When I was the editor of You magazine (2018-2022), I’d spend Sunday evenings checking the inbox I’d set up especially to receive reader feedback. I’ll always be addicted to that engagement. I love hearing from you all on this platform, it’s a feeling that never ever gets old for me, so thank you!
The readers of You magazine could be relied upon to deliver you the full gamut of emotions. If one email was a heartfelt thank you for something that changed a reader’s life for the better and had my ego swelling, never fear: the next one I opened would be telling me I deserved to die because I moved the crossword to page 61 from its usual 59.
And every single week, without fail, I would receive at least half a dozen emails from very angry men. You magazine, for the unaware, is a glossy magazine that comes as a supplement with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. Its whole reason for existence, since it was launched more than 40 years ago, was to entice women to pick up a paper that had an inarguably male-centric vibe. To this day, most of its bylines belong to men and the sports section, usually exclusively about mens’ sports, is a nice chunky third of the whole thing. You magazine was launched to be by women, for women. And I quickly learnt that, even though this has been the case for its entire lifespan, a lot of men have a major problem with it.
‘Why is there nothing in your magazine for men?’ ‘You feminazis are always trying to erase us.’ ‘This is sexism’. I even had a woman tell me she was moved to write to me, so angry and fed up was she, because she found her husband thumbing through You magazine and looking on the verge of tears, due to feeling so ignored by our pages of fashion and an interview with a Hollywood actress.
And they say Generation Z are the snowflakes.
One guy told me he was going to report us to Trading Standards for false advertising because the magazine was called ‘You’, but as he was a man it was not about ‘me’.
And therein lies one of the most fascinating things that job taught me about men. There’s a good many of them who are genuinely outraged by content that is not all about and only about stuff that interests them. If I pick up a copy of say, Nuts magazine (can I even do that anymore? Is it still around?) I will think, ‘There is nothing in this that interests me, I see this is not for me’ and I will put it back down again and carry on with my day.
I’m not a huge fan of sweeping generalisations - and I will say here now that I know I have some very supportive, loyal male readers of this female-centric Substack. But it’s also true that my own experience showed me, relentlessly, that many men have a different reaction when confronted with content that’s not about them. And that reaction is incredulous outrage.
Sometimes I would ignore these emails, but I would bite back when a man told me there was nothing in it for him to read. Because I wanted to challenge those men who were basically saying that stories about women were barred from entering their brainspace. For instance, we’d run stories like one about a woman who survived four concentration camps in World War II: I’d write back and say, Are you telling me that, because that story is not about a man, it holds no interest for you? In my four years of editing that magazine, just one man replied to me to say that maybe I had a point.
They’re probably the same people who’ve been asking my friend, Kat Brown, if her new, brilliant book about adult ADHD, It’s Not A Bloody Trend, can be read by men. This is only a question because it’s been written by a woman. And for the record, she has explored so many facets of adult ADHD and as such has spoken to a lot of men for it. Just in case any man is panicking about being seen delving into a book written by a woman.
Women’s entertainment options would be very limited if we applied the same logic. I’ve been to see The Iron Claw today - wall to wall testosterone there, save for a ‘mother of’ and ‘wife of’ who get a tiny bit of screentime.
But I loved it. A true, unique, wild and heartbreaking story that I had not known about. If I employed the logic of all those guys who’d write to me at You, I’d have taken one look at the poster and dismissed it out of hand.
It’s a fact that many TV executives have told me over the years: content for and about men will also be watched by women. The same is rarely true in reverse. Which is why my name’s been attached to a lot of TV shows over the years that have never gotten past the pitch stage. Invariably it’s because they’ve been about fashion and so considered ‘too female’ to get enough of an audience. Is this how Queer Eye got commissioned? It’s about fashion, yes, but hosted by men and mostly about men? (Again, no shade to Queer Eye I bloody love it).
I wonder if we will ever, ever rise from this deep seated belief that so many have, that if a subject is popular with women, it’s inherently inferior. When Amy Schumer appeared at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards in 2015, she was relatively unknown in Britain. Her acceptance speech had the crowd in pain from laughing, and when footage of it appeared online it quickly went viral. The very next morning, when I said to one of the senior execs at work, ‘Wasn’t she hilarious?!’ he responded with, ‘Well… women find her funny.’ His assertion that she was not ‘really’ funny because she was ‘only’ funny to women just blew my mind and infuriated me. Because it’s not true that ‘only’ women find Amy funny. But also…. Even if that was true, why is that a bad thing? Is it really terrible if something exists that men aren’t into?
Apparently so.
I was thinking about all of this in the wake of the exciting news from my rock star friend, Elizabeth Day, who’s launching a new podcast production company. Daylight Productions aims to give a platform to female and minority podcasters, in an increasingly white male dominated medium. Her observations about what podcasting has become are right: the top podcasts are almost exclusively hosted by white men. If there are women featured in that top 10 list, they’re almost always the co-host with at least one man. Elizabeth is the veritable unicorn in that space: her How To Fail podcast has been downloaded multiple millions of times, so clearly must enjoy an audience of all genders. If anyone is well placed to disrupt the norm, it’s her.
But I can’t shake the feeling that that top 10 list says more about us, the audiences, than it does about any inequities happening in production companies. Is it their fault if they’re just going with what they know will get audiences engaged?
We can platform countless women to tell their stories - across all manner of mediums. But if men reject this content, and this inevitably impacts an audience size, will this just perpetuate a cycle where the numbers aren’t viable and women just don’t get the air time? Discuss.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are some men who are absolutely thoughtless and consider magazines geared primarily toward women as alien territory, but I think in part it has something to do with the fact that magazines aimed specifically at men just don’t offer them what they really need.
From my experience, most men’s titles are so po faced, packed with dreary features about gadgets, sport, cars and the more material aspects of life. It’s why I rarely read them and tend to devour Cosmo and Grazia where I can read about the ups and downs of people’s lives and see how they deal with them.
Men’s magazines rarely feature articles like this and dare I say - and I’m not excusing those fellas’ rude and grumpy complaints - I feel somewhere in their heads they are super peeved that they see so much rich material for women to dive into while they themselves are starved of this kind of emotional and reflective content! (Sorry for using the C word!)
In this day and age, when men are so varied and not all beasts, there is still a gap for a title that is for the more sensitive chap. Maybe.
I have 8 podcasts in my library at the moment & every single one is hosted by a woman, a duo or a trio of women. And that is because I only want to listen to women talk about the things I enjoy right now. There have been times when I have listened to male-hosted podcasts but they go on for HOURS! I would love to know what the male listenership of these women-hosted podcasts is because I bet it is virtually zero.