ABSTRACT
Men’s lifestyle magazines are an example of a discourse type which supports a set of ‘regulatory fictions’ concerning gender. Like most forms of mass media, lifestyle magazines, particularly those that explicitly address one sex rather than another, are a locus for a particularly exaggerated binary oppositional account of gender. Images of men in men’s lifestyle magazines therefore tread an uneasy line between occupying subject and object position. When a male represented participant is the object of the viewer’s gaze, he tends to be active and nonsexual; when a male represented participant occupies a subject position, by gazing out at the reader, his gaze tends to be hostile and unsmiling. Humour and irony are two other magazine masculinity’s chief defences against sexual or gender ambiguity. Humour and irony are thus chiefly employed in making these necessary adaptations and additions to masculine identity palatable and congruous with a more traditional model.
