Fashion Police: Magazines and Body Image

Messages about male and female beauty standards are prevalent in men’s and women’s fashion and beauty magazines. Not only do these standards appear in advertisements, but also in the magazine’s content as well. The only significant differences between the messages in both types of magazines are to whom the messages are aimed. Both types contained stereotypical images of “beautiful” males and females, although there were small variations from magazine to magazine. 

The magazines examined for this essay were Cosmopolitan, Glamour, GQ and Men’s Health. On average, Glamour contained fewer pictures of men than Cosmo, GQ and Men’s Health. Cosmo contained many pictures of men and men with women. The men were all stereo- typically handsome and, in most cases, were touching the women in some way. Cosmo also contained a lot of images, both in article content and ads, of unclothed body parts, whether it was for beauty, alcohol or anything else. The images basically said that a person is the sum of their parts; as long as your parts meet up with the standards of beauty, you are beautiful. 

Men’s Health contained the most pictures of shirtless men. Men’s Health and GQ both contained images of men that were thin, cut and ruggedly handsome (square jaw syndrome). These two magazines were also the only two featuring naked women: In Men’s Health, a story about breakups featured two pictures of a naked woman covering her private areas, one of which encompassed two pages. The woman’s head was entirely cut off from the photographs. In GQ, the cover story about Star Wars’s Hayden Christensen featured a photograph of the actor driving a car while the passenger, a blonde woman with half her head cut out of the shot, reclines in her seat. Her shirt is unbuttoned and one breast is exposed.