Women’s Magazines

by Bonnie Wiscarson

 BIO:  Bonnie Wiscarson, 23—perpetual student studying cultural anthropology and sociology.  Eventually will decide to graduate and head off to save the world.  Until then, settles for learning as much as possible about the forces that shape our sense of self in the hopes of being one of the 50% of Americans whose marriage actually lasts and providing the best upbringing possible for her son, Aidan.  Particularly enjoys dissecting movies for gender roles and expectations, then lecturing anyone who will listen about why women are the way we are! 

Introduction:  A Personal Reflection on the Topic at Hand

About every three months I insist on purchasing an overpriced magazine aimed at selling products, behaviors, and images to women.  Sometimes it’s Cosmopolitan, sometimes it’s Glamour, but it’s really all the same thing- a woman’s magazine.  What exactly is it?  Well, it’s a piece of material culture that has so many symbolic qualities its ridiculous.  It’s a flimsy, glossy, 100 pages of garbage that somehow has the power to tell us what the ideal woman is- how to walk, talk, behave, and look like her.  And by reading it, I consume all of these things.

What does this type of magazine mean to me?  I tell myself that I purchase it for relaxation time, to just “veg out” and think about meaningless things.  But as I read it, I am internalizing information, everything from clothing styles to sex tips.  I see how women pose, their facial expressions, and contemplate whether I could look like that, or if those clothes would make me look that way.  It follows the thoughts of Bourdieu regarding reaffirmation of place in society; by reading what is “in”, I somehow reaffirm that I fit in and am keeping up with the trends.  My consumption of this product is somehow reaffirming my place in the social hierarchy, and I am on the “cool” end of things. 

On a more subtle level, magazines have become more than their face value indicates, they are in fact advertisements peddling consumption.  I will reiterate that they sell ideas, images, and products.  I have already alluded to what it means for my feminine identity, but I think the producers of this text have much more in mind.  They create the magazines in such a way that it sells everything in it- there are always directions and information for how to purchase the products used, from clothing to makeup and hair products.  They even indicate the shades and brands of makeup used for almost every model.  If one examines the “articles”, you will find that they are often selling behaviors and products as well. 

I realize that the funding for these magazines comes from companies that want advertising medium for their products, but somehow the thought escapes me while I’m consuming it.  Talk about effective!  I know better, yet I still sometimes forget what I’m consuming.  I believe the item is produced to entice us to purchase items, and consume more behaviors, etc.  They market their information as “necessary” to the female existence, referring to themselves as “the female bible” and the like.  And I help their production by buying their product.  So I follow the typical mold of saying that I see through the advertising, but in fact, it is somewhat effective because I keep consuming the product.  

Siavanadan sums it up by explaining that consumption fools us into thinking we’re acting as individuals, while the magazines really hide social and power issues (cited in Jackson).  After all, what more is there to women but looking good and pleasing men sexually (as the magazines would have us believe)?

Section 1: Getting to the Heart of the Issue

These questions provided the impetus for developing this dissertation on women’s fashion magazines.  Thus began my quest for an educated, thorough, and broader scope of the role of women’s magazines as cultural texts.  Using a dual-systems feminist approach, I will analyze women’s magazines as cultural texts which both promote capitalist ideologies of consumption and define femininity.  By blending Marxist and radical feminist theories with an overview of current magazine content, I will strip away the layers of ink that paint us “woman”, revealing the underlying mechanics of the powerful system that we all must come to terms with existing in.

In order to understand women’s magazines as popular culture text, it is necessary to consider what defines them as such.  Storey provides several definitions of popular culture which can be applied to women’s magazines (5-13).  Magazines are well-liked by many people, a quantitative element of definition.  They are also mass-culture; that is commercialized and produced for mass consumption.  Arguably, magazines originate from the people; the population of consumers actually determines the content and focus of the text by shaping social trends that are simply reflected by the magazine editors.  The Gramscian element of popular culture explores the resistance and incorporation of material in terms of dominant and subordinate groups.  The way that magazine producers edit their content in order to please the requests of readers, all the while reinforcing the dominant ideologies of femininity and consumerism are examples of this.  Finally, a postmodernist illustration of women’s magazines as popular culture focuses on the lack of distinction between ‘high’ and popular culture, as elite material is superceded by commercial images.

