This book presents a Feminist Critical Stylistic analysis of a large dataset of women’s magazines collected in 2008, to examine the ways in which men are ‘sold’ to women as part and parcel of a successful performance of heterosexual hegemonic femininity . The book is an explicitly feminist endeavor; I am interested in the implications of these constructions for the ways in which women may then perceive themselves, and potentially alter their behavior in line with the standards and expectations set by women’s magazines.
Women’s magazines have been in circulation since the late 1600s (Braithwaite 1995), and although sales figures for UK print publications are generally in decline, top-ranking women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan still achieve bi-annual sales figures of around 300,000 (Oakes 2016). Research on reader engagement with online and print versions also shows that, on the whole, readers of women’s magazines prefer print versions to their digital counterparts (Edelmen 2010; Ytre-Arne 2011). The fact that women’s magazines have such an established history and persistence in the face of digital markets is therefore testament to their popularity among female audiences. It is also for this reason that examining how gender is constructed for their readers is such an essential area for feminist study: it is important to examine the kinds of ideologies of gender that women are buying into when they consume these texts, and to interrogate the potentially damaging effects of these.
A critical linguistic analysis of women’s magazines is not in and of itself a new idea—there is a healthy body of existing research on women’s magazines and other types of media discourse that deals with the various ways in which texts can and do influence their readers (discussed in more depth in Chapter 3), but work on women’s magazines is almost exclusively concerned with examining these issues through the lens of how women are sold to women (see, for example, Talbot 1995; Jeffries 2007; Ringrow 2016). Feminist linguistic research has shown how women are constrained by what Talbot (1995) refers to as ‘consumer femininity ’, whereby women are encouraged to engage in beautification processes that involve ‘fixing’ problems in their appearance in order to uphold ideals of femininity and, ultimately, please men. Very little has been said about how men and masculinity are manifested in these texts, despite the fact that much of this research cites men as the motivation for these constructions of women. Choosing to focus solely on women’s roles, women’s language, or women’s writing means that women become marked; studies of gender in discourse analysis demonstrate a phallocentric tendency to analyze ‘women’s language’ as a deviation from the male norm (Mills 2012: 17). It is therefore important to challenge the androcentrism of research which implies the deviancy of women’s behavior and implicitly upholds men’s status as norm-makers.
Research focusing on the notion of gender -linked speech styles in the past dominated discourse analytical work on gender identity (see Chapter 2 for an in-depth overview). However, studying the ways in which gender stereotypes are created and recirculated through discourse is also a useful contribution to the study of the relationship between language and gender identity. The kinds of ideologies that are valued in a particular culture will most likely have some effect on the members of that culture and therefore have the potential to shape opinions and beliefs. For example, studies in psychology suggest that ‘media framing’ (Taylor 2008) can affect beliefs and attitudes regarding sex and relationships, as well as sexual behavior (Taylor 2008; Aubrey et al. 2003; Collins et al. 2004).
In recent years there has been increased public interest in how ‘lad culture ’ proliferates in spaces such as university campuses and ‘lads mags’, where ‘lad culture’ can be viewed as behavior involving youthful hedonism and participation in ‘raunch’ or ‘sex object’ culture, serving as a form of homosocial bonding (Phipps and Young 2015: 3). Feminist interrogation of ‘lad culture’ is exemplified by, for instance, the 2013 Lose the Lads Mags campaign in the UK, coordinated by feminist organizations UK Feminista and Object. Grassroots feminist campaigns like the Everyday Sexism Project (Bates 2014) and No More Page Three have been successful in making visible the sexualisation and objectification of women in such spaces, and critical attention has been given to the notion of the ‘mainstreaming’ of lad culture (see GarcÃa-Farvaro and Gill 2016), but this book will argue that the ideologies of hegemonic masculinity that circulate in male-targeted media like men’s magazines are also prevalent in female-targeted media such as mainstream women’s magazines , which makes them an important site for feminist critique.
1.1 Theorizing Gender: The Trouble with Binaries
The distinction between ‘sex’ as a biological category and ‘gender’ as a social construction is a fundamental development of Western feminist thought, and can be attributed to feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that one is not born, but ‘becomes’ a woman (1949). Asserting a sex/gender binary recognizes that femininity and masculinity can be viewed as behaviors or practices that are not shaped by biology: men can exhibit stereotypically feminine qualities (such as a predilection for wearing pink), and women can behave in ways associated with ideological masculinity (such as displays of aggression). On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition for feminist commentators who wish to point out the fallacies of asserting that men or women are biologically destined to be better suited to particular roles or occupations. However, early theorizing in areas like anthropology and sociology has tended to oversimplify the sex/gender dichotomy to the extent that gender is sometimes viewed as an adornment that can easily be untangled from biological sex—indeed, this is sometimes referred to by feminist theorists as the ‘coat-rack’ model of gender (Nicholson 1994). The reality is much more nuanced, since gender stereotypes are often based on biological traits. For example, the prevalence of the ‘male as breadwinner’ script has been largely based on a generalization that men are physically stronger than women, and this has been used as justification for men’s dominance in the workplace for centuries.
In her treatment of what she calls ‘neurosexism’ in scientific research, Cordelia Fine (2011) debunks myths surrounding so-called ‘hard-wired’ differences between the male and female brain that have been used to justify why men make better scientists than women or why women are naturally suited to caring roles such as nursing or teaching. She argues that the social effects of gender (expectations of gendered behavior) can have an observable impact on the brain, resulting in patterns that we then interpret as sex-based difference. Acknowledging that supposed ‘hard-wired’ biological differences are often in fact the psychological result of social stereotyping is an important and compelling argument. What this nuanced interpretation of the social constructionist account of gender shows is the highly complex relationship between the biological and the social. As Cameron (2007) argues, what is important is not necessarily whether or not biological differences exist between men and women, but what ideological use is made of (supposed) differences.
1.1.1 Gender as Performative
In her seminal work, Gender Trouble (1990, 1999), feminist philosopher Judith Butler interprets gender as ‘performative’, defining ‘gender’ as ‘the repeated stylization of the body’ (1990: 33). Like the coat-rack model, this theorization of gender emphasizes a separation between biological essence and social construction, but this reconfiguration also emphasizes the role of individual and structural agency in the production of gender identity: gender in the performative account t...