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1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirt

1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class millennial career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable. 2) The readers are self-consciously choosing this media themselves anyway - through the YouTube channels they subscribe to and watch, the Instagram influencers they follow, the products they buy. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, these readers are now being encouraged to think how they can follow in their footsteps. This article imo, reveals much more about the prejudices of the author than the readers or the publishers.

smacktoward 9y ago
> An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Girls who want to should be free to engage in those kinds of "girly" pursuits, of course. To each their own! But by focusing only on those pursuits, Teen Boss sends the message to girls who are interested in other things (like STEM!) that they're weirdos who are walking away from success instead of towards it in their own way.
- kristianc 9y ago
  > Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Perhaps not, but then you're being reductive by equating engineering with 'grease on their hands'. There's plenty of STEM careers that don't involve any grease - such as materials science, fashion design, sound engineering, to stuff that this magazine would wholeheartedly endorse, like developing your own make up line. 'I made thousands building a FaceTune competitor' certainly would. For that matter, how many people on Hacker News deal with grease in their day to day work? And is the kind of thing being discussed here that different from 'I made $32k a month recurring revenue' IndieHackers story, the likes of which regularly gets voted to the top of HN?
  - adamsea 9y ago
    That's not the point. A software engineer would work perfectly well for the example in the parent post.
  - doctorstupid 9y ago
    Slow down and process the metaphor.
  - spacehome 9y ago
    If fashion design is STEM, then there's nothing that isn't STEM.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      Materials science isn't STEM?
      - spacehome 9y ago
        I said fashion design.
- hitsurume 9y ago
  Not to butt in, but nothing is stopping other women from making their own STEM girl themed youtube channel? I think that's what the beauty of youtube and the internet gives people, the ability to create their own niches. Yea if you want to be a certain type of success you may need to fake it like what everyone else is doing, but there's nothing stopping people from carving their own place in the world.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Wasn’t there an article here a while back about a Chinese woman who had a STEM/Maker YouTube channel who got harassed, heckled, and called a fraud because she also happened to be good looking? There seems to be at least some forces out there discouraging STEM girl themed channels.
    - gowld 9y ago
      That person made videos of STEM + soft-core porn that she said he did specifically to get attention, so it's more to parent's point about portrayal of women in media imagery, not against.
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        I don’t think we are talking about the same thing. I don’t recall seeing any porn in her videos but I think I saw some very hot soldering irons. If you’re having a hard time disassociating “females on the Internet” from porn, I’m sorry but I don’t think I can help ya there.
        fjsolwmv 9y ago
        Her professional name is "SexyCyborg", so you can lay off the concern trolling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu
        acomar 9y ago
- gfo 9y ago
  Obviously the content of these young girls' entrepreneurial pursuits don't appeal to you. They don't appeal to me either, the target audience is 8-14 year-olds. It's celebrating a new generation of girls who are interested in business or entrepreneurship and want ideas to get into that business. It's a new magazine, how can you say that a 15 year-old girl that does something revolutionary couldn't be featured? I'm reading this as, it's a new magazine that's focusing on the low-hanging fruit and could eventually gain enough traction to feature other things. Who's to say the lessons learned from these "girly" ideas couldn't also be applied to STEM-related pursuits (after all, a specific section is called out where someone pitched a roomba-like idea).
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. How sure are you of this? I think there's a good chance – I'd bet even odds – that they'd publish a profile of a girl like you describe.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  It's incredibly sexist to say that girls are only acceptable if they are acting like stereotypical boys. Please stop.
cat199 9y ago
How is: > make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels different from: > job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona ? seems more like 'stepping stone' to me, no?
FussyZeus 9y ago
> 1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class snake person career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable. The "professional influencer" career path though, especially done the way the platforms want it done (i.e. NON STOP) requires that the person attempting it eschew any and all activities that don't work towards their perceived "career" in favor of ones that do. It would be like if struggling to be an actor for a decade left to completely incompetent to even wait tables. I'm all for approaching a utopian future where no one needs to work, but we're not there yet. If 1 in 4 young women are going for this kind of work today, we're going to have market saturation at peak levels. We already have way too many twitch streamers for it to be reasonably successful unless you slavishly dedicate your life to doing it, and I'd say the YouTubers are maybe a couple of years before they hit the same problem, if they aren't already. We have an entire section of our economy right now based on, for lack of a more eloquent term, bullshit. Bullshit people pushing bullshit products with bullshit content published on bullshit platforms. And yeah sure, this has always been a thing, it's not new, but it's never been this HUGE. We're already seeing cracks forming from the sheer number of young women (and men too, it's for both sexes) who are dedicating every minute of every day of their lives to this "influencer" nonsense, combined with the fact that digital advertising is tanking, and long overdue privacy rankings are going to take the wind out of all of these platforms sales, and then we'll have to deal with having millions of people who's only once-marketable skill is smiling into a camera like an idiot, and peddling shit that no one needs.
- replicatorblog 9y ago
  IDK, I think most of the people who invest heavily in building online personas in high school and college would make for pretty compelling entry level marketing folks.
albedoa 9y ago
> who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class millennial career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education... You bled through a little here. The vast majority of YouTube stars aren't being discovered on the street, and the vast majority of kids who buy in to the promise never become stars. You're contrasting two largely overlapping paths while framing them as the alternative versus the standard.
adamsea 9y ago
> 1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creator Creator of what? IMHO, in generals "creators" and "creatives" are red-flag words, signaling, not creation in the sense of artistic work or craftsmanship, but capitalism - money to be made by graphic designers, whatever. Not to knock making money, just sayin' ... > 2) The readers are self-consciously choosing this media themselves anyway - through the YouTube channels they subscribe to and watch, the Instagram influencers they follow, the products they buy. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, these readers are now being encouraged to think how they can follow in their footsteps. I dunno - "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. People who make money off of something love to talk about how the people whose money they are taking are exercising choice.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. I still think most people using the internet regularly find themselves in weird cul-de-sacs. It's very easy to find surprising and novel things to read, watch, look at. I'd be surprised if lots of people don't also have that experience.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    > > "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. I don't see the point you're making. Thirty years ago, people had a choice of four main TV channels, three newspapers, and whatever the Billboard 100 said they should listen to.
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      The comment I was replying to was, AFAICT, implying that people don't have much choice now, today.

