Stephen Hill compares the representation of gender in lifestyle magazines with those in specialist music publications.
In this article I am going to discuss the assumptions made about gender by four contemporary magazines: Zoo, Bliss, Smash Hits and Q. I will look at this in relation to the forms and conventions of each title, the representations of gender on the front cover, the institutional background and issues to do with audience. The logic in comparing two general lifestyle titles with what are nominally music magazines is to see if the assumptions made about gender pervade beyond the surface culture of ‘lifestyle’ into other areas of society and culture. First, however, I would like to clarify what is meant by gender, with specific reference to magazine publishing.
Defining gender
Gender is different to sex; there is general consensus that while sex is biologically given, gender is a social construct. The traditional male order of society and culture known as patriarchy (the rule of the father) is something that feminists have long challenged. For example, Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, 1990) argues that gender is an artificial performance. The influence of feminism on Media Studies can be felt in the work of Janice
Winship (Inside Women’s Magazines, 1987) who has argued that, historically, women needed lifestyle magazines because they were excluded from mainstream culture. Others (such as
Frank Mort in Cultures ofConsumption, 1996 and Sean Nixon in Hard Looks: Masculinity,
Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption, 1996) have argued that the rise of the men’s lifestyle title from Arena in the 1980s to Loaded and FHM in the 1990s is suggestive of a crisis in masculine authority. Contemporary society is often characterised, therefore, as postfeminist. Like other aspects of post-modernity, current attitudes towards gender politics have become fragmented, characterised by playfulness and irony.
Comparing front covers
The representations on the front cover of Bliss and Zoo seem to reinforce the confused assumptions that are being made about gender. For example, denoted on the cover of both titles are low angle medium shots of slim and youthful female figures with long hair and careful makeup. However, their connotations are quite different. On the cover of Bliss the clothing codes and facial expressions connote openness and sisterly friendship, while the seductive pose and partial nakedness of Zoo’s main feature photography connotes sexual passivity and permanent availability. This binary opposition is inverted when we look at the representation of male figures on the cover of Q and Smash Hits. (See overleaf.)
The main feature photograph of Smash Hits is a boyish male figure framed by two female figures whose body language suggests that they find him irresistible (this is reinforced by the plug ‘Celebrity snogs exposed’). However, his manicured appearance and in particular his highly coiffured peroxide blonde hair connote a more feminised representation of masculinity
– he seems to be purposely de-sexualised (connoted also by ‘snog’ as a opposed to a more explicit sexual reference). The juxtaposition of this against the black and white medium closeup of John Lydon’s snarling face on the front of Q could not, therefore, be greater. The staring eyes and unkempt appearance connote aggression and authenticity: an altogether more violent representation of masculinity. The use of black and white photography and the phrase
‘Punk 76’ as the main cover line anchors the historical symbolism of the image with which the representation of masculinity is seen as synonymous.
Superficially the forms and conventions of all four titles are very similar. All have a prominently featured masthead on the front cover that connotes something specific about the magazines assumptions about gender. This is embodied in the actual titles: Zoo for example implies a primordial wildness while Bliss connotes heavenly pleasure: constructing the male subject as active and the female subject as passive. The typography and colour palette of the

house-style then reinforces this. Zoo employs a bold red font in capital letters to communicate the no-nonsense assertiveness of the heterosexual male. By contrast Bliss uses a range of different fonts, swirling italics and pastel colours that suggest the feminine ideals of delicacy and daintiness.
This distinction is extended by the titles Smash Hits and Q. While Smash Hits connotes the ephemeral short term pleasure of the pop hit, Q is more retrospective in its reworking of the phrase ‘cue the music’. Both titles configure themselves around the division between pop and rock. As Norma Coates argues in ‘RevolutionNow’ (Sexing the Groove – Popular Gender and
Music, 1997) rock is associated with ‘authenticity’ while ‘pop’ is associated with ‘artifice’; as a corollary ‘authentic’ becomes ‘masculine’ while ‘artificial’ becomes ‘feminine’. This is reflected in the typography of both titles. While Smash Hits utilises Warholian pink to connote its Pop
Art ideology, Q uses the more learned Times New Roman in bookish black to signify its cultural authority.
