To say that websites with women-oriented topics, like iVillage.com
and gURL.com, are women communities is an overstatement. Although they might
have started with the intention of providing meaningful content to a “niche”
that has been underserved for many years, their purpose has visibly shifted to
target mainstream female audiences. Before it was bought out by iVillage,
Women.com’s purpose was to serve a specific audience, a community of intellectual
women. However, this initial idea seems to be now inexistent. Entertainment and Beauty are the main concerns
of this site, thus falling into the trap of the typical women place that
encourages consumption as opposed to creation, production, or analysis. It is
clear that the website has stopped serving its audience to start serving its
advertisers.
gURL.com is an odd site that “believes” is doing something
different for young girls when in reality is promoting the same stereotypical idea
of women as ornaments. The difference is that the site uses a more youthful
language to promote the same message. Although the founder might have thought
that she was creating “a place to do something different,” article titles like “I’m
17 Should I Have Lost My Virginity By Now?” or “My Guy Shaves Down There! Weird
or Not?” are conveying the same sexist message. The fact that the site opens
the sex discussion to young girls doesn’t make it feminist or different in my
view. What does the site advertise? Sally Hansen’s nail polish and Soffe’s “cute
pair of swets.” gURL.com clearly revolves around guys and sex –it even has a
column named “Ask a Guy”—, a message not very different from what women are
used to hear already, but with a different language.
Nora
Good analysis! It makes me think about Facebook ads that supposedly get targeted to us as users, but they often seem so wildly inappropriate. What these sites try to sell me do shape how I feel about them.
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