Page 581 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Women’s Magaz nes

Men’s Magazines
Do men’s magazines construct their readers as helpless consumers of products that express
their identity? Initially, all magazines were men’s magazines; they presumed a male reader.
Differentiation was by class, not gender, and the “gentleman’s magazine” denoted a more
sophisticated and cultured audience. The rise of mass-market, advertising-based magazines
problematized the upper-class gentlemen. Suddenly, he seemed a fop, a dandy, and as con-
sumerism was coded as feminine, men’s magazines began to emerge as a distinct genre. In
the twentieth century, anticonsumerist, working-class masculinity found outlets in hypermas-
culine titles like True or Argosy, while publishers rescued the gentleman’s magazine by mas-
culinizing consumption. “Girly” magazines like Playboy or Penthouse used buxom women’s
bodies to naturalize male consumption and avoid the taint of homosexuality. Recent men’s
magazines, including Maxim, Details, FHM, and Stuff attempt to fuse these class-based
strategies, with depictions of rough-hewn athletic manhood next to scantily clad women
and high-end consumer goods. And while some scholars suggest engaging men as self-
objectified consumers reinforces traditional gender inequalities, others observe a liberatory
expression of a more refined masculine sensibility.

academic disciplines, and are also articulated, in updated form, in the contem-
porary media itself. Naomi Wolf’s best-seller, The Beauty Myth, for example, ar-
gues that the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife heroine as
the new arbiter of successful womanhood, taking over the work of social coer-
cion in an effort to undo the progress feminism had accomplished.
At the same time, other critics have seen women’s magazines as excessively
progressive. A study by the conservative Media Research Center in the mid-
1990s concluded that women’s magazines are left-wing playbooks for liberal ac-
tivism. Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in the Washington Post, accused top
titles including Redbook, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, and Parenting of
advancing feminist “Ms.-information.” Soon Danielle Crittenden’s What Our
Mothers Didn’t Tell Us and Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty explicitly allied
women’s magazines with the feminist movement, and blamed magazines for
leading women away from their true pursuit of happiness—domesticity.
A third group of critics assumes both these lines of argument are accurate,
and that is the problem. They complain that women’s magazines argue both
for and against sexual freedom, careerism, financial independence, couplehood,
and the thinness ideal. With so many competing ideas all under the same roof,
how is a reader to avoid a sense of frantic confusion and anxiety about how to
add it all up right?

“PoLyvoCaLiTy”: PsyChiC TraP or LiBEraTing ChoiCE?

Women’s magazines exhibit what media theorists call “polyvocality”—a mes-
sage that contains many voices. In fact, multiple messaging is a structural hall-
mark of the American magazine from its rise in the early republic.