 Are magazines building hedges between the genders to keep readers coming back?
By Martina Cermakova
The headlines “Your orgasm guaranteed,” “Treat yourself Like a Goddess,” "Ways to Make New-Man Sex Amazing” on the front page of Glamour, and Cosmo, and increasingly any other women's magazine, talk of assertive women – women, who mimic men sexually, who are no longer the prey but the predator. Never mind that, as Anthony Clare in his book On Men: Masculinity in Crisis puts it, “men still outnumber women in positions of power across the globe, still glower downwards through the glass ceiling, still strut the cabinet and boardrooms in every developed country in the world,” women are taking charge – even if only in bed for now.
With gender relations shifting and the lines between masculinity and femininity blurring, some speak of the “crisis in masculinity" (read insecure men). "Once so proud of his penis (Freud, after all, argued that women envied it), contemporary man now finds he is being reduced to the role of support seed carrier," writes Clare.
Not solely a response to gender-relations changes, Lucy Brown explains in her essay on young men's magazines and the reinforcement of stereotypical attitudes, that some argue that men’s magazines are a reaction to feminism, an attempt for the male to regain some of the power he lost thanks to this movement. Then, man said: "Let there be a return to the pre-feminist masculine ideal.” And so there was Loaded.
All in all, in her Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America, Myrna Blyth argues that men’s magazines reassure their readers from the very beginning. The assumption is that you’re “ok,” it's other things that need the fix.
Women’s magazines, on the other hand, do anything but reassure by working from the premise that their readers want, and need, to improve their lives, Blyth argues according to the New York book review. "Women's magazines can be like bad boyfriends. They’ll tear you down, then spend pages trying to build you back up. But in doing so, they’ll give you all the service and the information you need.”
The scenario of conspiracies-at-work unfolds as the Cosmo reader concludes, she might need the next month's edition for advice on her troubled state of affairs fed to her in this issue, just as her not-so-binary-opposite returns for another Maxim to plaster his leaking self-esteem. Indeed, stress sells. Except that our Cosmo reader comes out of it self-esteem crumbled, while his is mended.
So the circle of fear and gender roles and consumerism goes.
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