Semiotic Analysis of Teenage Magazine Front Covers

In "Where the girls are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media," Susan Douglas analyses the effects of mass media on women of the nineteen fifties, and more importantly on the teenage girls of the baby boom era. Douglas explains why women have been torn in conflicting directions and are still struggling today to identify themselves and their roles. Douglas recounts and dissects the ambiguous messages imprinted on the feminine psyche via the media. Douglas maintains that feminism is a direct result of the realization that mass media is a deliberate and calculated aggression against women. While the media seemingly begins to acknowledge the power of

Magazines want to be read and enjoyed by the most customers possible, and in order to do so they try and attract a vast variety of people.  This means that they must include different hairstyle and clothing choices for all races, cultures, and ethnicities.  By expanding the types of wear in these magazines, people are able to identify and connect with the articles and overall message of the magazine.  Often times, the goal is to make women feel empowered and part of a larger whole.   Increasing the amount of cultures that these magazines and their articles represent means that more women are able to feel a part of something and can knock down the walls of difference between groups of people.  It is crucial for magazines to display various culturized styles in order for these cultures to feel included and is a great way to diminish the separation and therefore the discrimination of

Women’s Body Image (www.wellesley.edu/Health/BodyImage) helped demonstrates the young influence of magazines. Those days when girls strive to be something they weren’t, were probably the most crucial days in body imaging. They succumbed into the pressure of looking how everyone else wants them to look. Such teeny bopper magazines sell to many young girls the idea of beauty. Teen Magazine is the princess of that royal court. In every young woman, or man’s mind, there is this longing to be desired. To be desired, you must be attractive. To be attractive, you have to look like that girl on page seventy-one in the latest Teen Magazine (Women’s Body Image).

In the recent history, feminism and pop culture have become more closely entwined than ever before. This can be partially because of the growing interest in culture studies as an academic discipline, but it can also be explained by the fact that, there’s a whole lot more popular culture to watch. Pop culture has become our common language, a universal way of uniting the world. Pop culture is also a key route to making the concept of feminism both resonant and relatable. In this paper, I am interested in the relationship and connections between pop culture’s representations of women and girls and the depiction of feminism through the lens of pop culture. There’s a

Teenage girls are at an impressionable time in their lives. Mass Media is a key idea in one of the factors of socialization that become important to teenagers. Teenagers look to the media for a sense of entertainment. Whether it is movies, magazines, or even some aspects of social media, teenagers get a lot of influence from the media’s message. The problem with this is the media has a specific way of doing things and can be negative to a susceptible teenage girl. Media’s way of portraying a woman can be skewed and unrealistic way from what reality is. Teenage girls then have a desire for this look or way. In this essay the three ways I will describe as to why the media can negatively affect a teenage girls body image is by showing

The Netflix documentary Miss Representation by Jennifer Siebel Newsom explores how the media contributes to influence the young girls and boys in America. Every day in America we are showed this unrealistic look of what the so-called perfect image of women is supposed to be from the TV shows we watch, the movies we see, to the magazines we read, to the online social media outlets we visit. This documentary shows the negative effects it's having on teenage boys and girls in America, Miss Representation interweaves between the stories of teenage girls, telling their own experiences and how the media has portrayed the image of women to them. They share their stories from pressures they feel they have to live up too from how the media shows them

Featherstone looks down on publications that emphasize most of their print on Fashion, relationships and celebrities and advocates for magazines that stimulate intellectual growth, promote a healthy body image and include diversity. As an active journalist, columnist and activist, Liza Featherstone makes a good point in her article all while using most abundantly three rhetorical tools: logos, ethos and pathos that she wove into a studied text organization and a simple writing style. It is through ethos that Featherstone does a great job at defending her viewpoint, because her argument lacks a lot

