Spectatorship of women is a key theme in the media world, with the ‘objectification’ of women’s bodies. This is clearly presented in pornography, but is also present in many other genres of the media such as the advertising of drinks, clothes and very commonly, cars. Many adverts for lingerie in women’s glossy magazines have much in common with soft pornography. An example of this was the advert promoting ‘Opium’ perfume featuring Sophie Dahl. A large number of people complained about the image of women portrayed in the advert. John Berger (1972) labels women in many adverts, “a sight”, and nothing more. This contrasts with men who are frequently portrayed as being powerful and doing active things. Cover images on magazines are shaped by the consumer culture geared to selling fashion and making profit. Berger suggests the women’s face is usually white, young, smiling seductively, smoothly attractive and immaculately groomed.
Naomi Wolff’s 1990 bestseller, ‘The Beauty Myth’ looks at the effects of voyeurism upon women in western society. Wolff argues, “The cultural industry’s prescriptions for women to be beautiful and slender have produced a generation of women who suffer from eating disorders.” Éva Székely agrees with this in her book and critiques of society, ‘Never Too Thin’. In recent media, it has been suggested that women who are over weight are not only victims of prejudice in the workplace, but are actually paid less. It is this type of media coverage that motivates women into changing their appearances. However, it is important to reflect upon the unreliability of some media reporting. It is very common that scientific results are distorted or over simplified for the readership. This exploitation of ‘facts’, although they may be incorrect, has the desired effect for the global market that includes dieting companies and cosmetic surgery, generating a billion pound turnover per year. Williams (2003) in his exploration of the sociology of the body noted women’s increased use of plastic surgery to manipulate their bodies to meet current fashion trends.
In conclusion, it is clear that feminists have identified the media and some aspects of modern society as having a negative impact on women’s aspirations and self image. Studies of the cosmetic industry regarding the types of products produced and advertised show their success in creating products that women believe will enhance their beauty, personal happiness, and success. Advertising in the media is widely held as being the catalyst in awakening these inert desires within women. Fashion plays a role within this widespread body dissatisfaction, as clothes form the covering for the body underneath. Women are constantly presented with images of ‘beauty’ presented by the super model and spend a large part of their income trying to find the perfect outfit. However, as these women are seen as both successful and beautiful, the average young woman will aspire to be like them. It is clear that this sets up a vicious cycle in which women become entrapped by advertising, the rest of the global media, sexuality, fashion and cosmetic surgery.
This study intends to widen my knowledge of media’s effects upon women, and more specifically how the media portrays women’s bodies through content analysis of a range of women’s magazines. A problem I will encounter will be to prevent my personal opinions biasing the outcome of my piece of research. For example if I hold a strong feminist opinion that women are portrayed negatively in the media then I must be careful not to use evidence which will only support my opinion as this would make my work unreliable and difficult to replicate.
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My Methodology
Within this piece of research I aim to examine how the media represents female bodies, focusing on the content of women’s magazines.
In sociology, there are a number of different assumptions about the nature of our world that have led to different and opposed research traditions e.g. positivism and interactionism. I shall be focusing on a positivistic approach.
Positivism claims that a person lives in an objective world and that man is capable of rational critical thought and the ability to organise and make sense of evidence. To know the objective world, a person should study it carefully and dispassionately, preferably using scientific methods. This enables the researcher to explore, describe and attempt to explain events through the development and testing of a theory.
When choosing my research method I had to be careful that I was not being influenced by outside factors. I decided to use content analysis because I felt this systematic method was best suited to my study. In depth interviews would have been another useful approach but this would have involved interviewing a large representative sample so that their understanding and interpretation of the magazine contents could have been explored. This was not possible. Content analysis is quicker, cheaper and if carried out with care, can provide useful data. I also thought it was the most ethical and appropriate method to use. Content analysis can be used to present an objective, quantified, account of events, themes, and issues which may not be apparent to a reader.
Content analysis involves statistical analysis, and the development of an analysis grid with preset categories. At a later stage Seale (2004) suggests more categories may arise after the content has been carefully explored. The aim of this approach is to limit the margin for interpretation of the underlying patterns of behaviour. It is the most commonly used method of research in the study of the mass media, at its most basic, content analysis is a statistical exercise that involves categorising some aspect or quality of people’s behaviour or images and counting the number of times they appear.
However it does have its limitations, reliability being the most important because it can be questioned as the researcher has to make judgements about the categorisation of behaviour. I will have to judge what categories will be used and whether everyone can be put into a particular category. Seale (2004) has noted that two different researchers using the same method may not categorise data the same way. Another drawback of content analysis is that it tells us little of what it means which is why it is usually accompanied by another form of research or analysis. Unfortunately I am unable to carry out another method of research as I am constrained by time.
