I don't remember the last time I opened a magazine and wasn't greeted by the perfectly clear skin and symmetrical face of a model. Let me expand on that. I don't remember the last time I turned on the television, glanced up at a billboard, or drove by a bus-stop ad that didn't have the shiny eyes and perfect proportions of a model staring down at me.
Funnily enough, I remember the first time that I opened Vogue magazine. I was surely only about eight or nine years old and I was sitting in the dentists office with nothing to do, bored before my visit. I think the reason I opened the magazine in the first place was because the model on the cover was stunning, and probably reminded me of whatever Disney princess or movie character was my favorite at the time. However, the magazine confused me. I flipped through the pages and saw pages upon pages of ads. Perfume ads, ads for cars, clothing campaigns, beauty products. The list was endless but as a child in a dentists office armed with a magazine I was just confused. Questions ran through my head. Where were the stories? Where were the words? Why were none of of people wearing clothes?
In theory, I am not opposed to using beautiful people to sell products and I agree that yes people will be more likely to stop and examine a product if it is being sold by a figure with chiseled abs or shiny lips.
What does bother me, though, is the clear double standard portrayed in magazines between men and women. Men are not degraded to nearly the same degree as women, and advertisements in men's magazines still feature scantily clad women trying to sell men's products. If men are, by chance, featured barely clothed or in their underwear, they still stand strongly and powerfully. Their bodies are stronger than the average man's, not thinner and weaker. "Rape is the current advertising metaphor," Wolf says, which is certainly true (Wolf 79). Men are constantly powerful, strong, figures, whereas women are weak and submissive, important only for their bodies (and more often than not, the sexuality of their bodies: breasts, legs, cleavage).
Unfortunately, this has turned into sort of a trickle-down system. What I mean by that, is that Wolf argues that it is the advertisers who are perpetuating this vicious cycle and enhancing the prominence of the Beauty Myth in advertisements, and by doing so in society too. "Advertisers are the West's courteous censors," she claims which feeds into the production cycle of magazine (Wolf 77): ""What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women" (Wolf 73).
Renowned feminist Gloria Steinem agrees and has said, "Advertisers don't believe in female opinion makers" (Wolf 82).
This double standard in advertising has caused magazines to take on different tones too. Women who read magazines are constantly made to feel bad about themselves. Whether they are too old, too fat, too blemished, too lazy, or too plain, they are far from perfect and advertisers make sure that they acknowledge their flaws. Unfortunately, this means that "many readers have not learned how to separate the prowoman content from the beauty myth in the magazines, whose place is primarily economic" (Wolf 73). Women's self esteem plummets as they sit on airplanes flipping through the latest pages of Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair, and the sad thing is they don't realize the harm they are causing to themselves. Women are belittled by the advertisements, that much is certain, but also by the wording, which Wolf argues is equally harmful and worlds apart from the way men are addressed in men's magazines, saying, "Hence the hectoring tone that no other magazines use to address adults with money in their pockets: do's and dont's that scold, insinuate, and condescend. The same tone in a men's magazine - do invest in tax-free bonds; don't vote republican - is unthinkable" (Wolf 84).
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