1. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
AS MEDIA STUDIES
Morecambe Community High School
MS1: Responses and Representations
Magazine Case Study
This case study will focus on two
magazines that you will refer to
as case studies in the summer
exam, so keep it safe. Additional
material for this unit can be
found on the MCHS Media Blog
as well as the shared area on
the network.
The emergence of men’s
lifestyle magazines
• Magazines have always been popular with men. The problem is that the
publications were somewhat divided between niche market ‘specialist’
publications such as What Car, Hobby Electronics or Angling Times ‘Top
shelf’ pornography magazines such as Playboy, Penthouse and Men Only
• There was no ‘general interests’ magazine to parallel the numerous
‘women’s’ titles
• Although a gap in the market was evident to publishers, the ‘glossy’
magazine was considered feminine, and ‘real men’ didn’t need a
magazine to tell them how to live.
A brief history of male lifestyle magazines
1980 The Face, i-D and Blitz are launched featuring fashion, design and music
for trendy young men and women
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2. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
1986 Arena is launched by The Face editor Nick Logan for ‘the slightly older
style-conscious men’.
1988 GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) launched featuring expensive but stylish living
and fashion
1991 Esquire launched into a market which was seen as catering for ‘posh
blokes and advertising executives’.
1994 Loaded launched and has since become recognised as the cornerstone for
modern British ‘lad’ culture and established an infamous readership of twenty-
something, beer-drinking, football-loving, sex obsessed male stereotype.
1995 Maxim & Men’s Health launched
1996 FHM launched with an emphasis on sex and humour
By 2000, market researchers Mintel reported that the UK men’s magazine market
had grown to ten times its 1993 size and had begun to open a significant market
in the US
TASK
What are your perceptions of male lifestyle magazines?
Make a short list of other ‘Lifestyle’ magazines.
TASK
Log on to the Media blog and look at the post on ‘Top 100 Magazines 2010’.
Which of these are lifestyle magazines aimed at women? Comment on their
popularity/sales and compare these to other magazines on the market.
Magazine advertising and gender
Before any discussion of gender in lifestyle magazines can be considered, it is
important to be clear on the difference between sex, gender and sexuality.
• Sex refers to a person’s biological sex: whether they are male or female.
• Gender refers to the role or behaviours a person has been socialised into
according to their sex, whether they are masculine or feminine.
• Sexuality refers to a person’s sexual preference: whether they are
heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.
The issue of gender is not static. Acceptable behaviour for each sex changes
over time. Contemporary ideas of masculinity and femininity will be different to
those of previous generations. For example, your grandmother would probably
not, enter a pub alone and order a pint of beer, whereas young women today
may well do just that.
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3. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
In our society there are certain attributes and behaviours which are seen to be
more appropriate for one sex than the other. The following opposing lists
illustrate how men and women are seen to be different:
MEN are / should be: WOMEN are / should be:
masculine feminine
dominant submissive
strong weak
aggressive passive
intelligent intuitive
rational emotional
communicative (talk about
active (do things)
things)
empty
Men and women are also seen to like different things. For
example:
MEN like WOMEN like
cars / technology shopping / make up
getting drunk social drinking with friends
casual sex with many partners committed relationships
There are several other likes and attributes you can probably think of that are
stereotypically male or female. However, it is also clear that these neat lists are
not truly representative of what men and women are really like. You all probably
know a woman who likes cars and can be aggressive or a man who doesn’t drink
and cries at weepy romantic comedies.
These stereotypes exist, to a certain extent, because they are easier than getting
to know every man and women in the world personally. Advertisers are
especially prone to using stereotypes to sell products for the same reason. They
assume that all women or men are similar to make targeting audiences a simpler
process.
We can use advertising as a starting point when considering representations of
gender in lifestyle magazines. By looking at how alcohol and food are sold to
male and female audiences it is clear to see how gender stereotypes are
employed and perpetuated by advertisers.
The gender stereotypes used in magazine of advertising make assumptions
about men and women that may or may not be true. They are likely to be true of
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4. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
some men and some women but there will be very few people who fully conform
to the magazine’s neatly packaged feminine woman and masculine man.
Readers today are more sophisticated than ever before and are likely to be
aware that not all of a magazine’s content does relates to their lives and likes.
‘Postmodern’ readers may well take parts from several magazines to create a
mix and match magazine that is perfect for them. For example, a young man may
choose whether to read Loaded or Maxim according to the cover star, subscribe
to Four Four Two and sneak a look at his mum’s Women’s Own; a young woman
may enjoy the serious articles in Marie Claire but ignore the fashion, subscribe to
Total Film and sneak a look at her brother’s Bizarre. Both readers are conforming
to parts of the gender stereotypes presented to them but are also moving outside
of them.