There are three key elements of any popular culture text.  The first element is the text itself.  Texts are polysemous, subject to a variety of readings depending on your subject position.  There are any number of interpretations and meanings that individuals will derive from the content in popular magazines.  Secondly, consumption addresses the audience appropriation of texts for their own purposes; what consumers do with the information contained in the magazines.  Do they spend money on the products advertised or create their own versions at home (an illustration of recombination)?  Does the material absorbed actually shape the self-identities of the consumer, giving them the cultural capital to act out their role?  Finally, production covers intent of the producers, profit generated, and the raw materials that go into creating the text.  In the case of magazines, production would include questioning what the owners and editors intend to convey with their text, what they gain from it (i.e. the profits garnered through selling of advertising space), and consideration or the raw materials involved- where do beauty and sex tips come from?  Why are certain brands of product recommended for use?  Who is complicit in getting the texts out to the consumer? 

These questions of production lead us to a Marxist feminist view of women’s magazines, which purports that the system of capitalism acts as a source of oppression for women, trapping them into a vicious cycle of satisfaction via consumption (Storey 113).

Section 2:  Who needs equal rights when you can go shopping?

To a Marxist feminist, gender oppression is associated with class oppression.  Capitalism is the economic system which preserves the system of oppression via encouragement of consumption.  Producers gain at the expense of consumers, who are convinced via ingrained ideologies (and clever marketing) that they must purchase a product to satisfy some need.  However, it bears note that needs as well as products are often manufactured by the producers.  Ball sums it up nicely, “Ideas and ideals of mass culture producers are largely self-serving, and include capitalistic goals of expanding markets, maximizing profits, and reinforcing ideology” (qtd. in Bentz 78).  In this way, the economic system of capitalism works to perpetuate itself, to the benefit of the producers. 

With regard to the text we are examining, “a small number of transnational multimedia conglomerates now own most of the world’s magazine publishers” (Ball qtd. in Meehan 165).  Seymour Marketing points out that for women’s magazines, we have “the National Magazine Company, IPC, EMAP, and Conde Nast accounting for 97 per cent of all glossy magazine sales” (qtd. in Gough-Yates 133).  So four companies are largely responsible for determining what products and behaviors are recommended to our entire population.  Furthermore, according to Winship, the content presented in magazines serves the ultimate purpose of capitalism, “since no magazine can make a profit on its cover price alone it is ‘the wooing of advertisers which is… pivotal in the competitive search for revenue’” (qtd. in Gough-Yates 56). 

A magazine will only be successful in getting advertiser sponsors if they effectively market the products to readers.  Those corporations in charge of the majority market have done an excellent job of creating a lifestyle of consumption for readers.  By bombarding consumers with the idea that they need to purchase products in order to improve their lives (and themselves) to the point that it becomes an ingrained, unquestioned practice, women’s magazines have created needs for existing products.  Producers can sell their products to the market created by magazine publishers.  This method of selling a feeling of satisfaction via consumption is central to the capitalist structure.  Convincing the consumer that they need to purchase products in order to be happier and have better lives is done jointly by producers and magazine publishers, via advertising.