An example of a study where content analysis has been used is Levy’s (2000) feminist content analysis of Ally McBeal1. She explored Ally McBeal as a representative character in order to ‘discuss the larger social-cultural-political American context in which the TV show and character have emerged.’ Through the character she explored feminism in the 1990s and body image issues including the American female body ‘ideal’ among other things.
In terms of ethics using content analysis as a research method reduces most of these, the only ethical issue I should consider is that I might be exposing myself to material which could negatively affect me, in terms of looking at all the pictures of these women could make me feel insecure about myself. So to prevent this as much as I can I will have to remain objective and detach myself from any feelings I have about what is being portrayed this will make my study more reliable as well.
Another method I could have used was focus groups. I could have selected a group of women and asked them a range of questions about body image. I would then give them several women’s magazines and then ask them the same questions after they have studied them to see if the magazines have made any difference to their viewpoint. This method would result in a more in depth study but I chose not to carry it out because I felt my interpretation of what the women had to say could be biased due to my lack of expertise and the short time scale. Also I was concerned that exposing them to large amounts of these images could be unethical as well as issue of probing them for personal information. Finally the results could be unreliable because the women might want to please me and give me answers they think I want to hear rather than what may be true; therefore I decided to use context analysis instead.
I wanted to ensure that my research was as fair and accurate as possible so I decided to conduct a pilot study before I did the full piece of research. A pilot study is a small scale study which is used to test validity (truth value) and reliability and can be used to iron out any unseen problems before the main study is carried out. This could come in very useful as I have never carried out content analysis before and it may take me more than one attempt to get accurate unbiased result. Also I can establish whether my categories are correct or whether I might need to add or change existing categories to get a better fit.
I encountered a problem with my choice of magazines as there were so many on the market. I wanted to use women’s magazines guideline there were many types of magazines. Vogue is very different in price, quality of paper, images and content to a gossipy magazine such as Heat. In the end I decided I would look at the low price end of the women’s magazines market and buy magazines only under 2 pounds. So I wouldn’t be biased in choosing the magazines I like to read, I sent a relative who does not read these magazines to pick out 3 magazines for me. She came back with Heat, More and Closer these were my sources of evidence I would use to analyse content and construct a grid. I then planned my categories. This was harder than I originally thought. After I had done this I then carefully studied the images on each page of the magazine and put a tally in the appropriate category, if one did not fit I made a note of it so I could consider whether I should add another category in which it would fit.
For the results of my pilot study please refer to the appendix.
Evidence
The aim of this piece of research was to examine how the media represents female bodies, in this section I will describe, explain and analyse my results and state any problems I had and how I solved them. Using my content analysis grid I analysed 5 magazines, More, Heat, Company, Star and Reveal.
When I was carrying out the research I discovered that images of women were presented more than twice as often as men. In my content analysis grid of 5 women’s magazines I found 531 images of women and only 248 images of men. This shows that women are represented more in the magazines catering for them. However I decided to explore this further and carry out a tally of how many of these images of women were presented in different ways.
Each magazine had a mean of 9.6 pages with images of women catered to beauty. This number was exceptionally high in Company magazine where 23 pages out of 118 containing women were solely dedicated to beauty. The other 4 magazines ranged between 2 and 11 pages. This clearly shows that the editors believed that their readers would view up to date product information and beauty techniques as important and valued it highly. An even more powerful finding was that 97 pages within the 5 magazines depicted women’s fashion and told women how to dress or not dress. Many of the accessories were priced at over 100 pounds even when the readership profile was known to be young.
A very controversial topic for women and the media today is plastic surgery. Through my research it has been stated by Williams (2003) that the media overly promote the cult of youth and actively encourages plastic surgery. The only magazine not to include anything about plastic surgery was Heat. However I have read this magazine several times in the past and I know that it does include plastic surgery stories but in this particular issue it neglected this topic due to a top 10 sexiest men story. Between the other 4 magazines 36 pages of images were dedicated to the topic of plastic surgery; the highest ranking being More magazine and Company magazine. I think it is important to point out that as well as a mixture of horror stories and real life stories some of these pages contained adverts promoting plastic surgery.
I thought it was important to look into how many pages women’s magazines spent on criticising other women and I found that 49 pages between these 5 magazines were used to make negative comments. I included any images from the circle of shame, where magazines circle an imperfection such as cellulite on somebody’s body and then make negative comments about it, or any images where a women’s dress sense or hairstyle was negatively commented on. In More magazine this was taken to an extreme with 5 pages dedicated to ridiculing female celebrities for wardrobe malfunctions such as showing a nipple, sweat patches, spots and cellulite. The type script used is very large against a bright yellow background so that the visual impact is very powerful. Yet I wanted to fairly represent these magazines so I looked into how many positive comments they made and 32 pages of images accompanied by positive comments were found. So between the magazines there were 17 more pages allocated to putting women down rather than praising them.
