thelounge

women be shopping

originally posted: 2023

Hey ladies of Australia! Did you know that all a woman like you needs is right there in your function keys? You know, the ones on your keyboard, the ones that are labeled to learn, to indulge, to smile, to relax, and to shop! What do your mean, your keyboard doesn't look like that? It should look like this:

This is, as you can see, another advertising postcard, for the early-2000s Australian women's e-commerce website theLounge.com.au. (A lot of these will be advertising postcards, often from the kind of sponsored postcard racks that various bars and the like would have out; advertising is kind of one of the major postcard use cases.) According to The Sunday Age, founder Julie Tylman envisioned "a site aimed at women who wanted to read snappy copy, be informed and, more particularly, buy product in a comfortable, informal and particularly Australian kind of way." The "more particularly," clearly, is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I love to informally buy product as I read snappy copy!

There is some sparse coverage of this site findable through ProQuest; the URL is now a dead link, though, and even its public-facing news footprint has mostly been sloughed off the net. Thankfully, there is the Wayback Machine to preserve scattered bits of the public-facing site. As one might guess, the offerings were more Cosmo than xoJane: broad and bland. There were the verticals you'd expect: relationships, entertainment, home, parenting, etc. (Personally I'd have preferred Learn, Indulge, Smile, Relax, and Shop, but I suppose clarity is important.)

Despite being an online publication with no print space to fill, there's lots of the kind of filler editorial that's been supplanted by ChatGPT ("Let's get one thing straight: not all house-warming gifts/ anniversary presents/ birthday offerings are equal. There's a method of gift-giving that works - and one that doesn't"; "With more women staying single longer, and abstinence becoming a passing `girl power’ phase, the one-night stand is never truly out of favour.") There was Sex and the City voiciness:

"“Describe your ideal man,” a girlfriend asked. I thought about it and came up with this: Tall, broad-shouldered, coolly dark, a voice dripping velvet, honeyed seduction and....oh my god, I’m describing Dean Martin. Now, there was a real man, one of the old-school dinosaurs who, when through carousing with his buddies, would select a broad from the nightly smorgasbord and disappear into the dusky pink of a Vegas sunrise. “You wanna talk? Go see a priest”, he would advise these star-struck dames. More and more, my contemporaries are throwing over the whole SNAG ideal for the old world He-Man..."

TheLounge's rise and fall -- as well as that of similarly Cosmoesque iVillage and SheSaid -- mirrors that of the 2010s spate of women's sites; not much has changed. Its staff included Who Weekly (not the podcast) as well as finance and Silicon Valley types; Tylman came from Merrill Lynch. The site had raised $2 million in venture capital funding by 2000 and was purchased by e-retailer Wishlist later that year:

"'In the United States there are more women Internet users than men now, so we feel that it's a great market to get into,' [wishlist's executive director Jardin] Truong says. 'And theLounge does a good job in attracting the female community. It also has very loyal users who had been requesting shopping, so in the short term we want to convert the membership into customers, if you will. It's our first step in testing contextual shopping.'" - Dan Kaufman, Sydney Morning Herald, November 14, 2000

Here, as many places before, you see the throughline of the modern Internet, the final stretch of a perpetual cycle: stop talking to each other and start buying things. There is a line between this sort of thing and selling used pencils on TikTok. (There's no postcard for that; I imagine it would be pretty wild.) What I find most interesting, though, are the contemporaneous quotes. From The Age again:

"The Internet business is fast-becoming a blokey world where the risk-takers, key players and winners are men. And while there is an annual increase in the number of women who use the Net (in the US, studies say women will comprise 48 per cent of all online users by 2000), men still rule the cyber market."

("Fast becoming!")

And from The Sunday Age:

(Online magazines) have been a spectacular failure," (*Cosmopolitan* editor Mia Freedman) says. "Reading a magazine is a very intimate thing. You take it to bed, you take it to the beach, you take it to the bath, and you can't do that with a computer. It's certainly not a threat. We have to give women a multi-media experience — you have to be represented online but that's just part of marketing these days."

I have taken a computer to all of these places. Isn't the multimedia experience just great?