'Reading' the Print Media 

Perfect skin . . . just everything like, you have to have every certain like wicked feature. . . . you have to be smart and have money, but yet they don’t want you to have a job because then you might be making more money than them, like it’s all very confusing.”
—reaction from a young woman after reading an article in Cosmopolitan.

Analysis of women’s print media has been a constant presence in media and gender studies over the past forty years. Some feminist media scholars have argued that this presence reflects the understanding that women’s print media offers a powerful space for the construction of normative femininity. Women’s magazines are powerful representations of women’s lives and comprise part of a network of social institutions that exercise a regulatory function in women’s behavior, and in particular, their sexuality.

How female sexuality is represented and shaped by women’s print media and the role of these representations in promoting reproduction of, or resistance to, female oppression has been a topic of considerable debate among feminist media scholars. Some feminist analyses of women’s print media have indicated that central to the media construction of female sexuality is the unachievable and unreal objectified woman, whose primary concern is with appearance and “catching and keeping” a man.

However, during the 1990s, this construction of female sexuality was destabilized (although not eliminated) by an increasing focus on explicit sexual representation. For example, content analysis of Australian Cosmopolitan from 1976 through 1995, indicated that the number of articles with sexual content had doubled by 1995. The new sexual discourse in women’s print media presented itself as bold and adventurous, encouraging women to exercise freedom and self-determination in seeking out sexual partners and the expression of sexuality. However, it simultaneously involved attraction of and submission to male desire—particularly within a monogamous relationship.

Consequently, women’s print media currently offers a range of competing representations of female sexualities. Such a range of representations opens the possibility that an audience may read and respond to print media texts in multiple ways, and that female oppression is not an inevitable consequence of reading and engaging with women’s print media. Although many feminist media scholars have argued that the messages in any one media text cohere around a central meaning, prompting one dominant reading of a text, it seems more likely that the contradictory representations of female sexualities currently offered by women’s print media promote a multiplicity of textual readings. Rather than being passive recipients of media messages about female sexualities, audiences, then, may engage with texts in nuanced and complex ways, so that socially constructed meanings around sexualities are negotiated—both resisted and reproduced. It becomes important, therefore, for research to focus on the ways in which audiences read and make meaning from media texts.

Recently, I conducted a study to explore the ways in which four groups of adolescent women read and make meaning from two excerpts concerning female sexuality drawn from a popular women’s text, U.S. Cosmopolitan.

Nineteen women from rural Prince Edward Island, Canada, participated in the study. The women were aged between 15 years and five months and 17 years and five months. Approximately 63% of women indicated that their religious affiliation was Catholic, and 68% stated that they were not currently in a romantic relationship. All women read two randomly selected articles from U.S. Cosmopolitan, “His Point of View: 4 topics that totally turn him off” (May, 2003) and “Sexy Date Tips” (June, 2003), and then discussed their reactions and responses to the articles in groups.

“For fun and something to do”

The magazine most frequently read by the women in this study was U.S. Cosmopolitan, read by 95% of the women. The women read the magazine to obtain information on fashion style (68%), sex (44%) and exercise techniques (37%), and real life stories (26%). All participants, however, commented that they primarily read U.S. Cosmopolitan magazine for “fun”, because they had “nothing else to do”, and “boredom”. Therefore, the reading of women’s print media had an everyday, pleasurable aspect that provided a form of relaxation.

“You wanna know what guys think”

Women’s print media, however, was not read only for relaxation and pleasure. For some women in the study, reading U.S. Cosmopolitan provided them with information on men and what constituted appropriate codes of behavior with men. As commented by one participant, “You wanna know what a guy thinks, and you’re not going to risk asking him ‘so what are you thinking?’ You don’t feel like sharing your feelings as open as that. I don’t like to say that, but people like guys, it’s good to have their point of view.” Furthermore, participants observed that being provided with information on men enabled them to feel “good” because “you know stuff”. This information helped to make up for what these women believed was a lack of experience with men and provided them with a sense of self-confidence.