In this piece of research I also wanted to investigate how women are represented as sexual or domestic beings which can be both derogatory and sexist. I found this was still apparent in these magazines as there were 63 images of women in sexually provocative positions or outfits which would appeal to the male eye. I thought this was very interesting and ties in with the objectification of women and their bodies. After further thought I decided it would be wise to look at how many images there were of women partially dressed because I realised that what I thought might be provocative may not be in someone else’s opinion. So throughout all 5 magazines I found a total of 62 images of partially dressed women. This is a very similar result to the provocative images result so I think this reinforces my evidence. Also the images shown of women were very different to the images shown of men. The men were shown in magazine were wearing suits and high fashion clothing where as the women were frankly wearing a lot less. The only magazine which showed a similar objectification of men was Heat. As it was featuring top 10 hot male bodies of 2006. There was an additional 33 pages between the magazines dedicated to showing women in a domestic role. For example in Company magazine there was a run of 3 or 4 pages showing women carrying out ‘housewife tasks’ such as cleaning the bathroom and cooking in the kitchen.
With the ‘size zero’ debate being a hot topic in the media I thought it would be interesting to see how many pages included images of women which were accompanied by text describing how much weight a female had lost and what diet tips she recommended. Each magazine had a very similar number of pages dedicated to weight (approximately 10 pages). Although it was not the most prominent issue in each magazine it was certainly one of the fundamental elements included in each magazine. In fact several of the cheaper magazines I looked at included a different celebrity diet every week.
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Evaluation
The research method I used followed the positivist approach as content analysis is a systematic sampling method rather than something based on a person’s emotions and feelings. I chose content analysis of magazines because I felt this method was less likely to be affected by bias especially as I have strong opinions on the topic. However this method did not eliminate bias as I had to make judgements about what went in each category using my own opinion which may have differed from someone else’s. Also when it came to analysing and explaining my results I found that content analysis gives me figures but doesn’t actually explain itself. Yet I still think I chose the right research method because the positives outweigh the negatives and it is a very effective way of beginning to analyse the media. Although when I had carried out the research it was quite difficult to know what to do next with all this statistical information but no real written information explaining it. This meant it was up to me to draw conclusions and make links which always brings in an element of bias.
I chose to only look at images of women in the magazines as I thought a more focused research topic would enable me to go more in depth and reduce generalisations. Choosing the categories for my content analysis grid was quite hard because in my pilot study quite a lot of them had been subjective and I had been making too many personal judgements rather than just analysing what I was looking at. So in this study I tried to use categories where I could just count up how many pages would fit into this category. This method was reasonably simple to carry out however I had to adjust the categories as initially some of them were not objective enough. I have included a sample of my content analysis grid below (the full grid can be found in the appendix).
From this grid you can see that I included a total number of pages containing images of women. I decided to include this as a category because I felt it would be good to use as a comparison with the other results and would enable me to calculate a percentage of how many pages were related to each factor in my category. It also means the number of pages in each category can be linked to the number of pages containing images of women. For example in my research I used several different types of women’s magazines aimed at different types/age groups of women. However some magazines contained more content than others so if their values were particularly high it may not be because they are putting more emphasis on a particular topic but in fact there just are more pages of content altogether so therefore as a percentage of the number of images of women per magazines the percentage may be lower than the other magazines when the value is actually higher.
I carried out my research in mid-October which could have affected the results of the research as magazines carry different content at different times of the years. Especially with the lead up and aftermath of Christmas diets become much more prominent in magazines so women can lose weight for Christmas day or try and lose their Christmas weight they may have put on. So if I had chosen to carry my research out in December or January the results may not have been representative of the whole year. However October is still close to Christmas and this may have caused there to be an increase in weight related topics in the magazines. For example in my research I found between 7 and 12 pages of images of women related to weight. This comes out at a mean of 9.8 pages per magazine with images related to weight. This is quite a lot especially as there was only between 77 and 118 pages of content with images of women on it.
What I found quite shocking in the magazines was something I also mentioned in my context. This is the number of pages with pictures of women where they were criticised, I included this as one category but in fact in some of the images they were being criticised for their weight (loss or gain), outfits, cellulite, and even sweat patches. Across the board in over 5% of the images, women were being negatively presented. In my context I mentioned the ‘circle of shame’ this is something where an impurity on a women’s body or clothing is circled or pointed at just to make a point that they are not perfect and to ridicule them. There was an example of this is every magazine I looked at, and it particularly focused on celebrities with the general emphasis of “Ha-ha you’re not so perfect”.
