Page 585 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Women’s Magaz nes

serious attention to both. Editorial content and especially advertising often in-
corporated political language and longings beginning in this era. Ad and feature
copy linked consumption to greater political freedom, self-representation, “lib-
eration” from household responsibilities, and more. These moves are seen by
some as legitimating politics in women’s identity, self-definition, and social role.
As a result, merging of politics and product consumption may have increased
women’s interests in real rather than consumer politics.
Today, the appropriation of political messages by consumer culture has be-
come a widespread phenomenon across the media. But it remains a matter of
debate whether or not those maneuvers replace political actions with consumer
purchases. Does the pervasive use of political ideals to promote products ex-
tinguish the political content, or raise it for audiences, repeatedly, nearly every-
where they turn in our media-saturated culture?

womEn’s magazinE auDiEnCEs
Arguments and answers both depend greatly on audiences. Every camp of the
women’s magazine controversy relies on certain assumptions about how women
readers read. Whether you argue that women’s magazines disempower readers
by telling them that their greatest satisfaction lies in fulfilling their femininity;
steer women 180 degrees wrong by telling them their greatest satisfaction lies
in independence and careerism; or cynically trap them in schizophrenic self-
doubt—any of these positions envisions a reader unable to navigate magazine
form and content to satisfy her own interests and pleasures.
The issue of audience agency and creativity is itself much debated in media
studies. And women, particularly audiences of so-called women’s genres like soap
operas, romance novels, and women’s magazines, have been a special focus of
concern. Unlike elite and highly educated readers, popular audiences of women
are often seen as passive, suggestible dupes, unable to make what they will of a
media text, to master it in their own terms.
Yet media research on audience reception repeatedly finds that all kinds of
audiences actively interpret what they read, see, and hear, without any special
academic or analytic training to do so. Audiences are not free agents with an un-
limited range of options, of course: content sets some limits to coherent readings,
and it takes intellectual and social resources to decode creatively—particularly
to resist or oppose dominant or “preferred” meanings. However, audiences of all
sorts have proved capable of creative and self-serving interpretation, and women
have repeatedly shown themselves to be as adept as anyone at constructing their
own meanings from media texts.
The elitism that underlies a good deal of scholarly commentary about wom-
en’s magazine readers is somewhat ironic since women’s magazines are simul-
taneously accused of an elite bias: they are about hegemonic straight, white,
middle-class women, and exclude or marginalize racial, ethnic, sexual, and socio-
economic differences. These demographic biases have always been present in
women’s magazines. The earliest versions appeared when only the upper crust of
American women—white and bourgeois—could afford subscriptions that cost