Gendered audiences
As one might expect, the audience for these four titles is very different. Bliss has the youngest demographic of readers, focusing on the mid-teen age range while Zoo has a median age readership of 23. Both Zoo and Bliss have substantial sales: ABC figures for July to
December 2005 were 260, 470 and 277,165 respectively. This suggests conclusively that twenty years on from Winship’s article there is definitely a market for men’s lifestyle titles.
There is, however, a definitive difference in the wayin which the two titles address the reader.
For example, the editor’s letter in Bliss is chatty and conversational; it uses hedges and polite forms to address the audience (suggestive of what Robin Lakoff in Language and a Woman’s
Place, 1975, describes as feminised language). By contrast there is no direct letter addressing the audience of Zoo. The editorial of the magazines is fashioned from lists of facts an d bullet points that the reader will then be able to use as ‘pub amo’.
Q and Smash Hit’s ABC figures for the second half of 2005 were 168,547 and 92,398 respectively. For Q this reflects its specialist status as a music title (it is the best-selling music title in the UK). This intimate relationship between Q and its readership is reflected in the high level of what Bourdieu (1979) would describe as ‘cultural capital’ that is required to access the magazine’s editorial. Understanding of the magazine is dependent upon high literacy levels and a familiarity with a range of popular music performers and genres. While this does not necessarily exclude women (indeed there is a 70/30 split among its readership), it does favour certain kinds of male stars: cultural history and the history of masculine culture are presented as synonymous. For Smash Hits, however, these ABC figures signalled the end and in February 2006 the magazine closed. The official reason given for this is that the magazine could no longer compet e with other titles like Bliss and indeed, Smash Hits’ emphasis on celebrity gossip as opposed to popular music have taken it away from the product that dominated the market during the 1980s.
Ownership and assumptions
In a way it is ironic that the assumption made about gender in these four magazines is so mixed up, given that they are all owned by the same media company, Emap. Launched in
1947 as the East Midland Allied Press, Emap is now a global giant at the forefront of the digital revolution. All four are multiplatform brands with synergised websites; both Q and
Smash Hits also exist as digital television and radio channels. In part then the diffuse range of assumptions about gender that these magazines embody is a reflection of Emap’s move to embrace t he niche markets of ‘defined communities’.
This institutional interest in the assumptions made about gender in the wider society and culture is confirmed by research that Emap has carried out into its audience. Projects like the
‘Alpha Male’ investigation have enabled Emap not only to target particular demographics of magazine readers, but to demonstrate to its advertising clients that the editorial strategy of a particular title will appeal to discrete groups of consumers. Nevertheless, the positioning of advertising campaigns across all four titles betrays considerable fluidity in the representation of gender. For example, in Smash Hits the hyperfemininity of Tampax’s sweet campaign sits quite comfortably next to an Army recruitment poster. This reflects not only the multiplicity of post-feminist ideals about what it means to be a woman in contemporary society but it also

reflects the fragmented and detached Uses and Gratification that determine audience’s consumption of any post-modern text.
In conclusion the contradictory assumptions made about gender in these magazines can be seen as a reflection of the gendered order of society and culture. Stereotyped ideas about gender in terms of representation and forms and conventions should not be taken at face value. On the one hand, there is nodenying the objectifying focus of the male gaze in Zoo; on the other hand, much of the laddish posturing is laced with irony. Similarly, while Bliss reinforces gender stereotyped representations, it does so to empower its readers in a celebration of the qualities of femininity. Smash Hits and Q are perhaps more worrying. While
Smash Hits appears to redress the balance by offering up the male for objectifying consumption, this is a neutered and desexualized version that perhaps says more about anxiety about female desire than the transformation of masculinity. In the same way while Q is a lot less regressive in terms of its representation of the female body it is insidiously patriarchal in the way it represents popular music’s cultural history. What we can extract from this is a model in which surface representations of gender may appear stable and extremely stereotyped. However, the way in which media audiences read those representations is open to multiple interpretations.
