Marketing "Woman" to Women Online

Noy Thrupkaew

I just couldn't do it. I was shuddering at the thought of becoming a member of women.com, one of a rapidly proliferating group of "women's websites," for the purposes of research for this piece. After spending just a few days surfing women.com and iVillage.com, the only publicly traded websites "made by and for women," I was already worried that I would turn into the endlessly dieting, baby-making, big-rock-wearing, tamale-pie-baking, husband-pampering creature that is "Woman" on many of the mainstream women's websites.

These websites don't sell themselves that way, of course. They attract women web surfers with perks like surveys, online sex therapists, tax advisers, and chats with famous folks. It's sort of fun in a gross and bloated way, like screeching over Angelina and Billy Bob while eating buckets of chocolate chip cookie dough with your girlfriends. But after a while, it's hard to take. Both women.com and iVillage.com assault the web surfer with immense amounts of feminized goo, from "Pecan Pie: The Southern Specialty," to the helpful "Take some time to make yourself look good!" in an advice column on Making the Transition From Housewife to Employee. It was a little difficult to get to the articles themselves, though, because my attention kept getting diverted by the shrieking ads telling me to subscribe to Cosmo, buy cute shoes, and purchase "solutions for easy living."

I had already exposed myself to this radioactive blast of "marketing for women," so why not go the extra step and become a member? After all, members of women.com and iVillage.com get a range of goodies from free email accounts and live chat to pregnancy calendars, access to online women's mags, and a "wedding builder." But becoming a member would mean that the websites could declare open season on my email inbox, sending chirpy newsletters, special offers, and heavy-breathing ads for "women's stuff."

My emailbox is already bursting with DO YOU LIKE HOT SEX?, LOSE 2-14 INCHES IN ONE HOUR!, ACNE CURE & PENNY STOCK PICK!, MAKE $$$$ FOR NO WORK!, so the thought of adding this new twist to what the cybergods already see fit to send me would be too much. "Oh, not only is this person horny, chunky, zitty, and lazy, but she's a woman! She must be white, straight, and married, with two kids, a dog, and an SUV! She must like to shop! And for woman things! Things for her family! Because women are relational." This is actually pretty much the logic behind women's websites. Studies like those published in the past two years by Jupiter Communications, the "worldwide authority on internet commerce," fanned the flames with their predictions that women will be spending $53 billion per year on internet purchases by 2003. Venture capitalists and internet developers jumped on board, launching "women's websites" as part of a strategy to corner a previously ignored market.

-- Relationship Marketing -- These folks turned to a bit of corporate philosophy called "Relationship Marketing" to peddle their consumer portals. A prime example is this inspirational nugget from Faith Popcorn, trend guru and corporate consultant, who wrote a book on marketing to women entitled EVEolution: "Marketing to women requires not just learning, but unlearning. Marketers will need to create a rich series of connections and bonds rather than episodic consumer collisions."

MLM Talk Online, a resource website for network marketing professionals, exhorted internet developers to cater to women's "advanced social and people skills. The current rage of `Relationship Marketing' just puts a new label on the tools that women have always used to build their business." Got that? It seems that women are a whole different species from men--we are relational and love community. This is not an unfamiliar concept to those who have indulged in John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, or Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand to explain away all the difficulties between men and women. (Carol Gilligan may have started it with In a Different Voice, but she was genuinely on to something, and I don't think she had Gray's intergalactic sexism in mind when she wrote her book.)

I'm sure some differences between the genders do exist, but as Francine Prose wrote in "A Wasteland of One's Own," her scathing New York Times Magazine essay on women's culture and websites, there are probably not as many "as there would be if this were a society in which men and women could casually decide which gender wants to be president this term, and which one wants to take care of the kids and Great-Grandma. Humans are adaptive creatures, and the people who are responsible for the family tend to get interested in family relationships."