In order to effectively study gender or any other demographic such as race or
class, generalisations need to be made about people who are all different
individuals. In the case of gender in lifestyle magazines we can conclude that
magazines target their audience according to gender in order to appeal to a
specific audience that is still broad enough to ensure high sales, to ensure
continued readership and to attract certain advertisers by being able to
guarantees a certain ‘type’ of reader.
In doing this the magazines are using gender stereotypes but also perpetuating
them. Consider the following questions:
• Is it nature or nurture that makes young women want to wear make-up
and young men want to drink and fight?
• To what extent does the content of magazines like those mentioned here
encourage men and women in their choices?
Lifestyle Magazines
Imelda Whelan (2000) argues that magazines like FHM, Loaded and Maxim:
• Are an attempt to override the message of feminism
• promote a ‘laddish’ world where women are sex objects
• dismiss changes in gender roles with an ‘ironic’ joke
She goes on to say that
‘it is impossible to ignore the growth of this image and its depiction of
masculinity…its prevalence offers a timely warning to any woman who felt that
gender relations were now freely negotiable’
When looking at lifestyle magazines it is essential that we consider what attracts
a consumer to the product.
TASK
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5. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
• Apply Whelan’s comments a cover of FHM.
• In regards to Cosmopolitan, how might we go about applying
Whelan’s? To what extent does the magazine reinforce patriarchal
representations of women?
Text 1: FHM
FHM is a men’s ‘Lifestyle’ magazine. Lifestyle magazines literally offer their
readers a certain ‘lifestyle’; in other words a model to base their lives: what to
wear, eat, drink, how to spend their leisure time, where to go on holiday, what
kind of car they should drive, where they should live etc. To do this successfully,
magazines need to be able to make their readers identify with the lifestyle on
offer, but at the same time offer them slightly more than they have. The
magazines offer both guidance and aspiration. The way this works for successful
magazines is to have a clear sense of the target audience and to adopt an
appropriate mode of address.
What kind of lifestyle is FHM trying to promote?
All lifestyle magazines are trying to make a profit by ‘selling’ particular types of
audiences to advertisers. The revenue, which lifestyle magazines get from
advertising, is far more important than the income they receive from the cover
price and individual sales. As new magazines come on to the market they are
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increasingly trying to narrow down the market (narrowcasting) and provide
advertisers with more and more detailed reader ‘profiles’.
What concerns advertisers is reaching their target audience, i.e. those people
most likely to buy the product. Demographics are very important, i.e. the social
profile of the audience in terms of class, gender, age etc. The audiences with the
most disposable incomes are more attractive to advertisers; these people tend to
be younger and more middle-class. Advertisers are less interested in old
working-class people with small disposable incomes.
Explain the target audience for FHM. Look through the magazine and write a
detailed profile of the FHM reader, include age, income, social class, interests
and hobbies, hopes and aspirations etc.
FHM Content analysis
‘FHM understood how men communicate, and principally that’s through
humour…In a group of men there’s no-one more respected than the funniest guy.
Whatever men are like on the outside, on the inside we’re just a seething mass of
insecurities and we are simply unable to do things in the house very well.’
Mike Soutar, Editor of FHM, 1999
TASK
Look though the contents pages of FHM
Which features communicate to the reader in the way that Soutar
suggests?
Which features highlight insecurities?
How do the advertisements fit into the suggested ‘lifestyles’ of the
magazine?
Gender in Lifestyle Magazines
Theory
Edwards (1997) suggests that the primary role of men’s magazines is to
• Encourage and perpetuate spending amongst its readers
• Emphasise consumption as a means to join a new style elite
• Make this need more desirable through high-profile advertising and visual
attention paid to commodities
THEREFORE, masculinity can be defined in terms of commodities, leading
ultimately to masculinity being defined in terms of how one looks and not what
one does.
You are a man through what you buy!
Nixon argues that within fashion photography, new codings of masculinity can be
seen.
• Menswear is seen primarily in terms of utility i.e. a product with a function
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• The suit symbolises masculine sexuality as well being a uniform of
masculinity
• Women are used as objects for men to look at which highlights the
‘laddish’ masculinity of the male
• Although some models may look introspective, vulnerable and even
feminine, the image is regarded as masculine
Task
• Choose three advertisements from FHM and apply Edwards
theory using your notes.
• Apply Nixon’s theory of coding to the same advertisements
Key terminology for discussing audience and representation
Hegemony: The theory that those in power maintain domination through cultural
influences rather than force.