February 2004 saw the launch of two very similar titles that will be of interest to Media Studies students looking at magazines and gender: the new weekly ‘lads’ mags’, Nuts (from IPC) and Zoo (published by Emap) . Both magazines are on the cheap side (£1 and £1.20 respectively) and are very similar in content and tone. They offer a rather predictable reflection of the male gender, and in turn a less than progressive picture of women, but for better or worse their weekly format means they constitute a new genre. As such they demand the attention of students who are studying the ways in which magazines deliver audiences to advertisers.
Laura Barton, Guardian Weekend columnist, is less than excited about these two new additions to the newsagent’s racks. In her January 17th piece, she suggests quite persuasively that the ‘self-reflection’ offered by the publications is as depressingly formulaic as that of their feminine counterparts:
While it’s difficult to relish the sugary notion, propounded by the ladies’ glossies, that women are all chocca-shopper-holics who like nothing more than a good multiple choice quiz on whether they’ve found Mr Right while simultaneously practising their pelvicfloor exercises, it’s even harder to stomach this ‘slugs and snails’ definition of men’s tastes endorsed by the brasher blokes’ magazines. These days, the insinuation that all gents are satisfied by 29 cans of Stella and a slightly stained copy of Razzle is as quaintly outmoded as the suggestion that the lady loves Milk Tray. Nevertheless, Zoo and its brethren seem to act like some elaborate cultural muck-spreader, coating everything in an impermeable layer of tits and ass and porn and fighting. And the intimation is that any bird who can’t handle that can feck off and take her scented candles with her.
These magazines prompt the classic nature/nurture question or, in Media Studies terms, the reflection/construction equivalent. In short (and there is no right answer) it is for you to

decide whether you think men and women have natural differences in outlook and interests that are innate (the Mars and Venus thing), or whether we get our ideas about our own gender and the other through magazines like these. Do the magazines make money out of connecting to always-ready gender demarcations, or do they persuade us to ‘interpellate’ –
(mis)recognise ourselves in the pages?
Here are a few starting points for such an analysis. A textual analysis of the covers of Nuts and Zoo (and if I appear to be lumping them together it is because it is hard to distinguish between them at this level) reveals a clear formula shared by both titles – a semi-naked woman stares into the camera in a sexual pose on every issue, performing clearly for what
Laura Mulvey calls ‘ the male gaze ’. Have you noticed that women’s magazines tend to feature female cover models, and wondered why this is? The only male magazine that features a male model on the cover is Men’s Health , and the image is always in black and white as this provides more distance from the heterosexual reader (who would not want the newsagent to get the wrong idea, I suppose). Returning to women’s magazine covers, Janice
Winship’s feminist reading (1987) of the genre analysed what is at stake in the semiotics of the female cover star, concluding that:
The gaze between cover model and women readers marks the complicity between women seeing themselves in the image which the masculine culture has defined.
In other words, the female reader looks at the ideal version of herself, and enters into the
‘shared world’ of the pages, a world which, according to Janice Winship in Inside Women’s
Magazines (1987), has been constructed to form a view of women as men see them, not on their own terms.
Clearly there is a different connection at work in the semiotics of Zoo and Nuts , which is all about male power and female seduction.
