If you were to pick up a magazine off stands published in the 1930’s you would see a totally different image of the woman gracing the covers than the woman we see on covers today. Since then women have been constantly fighting for equality, smashing gender roles and expectations and embracing their sexuality. (Pittman 2015) The question is have magazines learned to adapt to the evolving woman or has it simply taped into another way for the male dominated society to exploit women? In a 2015 Huffington Post titled “What 100 Years Of Magazine Covers Reveal About How We See Women” Karen X Cheng, a creative director and viral video consultant in San Francisco told Huff Post “One interpretation is that women are getting objectified for capitalism.”
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Risman’s “Gender as Structure” discusses the concept of “Doing Gender”. “This approach to gender was best articulated by West and Zimmerman in their 1987 article “Doing Gender.”. . . West and Zimmerman suggest that once a person is labeled a member of a sex category, she or he is morally accountable for behaving as persons in that category do.” (Risman, pg 295) “Doing Gender” insinuates approved inequality because what is viewed as female in our patriarchal society is devalued and what is viewed as male in our society continues to justify male dominance. My findings support Risman’s discussion of doing gender because our society continues to devalue women and value men, even in print media like magazines covers. Many of the cover stories in my qualitative findings section show how men in magazines are being described as “powerful, gods, great artist” while women are constantly degraded while being described as “bad girls, skimpy, and …show more content…
It also suggest that men and women don’t consume the same media and different groups are targeted with different messages. These images portrayed to us by the media continue to reinforce gender inequalities. “Part of an institution’s function of maintaining inequality is to first create the differences and then to attempt to conceal its authorship so that those differences seem to flow from the nature of things.” (Kimmel, pg 290) These images portrayed by the media of powerful men and oversexualized women construct our own gender identities. As we construct our identities around these stereotypical images they seem to become natural and the original author is
Risman’s “Gender as Structure” discusses the concept of “Doing Gender”. “This approach to gender was best articulated by West and Zimmerman in their 1987 article “Doing Gender.”. . . West and Zimmerman suggest that once a person is labeled a member of a sex category, she or he is morally accountable for behaving as persons in that category do.” (Risman, pg 295) “Doing Gender” insinuates approved inequality because what is viewed as female in our patriarchal society is devalued and what is viewed as male in our society continues to justify male dominance. My findings support Risman’s discussion of doing gender because our society continues to devalue women and value men, even in print media like magazines covers. Many of the cover stories in my qualitative findings section show how men in magazines are being described as “powerful, gods, great artist” while women are constantly degraded while being described as “bad girls, skimpy, and …show more content…
It also suggest that men and women don’t consume the same media and different groups are targeted with different messages. These images portrayed to us by the media continue to reinforce gender inequalities. “Part of an institution’s function of maintaining inequality is to first create the differences and then to attempt to conceal its authorship so that those differences seem to flow from the nature of things.” (Kimmel, pg 290) These images portrayed by the media of powerful men and oversexualized women construct our own gender identities. As we construct our identities around these stereotypical images they seem to become natural and the original author is