Samantha, Rachael, yes: Women over 40 are, if not yet terminal, terminally uncool. That seems to be the sole reason that More magazine has not been able to attract the kind of advertisers you would think would sign up for a magazine with 1.3 million readers whose average income is $93,000. Ironically, More's advertising staple of processed food manufacturers has helped insulate them from the ad page drop-off suffered by magazines that rely on luxury brands. But the notions behind this de facto ad boycott are themselves antiquated and based on decades-old thinking about consumers. This article about advertising age bias points out that the idea of needing to capture young readers and viewers to build brand loyalty is idiotic because that's not how consumers think anymore. The other point is that Americans ages 18-34 have $1 trillion in disposable income (and how quickly income gets disposed of these days!), while those over 50 have $2.4 trillion. You would think such money talks, but apparently not if it comes from the purse of grandma. And Rachael, you make the argument in favor of the older consumer. You're young, so your disposable income goes to disposable diapers. But once the kids are grown, there are several decades of spending left for most consumers before they hit the diaper stage of life again.

Tags: advertising, new york times

Sam, I had a different reaction to the NYT story on More magazine and its dearth of luxury advertisers. Whereas magazines geared toward younger readers are full of ads for expensive clothes and purses and jewelry, poor More, with its target audience of women north of 40, is stuck with Oscar Mayer and Bertolli even though its readers make more money than readers of magazines such as Allure and Vogue. Where you saw perhaps “illogical discrimination,” I saw a big “Duhhhhhh.”

I made less money back in my 20s than I do now, but those were also my carefree childless days. (I’m a few years away from 40, but close enough to relate.) Even though I was never a clotheshorse, I spent my weekends combing the racks at J. Crew and Banana Republic, eating out at good restaurants, and traveling. A nice watch or a good purse was an occasional luxury but still within reach.

Now that I’ve got three kids and a house big enough to hold them, those days are but a lovely memory. It’s not just the money—though, admittedly, I could buy a different Coach bag every week with what I spend on child care—but time. Right now both my disposable income and free time are dedicated more to the kids than to myself. (And that’s what I wanted, so I’m not complaining.) I even stopped renewing my subscription to In Style a few years ago because it was frustrating to see fashion spreads with $90 shoes labeled a “steal” when I was wondering if I should “splurge” on a pair that cost $40. That doesn’t mean I yearn to read magazines that have ads for cheap wine and Coffee-Mate. But I don’t blame advertisers for not reaching out to me.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: advertising, new york times

In 1984, MC Roxanne Shanté—nee Lolita Gooden—recorded the brash “Roxanne’s Revenge,” which launched the Roxanne battles and made the 14-year-old hip-hop’s first female celebrity. (Watch the video here: What’s amazing is how she’s simultaneously so cool and so awkward. And you must respect that sweater.)

Shanté left the business at 19 after two more albums, “disillusioned by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company,” according to a piece from yesterday’s New York Daily News. But then she remembered that her contract with Warner Music had a clause that promised the company would fund her education for life—and Shanté rode that clause all the way to a doctorate in psychology from Cornell.

Warner didn’t part with the money easily, though:

"They kept stumbling over their words, and they didn't have an exact reason why they were telling me no," Shante said.

She figured Warner considered the clause a throwaway, never believing a teen mom in public housing would attend college. The company declined to comment for this story.

Shanté now runs a therapy practice for urban African-Americans and funds college scholarships for female rappers.

Tags: roxanne shante, warner music

I can’t quite get my head around the piece about More magazine in today’s New York Times. Apparently the fact that a magazine aimed at women over 40 is pulling readers who are women over 40—and rich ones, at that—is off-putting to advertisers. Silly me, I thought all advertisers cared about was money! But even though “the average More reader makes about $93,000, around $30,000 more than the average for Vogue, Allure or Harper’s Bazaar, according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence,” the ads it runs are notably low end: “The July/August issue’s ads included Crystal Light, Pringles, Coffee-Mate, packaged meals from Oscar Mayer, Bertolli, Tyson and Marie Callender’s, and two liquor ads—for wines under $10. Oh, and Friskies.”