Clearly, women’s print media can provide some young women with access to information about men and sexuality that they do not seem to obtain through other avenues. This informational aspect to women’s print media might consequently enable young women to make informed choices in their sexual encounters, allowing them to negotiate gendered practices around sexualities from a more empowered position. Overall, these findings suggest that reading women’s print media does not inevitably contribute to female oppression.

“You wanna be yourself, but...”

The women in the study derived a uniform message around the representation of female sexuality from the two excerpts read. All women noted that women’s print media provided women with information on what men wanted, in order to attract them into a relationship, but did not encourage women to “be themselves” in this process. In the words of two participants:

“...the girls are trying to impress the guys. It’s just on what we should do to make them want us.”

“It seems to me that they (authors of Cosmopolitan) are trying to make us, no, not make us, get us to act the way a ‘perfect girl’ would act, the ‘perfect’ girlfriend would be.”

Implied by the message identified by participants are that a woman should want to attract and be in a relationship with a man; that heterosexuality is normative; that the agenda for the “perfect girlfriend” is set by the man; and that women’s print media exercises a regulatory function in women’s lives, in that it reinforces one particular male-shaped image of women. This point is clear in this comment:

“..but like magazines, you have to be blonde, and have big boobs, and be skinny and tanned, you know, and smart you know, even now, it’s like smart and stuff too.”

This woman is picking up the contradictory messages about female sexuality implicit in women’s print media. The need to be beautiful, yet intelligent, but not threatening to men, is acknowledged as a confusing role model for these young women and echoes observations made by some feminist scholars that the “Cosmo Girl” embodies a stereotype of objectified femininity that is not only unachievable, but unreal.

However, although participants acknowledged the existence, and their own awareness, of these messages from women’s print media, there was strong resistance to the uptake of these messages. Resistance took two forms. The first form was offered by participants who dismissed the advice given in the articles as “completely unrealistic” and “really phony”. The second form came from participants who independently commented that the articles were written about “one type of girl”, that “not all girls were like that”, and that what men find desirable in a woman would be different for different men: “I think it’s different for different guys.” However, both types of resistance were underpinned by the belief in the “need to be oneself”. All participants noted that nowhere in the two articles was it suggested that a woman “be herself”. As one participant claimed, “I find that they are telling girls how you have to be, they don’t tell you to act yourself.” In being “yourself”, it would be possible to find a relationship (with a man), because in the “real world” different men seek different attributes in a woman.

Some participants acknowledged that it was “wrong” for a woman to change herself for a man, particularly if those changes were in line with those suggested by women’s print media: “Just go out as who you are, and not what a magazine tells you to be.” Consequently, in arguing that “if you are going to change yourself for a guy, you are not being yourself, and if the guy doesn’t like the real you, then he can just keep on movin’” the participants in the study are largely resisting the notion of shaping the self to fit a masculine fantasy of the ideal woman as presented in women’s print media. These participants appear to be acknowledging their own role in the production of the self and their sexuality and the importance of maintaining that self, even if a relationship with one particular man is the cost.

Despite these claims of resistance through the importance of being the self, it was evident that heterosexual romantic relationships occupied a central role in the participants’ lives. Not one participant questioned the need to have a heterosexual romantic relationship. Indeed, some participants acknowledged that “every girl wants to be liked [by men].” Clearly, then, despite the pluralistic representations of female sexuality available in women’s print media, and the resistance of participants to media constructed representations of the woman most likely to attract a man, love and romance continued to be understood as central to female sexuality.

Interestingly, even though the participants in the present study resisted print media constructions of the “ideal” woman through the rhetoric of the importance of being the “real self”, this rhetoric was located in perceptions of what the men in their environment found attractive in women. As two participants shared:

“...you start talking about the clothes you wear, and it does make you look superficial...if you talk about the diet you’re on, it makes you sound like you have really low self-esteem, and that’s not what a guy wants to hear. It will just turn them off even more.”

“Sometimes you hear guys in the cafeteria and stuff and they are going on about how fake some girls are and stuff, and they don’t want you to be like, fake.”

