Girl's Life v Boy's Life: "Do you Know When to Shut Up" vs "Jokes to impress"

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Welcome to Feminism 101 !

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I read that headline as “Do you Know When to Slut Up?”

I’m not sure which is worse.

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who is girls life associated with? boys life is a boy scout magazine, are they connected in anyway?

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Boy’s Life always reminds me of this scene from the movie Airplane.

But in all seriousness, what would be interesting is to see if you made an issue of Boy’s Life that was labelled Girl’s Life (with images changed appropriately, etc.) would it sell? In other words is this the source of the problem or the symptom? Or both?

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The discrepency is sad, but it’s a little like comparing apples to oranges. Boy’s Life is the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America - you get a subscription as a member of the BSA. It’s been in publication since 1911, and doesn’t need to pander for subscriptions, or sell itself in the check-out line. Girl’s Life is the product of some publishing group starting 1994 to make money - it needs to convince people to buy subscriptions or make that impulse purchase.

From a quick search, it doesn’t look to me like the Girl Scout’s currently have a comparable magazine for members. If it did, that would be the ideal comparison.

Not saying that society isn’t teaching gender inequality - I recently had to have a discussion with my 4 year old daughter that yes, boys can wear pink (a topic brought on by the NFL breast cancer awareness campaign) - just that this isn’t a great demonstration of it, though it would appear to be on its surface.

EDIT: I see there was once a Girl Scout magazine, first called The Rally, then The American Girl, last published 1979. Here’s some of their old covers. It involves some gender stereotyping as well, but at least I see some covers depicting archery, canoeing and swimming. Considering the time period, I suppose we could consider that fairly progressive.

There’s also covers from a more recent, unrelated magazine called American Girl; just disregard those.

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I prefer people that shut up to ones that try to bring attention to themselves by telling jokes.

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Next Comparison: Fortune vs. Soldier of Fortune

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i always loved the comics that were in boys life in the 90s (yes i was a boyscout, don’t judge me) the art was really abstract and amazing, i tracked down the artists contact info years ago but was always too nervous to write him

Yeah - I think is rather silly to compare the two. Just because their names are similar, doesn’t mean they have anything to do with one another. They are completely different genres for completely different audiences.

Boy’s Life is the official magazine of Boy Scouts of America. So of course they are going to have articles about - wait for it - stuff you do in Cub/Boy Scouts. As one would expect they are going to have articles on hiking, camping, fishing, or one of the dozens of topics you can get merit badges for.

They also usually have articles on scouts who helped or saved someone in a crisis, or who did something outstanding in citizenship. They even have - gasp - a page of Bible stories.

Girl’s Life has NOTHING to do with scouting and not affiliated with Girl Scouts in any way (nor do they pretend to be). If this was a scouting magazine and they had such fluff articles I could completely see why it would raise one’s ire. But as such, Girl’s Life has as much in common with Boy’s Life as it does with Sports Illustrated, Guns & Ammo, or 4x4 Magazine.

If you wanted to compare and contrast two magazines marketed to difference sexes you would do better to take something like GQ vs Glamour - both published by Conde Nast.

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look at this, look at how great the art is! this artist had a few different comics that would run in boys life

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I’d almost equate that with saying “So-called ‘racial stereotypes’ are not inherently bad.”

Gender stereotypes may help somewhat to navigate a certain view of societal standards for behavior, but that is a set of standards that are increasingly becoming irrelevant.

This is something that has been on my mind more and more, raising a daughter. I want her to fit in, yes, but I don’t want her to be restricted from growing into who she could be simply “because she’s a girl”. This stereotype that girls shouldn’t worry about math and science and education, and instead work on being pretty, and fit in socially, that bothers me a lot.

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A quick look at how people stereotyped races and even genders in the 1920s, though, and I don’t think you’d find too many that hold up today. So no, the basis in real fact is often much exaggerated when not entirely fictional.

But they do help. For instance if you give women a test of 3-D abilities and tell them it measures skills useful for floral arrangement they are primed to do well, and if you tell them it measures skills useful for flying planes they are primed to do poorly, and marks on the same test changing accordingly. Thanks to stereotypes people easily - instinctively - navigate toward what society tells them they can do, without all the trouble of actually finding out.

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I see someone flunked the quiz in that first magazine.

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The publishers and intent of the magazines are a factor here. One has a mission and philosophy beyond commerce. The other is just out to grab eyeballs.

Others have looked up previous Girl Scout magazines. The next question is: Is there a non-scouting-related general interest magazine for boys comparable to Girl’s Life? A purely commercial venture, that is?

If there were, I bet that it would be awful beyond words.


I loved Boy’s Life as a kid. When I read it, starting around 1970, it had SF stories, great comics (funny and serious), camping skills stuff, stories from scouting jamborees*, soap box derby stuff.

And the advertising! I learned about my two life-long hobbies from Boy’s Life ads: Model rocketry and SF wargaming. The model rocketry story is described in a MAKE blog column; I ordered my very first SF boardgame, Stellar Conquest, from a little ad in the back of a 1974 issue of the magazine.

  • I almost wrote “Hullaballoo.”
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Britney and Paris, Lindsay and Miley, the Kardashians, ad nauseam.

Poor girls today bombarded with this crap, somewhere along the way the sales pitch was twisted into Self-Exploitation = Empowerment!

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I’m shocked and appalled that lazy conformist stupidity is sexist!

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Again with the not knowing when to shut up.

If that post was meant as a joke, it failed to impress.

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I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of the “racial stereotypes that are based on truth” that you’re thinking of have significantly more to do with economic and social status, as well as cultural and/or subcultural affiliation, than race. Correlation ≠ causation, yada yada.

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The wikipedia page for the magazine says:

This website and magazine became very famous in 2010 when tweens and teens needed advice.

What happened in 2010? Did teens and tweens never need advice before then?

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