Ideology: A set of ideas, or a world view, which produces partial and selective
versions of reality often to protect the interests of the powerful social groups.
Preferred Meaning/Reading: The ways in which texts are constructed to
encourage the reader towards a dominant or consensual interpretation.
Hypodermic needle Model: A theory which asserts that the media are powerful
agents of influence, capable of ‘injecting’ ideas and behaviour directly into
relatively passive audiences.
Task:
• Apply each one of these theories to examples in a magazine
Encoding/Decoding (Stuart Hall & David Morely): Audiences vary in their
response to media messages because of social position, gender, age, ethnicity,
occupation, beliefs etc.
TASK
• Discuss the different readings of a lifestyle magazine.
• What is your reading of this magazine?
The Guardian
Monday February 10, 2003
Lads on top
Dawn Hayes
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8. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
Marcus Rich, managing director of FHM Worldwide, is talking about the Babe
Laid
phenomenon, or so I think. In fact, he's comparing the Beyblade spinning top
craze of Christmas with the lads' magazine market. The point is that all crazes
result in oversampling, followed by a settling down period where demand falls
off.
Lads' magazines, which powered growth for consumer magazine publishers in
the
1990s, have reached the settling down stage. Sales and circulations have
spiralled downwards at an alarming rate in the past year or two. But those who
have already written this young market's obituary will be eating their words
this week. ABC figures to be published on Thursday are expected to show that
FHM's circulation has bounced back up to 610,000 from a low-point of 570,000 a
year ago. Loaded, too, will show a modest improvement.
FHM's circulation is still far from its 775,000 peak in 1999, and the longevity
of its revival is in question, given expectations that this year will be the
worst yet for advertising-led media. But FHM has come a long way since Tom
Moloney, now chief executive of Emap, and Rich were the only people at the
company who believed that men secretly flicked through women's magazines,
especially the problem pages, and would therefore be likely to buy a lifestyle
magazine of their own.
Their hunch was right. FHM followed Loaded into the market, with a diet of
babes, bizarre fare and other blokeish topics. But FHM proved to be the bigger
commercial success. Emap's £1m punt on buying For Him Magazine in 1994
spawned a
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9. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
business that is now turning over £100m and reaches more men per capita than
any
other magazine in the world.
Now a division in its own right at Emap, FHM sells 1.5m copies in 16 countries;
Emap plans to launch the magazine in Thailand and Indonesia this year and is in
talks to do the same in Japan and Korea.
But things looked decidedly less positive when Rich returned to the UK last year
after launching FHM in the US and Australia. The title looked stale. "Where
editors are successful, I find they start writing for themselves," said Rich.
"The surprise element was gone. It was a bit copy-heavy and out of touch with
the populist view." The magazine's circulation began tanking in 2001, along with
those of its rivals, and the media decided that time had been called for the new
lad of the mid-1990s.
Rich appointed a new editor, David Davies, and between them they drew up a
plan
to restore the magazine's fortunes. Davies, a stalwart of Emap's youth
magazines, steered the monthly away from features on topics such as loft
conversions, part of an attempt to hold on to its original readership as it grew
older. Instead, he reverted to the short, sweet, punchy approach for
twentysomething single men with money to burn.
Rich decided each issue should also have a distinct theme. There was
December's
"lingerie" issue, which came packaged in a fishnet bag, June's "pub-in-a-bag"
issue, and the "High Street Honeys" campaign, which generated a website that is
in danger of making money.
"The improvement may be a slight blip, but this kind of value-added will have
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10. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
bolstered circulation for FHM and for the sector as a whole," says Peter
Williams, press manager at Zenith Optimedia. "Men's magazines are still an
integral part of any campaign trying to target 16- to 34-year- old men."
Rich insists that men's magazines have no more had their day than
Cosmopolitan
has in the women's market. "In any mature market, the packaging is as much
part
of the offer as the magazine itself," he says. "These men's lifestyle magazines
are an essential handbook for single guys, and as relevant as Cosmo or Red are
to women."
He and Davies believe, though, that some of the smaller titles in the field will
fold as the advertising downturn hits home. "We are closing in on 45% of the
total men's market," says Davies. "Apart from FHM and Arena, men's magazines
have changed very little in the past year and, in a market that is showing signs
of staleness and predictability, they are paying the price in this round of
ABCs." Fighting talk indeed. But can FHM and the lads' magazine market in
general sustain a revival?
With advertising in the doldrums, Emap is banking on brand extension for growth.