An Althusserian Marxist may view magazines as promoting dominant standards and providing instructions on how to become a participant in them, such as promoting behaviors (of consumption).  Advertising creates answers for questions that were never asked.  For example, the self-help and how-to sections that are scattered throughout magazines offer solutions, which cost time and/or money, to “problems” that many women might never consider had they not read that article.  Like when a woman writes in asking how to keep her mascara from running and the editors reply with an entire host of products to enhance her eyes and make them seem bigger, further apart, closer together, etc, whichever she “needs” for her face type.  Self-help articles, which often regard raising your self-esteem and relaxing or de-stressing, create a focus on stressors in life, which prompts women to seek actions to correct it.  If women read over and over again about how the workplace is stressful and requires relaxation to deal with, they might just start to believe it; or to think that their experience of having a pleasant workplace is not normal.  And because satisfaction via consumption is naturalized as a behavior, it is follows that reading these types of articles encourage consumptive habits in women.  They end up buying products to “feel” better.

Frankfurt schools focus more on the consumer being lulled into complacency, and discouraged from thinking beyond the present.  By creating a focus on immediate solutions via consumption and ideologies that we can take action to improve our lives, women’s magazines both trivialize the institutional problems of gender equality and distract women from pursuing other avenues of democracy.  Instead of pondering ways to break the glass ceilings in politics and other male-dominated work areas, for example, women are encouraged to take immediate action by purchasing products to appear younger, sexier, and more attractive to men.  Magazines are texts which sedate women in their roles by providing some satisfaction via consumption of the text, while ultimately limiting them by narrowly defining appropriate methods of behavior and appearance. 

Finally, a Gramscian would view magazines as a site of hegemonic struggle between producers and consumers.  The producers encode texts, which consumers then decode in individualized ways.  It is possible for consumers to have some power, as they can interpret texts in ways that benefit them.  It bears mention, however, that the power is not equal; producers provide the material which is to be considered, and do so in ways that reinforce limited options for decoding.  There are any number of ideas and products sold to consumers with effective advertising, all of which address a conveniently small and concentrate group of problems, namely superficial ones or those related to (hetero)sexual happiness.

Oates notes that, “the agenda of women’s weekly magazines … and the way they represent women, remain largely outside the realm of the reader, yet the illusion of readers being allowed to participate in and even write their own magazine is an image offered by editors” (qtd. in Gough-Yates 17).  This is evident in the way that magazines frequently address “reader” questions and comments, providing names or ages/ locations of women who write in to magazines.

When it comes to marketing, Riordan believes that women’s magazines can be viewed as promoting the consumption of “ideological images by groups of people who are in turn sold to advertisers as a niche market” (qtd. in Meehan 8).  Magazines use their readers as target audiences for advertising, sponsored by capitalist producers.  Some argue that magazines not only have advertisements, but are advertisements.  As I will illustrate, the articles as well sell products, ideas, and images.

Aside from the ubiquitous advertisements that clutter pages of magazines, other hidden plugs for products, behaviors, and ideas exist in the form of “advertorials”.  These advertorials are advertisements disguised as editorial pieces, in which what is being sold is meant to appear as being recommended personally or objectively.  Common advertorials include such things as celebrities hyping products, shows, and movies in their “interviews” and travel agencies paying magazines to do “reviews” of vacation sites.  Women’s fashion magazines include under models the makeup products used by brand and shade, as if you could look like they do if you should purchase that product.  Advertorials are meant to appear informative, when they are really attempting to sell something.

There are a number of specialists who do nothing but research and report on market trends, selling their data to media buyers who then determine what advertisements to print.  According to Gough-Yates, agencies such as the Audit Bureau of Circulations and the National Readership Survey work in conjunction with magazine publishers to produce market reports which analyze what consumers want to read and which types of products they choose to purchase (81).  Perhaps they report the truth objectively, or perhaps they report what will create the most profit for them.  It is further suggested that publishers use professional market research businesses (whom they pay, of course) to ensure that the data presented to clients who buy advertising space be considered as ‘objective’, when in fact it is sponsored by the publishers. 

It is no surprise that certain products are touted in certain magazines.  Market analysis provides producers knowledge about which products are likely to create “feelings of insecurity, joy, inferiority, and happiness in relation to purchasing a product” in their population of readers (Zuckerman 67).  It is this evoking of emotion, of desire to take action and purchase, which maintains the cycle of capitalism.