Consequently, although the women in the present study resisted messages from the print media about being what “men” wanted them to be, they did not resist the messages that they received through their own lived experience. There was a sense, then, that “you wanna be yourself, but...”, and that even though “it’s wrong to change yourself for a guy,” “you do have that feeling. Every girl does, you’d be lying if you didn’t.” Therefore, attracting a man to a relationship was still perceived to be central for the participants in the present study, and although it was important not to be “fake” and to be “real” for these purposes, there remained doubt that “real” was sufficient.

“Real” became especially insufficient in the arena of scripts for appropriate feminine behavior, both generally and sexually. In particular, there was the fear raised that a woman would not want a man to think she was “too aggressive” (“I don’t think it’s good to be too extremely aggressive because you might scare him off. Especially if it’s all first dates”) and sexually promiscuous (“If he’s interested in you, you don’t have to be flirting with other guys to make him want you more. It’s probably just going to make him think that you’re a slut, so it’s not really going to work out”). Violation of scripts for “appropriate” sexual behavior was a particular concern for the young women.

“You don’t want to come off like a skank...”

All participants in the present study acknowledged the existence of the more free sexuality that was advocated in the selected articles from U.S. Cosmopolitan. However, all participants also chose to resist this more permissive construction of female sexuality. The participants rejected the advice offered, particularly in the article “Be a Super Sexy Date Tonight” because they perceived it as encouraging them to behave in a way that was sexually promiscuous. As two participants stated: “You don’t want to come off like a skank,” and “it makes me feel like being a slut is extremely acceptable.” Furthermore, the participants evaluated sexually promiscuous behavior as damaging to their opportunities to attract men into relationships with them: “But if you were on a first date, you’re not going to just like start getting on him ... you would just ruin it on the first date.”

These quotations suggest that the participants in the present study adhered to traditional constructions of female sexuality, where women’s sexuality is understood in terms of a relationship with a man, rather than in terms of active sexual desire. In these traditional constructions, sexual cleanliness is one of the attributes used to “catch and keep” a man.

Even though participants resisted messages from the media around the importance of being a man’s vision of “perfect woman”—and so exercised some self-determination in the construction of self—their understanding of female sexuality as needing to be expressed within a relationship with a man, suggests a less empowered perspective on female sexuality.

Why such young women would choose to reject more empowering constructions of female sexuality offered by women’s print media is intriguing. One possibility is that the lived experience of these participants—and the resultant knowledge that particular codes of feminine behavior, such as sexual assertion, permissiveness, and perceived superficiality, continue to be stigmatized (by men) for women—dictates the extent to which messages from women’s print media are taken on by these young women, and influences them to create their own meaning from media texts.

Indeed, some of the women acknowledged that the messages in women’s print media might be most likely to be assumed by particular women, those who were invested in the message being advanced or those with low self-esteem. Some participants note “it does tell you what to wear sometimes ... but you don’t always pay attention to it, coz you might not care about it,” and “...but then there’s people that don’t have as high self-esteem and they think that what they see and what they read is how they should be, and then that can hit them wrong.”

Women’s print media have been traditionally indicted as sites for the construction and reproduction of gendered power, and thus women’s oppression. Such indictment, however, has been challenged by recent feminist scholarship, which suggests that the more free and diverse female sexuality, also currently promoted by women’s print media, creates a space allowing for the resistance of oppression. The contradictory construction of female sexuality advanced by women’s print media might therefore invite multiple readings of texts that may be used to challenge traditional relations of gendered power.

This study indicates that the women read women’s print media both for pleasure and for information, which could then be used to empower themselves in their relationships with men. Their lived experiences provided them with a unique framework within which they created complex meanings around female sexualities from texts, which embodied both reproduction of and resistance to traditional feminine subjectivities and sexualities. What aspects of lived experience most shape dominant readings of media texts, and how contradictory understandings of female sexualities contribute to women’s sexual practices, has yet to be determined.

Fiona Ann Papps is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Prince Edwards Island, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her research interests include women’s print media analysis, body image, and body modification and beautification practices.