Final Essay

Magazines have been around for great long time, and is a productive way of contributing information to the public. The format of magazines is a diverse one, there are countless formats, contents and markets to distribute to. It is a massive industry entailing a whole lot of money. The business was heavily led by men from the early stages, “magazines quickly established themselves as a forum for gentlemen editor and writers to espouse their opinions on a whole range of subjects” (Whittaker, 2008, p.3). Consequently, over time there have been a large number of magazines, made for women by men, but mostly made for men by other men. According to Whitehorne, out of the 2500 magazines published, only 130 are ‘women’s magazines’ (2010, p.16). When

They found a space to have fun and break away from the ‘old’ figure of themselves, albeit at the cost of heavily sexualized and objectifying depictions of women (Gill, 2015, p.206). Playboy contributed to the belief that a higher frequency of sexual intercourse, sex without love and having sex for favours were more common than they actually were (Taylor, 2005, p.155). These beliefs were in on creating an unrealistic view of the world to their audience, making the attitudes the audiences created work against a healthy view of relationships and women. Whitehorne stated the model on the cover is chosen to represent and portray the mood of the magazine, and to stand out amongst the other magazines on the racks (2010, p.41). When drawing on what Gill said about women being portrayed as sex objects and how they need to be ‘managed’ for men’s interest earlier in this paper, it raises a question about what the aim for these magazines were. If the mood and the aim for these magazines were to show the audience that the females depicted needed to be managed to serve you, it makes a twisted representation and considerably heightens the portrayal of women as the weaker

Influencing them to being the way a woman should (Braithwaite and Barrell, 1979, p.21). Housewife magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, became some sort of ‘bible’ for the housewives, “pressuring women to expect fulfilment in the role of the homemaker and establishing impossible ideas for their performance of the role” ((ed.) Davis, 1998, p. 228). Collectively, Women’s Magazines share similar features such as addressing their readers as equals and friends, they are all organized around women’s shared joy in femininity and the labour of being a housewife; they are organized around the opposition of masculinity and more on what women share with each other because of their sex (Gill, 2015, p.183). All this pressure on being a good housewife and mother by the magazines could have been an interference within employment of women, because the prospect of having an actual job seemed so far-fetched (Tuckman, Daniels and Benét, 1978, p.