Magazine Similarities/Differences

Last class, we analyzed both a men's and women's fitness magazine.  There were some interesting trends seen between the two, along with major differences.  For the men's magazine, 55.5% of the advertisements were for dietary supplements.  This was a huge contrast to the women's magazine having only 26%.  The other big difference was the heavy promotion of cosmetics in the women's magazine (30.5%) compared to the smaller percentage in the men's (6.9%).  This doesn't come as a huge shock as women are more concerned about beauty products than men are in most cases.

Our group identified three themes in the women's magazine.  The first theme was cosmetics.  As mentioned, this was heavily prevalent in the magazine.  We decided that foods were the second theme.  We felt that some dietary supplements were classified as food and there were many other advertisements that fell into the "other" category that were food related.  There were many advertisements for things such as chips or ice cream bars which we found interesting.  The snack foods were portrayed as fun and very enjoyable.  Finally, our third theme was dietary supplements.  These were pills or medicine needed to maintain or create a healthy and sexy body.

The men's magazine identified three continuing trends.  The first was positioning the reader as inferior.  This is done is most advertisements when the male pictured in the advertisement is usually extremely muscular and looking down on the reader.  It is made seem the ad is more masculine and tougher than the reader.  The second was an advertisement's promise of transformation.  This is seen in advertisements for dietary supplements that show a very muscular male featured on the page.  It also goes on to essentially say the model is this muscular because they took the given supplement.  Finally, hegemonic masculinity is shown in several advertisements.  This is where a male is projected as the dominating figure to a woman.  This was shown in a Lectric Shave advertisement where a man is shown dominating the relationship with a beautiful woman.

All in all, it was interesting to see the two different trends between the two magazines.  We believe that the ideal man's body is extremely muscular and powerful; where a woman is projected as skinny and sexy.  We also decided that the ideal male body is not one of such terrific muscle.  The pictures struck our group as disgusting and extremely unattractive.

Wes Gates
Mike Discipio
Samantha Melchor
Joey D'Agostino