Alongside the soft porn imagery, we are given a standard montage of football, cars and comedy or famous celebrities in the ‘lad’ mould. A banner at the top of Zoo announces ‘ New men’s mag – girls, sport, gags, TV ’, and with that we are offered a shorthand for the assumed horizons of the readership. My students were given 20 questions to answer about the reader of these mags, just from one issue (such as ‘what is his favourite food, what does he do on a Saturday night, where does he buy his clothes?’ and so on). They were able very easily to come up with a shared pen portrait. This is because the stereotype of the reader is entrenched in the pages, and deliberately so. The editorial team of any magazine construct such a profile of their reader themselves, and use this to select and construct content, and to sell space to advertisers. If the readership were viewed as complex and variable in their views and interests, how would advertisers know what to sell them? In the first editions of these two titles, the reader was encouraged to consume beer, watches, FHM , CDs, Brylcreem and
Nivea for Men (male grooming is an interesting aspect of these texts), more CDs, DVDs, a
Plasma TV, and to watch Crime Scene Investigation on Five.
We could take an oppositional reading (i.e. the one the publishers don’t want us to take) of these magazines further by considering whether magazines such as this are responsible for the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of women!? In other words, the magazines trivialise women by objectifying them – they feature in the pages only as sex objects, not as thinking people.
However, recent theory has tried to deal with the complexity of readers and their identities by suggesting that we need a ‘third way’ in our approach to this debate.
Maybe, in our postmodern media world, both genders might take some pleasure from texts such as these without actually swallowing whole their rather outdated representations of the sexes? David Gauntlett, in Media, Gender and Identity (2002) offers a deeper analysis of the relatively new mens’ mag genre; he considers the tendency of readers to play with their identities by shifting between more and less clear traditional gender positions through negotiated, active responses to such texts . Indeed it could be argued that due to the potential of these mags to offend the ‘enlightened’ academic reader, some theorists might fall into the trap of treating the male audience as passive and homogenous, even reverting to the

‘ hyperdermic syringe’ model of media influence and effects .
Referring to female readers, Gauntlett describes this negotiated reading practice as the activity of the ‘pix and mix’ reader:
They enjoy the magazines, and may at times learn bits and pieces – ideas about how to look or behave, as well as straightforward information about health, popular culture or social issues. At the same time, these readers would not often argue that the magazines are perfect or ideal … the magazines are not taken literally although they may suggest some good ideas.
However there is some evidence that male readers (perhaps because magazines tailored to them are less established) are less flexible in their acceptance of the gender codes presented to them in magazines like Nuts and Zoo . Alex Kendall (2004) carried out research into the reading habits of students in the West Midlands and discovered that, in comparison to female students, male students read such publications less critically.
The magazines functioned, as for female readers, to offer prompts and possibilities for representing self through negotiation of symbolic codes.
However, the male readers were characteristically less critical and more acquiescent to the identities inscribed through the modalities of their ‘hobby’ magazines.
To put all this stuff into a simpler framework, the debate over these mags and their intervention in our popular culture (negative or otherwise) revolves around the following four questions:
– Do they construct or reflect gender difference?
– What is their purpose and who do they serve?
– How seriously do the readers take them?
– And does it really matter?
For what it is worth, my own response as a male reader is that Nuts and Zoo would need to be a bit more interesting to do any real damage! MM
Much has been made of the ‘new’ postmodern breed of magazines, from lads’ mags to celebrity glossies with their tongue-in-cheek versions of conventional gender roles; but how far do our current lifestyle mags really challenge the well-worn stereotypes they claim to undermine? A2 student Theo Sweeting tackles the issue.
All magazines rely on stereotypes of sorts, some in their imagery or representation of people within the articles, but all with their basic assumptions about their target audience. They determine their content based on assumptions regarding an audience’s interests, and thus effectively they are stereotyping that group. These assumptions about interests and lifestyles are a subtle way of categorising the audience and blatant use of stereotypes can be seen in most magazines.
Sex sells
Male lifestyle magazines are increasingly styled around the premise that sex sells. With the emergence of the highly successful weeklies Zoo and Nuts more established names such as
Loaded are being cut out of the market and forced to make big changes to their image in order to compete. Loaded is an example that many readers believe has become increasingly pornographic in its content; as such it has increased the use of female stereotypes, namely as sex objects, the ‘all-looks-and-no-brains’ chauvinistic dream. Loaded has always used

provocative images of femininity in order to sell itself; but a comparison of early issues which feature fully clothed female cover models with a recent issue showing three scantily clad females, suggests that the sex quota has drastically increased, while the clothes dramatically decreased. The use of this image not only presents women in a stereotyped and demeaning way, but makes stereotyped assumptions about its audience and what they are interested in.
