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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-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.

> 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.

> 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?

That's not the point. A software engineer would work perfectly well for the example in the parent post.

Slow down and process the metaphor.

If fashion design is STEM, then there's nothing that isn't STEM.

Materials science isn't STEM?

I said fashion design.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Her professional name is "SexyCyborg", so you can lay off the concern trolling.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu

The name alone is enough for you to accuse her channel of being soft-core porn? Come on. Reading her Wikipedia page, I see nothing objectionable and a lot that's admirable. It sounds like the channel subverts the traditional appearance and role of women.

> she is notable for her strong advocacy of women in STEM, transhumanism, open source, and body modifications,[1][2] variously challenging both gender and tech stereotypes with her flamboyant public persona[3][2][4] which turns objectification on its head.[5]

I don't think there's any Youtube channel out there that hasn't been the subject of harassment or heckling. I don't think there's any special agenda against STEM girl channels.

This is my general response to most criticisms of other's efforts: What is stopping you from doing something better? In other words, don't talk about it, be about it. Lead by example. The world has enough critics.

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).

> 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.

It's incredibly sexist to say that girls are only acceptable if they are acting like stereotypical boys. Please stop.

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> "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.

> > "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.

The comment I was replying to was, AFAICT, implying that people don't have much choice now, today.

> 1) It reinforces the idea that for young women, the only way to achieve business success is to be performatively "girly" -- being unceasingly cheerful and social, presenting a breathless aw-shucks ("so amazing!") demeanor

Or, it takes girls, who are already socialized that way, and teaches them that pink and glitter isn’t inconsistent with making money. (Which is the most important thing for kids to learn, because we live in a country where you die without money.)

Beyond the covers and YouTube features, from what I've seen the magazine does have less traditionally gendered sections. E.g. this spread is a generic "learn to code" piece, featuring a female engineer and highlighting various career paths SW engineering skills can unlock:

https://twitter.com/girlswhocode/status/909883045406281728

I've seen other spreads that highlight people like Tim Cook, who, while famous in our orbits, isn't a typical topic of conversation among my nieces.

That's good to hear!

Thirteen year olds used to be adults. It's no coincidence that the traditional cultural markers of "transitioning from childhood to adulthood", like bar mitzvahs, take place around that age. Teenagers used to be apprentices or naval midshipmen.

Then society got to the point where teenagers were no longer capable of doing anything useful, so society started extending childhood, to the point where nobody under the age of 30 considers themselves adults anymore. From that perspective, any reversion to the more natural pattern of human development is going to seem sad and destructive of childhood.

But that perspective is formed by a very unnatural way of life. Teenage naval midshipmen weren't wracked with angst and depression the way contemporary American teenagers are. They didn't chafe and rebel against their parents the way contemporary American teenagers do, because they weren't treated like children; they were treated like young adults.

> ...to trade the traditional privileges of childhood...

Traditionally children help out with chores, work on the farm, watch the other children, or even get jobs to help with the household expenses.

> ...kids who have internalized the idea that work is all there is...

There is a certain segment of the population that scrapes by and survival is the biggest concern. A certain level of privilege is needed to take principled stands on issues, invest large amounts of time and energy in charitable work, or even just travel and experience the world.

That is to say, life as a struggle is actually pretty normal. And it's not new or unique to this time and culture.

Maybe it's perverse to choose to struggle as a middle class kid. And maybe it's especially perverse to chose this kind of struggle. But there are many less healthy things for tweens and teens to invest their energy in.

Regarding point 2 - that is only traditional within the last 75 years for the modernized west; prior to that it was the upper class which had such ideations regarding children.

Most cultures historically have expected children to work and contribute - work and play intermingled, and then at a point, they were graduated to primarily contributions.

I wouldn't get too peturbed about children working.

n.b., exploitation is a different thing, I want to make clear. But historically, children contributing is a thing, and it was not an evil.