What am I missing here? Are women over 40 really so dreadfully uncool that it’s worthless—or worse—to have them buy your expensive wares? Or so close to death that their spending power is rendered moot? Other theories that my colleagues have offered, in response to my baffled query as to what these advertisers could possibly be thinking: that older women are less likely to switch to new brands; that women old enough to have kids and a mortgage aren’t going to want to spend frivolously. Really?

Granted, I’m being influenced by my atypical surroundings—Manhattan streets crawling with uber-chic white-haired ladies; a mother whose Casch by Gro Abrahamsson coat makes me drool—but I’ve often spotted and been inspired by well-dressed women of the More demographic; more inspired, actually than by similarly-stylish women my own age. With a fancy Gen Yer, I’ll assume she has some means (inherited wealth; an investment banking job; a sugar daddy) that I can’t hope to achieve. But a designer-clad Baby Boomer gives me something to look forward to: Maybe once I’ve squirreled away enough for a house and kids and my kids’ college education, I too can be indulgent and stylish.

Writing off older buyers as brand killers seems wrong to me, as does assuming that they wouldn’t spend on anything but lunch meat and diet drinks. After all, as seems to be typical of my generation, the only way I’d wind up with a Gucci bag or Tiffany necklace would be if a friend or relative 50 or older bought it for me. So why in the world would advertisers eschew the ones with the spending power in favor of someone like me? Are illogical discrimination and unfounded misconceptions to blame for advertisers steering clear of More? Or is there something ... more to it?

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Newsmakers/Getty Images.

Tags: advertising, media, more, new york times

Paging super-fan Lindsay Lohan: Marilyn Monroe acolytes have just under 30 minutes to bid on eBay for the crypt above hers, according to the L.A. Times' local blog. The current occupant has been R.I.P.-ing there for 23 years; his widow now needs the money to pay off her mortgage.

The listing reads: "The lucky bidder will be deeded a piece of real estate that he or she will make their last address. And below you will be Marilyn Monroe. In fact the person occupying the address right now is looking face down on her."

The lucky winner's other eternal neighbor will be "Hugh Heffner," according to the listing.

Image is a screenshot.

Tags: crypt, Los Angeles, marilyn monroe

The Times ombudsmen scolds Cintra Wilson for a column she wrote recently about J.C. Penney coming to midtown Manhattan, or rather, waddling into Manhattan in its “big ole shorts and flip-flops.” “A virtual sneer seeming to drip from her keyboard,” the ombudsman complains. I love it when the Times pretends to be populist. Yes, a paper that regularly wallows in inside-Hamptons gossip is very pro- JC Penney’s. Gawker fingers Wilson’s real sin: Times editor Bill Keller’s mom apparently shopped there, too.

Photograph of a department store by Getty Images.

Tags: j.c. penney, media, new york times, shopping

There’s a moment in Which Way Home, a documentary airing tonight on HBO, in which someone tells a group of Central American men that 20 percent of them will die on their way into Arizona. “Who wants to go to the United States?” he shouts after imparting this factoid. Every man cheers. It seems that no traveler considers himself part of that unlucky minority.

Which Way Home is about the children who start this journey alone, atop freight trains, prey to rapists, robbers, and gruesome accidents involving tracks and limbs. There’s a 9-year-old girl named Olga who hopes to find her mother in Minnesota, and a 13-year old named Kevin who wants to earn some money so his mom can buy a house in Honduras. Olga wants to play in the snow; Kevin wants to see the big city. The filmmaker, Rebecca Cammisa, says she made the film to warn Central American parents of the dangers awaiting their kids on the way North. But horrific as the journey is, the film is perhaps less a work about the stupidity or negligence of Central American parents than about the risks people knowingly accept when the only alternative is hunger and boredom in the Guatemalan countryside. If we can’t imagine letting a 13-year-old risk death in the desert on the way to Laredo, maybe we just lack the imaginative capacity to conceive of raising kids in a country far less prosperous than Mexico.

