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With the growth of magazine popularity, both online and in print, youth around the world are exposed to the ideas of gender expression, identities, and roles. However, with society’s influence, the spread of heteronormative, cisgender, and white ideals have been placed as top priority. After examining men’s fashion magazine, Gentlemen Quarterly, I discovered that much of their magazine revolved around the typical wealthy, white, straight, and able-bodied male. Despite their attempts to branch out to other minority groups, they are unsuccessful in breaking out of their classic audience. GQ’s website is built to automatically draw their viewers into articles, flashing large pictures and headlines immediately into their audience’s face. Most photos Pairing these particular items together creates an atmosphere which enforces male expectations and norms to their audience. GQ, while appearing as a harmless fashion magazine, sends out a number of subconscious messages to their viewers of what it means to be a well-respected, successful male in today’s world. Gentlemen Quarterly, like many other magazines, implements the gender binary onto its readers through its advertisements and articles. They market solely toward male and female people, dividing into “...suits and dresses” and “action movies and chick flicks” (Wade, p. 5) and dictating specifically what is feminine and what is masculine. Men’s fashion trends are centralized on suits and hair grooming, all of which fall under the masculine category. On the other hand, the female section doesn’t seem to dictate fashion but rather advice and celebrity news, which contrasts it’s sole purpose as a clothing magazine. In this sense, GQ obeys the “gender rules” of what it means to “appear and behave as a man or a woman” (Wade, p. 61) but there are few Well, they do fail, but in a different way. In all the articles I encountered under the broadly titled ‘Women’ section, they featured a scantily clad woman and tended to give advice toward men. The photos featured in the women’s section had an emphasis on both the breasts and butt, further simplifying women down to just their body. Most headlines contained the word ‘sexy’ and referred to women as ‘babe’ or ‘our girl’, not only dehumanizing them but also pushing a sense of ownership. One particular article, written by a fellow woman, had the title Victoria’s Secret Model Throws First Pitch Like a Really Hot Girl which enforces everything that a feminist would despise. Clearly Corsillo, the article’s author, wrote the article with the intent for a male audience, even if she herself does not feel the same way. The few women that were actually interviewed included two WWE female twins who happen to be in relationships with famous wrestlers. Instead of interviewing them about their life stories, their questions centered on “tips on picking up women at the gym” or “what [their] stance [is] on working out with a significant other” (Rouse). Partnered with this article is a picture of the twins gazing at a male’s butt as he works out, enhancing heteronormativity but with a new twist. One article even goes so far as to dumb down the idea of consent for the male readers, promising that they won’t
Jimmy Draper’s (2010) article “Gay or not?!”: Gay men, straight masculinities, and the construction of the Details audience” analyzes the representation of gayness in the magazine industry. This article specifically targeted and analyzed the relationship how gayness was used to help construct straight masculinity in the men’s lifestyle magazine known as Details.
John’s “Metrosexuals Come Out”, referring to the commercialism that has reached the idea of being metrosexual and entirely redefining it. Metrosexuals were once deemed embarrassing or strange, but when the fashion industry began to embrace it, a large number of men did as well. The idea of sensitivity or even femininity in regards to a man was seen as strange, until metrosexuals began to be more desirable, thanks to the fashion industry, who used the angle of these stylish men to make more sales and even go so far as to change the idea that men cannot and should not be feminine. The movement to accept metrosexuals went so far that “[w]ithin a few years, the term was picked up by British advertisers and newspapers”. (175) Art and advertisement changed in this way, allowing for men and marketing to enjoy something
I was flipping through some channels on the television set one day and came across a woman's talk show, "The View." It caught my attention when one of the hostesses asked the audience of mostly women to raise their hand if they thought they were truly beautiful. Much to my surprise the audience did not respond with very many show of hands. The hostess then introduced a study done by Dove, the makers of the body soap. Dove polled over 6,000 women from all over the country and only two percent of the women polled said they feel beautiful. Women are surrounded by images screaming physical beauty is more important than their talents and accomplishments. Women are deriving their self worth from an ideal of how they think they should look and how they think everyone else wants them to look instead of focusing on their sense of who they are, what they know, and where they are going in life. In "Help or Hindrance?: Women's Magazines Offer Readers Little But Fear, Failure," Mary Kay Blakely states, "Instead of encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women's magazines have readers running in place, exhausted." She goes on to say, "This is a world we have 'made up' for women, and it is a perilous place to exist." One of the biggest culprits feeding women's insecurities are the popular women's magazine that line the book shelves of grocery stores, gas stations, and waiting rooms. They supply readers and the occasional innocent passerby with unrealistic images of what women should be instead of showing diverse age groups and women with natural beauty. Reading through a couple of magazines, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Shape, I found nothing but hidden agendas and...
In this study I will do a content analysis of the portrayal of men in 20 magazine advertisements. 5 ads were taken from "Maxim," a men's magazine targeted at 20 to 30 something males. 4 were taken from "Men's Journal, a men's magazine targeted at men from 30 to retirement age. 5 were looked at from Harper's "Bazaar," a women's magazine targeted at adult women. 4 were taken from "Allure," a women's magazine targeted at women in their 20's and 30's, and two were taken from "Entertainment Weekly," an entertainme...
