ABSTRACT
Women’s magazines have long been a topic of scholarly debate. Critics have documented the history of women’s magazines as well as analyzed the genre in terms of content.³ Additionally, some scholars have heavily criticized the medium for its problematic, gender representations. e first significant, twentieth-century criticism of the genre came in 1963 when Betty Friedan questioned the messages delivered to American housewives by such American publications as Good Housekeeping, the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and the Woman’s Home Companion in her book The Feminine Mystique. Later in the century, women’s magazines, specifically those publications aimed at a demographic younger than those reading such magazines as Good Housekeeping, became the target of heavy criticism. Scholars began analyzing the negative effects that such publications had upon young women, particularly in regard to body image. Jean Kilbourne, a leading media critic, began exposing the negative effects that magazine advertising had upon readers with her series of films Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women (1979), Still Killing Us Softly (1987), and Killing Us Softly 3 (2000). In these films, and in her book Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising (1999), Kilbourne addresses such issues as women and violence and women and addiction, but she also focuses on the pressure that such advertisements put on young women to be thin, a theme which she returned to and analyzed in more depth with her 1995 film Slim Hopes. Likewise, in 1991, Naomi Wolf released The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. Wolf ’s book discussed the role that women’s magazines play in constructing femininity, and, more specifically, The Beauty Myth exposed the harmful social pressure that the diet industry, cosmetic companies, and the plastic surgery industry can place on women. And, Susan Bordo addresses the negative impact that women’s magazines have on women readers in her 1993 book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.
