I am in the market for a new mobile phone. I love my current LG running android but it is a bit battered and after a little family member chewed the buttons it doesn’t work as well, and the camera is very slow. So, I was given a copy of Stuff Magazine The Android Issue and having looked at it for the first time today I am enraged. I am furious.
What has the girl on the cover got to do with anything in this magazine? Turning the pages there is more of her and another girl in progressively silly poses. They are not even interacting with the technology, they are just looking about with a vacant expression only ever seen in porn magazines for men. Android doesn’t need porn style poses to promote its wares. I think my alternative version of this cover is better. Same plastic dollie bird except Barbie has more clothes on and looks pleased with her ipad.
The Stuff magazine cover and its Android article appalls me. The message I guess this cover is aiming for is: Android is ‘sexy’. The message I receive is that this magazine is aimed at and edited by sad porn loving men who like to fumble furtively with their Android apps and believe any sort of technology is a man’s domain. Disturbing to say the very least in 2011. The Internet has opened up the world in so many ways and technology is moving on constantly to make things better and more exciting. But sadly, marketing ‘sexy’ is used to sell more than ever and we are bombarded by unnecessary pictures of scantily clad vacant women.
Come on, you might say, it’s only a bit of fun. It isn’t. It truly isn’t. I am a mother of young girls and a computer scientist. I want to share with them the excitment of a world improved by technology. Cool, accessible technology which makes life easier. I won’t be using Stuff magazine to do that because I don’t want to have to come up with an explanation of what the silly girls are doing in the pictures. Imagine it:
Daughter: What is that girl doing mummy?
Me: Well she certainly doesn’t need to use that stylus when checking the weather app, she hasn’t got to grips with the multi-touch functionality on that HTC phone and she really must pay more attention to what she is doing…
Give me break! Already my eldest has used the term ‘boy’s toys’ and I can tell you that it is not a term she learnt from me.
We don’t need to sex up our technology, especially not to promote Android. Come on Stuff magazine, have some respect for your demographic and stop treating them like porn mad losers.
Newsflash: women do technology. The first computer programmer was a woman.