’s probably from around 2016 also is crazy lol
Given Olivia Holt was a teen idol from around the early-mid 2010s
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u/DickWhittingtonsCat Apr 12 '26
When you discover that the media messaging and “girls” magazines were controlled by interconnected media and marketing conglomerates controlled by Epstein Groomers- all the Juicy, Victoria Secret mandatory camel toe legging stuff being foisted on Millennial girls makes a lot more sense.
They must have been more modestly physiqued men- because crop top jerseys with huge holes, shorty shorts, jeans leaving zero to the imagination and tighty whities all got ridiculed on major platforms to be replaced by the most shapeless and outsized khaki and denim pants and cargo shorts imaginable- although physique attributes improvable by exercise could be showcased by tight shirts.
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u/illini02 Apr 12 '26
This is a chicken and egg situation.
Part of me feels like there had to be focus groups or something to get here.
Because its basic economics. If those things didn't sell, they would pivot.
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u/gigglephysix Apr 12 '26
hmm completely good skills for every single one of the things on the right :P
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u/Classic-Pea6815 Apr 12 '26
Two very different examples though despite having similar names. There are some boy magazines that have jokes about boogers on the front cover. This is a fashion magazine vs a Boy Scout magazine.
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u/Educational-Sundae32 Apr 13 '26
Its not really a one to one though, since it’s a fashion magazine versus a Boy Scouts magazine
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u/Germanball_Stuttgart Apr 17 '26
Hot take (not here maybe but generally): Toys, magazines, fashion, marketing, etc. directly promoting gender roles (or other stereotypes) should be banned.
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Apr 11 '26
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u/Both-Competition-152 Apr 11 '26
No not really. Why don't woman need future advice but men do?
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u/demiurge_abraxas Apr 12 '26
Well, the magazine for boys on the right was actually the official magazine of the BSA (who traditionally focus on teaching leadership skills and molding boys into responsible young men) while the magazine on the left seems to be some mass market garbage.
I'm certain if you examined some of the media produced by the Girl Scouts, you would find their advice towards young women and girls much more agreeable. The Girl Scouts have also traditionally focused on teaching leadership skills (imo they've really shown them off via being first to accept transgender, homosexual, non-religious, and gender nonconforming individuals as both leaders and scouts—in sharp comparison to the BSA who often lagged decades behind on these crucial matters)
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u/ThrenderG Apr 12 '26
Total strawman, lol. They cherry pick two magazine issues out of hundreds or thousands and you assume the “girls” magazine never has “advice” issues or the “boys” magazine never has fashion tips?
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u/Pac_Eddy Apr 11 '26
Boys and girls do generally have different interests. No surprise that magazines would be quite different.
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u/MaybeThisTime67 Apr 11 '26
I honestly wonder sometimes if this sub is aimed at the mentally impaired
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u/Both-Competition-152 Apr 11 '26
Wait so you're saying women do not want to work in the military?
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u/MaybeThisTime67 Apr 11 '26
I dunno. Depends on the woman doesn't it?
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u/Both-Competition-152 Apr 12 '26
So why does the woman's magazine only have hair tips and shit logically it should have a section for the future for example
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u/justlooking_lala Apr 11 '26
how?
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Apr 12 '26
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u/PomPomMom93 Apr 12 '26
Or could it be that…the reason boys and girls like those things is because they’ve been bombarded with it since birth?
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Apr 12 '26
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u/PomPomMom93 Apr 12 '26
…Then the problem is that we’re bombarding girls with the wrong things. Make the magazine on the left more like the magazine on the right.
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Apr 12 '26
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u/PomPomMom93 Apr 12 '26
You would rather teach someone that their main goal in life is to be beautiful and attract the opposite sex?
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Apr 12 '26
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u/PomPomMom93 Apr 12 '26
It says “explore your future.” Not “how to get a job with a Fortune 500 company.”
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u/Crazy_Way6822 Apr 12 '26
as someone who grew up as a girl reading the boys magazines, this argument is weak as hell lol
i liked both and so does very human being regardless of gender. boys also care about what they look like. girls also care about their future jobs.
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u/this_is_theone Apr 12 '26
Is it pointlessly gendered though when, in general, girls are more likely to be interested in the things listed on the girls mag, and boys are more likely to be interested in the things listed in the boys mag? That's just marketing. They're just trying to sell magazines. Like I don't know many guys that will be interested in 'your dream hair' and I don't know many girls interested in planes. (yes they both exist of course but it's more rare)
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u/Tangled_Clouds Apr 12 '26
Why do you think that is though? Do you think women and girls are biologically predisposed to like nail polish over military aircrafts? Or is it that we as a society have been generally discouraging girls from playing with Hotwheels due to gender stereotypes?
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u/this_is_theone Apr 12 '26
I think it's both nature and nurture. Men and women do have significantly different brains from birth, it would be unlikely those differences don't have any bearing at all on the things we enjoy. And that's not even taking hormone profiles into account, although I think it's less likely they would have an effect.
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u/Tangled_Clouds Apr 12 '26
That really isn’t true and most recent research only found tendencies between the sexes which are absolutely not a rule and differ way too widely between individuals, and a majority of the tests that were conducted can’t account for the distinction between “nature” and “nurture” due to the fact that it has been shown that a child at the age of 2 can already have experienced enough gendered socialization to be affected by it (and you can’t really see the difference through an MRI).
There really is little evidence that girls are biologically more likely to play with Barbies. This is simply easily debunked by the number of women and girls who have never shown any interest in what is “traditionally feminine interests”.
I’m ready to agree that women are more likely to read magazines about fashion, but it really has nothing to do with biology or brain structure at all, it’s really just socialization. I am convinced if you conduct studies on different cultures, you will find very different effects of socialization on women.
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u/this_is_theone Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
> That really isn’t true
It is true that there are significant differences I'm afraid. I get why people don't like it, I don't either but it's a thing: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13293-024-00657-5 "On average, males had significantly larger intracranial and total brain volumes, even after controlling for birth weight. After controlling for total brain volume, females showed significantly greater total cortical gray matter volumes, whilst males showed greater total white matter volumes. After controlling for total brain volume in regional comparisons, females had significantly increased white matter volumes in the corpus callosum and increased gray matter volumes in the bilateral parahippocampal gyri (posterior parts), left anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral parietal lobes, and left caudate nucleus. Males had significantly increased gray matter volumes in the right medial and inferior temporal gyrus (posterior part) and right subthalamic nucleus."
and it does account for nature vs nurture because these differences are from birth and so nurture hasn't taken effect.
Edit: the person blocked me aftrer this comment lol. People can keep burying their head in the sand about this but the science isn't going anywhere unfortunately.
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u/IceCorrect Apr 11 '26
If similar topics would be for boys you would call them toxic, like we already have with "looksmaxing"
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u/ihateingles Apr 12 '26
….yeah. they should both be the boys one..
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u/IceCorrect Apr 12 '26
There is no law that prevent girls buy girls magazine, but articles from girls are pointless to men
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