smacktoward 9y ago

> An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Girls who want to should be free to engage in those kinds of "girly" pursuits, of course. To each their own! But by focusing only on those pursuits, Teen Boss sends the message to girls who are interested in other things (like STEM!) that they're weirdos who are walking away from success instead of towards it in their own way.

kristianc 9y ago
> Who are creative within a narrow, conventionally "girly" band of creative endeavors. Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. Perhaps not, but then you're being reductive by equating engineering with 'grease on their hands'. There's plenty of STEM careers that don't involve any grease - such as materials science, fashion design, sound engineering, to stuff that this magazine would wholeheartedly endorse, like developing your own make up line. 'I made thousands building a FaceTune competitor' certainly would. For that matter, how many people on Hacker News deal with grease in their day to day work? And is the kind of thing being discussed here that different from 'I made $32k a month recurring revenue' IndieHackers story, the likes of which regularly gets voted to the top of HN?
- adamsea 9y ago
  That's not the point. A software engineer would work perfectly well for the example in the parent post.
- doctorstupid 9y ago
  Slow down and process the metaphor.
- spacehome 9y ago
  If fashion design is STEM, then there's nothing that isn't STEM.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    Materials science isn't STEM?
    - spacehome 9y ago
      I said fashion design.
hitsurume 9y ago
Not to butt in, but nothing is stopping other women from making their own STEM girl themed youtube channel? I think that's what the beauty of youtube and the internet gives people, the ability to create their own niches. Yea if you want to be a certain type of success you may need to fake it like what everyone else is doing, but there's nothing stopping people from carving their own place in the world.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Wasn’t there an article here a while back about a Chinese woman who had a STEM/Maker YouTube channel who got harassed, heckled, and called a fraud because she also happened to be good looking? There seems to be at least some forces out there discouraging STEM girl themed channels.
  - gowld 9y ago
    That person made videos of STEM + soft-core porn that she said he did specifically to get attention, so it's more to parent's point about portrayal of women in media imagery, not against.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I don’t think we are talking about the same thing. I don’t recall seeing any porn in her videos but I think I saw some very hot soldering irons. If you’re having a hard time disassociating “females on the Internet” from porn, I’m sorry but I don’t think I can help ya there.
      - fjsolwmv 9y ago
        Her professional name is "SexyCyborg", so you can lay off the concern trolling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu
        acomar 9y ago
gfo 9y ago
Obviously the content of these young girls' entrepreneurial pursuits don't appeal to you. They don't appeal to me either, the target audience is 8-14 year-olds. It's celebrating a new generation of girls who are interested in business or entrepreneurship and want ideas to get into that business. It's a new magazine, how can you say that a 15 year-old girl that does something revolutionary couldn't be featured? I'm reading this as, it's a new magazine that's focusing on the low-hanging fruit and could eventually gain enough traction to feature other things. Who's to say the lessons learned from these "girly" ideas couldn't also be applied to STEM-related pursuits (after all, a specific section is called out where someone pitched a roomba-like idea).
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> Teen Boss would not be interested in a 15-year-old girl who invented a revolutionary new type of automotive engine, because it is not a magazine about girls with grease on their hands. How sure are you of this? I think there's a good chance – I'd bet even odds – that they'd publish a profile of a girl like you describe.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
It's incredibly sexist to say that girls are only acceptable if they are acting like stereotypical boys. Please stop.