When I give talks about immigration, I point out that Australia and Canada absorb more immigrants per capita than we do. One response I get is that those countries accept educated foreigners through a point system; immigrants to the United States, documented and undocumented, tend to be poorer and less credentialed. This is true. But you can’t watch this film and deny that some intensely brutal selection process is at work. Average people cannot survive 900 miles on top a speeding train, trek across a burning desert, and slink past half a dozen militarized immigration checkpoints.

Photograph of a young immigrant with a photograph of friends who are in the midst of a deportation hearing by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Tags: documentaries, HBO, immigration

The New York Times Magazine published a special issue yesterday devoted to women in developing countries. The entire issue is extremely well done, but I was particularly intrigued by an article about the "daughter deficit" in India. The gender imbalance in China and India—due to cultural preferences for sons that caused parents to abort daughters and even resort to infanticide—is something that's been written about for several years. But contrary to popular assumptions, the "daughter deficit" is more the fault of the rich than of the poor. What's more, when women are given more power, they sometimes use it to favor boys.

According to Times writer Tina Rosenberg:

What unites communities with historically high rates of discrimination against girls is a rigid patriarchal culture that makes having a son a financial and social necessity. When a daughter grows up and marries, she essentially becomes chattel in her husband’s parents’ home and has very limited contact with her natal family. Even if she earns a good living, it will be of no help to her own parents in their old age. So for parents, investing in a daughter is truly, in the Hindi expression, planting a seed in the neighbor’s garden. Sons, by contrast, provide a kind of social security. ... [W]ealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women—but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Technology that allows parents to know the gender of their fetuses before birth has enabled some Indian and Chinese parents to abort girls. Although this is technically illegal, the laws are loosely enforced. I appreciated that Rosenberg didn't offer up any facile solutions to this immense problem. She admits that, "In the short and medium terms, the resulting clashes between modern capabilities and old prejudices can make some aspects of life worse before they make them better."

Photograph of an Indian girl by Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: china, daughter deficit, india, new york times, tina rosenberg

Dana, I have an Inglorious Basterd’s question for you. I saw the movie over the weekend and I loved it—it’s not perfect, by any stretch, but, damn, it was fun—and, unlike you, it didn’t leave me feeling a bit queasy. In your review, your major critique of the film was that Quentin Tarantino, again and again, “unproblematically offers up sadistic voyeurism as a satisfying form of payback.” Certainly, there are many scenes where this is the case (and if I wasn’t quietly sickened by the Nazi getting beaten to death with a baseball bat, I absolutely hid my eyes), but I thought there was at least one scene in which Tarantino served up his violence very problematically.

I’m talking about the scene (slight spoiler alert!) that takes place towards the end of the movie when the German high command, including Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and 350 of their closest friends, are watching a propaganda film about a “heroic” German sharp shooter picking off Allied soldiers. The Nazi crowd is having a blast, hooting, hollering, clapping and laughing every time the shooter takes down another easy target. Hitler—sweaty, chubby, deranged—is having the most fun of all. They’re disgusting.

Tarantino then cuts to two of the Basterds, our heroes, out in the hall, disguising themselves as waiters and strapping guns to their hands. They leave the restroom, walk down the hall, pause outside Hitler’s balcony, and, suddenly, leap, while punching, onto the two Nazis guarding the door, killing them instantly. It’s hugely badass. The audience I was with went wild.

And then Tarantino cuts back to the theater, where all the Germans are still hooping and hollering at what, to them, is some totally badass cinematic violence. There are the Nazis, all worked up and digging gratuitous death—and here are we, doing the exact same thing. So, here’s my question(s): Is that a meaningless cut? Or, rather, a judgment-free one? Or is it possible that Tarantino, the long-uncritical lover of beautiful, kinetic bloodspatter, finally has some critiques?

Image is a screenshot from the Inglourious Basterds trailer, courtesy of Universal Pictues.

Tags: Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, violence