Should we judge a woman by the cover of her magazine?

Aisling Pegg – media essay

Upon first glance of that question I find it extremely challenging not to dismiss it abruptly with a definite “no”. Women’s magazines often portray the stereotypical image of a seemingly beautiful yet some-what painfully thin woman on the front surrounded by captions on how to improve your life. I have personally noticed that nearly every leading issue of the typical ‘beauty magazines’ contains at least one story of a very non-controversial women’s issue such as anorexia. How many people do you know who are pro-anorexia? On one page they write of one girls battle against it yet on the next they discuss problems in what you thought was a normal diet. It is often quite questionable as to how these magazines even appeal to women. The cover of January’s Cosmopolitan is smothered with the words ‘sex’, ‘love’ and ‘desires’. Cosmopolitan is not the only offending magazine that imposes a false image of women however. All of the so-called beauty magazines promote shallow and superficial behaviour. This however, is not surprising.

It would seem that the underlying mission of ‘beauty magazines’ such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and More are to simply ignore the real issues concerning women and their insecurities and to focus on quite the opposite; The positive aspects of the female gender role. Sex, fashion and make-up seem to be high up on the list of priorities for these magazines yet they rarely focus on ‘real’ issues. Beauty magazines are very impressionable amongst young women and in fact it would seem are doing more harm than good.

Although we would like to believe that looks are not everything ...