It is appropriate to question also the amount of freedom which readers have to choose how said action is pursued.  “Problems” identified in women’s magazines focus around a limited number of narrowly defined topics (i.e. beauty, sexuality, and happiness).  Often, “solutions” presented involve purchasing items from a limited number of corporations and their subsidiaries.  Both products and choices are thus limited.  However, “production cannot be considered in isolation, and is inextricably bound up with the meaning-making processes that exist” (Gough-Yates 156).   

Section 3:  What would you like to be when you grow up?  A sex goddess of some sort, I bet…

Simone de Beauvoir said that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (qtd. in Currie 3).  Radical feminists are concerned with how women’s status and roles are defined within society.  The underlying question: who defines femininity?  Radical feminism is based on the notion that we exist within a patriarchal society, in which men control the means of production.  Women’s magazines are an example of a cultural text which defines and reinforces women’s roles, status, and identities within the patriarchy.  By defining the “weaker” sex as they do, men stand to gain money as women consume the products which they have produced and marketed. Men also gain/maintain power as women focus on their assigned identities and acting out their roles rather than challenging men for an equal share of economic capital and power.

Women’s magazines construct gender by literally teaching us to walk, talk, dress, and act in prescribed ways.  Women are presented as sexual objects, consumed with catching the right man.  They are overwhelmingly young, sexy, sensual, flirty, mysterious, delicate, romantic, seductive, and possessing natural beauty, power, and grace which can be attained via consumption of advertised products and behaviors. 

An “ideal” woman is presented (every picture of a woman in most magazines) as being thin, young, alluring, and with attractive make-up.  People often argue that no one really expects us to fit the mold of the ideal woman as depicted, however studies show the opposite.  For example, Currie found that

“Even readers who criticized the beauty standard perpetuated by commercial representations of women provided an extensive inventory of physical characteristics that are a source of personal dissatisfaction… conflict often surrounded a conscious acknowledgement that, while cultural representations are a source of anxiety for many girls, readers themselves accept these images as valid messages about femininity.”  (277-78)

Another issue of perpetual contradiction proffered in this text is that of “natural” beauty.  Makeup products are marketed as enhancing your natural beauty, or even as making you appear to be more natural.  A popular slogan comes to mind… “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline”.  It is interesting that one requires artificial products to be more natural, to express who you really are inside.  Thus we are confused between culturally created and natural definitions of feminine beauty.

I have already mentioned that women’s magazines focus on a very narrow range of topics; primarily heterosexual romance, celebrities, fashion, and beauty/makeup.  Often considered also are achieving happiness, lowering stress, and workplace drama between (female) coworkers.  Occasionally, “real-life” sobering stories addressing violence against women are thrown in, and women are presented as vulnerable.  Magazines offer behavioral solutions requiring changes on the part of the woman, making it appear as a personal rather than larger social problem.  In fact, this has been so prevalent in historical times (i.e. Vogue in the 1970s) that Stewart and Bryant observed, “She could never feel safe, for being a woman and being safe were antithetical,” (qtd. in Bentz 33). 

Overriding themes depict women as sexy/sexual, independent, self-centered (except when it comes to pleasing men), fun, young, free and savvy shoppers.  Articles are oriented around illustrating that women are these things as well as providing them tips and tools for how to do them better.  Both articles and advertisements alike provide information about how to purchase products which reinforce these self-identities.

Because these themes shape the realities and self-images of readers, they have larger implications for women’s roles in society.  How women look and act has effects on their personal and professional relationships.  How women are viewed by others determines the avenues open to them for what is considered “appropriate behavior”.  Women and men alike internalize the messages in popular culture texts such as magazines, and hold others accountable for personifying them.  Women are expected to look and act the roles prescribed to them.