The phasing out of serious articles in favour of more sex suggests the target audience is only interested in sex.
It ain’t who you show, it’s the way that you show her
The men’s lifestyle magazine Esquire has an older and more mature target audience than
Loaded and presents itself in a more adult fashion. Its fewer, far more individualised representations of women minimise the use of stereotype. An article on Cate Blanchett in one issue focused on her ability as an actress and although some images of her were used they were not the stereotypical, halfnude lads’ mag style, thus presenting her own character rather than a 2D stereotype. However, this does not completely clear Esquire of stereotyping women, a later issue with an article on the Soprano’s actress Drea De Matteo was given two pages towards the back of the magazine. It consisted of one very small paragraph and then images of her half naked and in a kitchen cooking, fusing sexual and domestic stereotypes of femininity. This suggests that Esquire bases its use of stereotypes on the status of the female in question: a high status Hollywood actress is given chance to show her own character whilst a ‘lower-order’ TV actress is presented in much the same way as she would be in many other male lifestyle magazines, once again showing the reliance on stereotype.
Many special interest magazines also make use of gendered stereotypes to appeal to their target audience. Technology magazines such as T3 often present a semi-nude female model on the front as a sex object to entice a male readership to buy the magazine. Such representations are entirely misleading as to the content of the magazine and are constructed in an entirely cynical way simply in order to sell, thereby proving once again the old adage: sex sells.
Female lifestyle magazines
Female lifestyle magazines may make less liberal use of stereotypes than their male counterparts. A recent article in Glamour magazine presented the sex lives of a porn star, a plastic surgeon and a gynaecologist. It first summed up the stereotypical assumptions about such professions from the point of view of the interviewees, and then gave the male and female interviewees a chance to present their side. The article offered a positive construction of the male porn star, who might have otherwise been portrayed stereotypically as a chauvinist or womanizer or even a sex object himself. This article deliberately challenged stereotypes; yet the magazine still makes many assumptions about its audience. It presents stereotypical ideals of female beauty for the readers to aspire to, and provides many pages of advice on how to recreate such looks, thus presenting its template of beauty positively to its audience.
Colourful contents
Even contents pages in female lifestyle magazines serve to reinforce gendered stereotypes.
The colour schemes and fonts are stereotypically associated with femininity, being predominantly reds, pinks and yellows with curvy and unthreatening fonts. The contents page sections are also frequently broken up by advertisements. The articles provoke the anxiety about achieving the stereotypically accepted norms of femininity, which the advertised products then (coincidentally) claim to have the solution to. In the particular issue of Glamour that I studied the fashion and beauty section is even highlighted from the other content body by a change in colour, it being a lighter pink than the rest, making it seem like the most important section (see page 54).
Until its recent relaunch, Loaded’s tag line was ‘for men who should know better.’ This suggests an acknowledgement of the negative way in which its content may be viewed by giving a knowing postmodern wink to the audience. This ‘wink’ implies the audience can enjoy the stereotypes without personally holding them as fact. However, the recent 2005 re-launch dropped the tag line, removing the postmodern irony and signifying that the use of sexual

stereotypes has become acceptable. This is further suggested by the fact that nearly all men’s lifestyle magazines now contain images which would once have been confined to ‘top shelf’ publications.
From these limited case studies it is fair to conclude that the use of traditionally gendered stereotypes is increasingly important to male and female lifestyle magazines. It all comes down to selling products, as magazines are primarily funded by advertisements. As most products are gendered and aimed at particular audiences, so the magazines that are advertising them must be too. Because nearly all articles in lifestyle and special interest magazines come down to one thing: selling the audience a product. As long as stereotypes help to market these products, then the magazines will continue to use them.