"Tease and Please Him!" "Fab Abs in 21 Days." "The Cosmo Way to Make a Man Commit." The headlines reach out and grab readers standing in supermarket lines, making them wonder if their boyfriend is satisfied with their "performance" and if they should ditch the Ben and Jerry's for some carrot sticks.
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Jane, Self. When it comes to magazines, women have no lack of options. That is, if they want hundreds of pages of glossy advertisements for make-up, advice on how to get a beach-worthy body, and tips on how to catch the man of their dreams. In a society that boasts equality of the sexes, why are so many women reading about how to please the men in their lives and reduce their waistlines?
Freshmen Lananh Nguyen, Sheena Chapman, and Sarah Smith all enjoy reading magazines like Cosmo, Glamour, and Vogue, and have been since they were young adolescents. According to the trio, "no one takes [the magazines] seriously", and thus are basically harmless in the message they deliver.
Sophomore Maria Heifetz disagrees. "Things like Cosmo definitely give a bad message to women," she said. "They make you feel like your ultimate goal in life is to look pretty and make your man stay - ultimately, you're going to wear pink and shave your legs."
Nguyen acknowledged the difference between magazines geared towards women and those created for the male mind, but didn't consider it a matter of sexism - just one of simple gender-based interest.
"I think that women's magazines are more focused on women's issues and themselves and men's [magazines] are more into entertaining men with pictures of beautiful women. They're not so much into the self-improvement," Nguyen said.
Sophomore Judith Soule doesn't want anything to do with so-called women's magazines. "They're boring," she said. "There's nothing of interest." Soule instead prefers magazines more geared toward her interest - namely, music.
Soule goes so far as to say that the magazines don't know what they're talking about in their articles. "I think they make stuff up. How do they know how to get a man in bed?" she said.
Sophomore Tamilla Azi shares in Soule's disinterest. "[Women's magazines] are too involved in girly stuff and looking perfect," she said. "I just don't like them - they're too self-involved."
Not to mention the fact that women's magazines feature just as many - if not more - scantily dressed women as men's magazines. While popular men's magazines such as Maxim hook readers with page after page of alluring women, magazines like Cosmo and Glamour also almost exclusively feature women on their pages.
"I think for guys, it's more fantasy-based advertising; what they want but don't have," Nguyen said. "For women, it's more about what they want to be themselves."
"It's also still not as acceptable to make men into objects to lust after," Chapman added.
"Besides," Smith said, "most of the advertisements in the women's magazines are for products for women."
Soule offered a different theory on why magazines geared toward either sex feature pictures of women. "Women are much prettier than men," she explained.
Heifetz agreed with Soule. "First of all, men are not really fun to look at - men are more appealing in person. Their presence is sexy. Women are beautiful to look at," Heifetz said. She added that the advertisements in women's magazines aim to make women want to look like the models and "be happy." "They all look so happy and radiant and beautiful," she said.
Four pages of the April edition of Glamour insist that "your curves" are in; "spaghetti-thin" is out. The pictures that accompany the article showcase beautiful, famous women who succeeded despite their curvy figures. Looking at the pictures, you might wonder who would ever consider these women anything but skinny. Yet, in the fashion world, they are considered, at least by today's standards, big.
So for four pages, Glamour insists that its readers shouldn't worry about being stick-thin. Yet the article is sandwiched between pages filled with models posing for what could be advertisements for eating disorders. Some students believe that, if Glamour was trying to convince its readers that more realistic models were the wave of the future, perhaps it should have featured one less picture of Kate Moss or Calista Flockhart. Or maybe stayed away from printing so many promises to "banish your bulge in six weeks."
"If you had really low self-esteem, [women's magazines] would be horrible," Chapman said. "You'd actually think to yourself, 'Oh my God, I actually have to do these ridiculous stomach crunches.'"
"They don't find beauty in things that aren't the normal standard of beauty," Heifetz said - for example, "normal" sized women as opposed to the traditional stick-thin models.
Add Cosmo's latest project, Cosmo Girl, into the equation, and you've got all the bases covered. Now middle-school-aged girls have a precursor to Cosmo, and 12-year-olds can finally learn all about "getting him, dumping him, and all the stuff in between." The next generation of Cosmo fans is learning early.
"I think that the content between Cosmo and Cosmo Girl is very different," Nguyen said. "Cosmo is very geared towards keeping a man - Cosmo Girl is more about entertainment and advice on friendships and stuff."
Not that Cosmo Girl is the lone magazine geared toward young girls. For years, the likes of Sassy, YM, and Seventeen have been stashed in the lockers of adolescent girls. Although the younger magazines stay away from in-your-face sex articles, they concentrate pretty heavily on "boy" issues (Oh no! A cute boy saw me totally pigging out! I could have died of embarrassment!).
"Cosmo Girl is a lot classier than Seventeen - Seventeen dumbs everything down," Chapman said.
Heifetz has been reading magazines geared toward women or girls since middle school, starting with the classics - Sassy, Seventeen, and YM. "I didn't start reading Cosmo until I was older," she said.
Then there's the issue of playing into the whole stereotypical heterosexual community. Some believe that gender-specific magazines work only to hook readers with pictures of, and advice on, the opposite sex.
"Magazines are so specific now anyway," Nguyen said, citing home-and-gardening type magazines as an example. "These are just 'heterosexual how-to-get-a-man' magazines."
"I think that is it's their magazine, it's not a big deal for them to gear the magazine toward heterosexuality, if that's what they choose," Nguyen added.
Chapman said that the editors of such magazines are probably just sticking to the norm, thereby reaching the greatest audience.
"If they tried to be too 'PC' and have everything be equal, it'd be too difficult," Smith said.
Maybe it's a matter of tradition, maybe it's a matter of maintaining popularity, or maybe it's a matter of discrimination. "For the most part, those magazines are really mainstream. They doesn't deviate from really standard norms," Heifetz said. "That's why they don't feature homosexuality or women of different shapes."
"I don't think it occurs to people to change it," she added.