But internet developers aren't so radical, so relationship marketing--"build a relationship with women so they buy things for their relationships"--and "women's culture" is what we get. They try to trick us with solicitous advice, sympathetic polls ("The hardest part about dieting and weight loss is a. hunger, b. unappetizing food choices, c. eating out, d. getting off the couch, e. all of the above"), helpful suggestions and tips, and wise experts to guide us through our harried lives as wives and mothers. (And no, there's no room for divorced, unmarried, single parent, young, old, disabled, queer, darker than lily, or poorer than middle here. We are Woman. Resistance is futile.)

But lurking behind all of the handholding are the twin evils of relationship marketing and the co-option of the noble idea of women's space. It's much like being invited to dinner at your best friend's house, only to have her shake you down for all you're worth once you're behind closed doors.

There's something even more insidious behind all the relational talk, however. At Oxygen Media, home to Oprah Winfrey's magazine, cable-TV network, and website, chairwoman Geraldine Laybourne says women "are pushed and pressured in such amazing ways that they deserve to have a place where they can take a deep breath." Of course women need their blissful solitude. We rarely get any help with or credit and financial compensation for the work of care and mothering--work that has been demeaned through the centuries as "women's work in the home." Add to that the work outside the home that many women do and what do you get? That old Calgon-take-me-away commercial, which was all about the incredible wear and tear of an "average" woman's life. But does this mean that that woman should never get up to fight the larger forces that sent her scuttling to her bathtub in the first place?

Cleaner Homes, Smurfier Lives? Or Something More? If one chooses to buy into this, one can gain a little happiness, I suppose. We can buy the products to make our houses cleaner and more efficient, our families happier, our work lives smoother, our home lives smurfier--ignoring the fact that all this buying will create a cycle of more exhausting work that necessitates another deep breath at the end of it. We can indulge in what I'll call "My Home-ism"--the belief that if our homes are spotless and full of gadgetry, our work is going well, and our families are perfect, our work as human beings is done. We can also tone, trim, dewrinkle-ize ourselves until we're perfect. Our worlds can get smaller and smaller, so we never have to think about all those bad things out there--imbalances of power, sexism, racism, homophobia, inequity, and economics--and we can escape in our pinker than pink cyberworld.

But I'm not sure that will happen, despite all the doom and gloom I felt after examining the marketing strategies behind the sites. Both iVillage.com and women.com have seen their stocks plummet after an initial stratospheric take-off, even though nearly four million women visit their sites each month. It turns out that not enough of the web surfers actually click on the ad banners that can bring the sites some revenue. This is no surprise to some shoppers, especially the ones who like to get all up in a potential purchase, try it on, frown, fuss, fidget, take it off, leave, and come back and try it on again before buying it and returning it the next day.

But more than that, women are actually building their own communities, real communities--with each other, and not with sponsoring corporations. Take Peg Gray of Maine, for example. As a breast cancer survivor, she felt alone because support groups were an hour's drive away, according to the Boston Globe. She turned to anonymous iVillage message boards and chat groups. "I lurked for a while, reading things that the ladies were saying to each other, and finally mustered enough courage to post something myself," she said. "The depth of compassion and empathy and the love and concern for others is unequaled. . . . It felt like family from the beginning." She now spends two hours a day on the website as a volunteer discussion leader.

Even the fact that some of the websites might draw women online can be a great thing. Oprah's Oxygen Media group was especially proactive about getting women online, creating a TV series, "Oprah Goes Online," whereby Her Oprah-ness and best friend Gayle King go online in twelve sessions. "From email to chats to search engines to home pages, the two women will explore their options and experience firsthand how the Web will change the way women look at money, shopping, education, community, technology and themselves." Although the priorities of the series are a little messed up--money and shopping come first, of course--who's to say that women won't feel they can handle the internet more comfortably? That we won't level that loudly lamented but not-acted-upon gender gap in technology even starting from such a capitalistically minded beginning?

We're already getting some kind of message out, it seems. By logging on, but not buying, by creating our own communities on the "women's websites" or by making our own sites, we're saying that we are more and want more from women's websites than we're given credit for. That we are finding a way to make the internet a place of our own.