As the rise in cover prices that propelled sales growth through the past decade
has run out of steam and its acquisition of US publisher Petersen proved a flop,
it needs to find ways to keep shareholders happy.
"Where growth comes from in future is the biggest problem facing publishers at
the moment," says Tim Ewington, a founding director of the specialist media
consultancy, Human Capital. "The advertising market has to grow rapidly to grow
at all because consumer magazines are getting an increasingly small slice of a
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bigger media cake."
Beyond Elle's fashion range, there are few successful examples of brand
extension in consumer magazines, but Emap is in good company. Leveraging
the
same asset in as many ways as possible is the name of the game in the media
market as a whole, as epitomised by companies like Disney. FHM has already
created Bikini Heaven, a TV series, and High Street Honeys.com. Surely it
stands
the best chance among its peers of developing the first lads' theme park.
TEXT 2 COSMOPOLITAN
COVER ANALYSIS OF MAGAZINES
TASK
Analyse the cover page of the magazine.
• Remember that the cover is an advert for the magazine itself as well as for
products dealt with inside.
• What does the photograph tell us? Is it offering an ideal image of
femininity / masculinity?
• What camera angle and shot size have been used been used? Why?
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12. MCHS AS MEDIA STUDIES MS1: Responses and Representations
• How are the models posed and why? What connotations does the clothing
offer?
• What is the connotation of the colour used?
• How does the language used anchor the meaning of the image?
• What is the mode of address of the cover lines?
• Are there any innovative design features?
• What sort of reader is the cover addressing? E.g. singe, married,
progressive/regressive views?
• What issues does the titles highlight about the target readers’ main
concerns? Do they play on feelings of inadequacy and anxieties? Is there
a promise of pleasure or fulfillment if we buy?
TASK
Answer the following question in 750-1000 words
How do magazines target their readership by gender? Refer to specific
examples you have studied.
This question is asking you to consider the role of gender in producing
magazines; to consider how magazines use gender roles and stereotypes to
appeal to their readership; and how audiences respond to and are affected by
the representations of gender within magazines.
You will need to give specific examples from Cosmopolitan and FHM
• What is the purpose of FHM?
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• Give some facts about FHM. Is their formula successful?
• Give some examples of how gender is represented in FHM. Key idea here
is to consider the range of representations in the magazine and the use of
stereotypes. Why does FHM (or indeed any media) use stereotypes?
• Having established that using gender representations is a key factor in
targeting and appealing to a readership you can then go on to discuss the
way gender is portrayed in FHM and in other magazines in more detail.
This is when you can introduce different readings or interpretations of the
magazine, and if you have not already done so bring in theory.
• What does Cosmopolitan offer to its readership?
• Explain how Cosmopolitan gives both progressive and regressive views
on how women are represented.
•
Possible inclusions:
• FHM as a progressive force; advice magazine, offering different lifestyles
and possibilities to its readership. FHM offers a more modern take on
traditional male identity – advertising and editorial that focuses on
appearance clearly shows this.
• Link between what you read and identity. How much does FHM play a role
in defining people’s gender identities? Does FHM create male or ‘lad’
subcultures?
• Negative aspects of representation; does a magazine like FHM just offer
men fantasy and tradition in its use of dominant male/willing female?
• Masculinity in crisis: to what extent are FHM using gender representations
as a kind of backlash against feminism and the erosion of traditional male
identity?
• Images of women in Cosmopolitan encourage women to appear pleasing
to the ‘male gaze’.
• Cosmopolitan offers its readers a progressive representation of women
and encourages them to challenge traditional patriarchal ideologies.
Specific theorists that may be useful;
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• Edwards – crucial in this essay as he sees the primary purpose of men’s
magazines as selling. Is this why men’s mags target by gender?
Ultimately you need to decide why gender is used. There are sociological and
consumer reasons – debate them.
Revision questions
1. What is the difference between a ‘new man’ and a ‘new lad’?
2. What is a ‘new woman’?
3. Define ‘laddism’ and the role that the ‘lad’s mag’ plays in this sub-culture.
4. What is feminism?
5. Compare one other male lifestyle magazine to FHM. What are the differences
and similarities?
6. Why might we argue that magazines like FHM are more than just
‘pornography’?
7. Men’s lifestyle magazines are said to highlight male insecurities. What is
meant by this?
8. Edwards highlights the importance of consuming as a means to join a ‘new
style elite’. What is meant by this?
9. How does Cosmo challenge traditional patriarchal views of women?
10. How might Cosmo be seen to be ‘failing’ to fully challenge traditional
stereotypes and not truly represent feminism?
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