Gender In Cosmopolitan Magazines

Cosmopolitan is the queen of women’s magazines. Her royal court also consists of Glamour, Red Book, Vogue, and other smaller magazines. These magazines demonstrate these beauty standards. Naomi Wolf researched on body image and found a

The mass media has become a big part of our society and its counterparts. In a time span of 50 years this medium has influenced society to an extent where it has created wonders. This immaculate tool can control almost every action we perform, from speaking to the actions that every human being performs in society. The mass media has brought upon a new era of idea's and changes in the world we live in. As we analysis media in depth we will find many aspects of media which overlap and some of the smallest factors and aspects of media, which create the biggest impact on society.

Cosmopolitan is a women’s magazine for fashion, sex advice, dating tips and celebrity news. This magazine has been around since 1886, but it had a totally different concept, until 1965. When it was first launched in 1886 by Paul Schlicht, it was considered a family magazine. It wasn’t until 1965 when a woman by the name of Helen Brown took over the magazine in seeking somewhere women could go to get advice on various topics. Now the magazine is being run by Kate White, Editor in Chief. Because Cosmo contains explicit information that is not advised to people under eighteen, its demographic is women who are at the ages of eighteen and older, Some grocery stores have to cover it up because of the complaints of its sexually explicit

Cosmopolitan magazine, as it is today, is an international woman’s magazine involving topics on sex, relationships, beauty, fashion and health. The variation of Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) we have in today’s society is rather sexually explicit in many of its articles and covers. This was not always the case. Cosmopolitan was founded by Schlicht & Field in 1886. The magazine was originally created to be a “family magazine” . Cosmopolitan introduced articles on family and home life. In 1888, Cosmo gained a new editor in E. D. Walker. He would add new elements to the magazine. These included serial fiction, book reviews and color illustrations.

Mass media is communication that reaches a large audience. This includes television, advertisement, the Internet, newspapers, and so on. Mass media is a significant effect in modern culture in America. It creates ideas and sustained within society not only send ideological messages out to the public but to advertise this ideas which are tend to manipulate our mantalities.

Question: Explain how media producers communicate a preferred reading to the audience and why alternative readings might be made.

Are the "Codes of Gender" suggested by Goffman apparent in advertising today, and are they a reflection of us as men and women in today's society?

Gender Matters is a collection of various essays on feminist linguistic texts analysis, by Sara Mills. Mills develops methods of analyzing literary and non-literary texts, in addition to conversational analysis based on a feminist approach. The author draws on data from her collection of essays gathered over the last two decades on feminism during the 1990s. The essays focus on gender issues, the representation of gender in reading, writing, and in public speaking. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of feminists’ analysis of sexism in literature and the relation between gender and politeness. The article is informative for my research paper, as my

The difference between the intended meaning of media texts and what the audience actually perceives can be shockingly different. Producers of media can do everything possible to force audiences to experience their work in the way they want them to, but in the end they still take away many different meanings even within the same audience. Stuart Hall outlines this in his encoding and decoding model. One of the most apparent examples of this is the television show South Park. The television show South Park is a media text with the producers’ preferred meaning of being decoded as joke or as being satire, but many audience members take an oppositional stance of taking it seriously. This is clear from the examples of controversy when South Park aired episodes focused on Scientology, red-headed people, and Islam. Through these examples it is demonstrated that the producers of media have less power compared to the audience in determining the meaning of media.

West and Zimmerman claim that gender is not something we are but something we do.

3. How does the critical/cultural perspective on mass communication view the media? How does it view the audience?

For this research, the unit of observation are magazines as obviously will be making my observations in magazines. What are the reasons for choosing this medium? Convenience, easy to secure, and also it is quite easy to analyse compared to other mediums. However, there is one important criterion for magazines, such as they have to be in English language as it will be important in identifying gender stereotyping in the writing. Though, there are criteria that are not important to me such as the genre (men’s and women’s magazine) and also, the magazines will not be filtered in terms of their release date

Four theorists are the contributing authors of the active research theory. These authors evolved the role audience play and their ability to actively engage with communication medians. The idea of deconstructionism was the focus of the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault during the 1960’s. Later in the twentieth century theorist Raymond Bauer developed The Obstinate Audience. In the early 1980’s a theorist by the name of Stuart Hall challenged the traditional theories of an audience role in the media and developed his encoding/decoding theory. Each contributed to the current understanding of the active role audiences engage in when information is presented.

Media influence is the force by which ideas are injected into people’s lives shaping the very culture of society. This influence is masqueraded through hidden media message, resulting in a change in its audience which can be positive or negative, abrupt or gradual, short term or long term. Although mass media’s influential effect can reach a wide ranged audience as an agent of socialization the responsibility to contain what it releases has not been of importance. “The media’s socially significant obligations are formally ignored.” (A.S. Zapesotskii, 2011, p 9). Media messages can be exerted through many different outlets such as TV shows, music, movies, commercials, news, magazines, games which are all gravitated to entertain audiences ultimately offering personal gratification that can sometimes blur the lines between reality and

Mass media is a media intended for a large audience. It may take the form of broadcast media, as in the case of television and radio, or print media, like newspapers and magazines. Internet media can also attain mass media status, and many media outlets maintain a web presence to take advantage of the ready availability of Internet in many regions of the world. Some people also refer to it as the “mainstream media,” referencing the fact that it tends to stick to prominent stories which will be of interest to a general audience, sometimes ignoring controversial breaking news. Many people around the world rely on this form of media for news and entertainment, and globally, it is a huge industry.