The British edition of Vogue is a fashion magazine that has been published since the autumn of 1916. The magazine's current editor stated that, “Vogue’s power is universally acknowledged. It’s the place everybody wants to be if they want to be in the world of fashion" and 85% of the magazine’s readers agree that “Vogue is the Fashion Bible”.[4] The magazine is considered to be one that links fashion to high society and class, teaching its readers how to ‘assume a distinctively chic and modern appearance’.[5] As a branch-off of American Vogue, British Vogue is a magazine whose success is based upon its advertising rather than its sales revenue. In 2007, it ran 2,020 pages of advertising at an average of £16,000 a page. It is deemed to be more
I have to admit I am an avid reader of magazines. I read everything from the the stupid celebrity gossip magazines to Time magazine and National Geographic. Since our brief overview of magazine advertisements in class, I decided to look into how magazines make us think and more specifically I wanted to see how the magazine advertisements portray women, since that has been a hot topic for a while now. I like analyzing advertisements and looking at how viewers react to specific advertisements that may or may not be targeted toward them. The question I wanted to research was “How are different genders and sexualities represented in magazine advertisements?”, but I figured it was too broad for this assignment so I narrowed it down to: “How are women represented in magazines and magazine advertisements, and how is beauty portrayed?” I also wanted to touch on how gay women are represented, and I will towards the end of this paper.
Associated Press. 2005. “Boi or grrl? Pop culture redefining gender.” MSNBC, October 1. Retrieved October 13, 2007 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9556134/).
Have you ever looked through a magazine and found it to be really interesting? That is because you are part of its target audience. You are part of a group of people that the magazine is trying to appeal to. There is a reason Sports Illustrated is more of a man’s magazine and Family Circle is more of a woman’s magazine. The people that run that magazine put certain things in those magazines to attract their audience. More commonly, men are interested in sports and anything to do with sports. In Sports Illustrated, the reader would find sports, and that is it. The reader would not find an article titled “How working women balance their careers and home lives.” An article such as that would be found in a magazine like Family Circle, as it is targeted more towards women who have a family. For the purpose of this audience visual analysis, I will be discussing the October 8th, 2012 issue of People magazine. Looking at this issue and reading through the magazine, it is evident that the publishers do have a target audience in mind. This visual analysis will discuss who its target audience is and how the reader can tell. Also, the essay will discuss how the magazine makes the advertisements relevant to its audience.
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
The society and I know that Cosmopolitan is a magazine that is aimed at women and has been a women’s magazine since the 1960’s. My main message, as me being a constant reader of the Cosmopolitan magazine, that I am trying to get across to you is the certain advertisements Cosmopolitan decides to include in their issues every year. These advertisements create a controversy within the media and I am inspired to make a change to this. I am not only speaking from one woman’s point of view but in fact several of my friends, who are also readers of the magazine, have mentioned similar things to me and the negativity they are concerned it may create towards the women
On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.
Men of the millennial age are trying to change the stereotype of men, and what better way of spreading the change then through the internet. Some popular posts on the internet regarding men are pictures of them wearing flower crowns, dressed in floral/pastel clothes or writing about their favorite Lush Bath bomb. These men are trying to change the way we associate hyper masculinity with being a real man, they’re letting other males know it’s okay to embrace their femininity. Although with all the articles and facts out there it still won’t change the minds of what a man is to most people. Keohane says, “Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds…In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs” (1). The facts are the...
Gender stereotypes and biasses exist in media. In most situations, women are associated with more negative stereotypes and their portrayals can “undermine their presence by being “hyper-attractive” or “hyper-sexual” and/or passive” (Smith, 2008). In The Wolf of Wall Street women are objectified. They are treated
A number of journalist and scholars brought this to the attention of many because sexual objectification is being seen as a part of Western culture and how things have become more “sexualized” or “pornified”. This study targets a well-known magazine called the “Rolling Stone”. The magazine has been around for more than four decades, with this being said, the image of men and women have changed. The sexual objectification of both men and women has increased, but women continue to be more frequently sexualized than men on the magazine cover. Women are increasingly likely to be “hyper sexualized” while men are not. Hyper sexualization is the combination of body position, nudity, and textual cues and more. Erving Goffman failed to examine the sexualization of women in his research because he was missing the whole point of the issue of sexual objectification towards women. Another researcher named Kang studied advertisements of women like Goffman but added more to it. Kang found that in the ads of women, the gender stereotyping of men and women disappeared but body displays of women had not. The sexualized image of women may legitimize violence, sexual harassment, and anti-women attitudes amongst men. This issue has also become a political debate and caused an uproar in the feminist
It is no secret that in the world we live in today we are reliant on the media as a source of information for what is acceptable in society and what is not. Due to the fact that technology has become widespread all over the globe and that we rely so heavily on it, makes it the best way to influence the masses on culture, social norms, and gender roles. How one is expected to look, dress, and act twenty four seven appears across screens of any kind. This form of socialization then divides us into groups of males and females forcing us to conform to the mold in which mass media portrays us to be. Media in today’s world takes many different forms; from movies, to advertisements, television shows, and comic books. The way each gender is expected