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and see to what extent women have been depicted within typical stereotypes, how they have been objectified and only seen as a sexual sell, and what consequences and effects these depictions can have on both the female and male audiences. The analysis is over two decades where major social changes underwent. The time after the war, being a housewife and mother was heavily implemented. Whilst after a decade, women started to step away from what was considered the norm, what was considered the ideal life. They started to fight for a better future for themselves, and a life free from their husbands ruling hand. I have chosen visual analysis of magazine front covers as my method because magazines were a major resource for both women and men at the time, it was one of their sources of information about what was going on around them. Front covers often represent the magazine or the audience it is meant for, and

In today’s generation no matter what gender a person is, they have expectations of society to act like either a “women” or “man”. Back in the day when our parents were growing up it wasn’t the same social standers. Girls didn’t have to deal with such high expectations. Adults usually can’t relate to our situation. In the two essays, Mary Piper’s, “Saplings in the Storm” and Sandra Cisneros “Barbie-Q”, gave a better perspective of girls going through adolescents. During this stage in their life they have to deal with social norms, which pressures girls to compare themselves to others and strive to be an unrealistic model of femininity. This emotional battle to blend in leads to metal distress while not allowing adolescent girl be themselves

Magazines have implicitly and explicitly been influencing humans for decades. They are continually more involved in the media, however the market is highly competitive. It is extremely important for magazines to maintain the readers’ interest and loyalty therefore they must excel in its appearance and content. Helen Brown created the Cosmopolitan magazine in 1965. It holds a spot as one of the most successful women’s magazines of all time, and proceeds to be the number one selling monthly magazine. (Ouellette, 360, 2005).

Gender and the Media by Rosalind Gill addresses gender stereotypes that are brought onto women and men through the media resulting in objectification and subjectification. Gill discusses how the representation of gender is altered as a result of the media in Western societies. Gender and the Media is aimed to address the rapid transmission of media and how those changes affect the construction of feminine and masculine gender roles in society. Gill uses her interest in the contradictions of gender construction by society, to analyze gender and the media. Using feminism as a backbone for her research, Gill and many commentators support the idea that feminist ideas are common and may even affect the media. Gender and the Media addresses multiple forms of media: postfeminism in advertising, gender in the news and journalism, and gender in magazines. Gild aims to address the construction of gender representations, elements for gender analysis, and feminist culture with Gender and the Media.

Media representations isn’t only a mirror to the society but as we can see it’s also a construct and realities that is popular in the society. As we know these portrayals has a big impact on the framing of the today’s life that we live in. The media constructs, “normalizes” and asset identities such as gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnic. All the discussions relies on how the covers of the magazines ad highlights how the social values and contexts on how this advertisement aid to construct, normalize and asset identities with specific emphasis on how gender and sexual identities, social class identities, racial intensities and how national identities is represented in the society.

Popular culture has an undeniable influence on how society perceives itself. When examining mass culture, one must keep in mind the equilibrium between how much we, as a society, affect the way popular culture is constructed and to what extent popular culture influences the way we view ourselves and shapes our ideologies. An aspect of popular culture that may serve to greatly exemplify this theory of society as both the affecter and the affected is the genre of magazines targeted at young women. Though these publications are targeted as the representation of our society’s adolescent females, they actually have a great influence over the ways in which teens view and construct

Magazines that are targeted toward adolescent girls focus on the importance of being viewed as sexy by men and focusing on the way your body looks. Studies have shown that adolescents who frequently read fashion magazines are two to three times more likely to diet based on the articles in the magazine.

I open up the “hottest” teen magazines on the market; Allure, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Teen Vogue are a few at the top. As I flip through the magazine this holiday season I see pages of clothes that only the rich can afford, pictures of half-naked people draped over each other, articles about horoscopes and editorials talking about which teen star is the sexiest. Fashion, makeup, men, sex, celebrities, and exercising are the most popular topics I see as I peruse these magazines. These popular magazines take no time to tell me how beautiful I am, but only tell me the hundreds of things I need to do to improve. They tell me that I need more new, expensive makeup to look like a movie star. These magazines teach me how to seduce a man, but