I used a feminist theory for this piece of research because I felt Feminists have often criticised the media for the way that they reinforce traditional gender stereotypes and have previously carried out research on women’s magazines. I believe I chose the right theory to use but I do think by choosing a Feminist theory it was very easy to adapt to their view and become biased along with my personal feelings.
In my context I mentioned Tuchman’s (1978) study on the representation of women by the American media. She claimed that women often appeared as nurses rather than doctors and secretaries rather than lawyers. This study was carried out over 30 years ago yet from I research I could pinpoint several patterns which still existed in the magazines. For example, in some of the magazines I analysed just under 50% of the images of women were related to fashion and beauty. I think this is depressing because clearly fashion and beauty is not 50% of women’s interests. It is quite a stereotypical representation and not unlike McRobbie’s findings in 1982 in which she studied the teenage magazine ‘Jackie’2. She found there were four codes identified in the magazine; romance, domestic life, fashion and beauty, and pop music. A lot of the fashion and beauty content particularly in ‘More’ magazine had an undercurrent of look good for your man. For example 3 pages were allocated to a heading of “Looks he will love” and there was also a double page spread where men were asked what items of clothing they were attracted to. Most of which were skimpy skirts and revealing tops. Therefore the fashion and beauty section was aimed at rather than look good for yourself it was look good so you can get and keep a man, just like what McRobbie identified in her study over 25 years ago.
Women’s magazines tend to motivate women into changing their appearances to fit the stereotype of what is seen as desirable and attractive even actively encouraging plastic surgery with over 36 pages dedicated to the topic and heat being the only magazine not to mention plastic surgery. This image that the magazine represent as the ideal has been said to fuel the global market for dieting companies and cosmetic surgery, which has over a billion pound turnover per year.
The results have in fact reinforced my initial thoughts on the topic, which women are still represented in an old fashioned, stereotypical way and that although things have changed in wider society it is yet to fully filter through into the media. I have noticed that being sexually independent is really encouraged by women’s magazines particularly the emphasis on casual sex, which was not present in any of the findings of McRobbie or Tuchman’s research. Sexual independence for mature women is a positive development but many very young girls in the UK feel overly pressured to engage in underage sex, due to peer pressure and emphasis on sex in young women’s magazines.
One point to make is that my research was selective because in my categories in my content analysis grid I would ask for certain things I was looking for. This therefore leads to the imposition problem which means could mean I am only finding these results because it’s what I want to discover rather than it being a true reflection of the wider situation. I think this is very true in my research because I kept my categories very linked to what I wanted to find out rather than having some unlinked categories which may have given me a truer picture.
Overall I think my research is valid and representative of the content and representation of women in magazines today however I think the reliability may be an issue because even though I tried to limit my opinion and bias there is no way to eliminate it completely. Also I carried out a small scale piece of research which could affect the representativeness but I tried my best to balance this out by choosing different types of women’s magazines. However I could improve the reliability, validity and representativeness of this piece of research by carrying out the research again on a much large scale over a longer period of time accompanied by other methods of research to reinforce my conclusions.
Ferguson, M. (1983) Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann
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Bibliography
Berger, J. (1972) Ways Of Seeing, London: Penguin, Books.
Ferguson, M. (1983) Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann
Levy, Patricia (2000) The Qualitative Report: volume 5, numbers 1& 2 May, 2000
McRobbie, Angela (1983) Teenage girls, Jackie and the ideology of adolescent femininity : B. Waites et al
Tuchman, Gaye (1978) Heart and Home: Images of Women and the Media, New York: Oxford University Press.
Wolff, N (1990) The Beauty Myth, London: Chatto and Windus.
Magazines:
Heat 30th October – 5th November, issue no. 404
More 19th October – 1st November, issue no. 489
Closer 21st October – 3rd November, issue no. 302
Reveal 30th October – 5th November, issue no. 126
Company 20th October – 2nd November, issue no. 483
Star 30th October – 5th November, issue no. 315
Books:
Moore, S. Aiken, D. and Chapman, S. (2002) Sociology for A2. London: Collins
O'Sullivan, T. Dutton,B. and Rayner, P. (2003)
Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. (2002) The media: an introduction. London: Longman
Lacey, N. (2002)
Marris, P. and Thornham, S. (2004)
(1998) Why study the media. London: Sage
Seale, C. (2004) London: Sage
(2003) Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Internet sites:
Media's Effect On Girls: Body Image And Gender Identity by Brumberg, J. J.
Mirror, mirror (A summary of research findings on body image) by Kate Fox, 1997
Does size matter? Research tackles female body image by Maggie Clune
Body image issues for women
Body Image
http://www.snac.ucla.edu/pages/Body_Image/Body_Image.htm
Research diary
Appendix
Pilot Context Analysis
Complete Context Analysis Grid
