Do We Still Need “Women’s Media”?

The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of newsletters uncorks a full-bodied Spread. Plus: special guest Jessica Pressler!

We’re here to reclaim the “women’s magazine.” Every week, two veteran editors read it ALL to bring you everything we believe women’s media should be: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, hot goss, and the odd shopping tip—aka, the full Spread. Plus: Original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!  

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Spreadiest Spreadinistas,

In the interviews we’ve been doing around here lately, an underlying question keeps rising to the surface: Do we even need women’s media anymore? It’s not a new idea. At the annual Elle “Women in Hollywood” events we once Spanxed up to attend, a version of this came up like clockwork, when some Armani-clad actor would open her remarks by bemoaning the category—why did she have to be just a “woman in”?—as if she was the first renegade ever to pose the question. We get it: There’s something dated and diminishing about the ring of “women’s media.” The term bears the scars of generations of diet stories and wall-to-wall whiteness. And it’s true that the majority of the reads we recommend here don’t come from women’s media, but rather from their better-funded general interest counterparts AtlanticNewYorkerNewYorkNewYorkTimes. Facts is facts, and it’s been many moons since most publications aimed at a majority-female audience have had the ad revenue to invest in deep reporting and top-dollar essayists. But as you probably know by now, that, to us, is a crying shame. Last week, when the question of the necessity of “women’s media” came up between two of our recent interviewees, Marie Claire EIC Nikki Ogunnaike and Puck’s Lauren Sherman—you see how the Spread is stirring things up, folks?—on the Fashion People podcast, Nikki said she prefers to think of MC as being read by “people.” Highsnobiety EIC Willa Bennett told us something similar. It’s a nice idea. We’re 100 percent in favor of the inclusivity that “people” implies. But on the other hand, what’s so bad about making a thing for women? We don’t think of women's media as a ghetto. We think of it as a highly desirable clubhouse full of the people we most want to talk to about the stuff that we find most interesting. (And, for the record, one that admits…anyone who wants to be admitted!) The smartest men we know read the Spread, and some of them aren’t even related to us. But they’re a rare breed. In our experience, there aren’t that many “people” who have a real appetite for period stories and motherhood woes. How many men do you know who are reading Miranda July’s “first great perimenopausal novel,” or sitting third row at Babes? Are you friends with a bunch of non-women who want to do the deep (and sometimes shallow) work of decoding women? We are not. That’s why we think it’s still OK—great, even—to make something that is explicitly for women and the people who find women very interesting, and to treat women as the intelligent, deserving, demanding and, yes, wildly varied but also, yes, highly specific audience that we are. While we would love to see Reese Witherspoon’s burgeoning media empire promote, uh…better books and make, erm… better movies, one thing we do love about it is that it’s unapologetically geared toward women, and why? Because we devour content and have money to blow on it! It would seem that the powers that be at New York/Vox Media are on a similar page, because it was just announced they’re launching a standalone print edition of the Cut (yippee!) with the first issue coming this fall. The question remains…will they call it what it is—a women’s magazine? 

Rachel & Maggie

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Here’s what paid subscribers are cracking into like a VHS copy of Untamed Heart this week…

• Do you let your parents read your sex diaries?

• We found it: The perfect magazine feature.

• A podcast we’re too chicken to listen to.

• What the hell is going on with Republican women? A plausible theory.

• EXCLUSIVE! New York Magazine cover story writer slash Hollywood-option-heavyweight Jessica Pressler spills all to the Spread!