When I read the news that the New York Times would be introducing a “Men’s Style” section, I checked the date (April 1) and wondered if Kristin Tice Studeman’s report might be a parody:

Inside this month’s debut copy, you’ll find a mix of sartorial musings (like the cover story on spring suiting), as well as travel (hang-over-free bachelor-party ideas), tech (to emoji or not to emoji?), and grooming features (men’s beauty is also fairly uncharted territory for NYT, according to [advertising executive Brendan] Monaghan).

This was no joke. The section has arrived, and it feels a bit like old news. An article about men who embrace uniform-dressing, “The Men Powerful Enough to Wear the Same Thing Every Day,” comes several months late to the conversation about Mark Zuckerberg wearing gray T-shirts. Content runs the gamut, targeting men who may not be at fashion's cutting edge (like a piece on non-iron shirts, a perennial style story) as well as those on the other end of the fashion-victimhood spectrum (why not a nearly $2,000 Lanvin backpack?). There's some Michael Musto nightlife coverage, but otherwise the masculinity theme seems a bit forced (ahem, the emoji article).

It’s easy to look at this section, which the paper itself admits is ad-driven, as a loss for journalism. It’s bad enough that women are shepherded towards articles about strife at upscale health clubs. Must men be dragged down with them? Won’t this just increase the number of “this isn't news” complaints?

What the “Men’s Style” section is, though—however inadvertently and surreptitiously—is a win for women in journalism.

The counterpart to a women’s magazine is a men’s magazine. But until now, the counterpart to the fashion pages of the Times was… the rest of the newspaper. And the more stereotypically male soft-news sections have had a way of getting the benefit of the seriousness doubt. The “Sections” sidebar on the top left corner of the website includes “Sports” among the hard-news categories rather than down below, with the likes of “Arts,” “Food,” and “Fashion & Style.” A subsection called “Personal Tech” (sample headline, and candidate for best headline ever: “Analyzing Your Twitter Life”) falls under “Technology,” well above the faint gray horizontal line dividing the serious from the frivolous. It doesn’t take a degree in Gender Studies to arrive at a hypothesis about why a gadget-themed story would be treated as more serious than a fashion-themed one.