A look at the subconscious psychological effects of reading women’s magazines finds that typical readers “would be exposed to 65-70 advertisements” per day (Barthel qtd. in Currie 71).  According to Wiley, we are able to process images much more quickly than written text, and that processing is holistic in that a cursory scan results in the reader getting the “gist” of the image, thus resulting in a superficial reading of the text (qtd. in Hocks 202-03).  “Because ads are so pervasive and our reading of them so routine, we tend to take the social assumptions which make them possible for granted: we do not ordinarily recognize advertising as a sphere of ideology” (Goldman qtd. in Currie 74).  And that is the crux of the issue.  When we do not recognize where ideology is being perpetuated, we fail to realize that we exist in a system that benefits those who create and produce texts.

In Conclusion

Dual-systems feminist theory combines Marxist and liberal feminist theory to illustrate how capitalism functions to keep men, who make the money, in power by defining femininity in such a way that women do not seek to usurp their power and political economy for themselves.  Women’s magazines are but one vehicle by which they do so.  They have the power to shape future behavior patterns via proliferation of ideas, behaviors, and consumption of products.  Another example of how women’s magazines serve to maintain the male dominated power structure is that women spend their time seeking to embody a ‘beauty myth’ that is both never-ending and impossible to achieve.  As women focus on achieving this goal, they busy themselves with “preoccupations which deflect women from the political goal of women’s liberation,” (Currie 4).  Furthermore, the inequalities inherent in our society are masked again by the presentation of gender inequalities as personal problems, to be overcome by individual actions.  According to Winship, even while “appearing to engage with questions of political liberation, women’s magazines actually inhibited its realization by emphasizing a ‘post-feminist’ individual whose life could be ‘whatever you, the individual, make of it’,” (qtd. in Gough-Yates 10).

In closing, let’s consider our own lives.  Our very livelihood, and indeed our ability to consume those items that will make us happy and successful, depends on our income, which is directly related to our job sector.  Women tend to have lower-paying jobs than men.  Therefore we are at a disadvantage economically.  So why is it that womens' reading materials are preoccupied with sex, beauty, and men?  Worse, that they pit women against one another rather than encouraging them to be collaborative?  Perhaps it’s because they are constructed by men, who want to continue to benefit from our social system.  So when are we going to stand up and say “No!”?  No amount of makeup, clothing, or sex tips is going to pay the bills or improve our lot in life.  But a little education and critical thinking about popular culture texts might get us closer to equality.

Works Cited

Ball, Michael R. “Romantic Expectations:  a Critical Dramaturgy of Black and White Romance Magazines.” Bentz and Mayes 77-115.

Beer, Amy. “Periodical Pleasures: Magazines for U.S. Latinas.” Meehan and Riordan 164-180.

Bentz, Valerie M, and Philip Mayes, eds. Women’s Power and Roles as Portrayed in Visual Images of Women in the Arts and Mass Media. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1993.

Currie, Dawn. Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers. Toronto: Univ of

Gough-Yates, Anna. Understanding Women’s Magazines. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Hocks, Mary E, and Michelle Kendrick, eds. Eloquent Images. Cambridge: The MIT

Jackson, Peter. “Consumption and Identity:  The Cultural Politics of Shopping.”
European Planning Studies. 7(1999): 25-40.

Meehan, Eileen R, and Ellen Riordan, eds. Sex & Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media. MN: Univ of Minn. Press, 2002.

Riordan, Ellen. “Intersections and New Directions: On Feminism and Political
Economy.” Meehan and Riordan 3-15.

Stewart, Mary W, and Tamera Bryant. “A Visual Essay on Women in Vogue, 1940-1990.” Bentz and Mayes 19-38.

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Great Britain: Prentice Hall, 2001.

Wiley, Jennifer. “Cognitive and Educational Implications of Visually Rich Media: Images and Imagination.” Hocks and Kendrick 201-218.

Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States,1792-1995. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.