cat199 9y ago

How is: > make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels different from: > job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona ? seems more like 'stepping stone' to me, no?

FussyZeus 9y ago

> 1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creators, who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class snake person career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education, job at BuzzFeed/Vanity Fair/Teen Vogue/New Yorker while building out performative angst Twitter persona." Following that line, for most people without the right background/connections/ability to take an unpaid internship in New York for three months, results in them becoming on several levels completely unemployable. The "professional influencer" career path though, especially done the way the platforms want it done (i.e. NON STOP) requires that the person attempting it eschew any and all activities that don't work towards their perceived "career" in favor of ones that do. It would be like if struggling to be an actor for a decade left to completely incompetent to even wait tables. I'm all for approaching a utopian future where no one needs to work, but we're not there yet. If 1 in 4 young women are going for this kind of work today, we're going to have market saturation at peak levels. We already have way too many twitch streamers for it to be reasonably successful unless you slavishly dedicate your life to doing it, and I'd say the YouTubers are maybe a couple of years before they hit the same problem, if they aren't already. We have an entire section of our economy right now based on, for lack of a more eloquent term, bullshit. Bullshit people pushing bullshit products with bullshit content published on bullshit platforms. And yeah sure, this has always been a thing, it's not new, but it's never been this HUGE. We're already seeing cracks forming from the sheer number of young women (and men too, it's for both sexes) who are dedicating every minute of every day of their lives to this "influencer" nonsense, combined with the fact that digital advertising is tanking, and long overdue privacy rankings are going to take the wind out of all of these platforms sales, and then we'll have to deal with having millions of people who's only once-marketable skill is smiling into a camera like an idiot, and peddling shit that no one needs.

replicatorblog 9y ago
IDK, I think most of the people who invest heavily in building online personas in high school and college would make for pretty compelling entry level marketing folks.

albedoa 9y ago

> who have achieved success through alternative routes (make up lines, t-shirts, YouTube channels) than the standard middle class millennial career path of "being born into the right family, liberal arts education... You bled through a little here. The vast majority of YouTube stars aren't being discovered on the street, and the vast majority of kids who buy in to the promise never become stars. You're contrasting two largely overlapping paths while framing them as the alternative versus the standard.

adamsea 9y ago

> 1) An alternative reading of the magazine is that it is celebrating young creator Creator of what? IMHO, in generals "creators" and "creatives" are red-flag words, signaling, not creation in the sense of artistic work or craftsmanship, but capitalism - money to be made by graphic designers, whatever. Not to knock making money, just sayin' ... > 2) The readers are self-consciously choosing this media themselves anyway - through the YouTube channels they subscribe to and watch, the Instagram influencers they follow, the products they buy. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds, these readers are now being encouraged to think how they can follow in their footsteps. I dunno - "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. People who make money off of something love to talk about how the people whose money they are taking are exercising choice.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. I still think most people using the internet regularly find themselves in weird cul-de-sacs. It's very easy to find surprising and novel things to read, watch, look at. I'd be surprised if lots of people don't also have that experience.
- kristianc 9y ago
  > > "choice" gets complicated in a world of advertising, algorithmically driven video rankings, fake news, the general limited range of what is available over mainstream media distribution channels, etc. I don't see the point you're making. Thirty years ago, people had a choice of four main TV channels, three newspapers, and whatever the Billboard 100 said they should listen to.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    The comment I was replying to was, AFAICT, implying that people don't have much choice now, today.